BFP Nightly Quote

“In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock.” – Randolph Bourne

International Newsworthy

Yet another Iran Terror Plot Allegation: Iran Plot to Kill Saudi Envoy in Cairo Foiled

Provocative War Games in Iran’s Backyard to Spark Conflict

Olmert: Iran Not Rushing to Produce Nukes

Obama Wants to Hunt Iran-Syria Sanction Evaders

Iran Set to Export Oil to Pakistan

…

Afghanistan: NATO Raid Kills 4 Children-Sparking Protests

Afghan Annual Drug Money Reaches $70 Billion

US-Pakistan Fighting Over Extrajudicial Murders by Drones

Pakistan Summons US Diplomat over Recent Drone Strikes

…

Syria: Rebels Kill Over 20-Wound 100+

Al Qaeda in Syria: Pretext for Intervention

Iraqi Civilian Deaths Climbed in April

Israel Closes Investigation of Those Responsible for Samouni Family Massacre

Israel: Bibi Unsettled by Early Election Noise

…

Egypt: Rise of Muslim Brotherhood Frays Saudi-Egypt Ties

Somalia: 2 MPs & 4 Others Killed in Bomb Attack

Mali: Counter-Coup Attempt

Ugandan Army: ‘Sudan is Backing Joseph Kony’

…

Georgia Develops State Strategy on North Caucasus

Uzbeks Fear Angren Revival

Balkans to Caspian: US & NATO Continue Cold War

Central Asia & Caucasus: Looking Back at Wikileaks Two Years on

Litveninko’s Widow Still Waiting for Answers

…

EU Mulls “Marshall Plan” for Europe

Euro Nears its Blow-Up Point

Germany: Porn Files Reveal Alleged Al-Qaeda Master Plan to Terrorize Europe

UK: Murdoch Unfit to Lead Company

National Newsworthy

Is the FBI Encouraging Terrorist Plot in Order to Stop Them & Boost their Success Rate?!

NYPD Raids Activists’ Home Before May Day Protests

Chief of Obama’s Atrocities Board Believes in Redistribution of Sovereignty

US is Underreporting Afghan Attacks

US Drone Victims’ Defender Speaks

Precision-Guided PR for Drones Falls Short

Audit Finds some US Funds Went to Insurgents in Iraq

Treasury Department Fails to Implement Two-Thirds of Post-Bailout Recommendations

Top Freddie Mac Executive Quits

Ammunition Shortages Coming?!

Noteworthy Editorials

Ron Paul: The Costs of War

Paul Pillar: The Debasement of U.S. Support

Stephen Lendman: Police State Harshness

Neocons Hypocritically Leverage “Human Rights” against China

The Empire Strikes Back: Attack of Drones

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: BFP EyeOpener Report- Fahrenheit 2012: Suppressing Dissent in the 21st Century

Video 2: James Corbett-Nuclear “Security” and Nuclear “Hypocrisy”

Video 3: May Day Display- 100,000s Rally Worldwide

Video 4: Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman

Podcast 1: Corbett Report-Classified Woman with Sibel Edmonds

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Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click HERE

You can purchase Classified Woman HERE

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by SUBSCRIBING, and by ordering our EXCLUSIVE BFP DVD .

The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The first steps binding the vast economic space are being constructed with a number of little-publicized rail links connecting China, Russia, Kazakhstan and parts of Western Europe. It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession.  Rail infrastructure is a major key to building vast new economic markets across Eurasia.

China and Turkey are in discussions to build a new high-speed railway link across Turkey. If completed it would be the country’s largest railway project ever, even including the pre-World War I Berlin-Baghdad Railway link. The project was perhaps the most important agenda item, far more so than Syria during talks in Beijing between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Chinese leadership in early April. The proposed rail link would run from Kars on the easternmost border with Armenia, through the Turkish interior on to Istanbul where it would connect to the Marmaray rail tunnel now under construction that runs under the Bosphorus strait. Then it would continue to Edirne near the border to Greece and Bulgaria in the European Union. It will cost an estimated $35 billion. The realization of the Turkish link would complete a Chinese Trans-Eurasian Rail Bridge project that would bring freight from China to Spain and England.[1]

The Kars-Edirne line would reduce travel time across Turkey by two-thirds from 36 hours down to 12. Under an agreement signed between China and Turkey in October 2010, China has agreed to extend loans of $30 billion for the planned rail network.[2] In addition a Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway connecting Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku to Kars is under construction, which greatly increases the strategic importance of the Edirne-Kars line. For China it would put a critical new link in its railway infrastructure across Eurasia to markets in Europe and beyond.

Erdogan’s visit to Beijing was significant for other reasons. It was the first such high level trip of a Turkish Prime Minister to China since 1985. The fact that Erdogan was also granted a high-level meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, the man slated to be next Chinese President, and was granted an extraordinary visit to China’s oil-rich Xinjiang Province also shows the high priority China is placing on its relations with Turkey, a key emerging strategic force in the Middle East.

Xinjiang is a highly sensitive part of China as it hosts some 9 million ethnic Uyghurs who share a Turkic heritage with Turkey as well as nominal adherence to the Turkish Sunni branch of Islam. In July 2009 the US government, acting through the National Endowment for Democracy, the regime-change NGO it finances, backed a major Uyghur uprising in which many Han Chinese shop owners were killed or injured. Washington in turn blamed the riots on Beijing as part of a strategy of escalating pressure on China. [3]During Uyghur riots in Xinjiang in 2009, Erdogan accused Beijing of “genocide” and attacked the Chinese on human rights, a dicey issue for Turkey given their Kurd ethnic problems. Clearly economic priorities from both sides have now changed the political calculus.

Building the world’s greatest market

Contrary to the dogma of Milton Friedman and his monetarist followers, markets are never “free.” They are always manmade. The essential element to building new markets is building infrastructure, and for the vast landmass of Eurasia railroad linkages, ideally high-speed rail links, are essential to those new markets and the fastest way to economic prosperity for all concerned.

With the end of the Cold War in 1990 the vast under-developed land space of Eurasia became open again. This space contains some forty percent of total land in the world, much of it prime unspoiled agriculture land; it contains three-fourth of the entire world population, an asset of incalculable worth. It consists of some eighty eight of the world’s countries and three-fourths of known world energy resources as well as every mineral known needed for industrialization. North America as an economic potential, rich as she is, pales by comparison.

The Turkish-China railway discussion is but one part of a vast Chinese strategy to weave a network of inland rail connections across the Eurasian Continent. The aim is to literally create the world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not just China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe. Direct rail service is faster and cheaper than either ships or trucks, and much cheaper than airplanes. For manufactured Chinese or other Eurasian products the rail land bridge links are creating vast new economic trading activity all along the rail line.

Two factors have made this prospect realizable for the first time since the Second World War. First the collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up the land space of Eurasia in entirely new ways as has the opening of China to Russia and its Eurasian neighbors, overcoming decades of mistrust. This is being met by the eastward expansion of the European Union to the countries of the former Warsaw Pact.

The demand for faster rail transport over the vast Eurasian distances is clear. China’s container port activity and that of its European and North American destinations is reaching a saturation point as volumes of container traffic explode at double-digit rates. Singapore recently displaced Rotterdam as the world’s largest port in volume terms. The growth rate for container port throughput in China in 2006, before outbreak of the world financial crisis was some 25% annually. In 2007 Chinese ports accounted for some 28 per cent of world container port throughput. [4] However there is another aspect to the Chinese and, to an extent, the Russian land bridge strategies. By moving trade flows over land, it is more secure in the face of escalating military tensions between the nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, especially China and Russia, and NATO. Sea transport must flow through highly vulnerable narrow passageways or chokepoints such as the Malaysian Straits of Malacca.

The Turkish Kars-Edirne railway would form an integral part of an entire web of Chinese-initiated rail corridors across the Eurasian landmass. Following the example of how rail infrastructure transformed the economic space of Europe and later of America during the late 19^th Century, the Chinese government, which today stands as the world’s most efficient railroad constructor, has quietly been extending its rail links into Central Asia and beyond for several years. They have proceeded in segments, one reason the vast ambition of their grand rail infrastructure has drawn so little attention to date in the West outside the shipping industry.

China builds Second Eurasian Land Bridge

By 2011 China had completed a Second Eurasian Land Bridge running from China’s port of Lianyungang on the East China Sea through to Kazakhstan’s Druzhba and on to Central Asia, West Asia and Europe to various European destinations and finally to Rotterdam Port of Holland on the Atlantic coast.

The Second Eurasian Land Bridge is a new railway connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic that was completed by China to Druzhba in Kazakhstan. This newest Eurasia land bridge extends west in China through six provinces–Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang autonomous region, which neighbors respectively with Shandong Province, Shanxi Province, Hubei Province, Sichuan Province, Qinghai Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Inner Mongolia. That covers about 360,000 square kilometers, some 37% of the total land space of China. About 400 million people live in the areas, which accounts for 30% of the total population of the country. Outside of China, the land bridge covers over 40 countries and regions in both Asia and Europe, and is particularly important for the countries in Central and West Asia that don’t have sea outlets.

In 2011 China’s Vice Premier Wang Qishan announced plans to build a new high-speed railway link within Kazakhstan, linking the cities of Astana and Almaty, to be ready in 2015.  The Astana-Almaty line, with a total length of 1050 kilometers, employing China’s advanced rail-building technology, will allow high-speed trains to run at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour.

DB Schenker Rail Automotive is now transporting auto parts from Leipzig to Shenyang in northeastern China for BMW. Trains loaded with parts and components depart from DB Schenker’s Leipzig trans-shipment terminal in a three-week, 11,000 km journey to BMW’s Shenyang plant in the Liaoning province, where components are used in the assembly of BMW vehicles. Beginning in late November 2011, trains bound for Shenyang departed Leipzig once each day. “With a transit time of 23 days, the direct trains are twice as fast as maritime transport, followed by over-the-road transport to the Chinese hinterland,” says Dr. Karl-Friedrich Rausch, member of the management board for DB Mobility Logistics’ Transportation and Logistics division. The route reaches China via Poland, Belarus, and Russia. Containers have to be transferred by crane to different gauges twice—first to Russian broad gauge at the Poland-Belarus border, then back to standard gauge at the Russia-China border in Manzhouli.[5]

In May 2011 a daily direct rail freight service was launched between the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest port, and Chongqing, the industrial hub in China’s southwest. That greatly speeded rail freight transport across Eurasia to Europe. Compared to the 36 days for maritime transport from east China’s ports to west Europe, the Antwerp-Chongqing Rail Freight service now takes 20 to 25 days, and the aim is to cut that to 15 to 20 days. Westbound cargo includes automotive and technological goods, eastbound shipments are mostly chemicals. The project was a major priority for the Antwerp Port and the Belgian government in cooperation with China and other partners. The service is run by Swiss inter-modal logistics provider Hupac, their Russian partner Russkaya Troyka and Eurasia Good Transport over a distance of more than 10,000km, starting from Port of Antwerp through to Germany and Poland, and further to Ukraine, Russia and Mongolia before reaching Chongqing in China.[6]

The Second Eurasian Land Bridge runs 10,900 kilometers in length, with some 4100 kilometers of that in China. Within China the line runs parallel to one of the ancient routes of the Silk Road. The rail line continues across China into Druzhba where it links with the broader gauge rail lines of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the largest inland country in the world. As Chinese rail and highways have expanded west, trade between Kazakhstan and China has been booming. From January to October 2008, goods passing through the Khorgos port between the two nations reached 880,000 tons – over 250% growth compared with the same period a year before. Trade between China and Kazakhstan is expected to grow 3 to 5 fold by 2013. As of 2008, only about 1% of the goods shipped from Asia to Europe were delivered by overland routes, meaning the room for expansion is considerable.[7]

From Kazakhstan the lines go on via Russia and Belarus over Poland to the markets of the European Union.

Another line goes to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s largest city of some two millions. Another line goes west to Turkmenistan’s capital Asgabat and to the border of Iran.[8]  With some additional investment, these links, now tied to the vast expanse and markets of China could open new economic possibilities in much-neglected regions of Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could provide a well-suited vehicle for coordination of a broad Eurasian rail infrastructure coordination to maximize these initial rail links. The members of the SCO, formed in 2001, include China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan with Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan as Observer Status countries.

Russia’s Land Bridge

Russia is well positioned to benefit greatly from such an SCO strategy. The First Eurasian Land Bridge runs through Russia along the Trans-Siberian Railway, first completed in 1916 to unify the Russian Empire. The Trans-Siberian remains the longest single rail line in the world at 9,297 kilometers, a tribute to the vision of Russian Sergei Witte in the 1890s. The Trans-Siberian Railway, also called the Northern East-West Corridor, runs from the Russian Far East Port of Vladivostok and links in Europe to the Port of Rotterdam some 13,000 kilometers. At present it is the less attractive for Pacific-to-Atlantic freight because of maintenance problems and maximum speeds of 55 km.

There are attempts to better use the Trans-Siberian Land Bridge. In January 2008 a long distance Eurasian rail freight service, the “Beijing-Hamburg Container Express” was successfully tested by the German railway Deutsche Bahn. It completed the 10,000 km (6,200 miles) journey in 15 days to link the Chinese capital to the German port city, going through Mongolia, the Russian Federation, Belarus and Poland. By ship to the same markets takes double the time or some 30 days.  This route, which began commercial service in 2010 incorporates a section of the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, a rail link using a broader gauge than either Chinese or European trains, meaning two offloads and reloads onto other trains at the China-Mongolia border and again at the Belarus-Poland border.

Were the Trans-Siberian railway passage across Russian Eurasian space to be modernized and upgraded to accommodate high-speed freight traffic, it would add a significant new economic dimension to the economic development of Russia’s interior regions. The Trans-Siberian is double-tracked and electrified. The need is minimally to improve some segments to insure a better integration of all the elements to make it a more attractive option for Eurasian freight to the west.

There are strong indications the new Putin presidency will turn more of its attention to Eurasia. Modernization of the First Eurasian Land Bridge would be a logical way to accomplish much of that development by literally creating new markets and new economic activity. With the bond markets of the United States and Europe flooded with toxic waste and state bankruptcy fears, issuance of Russian state bonds for modernization or even a new parallel high-speed rail Land Bridge linking to the certainty of growing freight traffic across Eurasia would have little difficulty finding eager investors.

Russia is currently in discussion with China and Chinese rail constructors who are bidding on construction of a planned $20 billion of new high-speed Russian rail track to be completed before the 2018 Russian hosting of the Soccer World Cup. China’s experience in building some 12,000 km of high speed rail in record time is a major asset for China’s bid. Significantly, Russia plans to raise $10 billion of the cost by issuing new railroad bonds.[9]

A Third Eurasian Land Bridge?

In 2009 at the Fifth Pan-Pearl River Delta Regional (PPRD) Cooperation and Development Forum, a government-sponsored event, the Yunnan provincial government announced its intention to accelerate construction of needed infrastructure to build a third Eurasian continental land bridge that will link south China to Rotterdam via Turkey over land. This is part of what Erdogan and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao discussed in Beijing this April. The network of inland roads for the land bridge within Yunnan province will be completed by 2015, said Yunnan governor Qin Guangrong. The project starts from coastal ports in Guangdong, with the Port of Shenzhen being the most important. It will ultimately go all the way through Kunming to Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Iran, entering Europe from Turkey.[10]

The route would cut some 6,000-km from the sea journey between the Pearl River Delta and Rotterdam and allow production from China’s eastern manufacturing centers to reach Asia, Africa and Europe. The proposal is for completing a series of missing rail and modern highway links totaling some 1,000 Km, not that inconceivable. In neighboring Myanmar a mere 300 km of railways and highways are lacking in order to link the railways in Yunnan with the highway network of Myanmar and South Asia. It will help China pave the way for building a land channel to the Indian Ocean.

The third Eurasian Land Bridge will cross 20 countries in Asia and Europe and have a total length of about 15,000 kilometers, which is 3,000 to 6,000 kilometers shorter than the sea route entering at the Indian Ocean from the southeast coast via the Malacca Straits. The total annual trade volume of the regions the route passes through was nearly US$300 billion in 2009. Ultimately the plan is for a branch line that would also start in Turkey, cross Syria and Palestine, and end in Egypt, facilitating transportation from China to Africa. Clearly the Pentagon’s AFRICOM and the US-backed Arab Spring unrest directly impacts that extension, though for how long at this point is unclear. [11]

The Geopolitical Dimension

Not every major international player is pleased about the growing linkages binding the economies of Eurasia with western Europe and Africa. In his now famous 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”, former Presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski noted,

“In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geo-strategy involves the purposeful management of geo-strategically dynamic states…To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and to

maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” [12]

The “barbarians” that Brzezinski refers to are China and Russia and all in between. The Brzezinski term “imperial geo-strategy” refers to US strategic foreign policy. The “vassals” he identifies in the book as countries like Germany, Japan and other NATO “allies” of the US. That Brzezinski geopolitical notion remains US foreign policy today. [13]

The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The first sinews of binding the vast economic space have been put in place or are being constructed with these rail links. It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession.  In the period prior to World War I it was the decision in Berlin to build a rail land link to and through the Turkish Ottoman Empire from Berlin to Baghdad that was the catalyst for British strategists to incite the events that plunged Europe into the most destructive war in history to that date. This time we have a chance to avoid a similar fate with the Eurasian development. More and more the economically stressed economies of the EU are beginning to look east and less to their west across the Atlantic for Europe’s economic future.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. He is a contributing author at BFP and may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net where this article was originally published.

Endnotes:

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BFP Nightly Quote

“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.” – Douglas MacArthur

International Newsworthy

US Strikes a Military Pose for Iran

US Amasses Stealth-Jet Armada near Iran

The Great US Heist on Iranian Assets

Iran to Take More Steps in Baghdad Nuclear Talk

…

Taliban Deny Holding New Talks with US

Western Withdrawal Portends Afghan Peace?

The UN May Have Silenced the Afghan Public

US Drone Strikes Resume in Pakistan

6 Gunned Down in Balochistan Violence

Swift Justice for Pakistan’s Premier

…

Syria: Armed Rebels Attack Syrian Central Bank & Police

Serbia ‘Ready to Arm Iraqi Army’

Bahrain Police Continue to Torture Detainees

Bahrain Court Orders Retrial of Jailed Activists

Turkey in a Middle Eastern Fantasyland

Cryptome: CIA-The Consequences of the Partition of Palestine (PDF Document)

…

Egypt: The Horror & the Pita

Egypt: Islamist Group Says it Carried Out Damascus Bombing

Libya: Government to Stay Put Until Elections

Former Libyan Oil Minister Found Dead in Austria

US Special Forces Team Up with African Forces in Hunt for Kony

Sudan Declares State of Emergency

UK Agents Leading Sudan Oil War Plot?

Blast in Eastern Nigeria’s Jalingo Kills Seven

…

Russia: Gazprom to Boost Export to EU by 50%

Putin: The Richest Man on Earth?

‘Azerbaijan is More Important to Israel Than France’- Israeli FM

…

MEPs Censure Lithuania over CIA Secret Prisons Probes

Russians Top UK Rich List

Switzerland Arrests Former Canadian SNC-Lavalin Executive for Corruption & Money Laundering in North Africa Business Deals

National Newsworthy

US Intel Official: “Al-Qaeda Affiliates” Biggest Terror Threat

US May Reopen Illinois Prison Exclusively for Anti-NATO Protesters

Feds Sending Armed Agents to Chicago Three Weeks Before NATO Summit

Banks Cooperate to Track Occupy Protesters

Embattled TSA Takes One Hit after Another

US Export to Mexico: Murder Weapons!

CISPA-SPA-PIPA & Big Lobbying

White House Defends US Drone Attacks

The Illusion of an Economic Recovery

Noteworthy Editorials

Glenn Greenwald: Celebrating our “Warrior President”

Paul Craig Roberts: Brewing a Conflict with China

Tom Engelhardt: The Obama Contradiction

Karen Kwiatkowski: Should Peace Prevail?

Tom Burghardt: Cyber-Intelligence & Internet Spying

Early “Psychological Warfare” Research & the Rockefeller Foundation

Does the US Have to be a Prison Camp?

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: Suspicious Activity Reporting Line Officer Training

Video 2: Humanitarian Crisis Continue in Gaza

Podcast 1: Corbett Report- How to Become a Billionaire (and What to do with it)

Podcast 2: Lew Rockwell Show- Alex Jones on People vs. the State

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by SUBSCRIBING, and by ordering our EXCLUSIVE BFP DVD .

I am truly honored by the following review of Classified Woman by David Swanson at WarisaCrime.Org. Here are a few excerpts from the review:

The experiences she recounts resemble K.’s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I’ve read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.

…

Edmonds translated other materials that involved the selling of U.S. nuclear information to foreigners and spotted a connection to a previous case involving the purchase of such information. The FBI, under pressure from the State Department, Edmonds writes, prevented her from notifying the FBI field offices involved. Edmonds has testified in a court deposition, naming as part of a broad criminal conspiracy Representatives Dennis Hastert, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Bob Livingston, Stephen Solarz, and Tom Lantos, and the following high-ranking U.S. government officials: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Marc Grossman.

…

Yet, thus far, no branch of our government has lifted its little finger to fix the problem of secrecy and the corruption it breeds, which Edmonds argues has grown far worse under President Obama. That’s why this book should be spread far and wide, and read aloud to our misrepresentatives in Congress if necessary. This book is a masterpiece that reveals both the details and the broader pattern of corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C. Edmonds has not exposed bad apples, but a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all — not just the whistleblowers like Sibel and the thousands of people in our government who see something and dare not say something for fear that we will not have their back. Let’s have their back.

…

You can read the full review here at David’s website.

As many of you already know, this book is opposed by the government and hated by the establishment. Meaning – it will depend solely on the people and real alternative media and forums to get the word out. I have been doing exactly that: challenging the government by writing this book, challenging the corporate publishers by independently publishing it, and choosing true alternatives over the establishment media to publicize it.

Every single one of you can help make this book known and read- whether it is e-mailing those you know, posting on various forums and social networks, or simply talking about it directly to your friends. And I am grateful to all of you- the members of our irate minority.

 You can visit the book website here: http://classifiedwoman.com

Classified woman is now available at Amazon, Kindle and Nook. You can access all these sales channels here : http://www.classifiedwoman.com/buy-book/

“We must tell our children about how this evil was allowed to happen — because so many people succumbed to their darkest instincts, and because so many others stood silent.”  – Barack Obama

When President Obama spoke those words at the Holocaust Memorial Museum last Monday, he was referring to atrocities committed by the government of Nazi Germany.  He urged nations to learn from the Holocaust and commit to preventing new atrocities. Then, he unveiled a plan for America’s implementation of this “core responsibility.”

“I’ve signed an executive order that authorizes new sanctions against the Syrian government and Iran and those that abet them for using technologies to monitor and track and target citizens for violence. These technologies should not empower — these technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them. And it’s one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come — the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people — and allow the Syrian people to chart their own destiny.” – Barack Obama

The president made no mention in his speech of torture and extraordinary rendition under his predecessor; no mention of his own administration’s efforts to silence disclosures of government wrongdoing.  In the US government lexicon, “evil” apparently means the use of technology by a government to monitor, track and target citizens for human rights abuses except when the government is the United States or when the government is too powerful to risk angering or a US ally.  This propagandistic definition of evil provides the framework for US foreign policy and the executive order mentioned in Obama’s speech.

Issued in the dark of night, the April 23 executive order basically bars any person or entity from directly or indirectly enabling the governments of Syria and Iran to use information technology to commit what the administration considers “grave human rights abuses” through such means as “computer and network disruption, monitoring and tracking.”  The order authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to block such entities from access to any property they have in the US

The order targets persons who have “materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of” the described government abuses.  Persons whose assets are blocked (upon being added to a government list without notice and thus without due process) become pariahs themselves.  Anyone who assists them by contributing “funds, goods, or services” for their “benefit” and anyone who receives any “contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services” from them will find their names added to the “blocked” list, also.

And, here’s a provision I didn’t see coming:  None of the restrictions described in the order apply to the US government or those who conduct its business.  That’s right. The US reserves for itself the right to do exactly what it has accused the Syrian and Iranian governments of doing: using computer and network disruption, monitoring, and tracking to commit human rights abuses. That would be chilling to read except that it is old news.

It is well known, of course, that the US itself has used technology to assassinate civilians, to disrupt networks used by dissidents, and to monitor and track communications for the purpose of imprisoning and torturing people convicted of no crime; and the list of abuses continues to grow.  This week, human rights groups prepared to meet in Washington, D.C. to highlight the “human cost” of US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.  Meanwhile, the US is considering expanding its use of drones for “signature strikes” that kill unidentified and potentially innocent people based solely on a pattern of activity.  The same day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released documents obtained from the Federal Aviation Administration that include a list of more than 700 authorizations to use drones in the US.

Less well known is the US government’s promotion of wiretapping in other countries, including Central American nations with histories of human rights abuses.

“The US has been pushing “intelligence-led policing” in Central America over recent years, advocating wiretapping operations across the region, according to a February 2012 US Congress report. With the passing of a wiretapping law in Honduras late last year, all seven Central American countries now have legislation in place that allows the practice.” - Insight

With that history behind him, President Obama, in the Holocaust Museum, denounced the use of surveillance and Internet technologies to commit human rights abuses. News coverage of the event does not tell us how many jaws dropped.

Obama was correct in pointing out that that modern technology makes it easier than ever to orchestrate human rights abuses. Surveillance and communications technology, such as that owned and promoted by the US and allies like the United Kingdom, gives governments the means to conduct violent purges with a speed and efficiency that would have dazzled Goring and Himmler.

Legal firewalls and separation of powers can hinder abuses of technology.  But, in the US, many legal firewalls have been eliminated or simply ignored.  Presidential power has grown while a key check on that power, Congress, has become increasingly impotent. In this context, the technologies that threaten the people of Syria and Iran clearly pose a threat to people in the US, too. Their houses are already aflame, but ours is filled to the eaves with tinder, waiting for a single match–one unprincipled individual in the White House–to trigger a conflagration, possibly worldwide. The proper response to America’s crisis is the one President Obama prescribed for Syria and Iran:  Remove combustibles from the house.

In his speech, Obama claimed for the US the mantle of human rights protector, citing interventions in South Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Libya and Central Africa.  But, his claim was premature.  In order to claim the mantle, the US must first excommunicate the high priests of torture. It must ring in the rule of law, close the manual of enhanced interrogation and turn off the lights in Secret America. Thus nations starve their darkest instincts of the fuel that turns them into hell.

Linda Lewis is a policy analyst with degrees in emergency management and geosciences.  Her experience includes 13 years as a policy analyst and planner for the U.S. government.  During that time, she brought attention to serious deficiencies in government preparedness prior to the disasters that confirmed her analyses.  Those included emergency communications (9/11 terrorist attacks), federal assistance (hurricane Katrina) and decision making (Columbia shuttle disaster).

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A top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug organization and his army of assassins in Juarez, Mexico — responsible for a surge in violence in that city that has led to thousands of deaths in recent years — may well have been supplied hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons through an ill-fated US law-enforcement operation known as Fast and Furious.

That enforcer, Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, was arrested by Mexican police in February this year and is now the subject of a 14-count US indictment unsealed in late April in San Antonio, Texas, that also charges the alleged leaders of the Sinaloa organization (Joaquin Guzman Loera, or El Chapo; and Ismael Zambada Garcia, or El Mayo) and 21 other individuals with engaging in drug and firearms trafficking, money laundering and murder in “furtherance of a criminal enterprise.”

However, public records and media reports reveal that the trail of weapons that reportedly helped Marrufo unleash a bloody war against the rival Juarez drug organization for control of the market leads, at least in part, back to the doorstep of US law enforcement agencies, principally the FBI and ATF, through the contortions of the US-sanctioned gun-running operation known as Fast and Furious…

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Read the entire report by investigative journalist Bill Conroy here @ Narco News.

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This week’s BFP/Jamiol Music pick was really easy. It was a request from our own Bill Bergman so it’s almost like a night off for me. Bill’s pick is Monster by Steppenwolf. John Kay and Jerry Edmonton wrote and released this powerful song back in 1969 almost over 40 years ago. Listening to the lyrics shows little over those 40 years has changed.

Part of the visuals accompanying the music are from our present time and slams home how little has changed. Bill, thanks for request. While Irate, our little furry friend in the recliner above, may not be all that soothed tonight, he will seriously enjoy Steppenwolf’s Monster…DJPJ

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BFP Nightly Quote

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” – Howard Zinn

International Newsworthy

US Amasses Stealth Jet Armada Near Iran

US Caught Between Iran & Israel

IDF Chief Calls Iran “Rational”-Barak Disagrees

Iran to Store South Pars Gas Underground

…

Afghanistan: Fuel Supplies at Bagram Diversified

US-Afghanistan-Pakistan Consider Safe Passage for Taliban Militants

CIA Alerts Pakistan to ‘Al Qaeda Plan’

Pakistan: SC Convicts PM Gilani

Pakistan to US: It’s Drones or Transit

…

9 Killed in Damascus Explosion

Russia: Syrian Rebel Using “Tactics of Terror”

Iraqi Kurd Leader Hints at “Secession”

US Terror Drone Kills 3 in Yemen

Lebanese National Wanted for Spying for Israel

…

East Africa at the Brink

Egypt: 13 Candidates to Run for Presidency

Somalia: US Drones Kill at Least 22 in Recent Attacks

…

Russians Expect Putin to Rule until 2024

Great Gaming Russia in Central Asia

Obama Nominates “Richard Morningstar” as Ambassador to Azerbaijan

Kyrgyzstan: Kremlin’s Tack Set on NATO Hub in Russia

Russia Eyes Energy Project in Kyrgyzstan

National Newsworthy

Obama Has Authoritarian Powers Bush Could Only Dream Of

Virginia Lawmakers Agree to Reject NDAA

Judge Denies Request for Release of Bin Laden Death Pictures

Obama Nominates Elite Fundraiser for Top Diplomatic Spot

Bradley Manning: A Show Trial of State Secrecy

Google Makes Data Grab

CISPA Got Worse-Passed on Rushed Vote

RICH: Son of SOPA

The Bailout of US Postal Service Begins

Padilla Takes Torture Case to Supreme Court

Cryptome: Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act (Document)

Noteworthy Editorials

Pepe Escobar: A History of the World BRICK by BRICK

Glenn Greenwald: Obama Escalates in Yemen-Again!

Paul Pillar: The Bin Laden Anniversary

John Pilger: The Global Spy Apparatus- You are All Suspects Now

Web Surveillance: Some of the World’s Most Invasive Regimes

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: Corbett Report- New World Next Week

Video 2: CISPA Snoops?

Video 3: Democracy in Israel

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The military leaders of 50 nations, more than a quarter of those in the world, opened a two-day conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels on April 25 to discuss, as the Pentagon’s website described it, “the present and future of the effort in Afghanistan” and other topics.

Afghanistan being the main subject of discussion, the military chiefs of NATO’s 28 member states, collectively the Military Committee, presumably met with the chiefs of defense staff of the 22 non-NATO nations supplying the alliance with troops for the war in Afghanistan.

In January top military leaders of 67 countries, over a third of those in the world, met at NATO Headquarters to discuss operations in Afghanistan in what is the largest-ever meeting of chiefs of defense staff in history.

The recently concluded expanded meeting of the NATO Military Committee was the last before next month’s summit in Chicago and was largely focused on that impending event.

Participants in the conference included General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; General John R. Allen (in teleconference), commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, in charge of the largest foreign military force ever to be stationed in that nation; NATO’s two top military commanders, Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis and Supreme Allied Commander Transformation General Stéphane Abrial; U.S. military chief Dempsey’s equivalents from 49 nations in Europe, North America, Central America, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Northeast Asia, South East Asia and the South Pacific supplying troops for NATO’s Afghan War. (Armenia, Austria, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia, El Salvador, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Jordan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Montenegro, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Tonga, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates.)

In short, NATO’s 21st century global expeditionary force and its top commanders. An international military coalition never authorized by the United Nations or discussed at any conference or other fora except at NATO Headquarters and at the bloc’s summits.

On the second day of the Military Committee conference in Brussels, NATO’s Allied Command Operations reported on a training course underway at the Allied Joint Force Command Headquarters in Brunssum, the Netherlands where staff officers from NATO’s Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative military partnerships are being instructed to “work as augmentees in a Deployable Joint Force Headquarters (DJF HQ) environment.

NATO added, “DJF HQ serves as an example of a Joint HQ for non-NATO nations to contribute to the Alliance’s missions.”

“Many of the attending nations already share close ties with NATO and have taken part in NATO’s missions, including the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.”

Participating officers were from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Finland, Georgia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Qatar, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates.

At the gathering of military chiefs on April 25 and 26, subjects addressed were NATO’s wars and occupations in three continents: In addition to the ten-and-a-half-year conflict in Afghanistan, NATO’s top brass discussed missions in Kosovo (Kosovo Force), off the Horn of Africa (Operation Ocean Shield), in Libya (Operation Unified Protector), the Mediterranean Sea (Operation Active Endeavor) and no doubt others. Most everywhere, indeed, but on or near the Atlantic Ocean, north or south.

Reporting on the conference, the Pentagon’s website paraphrased an unnamed senior Defense Department official, “speaking on background,” as affirming that “Every opportunity for NATO members and their partners to work together helps to keep the alliance moving forward…especially as they seek to improve interoperability [and] refine tactics and procedures…”

Quoted directly, the source added:

“NATO remains a very strong partnership – as strong as ever – and we have a lot of demonstrated successes with NATO if you look at the history up through today and current events, and especially in the last year. So I think that bodes well for the future of the partnership. The United States involvement in NATO is a strong partnership for tackling any future challenges.”

The Pentagon account also mentioned meetings between the assembled military chiefs and representatives of Georgia and Ukraine, within the NATO-Georgia Commission and NATO-Ukraine Commission frameworks, and of the NATO-Russia Council.

The top military commanders also discussed what in a Pentagon report on the conference was alluded to as Pacific perspectives.

The North Atlantic Alliance in fact has a Pacific strategy. Most of the most recent additions to NATO’s Troop Contributing Countries in Afghanistan have come from Asia-Pacific nations: Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea and Tonga. Japan has dispatched military personnel, medics, as well. Australia and New Zealand have had troops, including special forces, engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan for years. With 1,550 soldiers assigned to the International Security Assistance Force, Australia is the largest troop provider to that NATO operation of any non-NATO country.

The Afghan war has been employed by the U.S. and NATO to forge an unprecedented 50-nation interoperable military force and the bloc has formalized the arrangements initiated to that end with its new Strategic Concept adopted at the last NATO summit in Portugal in late 2010. At a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin a year ago the alliance endorsed a new partnership format, a uniform Partnership Cooperation Menu (with approximately 1,600 activities), to strengthen already existing military cooperation programs and to expand its network of military partnerships throughout the world.

In addition to the Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative programs – in Europe and Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf, respectively – NATO has a new category it calls partners across the globe, which as its name indicates has no geographical boundaries.

NATO lists Partnership for Peace members, which with the alliance’s 28 members are subsumed under the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, as:

Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Its Mediterranean Dialogue partners are Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.

Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners are Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with Saudi Arabia and Oman next in line.

Partners across the globe are, to date, though subject to expansion, Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Korea.

The new Partnership Cooperation Menu provides for a new type of global NATO partnership arrangement called an Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme. The first country to be enrolled in it was Mongolia last month. With Kazakhstan, NATO now has two partners that border both China and Russia.

The issue of Israel employing the Partnership Cooperation Menu to secure Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme status like Mongolia (in 2006 Israel was the first nation to be granted membership in another NATO partnership modality, the Individual Cooperation Program) has arisen lately in regard to reports that Turkey has blocked Israel’s participation at next month’s NATO summit to prevent the above reaching fruition.

The Partnership Cooperation Menu became effective the first of this year and initial plans were to grant the above-mentioned program to Israel and other members of the Mediterranean Dialogue.

NATO is cultivating Iraq and Yemen for prospective Istanbul Cooperation Initiative membership and Libya for membership in the Mediterranean Dialogue, with Lebanon and Syria (in the event of a change in regime) after it. With Iraq the partnership with the Western military organization is a continuation of the seven-year NATO Training Mission-Iraq.

In reference to partners across the globe, NATO maintains that “Japan is NATO’s longest-standing global partner,” adding:

“At their meeting in Berlin in April 2011, Allied foreign ministers listed Japan as one of NATO’s partners across the globe. As such, in the framework of the establishment of a single Partnership Cooperation Menu (PCM) open to all NATO partners, Japan will be able to access a wide range of cooperation activities with the Alliance and develop a more effective individual programme.”

Article 9 of the Japanese constitution expressly forbids the nation entering into any form of collective self-defense. A formal partnership with the world’s only military bloc is doing just that.

The government of South Korea has stated: “Following the new partnership policy of NATO approved in the NATO Ministerial meeting in Berlin, Germany in April 2011, the Republic of Korea is committed to further developing its partnership with NATO and to deepening practical cooperation with the trans-Atlantic defense organization.”

Pakistan is another nation that has expressed interest in the Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme.

Afghanistan, whose new military is being developed for interoperability with those of the major Western powers through the NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan, is another candidate.

The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of a truly worldwide military alliance, one which in regard to the number of members and partners, geographic range, defense capabilities and universal ambitions is staggering.

As the war council in Brussels was underway, Italian Defense Minister Giampaolo di Paola (former chairman of the NATO Military Committee) while speaking at a NATO Smart Defense Agenda meeting in Rome advocated the establishment of ties between the military bloc and the BRICS nations (Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa), asserting that “the Alliance must have a global vision and must take responsibility for the problems concerning security on a global level,” according to Agenzia Giornalistica Italia.

Rick Rozoff is an investigative journalist based in Chicago and has been an active opponent of war, militarism and intervention for over 40 years. He manages the Stop NATO e-mail list , and is the editor of Stop NATO, a website on the threat of international militarization, especially on the globalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Rozoff has a graduate degree in European literature.

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In September 2005, David Rose wrote an article in Vanity Fair about Sibel Edmonds, the founder of this website.  The article was titled “An Inconvenient Patriot.”

Well, let’s step back for a minute.  What is a “patriot?”  How does “patriotism” help illuminate the mission of Boiling Frogs Post?  

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the closest thing you can find to a definitive source on the English language.  The OED includes four main related definitions for the noun “patriot” when the word is applied to a person.  They don’t all mean the same thing, and some senses don’t inspire a lot of respect. 

The first definition described for “patriot” reads:

A person who loves his or her country, especially one who is ready to support its freedoms and rights and to defend it against enemies and detractors.

 That’s not so bad, but here’s the second: 

A person who claims to be disinterestedly or self-sacrificingly devoted to his or her country, but whose actions or intentions are considered to be detrimental or hypocritical; a false or feigned patriot.

 Yuck, who wants to be one of those?  Here’s the third definition:

A person actively opposing enemy forces occupying his or her country; a member of a resistance movement, a freedom fighter.

This one gets the wheels spinning a bit, for instance, in light of the oaths sworn to by new enlistees and officers of the Armed Forces of the United States.  These oaths include pledges “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” (It is interesting to compare and contrast the two oaths linked above, one for enlisted personnel and the other for officers, how each of those includes (or not) “the President” in the oath, and how that relates to the topic at hand.)

And while considering this third definition, do “we” currently have opposing enemy forces occupying “our” country?  Well, first, “we” have to define who “we” are.  Boiling Frogs has a number of contributors, including important work by James Corbett, a Canadian.

Hmm, let’s postpone that one for now.  Here is the fourth definition for “patriot” from the OED:

An opponent of presumed intervention by federal government in the affairs of individuals, esp. with respect to gun and tax laws.

These four definitions are related, in that they deal with the relation between a person and his or her country.  But there is a second sense in which the OED defines the word “patriot,” and it relates to when the term is used more generally, in extended fashion, to include:

A lover, devotee, or supporter of a particular place, cause, ideal, etc.; a champion.

My favorite example for a quote the OED provides in this sense comes from the year 1645, where in something called “God’s Sabbath,” someone named H.L’Estrange said:

The Truth which it professeth will gain it some measure of acceptance with so Profest a Patriot of Truth.

In other words, a person is called a “patriot” frequently as a relationship with country.  There are times, however, when patriots are in relation to other things, including ideals like Truth.

Patriotism Quotes for Boiling Frogs

Here are some illuminating ways in which public figures have defined or used the word “patriot.”  Some of these writers use the word in a positive sense, while others shine cautionary light on the potential downside.

For trivia buffs looking for a challenge, we don’t identify the authors explicitly.  Who do you think made each statement?  The quote link will take you to biographical information about the person quoted, and their photos are included below the quote:

“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”

“Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.”

“The highest form of patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.”

“The love of one’s country is a splendid thing.  But why should love stop at the border?”

“The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him.  Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born.”

“Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”

Do you have any other quotes about patriotism and what it means?  Is Boiling Frogs Post a “patriotic” endeavor?  Feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

Bill Bergman has 10 years of experience as a stock market analyst sandwiched around 13 years as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an M.B.A. as well as an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 1990. Mr. Bergman is currently working with Social Movement Sciences LLC, a new enterprise developing evaluation and funding services for not-for-profit organizations.

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Introduction: The economic, political and social outlook for the second decade of the 21st century is profoundly negative. The almost universal consensus, even among mainstream orthodox economists, is pessimistic regarding the world economy.

 Although, even here, their predictions understate the scope and depth of the crises, there are powerful reasons to believe that beginning in the second decade of this century, we are heading toward a steeper decline than what was experienced during the Great Recession of 2008 – 2009. With fewer resources, greater debt and increasing popular resistance to shouldering the burden of saving the capitalist system, the governments cannot revive the economic system.

Many of the major institutions and economic relations which were cause and consequence of world and regional capitalist expansion over the past three decades are in the process of disintegration and disarray. The previous economic engines of global expansion, the US and the European Union, have exhausted their potentialities and are in open decline. The new centers of growth, China, India, Brazil, Russia, which provided a new impetus for world growth during the first decade are de-accelerating rapidly and will continue to do so throughout the new decade.

The political and military outlook is equally bleak, especially in the Middle East and South Asia where the US and the EU are engaged in prolonged colonial wars, either directly or through proxies. Imperial wars are deepening the economic crises, draining resources, rather than extracting wealth, and in particular with regard to US-Israeli war preparations against Iran threatening to provoke a major economic depression.

We will proceed with an overview of the principle regions of the world political economy beginning with the ongoing crises in the European Union and follow with a discussion of the causes and consequences of the decay of the US Empire. We will then analyze the negative impact of the US proxy wars for Israel in the Middle East before turning to the dynamic growth, conflicts and reforms in the BRICs: China as it emerges as a major world economic power; Russia’s under the dynamic leadership of President Putin and Brazil as an emerging hegemon in Latin America. We will conclude by examining the social and political consequences of prolonged crises, especially the effects of prolonged class based austerity programs and new colonial wars on the class struggle and the reshaping of the global configuration of power in a world without a dominant hegemon.

The Crises of the European Union

The Eurozone faces a triple economic crises: an economy immersed in an ongoing recession including a depressed manufacturing sector; a severe decline in trade; and a precarious financial sector in which bankers in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal are on the verge of bankruptcy[1].

A crisis is developing in the empire resulting from sequential costly colonial wars and economic sanctions toward the Arab-Islamic world – Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

A constitutional crises as rising mass protests have led to the extension of police state measures including the suspension of constitutional guarantees and the criminalization of social protests in Spain, Greece and England.

Throughout 2012 unemployment rose to the highest levels since the introduction of the single currency in 1999. Annual trade with the EU’s main-commercial partners in Asia fell precipitously – over 18% with China, 14% with South Korea and a similar downturn with Japan[2].

Specifically, the crises wracked European Union is on the verge of a break up and the de facto multi-tiered structure is turning into a series of bilateral/multi-lateral trade and investment agreements. Germany-France the Low and Nordic countries are best placed to attempt to weather the downturn. England, namely the City of London – in splendid isolation- is sinking into negative growth, its financiers scrambling to find new speculative opportunities among the Gulf petrol-states and other ‘niches’. Eastern and central Europe, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, have deepened their ties to Germany but are suffering the consequences of the general decline of world markets. Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy) are in a deep depression suffering double digit negative growth over the period 2009-2013 while unemployment skyrockets to over 20% as the massive debt payments fueled by savage assaults on wages and social benefits and the decline of public investments, severely reduces consumer demand[3].

Depression level unemployment and under-employment, running to one-third of the labor force and youth (17-24) unemployment of nearly 50% in southern Europe, detonates prolonged social conflicts, repeated general strikes in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy intensifying into popular uprisings. A break-up of the European Union is almost inevitable. The euro as a currency of choice may be replaced followed by a return to national currencies, accompanied by devaluations and protectionism. Nationalism and class struggle are the order of the day. Banks in Germany, France and Switzerland are preparing to suffer “haircuts” – huge losses on their loans to the South. Major bailouts have become necessary, polarizing German and French societies, between the tax-paying majorities and the bankers. Trade union militancy and rightwing pseudo ‘populism’ (neo-fascism) are challenging incumbent rightist (Spain, Portugal), social democratic and “technocratic” regimes (Greece, Italy).

In response to crises and mass protest, police state measures have increased in Spain .The neo-franco regime of Mariano Rajoy has implemented new repressive laws, which penalize social movements for engaging in passive or active resistance to public authority, with jail terms ranging from one to three years[4]. In Britain, Prime Minister Cameron has approved measures allowing police to intervene any and all personal e-mails or other correspondence without any judicial authorization.

A depressed, fragmented and polarized Europe is less likely to join in any Zionist inspired US-Israeli military interventions .Already economic sanctions against Libya, Iran and even Syria, have caused a crippling 20% increase in the price of oil in 2012, undermining any chances of economic recovery. If crises ridden Europe follows Washington’s confrontationalist approach to Russia and China it will limit access to two of the most dynamic markets for its exports.

Wars and economic crises, each mutually reinforce the other in a downward spiral. As costly imperial wars multiply, the Eurozone domestic economy decays.

The US Crises Continues

The US crises has several inter-related dimensions: a decline in world market shares and hegemony especially in Asia and Latin America; rising class based inequalities and differential economic ‘recovery’ between capital and labor; and a increasingly repressive police state designed to forestall domestic opposition to new overseas wars (especially with Iran) and a long term decline in living standards.

Nothing illustrates the decline of the US empire as clearly as its shrinking share of world trade and manufacturing, in the latter case by China’s forceful entry as the “workplace of the world”[5]. Even in traditional US “spheres of influence”. Latin America and the Caribbean the US no longer is the dominant trader and financier[6].

Between 2005-2010 Chinese state banks lent more than $75 billion to Latin America more than the World Bank,the Inter-American Development Bank and the Ex-Imp Bank combined. The US has been displaced by China as the leading trading partner of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Ecuador – specializing in agro-mineral exports[7]. US de-fact devaluation of its currency and state subsidized interest rates has prejudiced Brazilian exports and created what its Finance Minister describes as a “currency war” – setting the US on a collision course with the biggest and most important economy in the region[8]. The US came up with no major economic iniatiatives to recast US relations with Brazil in recent meetings with President Rouseff. Nor did the US succeed in imposing its oil sanctions policy toward Iran in Latin America and Asia. India and China have rejected US policy and have continued to purchase Iranian oil[9].

Despite a slight and tenuous decline in unemployment, mainly a result of the shrinking o the labor force due to the fact that many long term unemployed workers have given up looking for jobs, the US economy has been incapable of dealing with a ballooning $1.6 trillion fiscal deficit. Because of cumulative public and household debt, Washington is finding it difficult to spend its way toward a robust recovery. Nor can it count on ‘exporting’ its way out of stagnation by turning to Asia, as China, India and the rest of Asia are losing economic steam. China’s growth for 2012 is likely to be 7.5% far below its 9% average and India will decline from 8% to 5% or lower[10]. Moreover, the Obama policy of military encirclement and economic exclusion and protectionism will preclude any new stimulus from China.

The US economic crises has hit the working and middle class the hardest They received nothing similar to the trillion dollar Wall Street bailout to ameliorate their socio-economic plight[11].

According to one report “about 12 million borrowers, or one in five of US homeowners with mortgages, owes more than their property is worth” depressing the housing market and reducing the net worth of US households by several trillion dollars[12].

The “decline in unemployment” claimed by the Obama regime is largely a result of the decline of the labor force from 146 million in 2007 to 140 million in 2011. In 2008 62.7% of the population was employed by 2012 it had dropped to 58.5%, thus accounting for the decline in unemployment from 9.3% to 8.3%. If the same number of workers were seeking work in 2012 as there were in 2007, unemployment[13] would be over 11%. The decline of the median income is cause and consequence of the sharp decline in the “middle class”.Well paid manufacturing jobs are replaced by low paid “service jobs”: over 90% of the 27.3 million new jobs added over the last two decades are in the service sector[14].

Exploitation of labor is evidenced in the growing productivity of labor even as the number of workers decreases: all the gains from technological innovations accrues to capital, as robots replace line workers .As efficiency rises, jobs dissolve and profits increase. Labor’s share of national income has fallen from 63% to 58% over the past 20 years.While median wages declined 2.7% since the recession of 2008-2010, profits have increased nearly 30%. While the domestic market shrinks, the Standard and Poor 400 draw 33% of their profits from exploiting cheap labor overseas.1 Globalization has clearly prejudiced US labor and benefited the MNC. A case in point is General Motors which in 2011 recorded $7.6 billion, its largest profit ever in 2011[15]

The Obama 2013 budget plan proposes to deepen the social divide by cutting health care and social security by $364 billion while only increasing taxes on the rich by less than one-third that amount.[16]

Faced with growing discontent with the economic crises, overseas imperial wars, rising oil prices and declining living standards, the US has vastly increased police state legislation allowing the state to assassinate citizens suspected of fraternizing with ill-defined terrorists, suspending judicial oversight (habeas corpus) on the use of police intervention in homes and offices and cyber sites.

A presidential decree on March 16, 2012, authorized the state seizure of all major work sites and the militarization of labor in time of “emergency” – including in peace time. [17]

The US and England are the biggest losers from the Iraqi post war economic reconstruction. Of $1.86 billion dollars in infrastructure projects, US and UK corporations will gain less than 5%[18]. A similar outcome is likely in Libya and elsewhere. US imperial militarism destroys an adversary, plunging into debt to do so, and non-belligerents reap the lucrative post-war economic reconstruction contracts. In fact empire building drains trillions in military spending without any commensurate extraction of economic wealth. In fact the domestic economy is drained to fund the military empire of 700 military bases. As the wars multiply, domestic consumption shrinks.

US economic stagnation and jobless recovery is evident in the rising number of Americans dependent on food kitchens, the epidemic in home foreclosure – over 10millions are 3 months or more behind in mortgage payments – and 30% of school children dependent on free lunches and breakfasts.

Labor exploitation (“productivity”) has intensified as capitalists force workers to produce more, for less pay, thus widening the income gap between wages and profits.[19] Several decades ago the average US CEO to worker salary differential was 70 to 1. Today it is 350 to 1. Inequalities have reached unprecedented levels and are increasing: over the past 10 years the top 1% of the class structure received 90% of the growth of income, leading to a real decline in median income of over 5%.

The economic downturn and growth of unemployment is accompanied by savage cuts in social programs to pay for the bailout of financially troubled banks, Wall Street investment houses and the automobile industry. The debates among the Democratic and Republican parties are over how much to cut the public health programs for retirees (Medicare) and for the poor (Medicare) and how to proceed in privatizing Social Security in order to secure the ‘confidence’ of the bondholders. Faced with limited political choices, the electorate is reacting by voting out incumbents, abstaining in large numbers – over 60% in congressional elections and 50% in presidential elections – or via spontaneous and organized mass movements, such as the “occupy Wall Street” protest. Dissatisfaction, hostility and frustration pervade the North American political culture. Both major parties attempt to deflect criticism and distract discontented voters by demonizing Islamic citizens and countries as “threats to national security” and augmenting the police powers of the state at the expense of constitutional freedoms. Democratic Party demagogues blame unfair trading practices of China rather than the massive flight of US MNC to the mainland. The Republican Party demagogues blame largely Latin American immigrant workers for “stealing American jobs” for Wall Street’s financial destruction of US manufacturing sector. Both, following the lead of the “Israeli Lobby, fulminate against Iran’s Islamo-fascists.

New Wars in the Midst of Crises: Zionists Pull the Trigger

In what is likely a first in world history, a global imperial power the US is subject to the dictates and pays tribute (in the form of military and economic aid to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars over the past half century) to a marginal state, Israel, with little significance to the world economy and few allies.[20] Never in past empires, has a tiny minority, US Zionists forcefully acted on behalf of the tributary state, and had such a powerful influence in harnessing imperial state to serve the military interests of a foreign power. Never in history has a prosperous elite, educated in the most prestigious schools and occupying strategic economic, cultural and political positions of power, driven an empire into a series of prolonged colonial wars which prejudice major private institutions (oil) industry, drain the public treasury, impoverish the vast majority of taxpayers and consumers of energy in pursuit of the goal of a “Greater Israel”.

Finally never in the history of modern social analysis has the public and blatant display of elite power and political manipulation on behalf of a foreign regime been so deliberately slighted and obfuscated, by complicit or intimidated scholars and journalists, another instance of the pervasive power of intimidation of the Zionist power configuration[21].

It is precisely this elite exercise of power on behalf of a foreign regime that explains the repeated costly imperial wars against Arab and Islamic countries, even in the midst of a major prolonged economic crisis. Since the Israeli Lobby’s first and abiding loyalty is to Israel, they have no qualms about deepening the US fiscal deficit based on trillion dollar military expenditures for wars to advance Israeli domination in the Middle East.

The 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations and their “Israel First” followers in Congress, State, Treasury and the Pentagon have escalated economic sanctions and military preparations for war with Iran despite the loss of a major market for US exports and the sidetracking of scarce economic resources to unproductive military expenditures. As a result of war threats emanating from Washington and Tel Aviv, speculators have pushed up the price of oil by 20% in the first 6 months of 2012, further undercutting any hope of an economic recovery. A US-Israeli attack on Iran will not result in a short localized war: it will result in a regional conflagration, sharply reducing the flow of oil, sending prices skyrocketing and in short order lead to a world depression.[22] Given the extremist Israeli regime’s success in securing blind obedience to its war polices from the US Congress and White House, with regard to Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Lebanon (2006) any doubts about the real possibility of an attack on Iran, with a major catastrophic outcome, can be set aside.

China: Neo-Liberalism and the Compensatory Mechanisms in 2012

China’s dynamic growth over the past 30 years owes as much to the socialist revolution in 1949 as it does to capitalist investment from 1980 to the present. The revolution created the modern state defeated the Japanese imperial army, local warlords and corrupt political rulers of the Kuo Ming tan and ended Euro-US foreign coastal enclaves .The revolution laid the bases for a unified country. By mobilizing labor, it created the essential infrastructure linking economic sectors; via an agrarian reform liberated the peasantry from semi-feudal constraints and created a domestic market; via universal free public education and health programs it created a modern healthy, educated labor force and an army of scientists, engineers and technicians, producing innovations and spurring double digit growth. The capitalist transition began in 1980 and accelerated thereafter via the de-collectivization of agriculture, privatization of industry, trade and urban land and the large scale, long-term entry of major MNCs.

The transition and consolidation of capitalist China had a dual effect: it unleashed the forces of production leading to double digit growth and it polarized class relations between a super-rich ruling class, a privileged ‘new petty bourgeois’ and a vast army of poorly paid exploited factory workers and migrant construction and domestic service workers.

As China became the ‘workplace of the world’ it also became the locus of the world’s worst social inequalities. Chinese capital in partnership with foreign capital turned it into the world’s second biggest economy. But China’s second and third generation of post-socialist working class increasingly has engaged in mass action demanding a greater share of the wealth, a return to free public health and education and low cost housing[23]. China’s elite is faced with dual pressures: on one side from private capital demanding greater financial de-regulation to allow for overseas investment and on the other side from labor’s clamor for greater political freedom and social spending on housing and an end to vast networks of corruption between Party officials and business elites[24]. As China’s economy matured it turned to greater investments in basic research and advanced engineering, moving China up the value chain toward complex and innovat6ive manufacturing[25]. Faced with shrinking trade surpluses due to declining demand from the crises ridden Euro zone and the US an increasingly sharp inter-elite struggle emerged, pitting neo-liberals against populists. The core leadership around premier Wen Jiabao embraced the opening of financial markets, the entry of foreign finance capital, the liberalization of the political system to allow for competing elites and the repression of advocates of neo-populist policies such as those proposed by former mayor of Chongging and ex- politburo member Bo Xilai. Bo promoted greater social insurance, environmental protection and social housing, greater social equality and robust prosecution of corrupt business-Party mafias[26]. The defeat of the symbolic head of the “populist faction”, with the arrest of BoXilai, heralded by the western financial press as a victory over “neo-Maoist demagogy”, signals the deepening and open embrace of neo-liberalism and the gradual discarding of the public regulatory regime over foreign financial flows[27]. This in turn increases China’s vulnerability to financial turmoil and opens opportunities for outward flows of capital by China’s new rich billionaires. The announced growth of domestic social spending has yet to ameliorate the class inequalities: China and its elite have become a mecca for luxury goods manufacturers and fashion designers both domestically and overseas in Paris, London, Milan and New York.

Faced with intensifying pressures from below and especially in light of the deepening of the neo-liberal option[28], the Chinese elite also has to deal with the crises in its principle export markets in the Euro zone.

China faces the US-EU crises of the new decade with several possibilities for ameliorating its impact. Beijing is shifting toward producing goods and services for the 700 million domestic consumers currently out of the economic loop. By increasing wages, social services and environmental safety, China is compensating for the loss of overseas markets. China is vastly increasing public spending on expanding public health coverage, increasing wages, and ploughing billions into basic research and technology. China’s economic growth, which depended on real estate speculation, has shifted gears, as the regime has tightened lending and demanded greater municipal investment in low cost social housing for the middle and working class. To avoid a sharp downturn, leading to job losses, municipal bankruptcies and increased social and class conflicts, China is prepared to launch a massive stimulus package as it did in 208/9. Faced with rising demands for greater economic and political liberalization from the new economic elite and working class demands for social equality and higher wages, the different factions in the Communist Party debate over greater liberalization and gradual democratization[29]. The outcome will profoundly affect China’s class structure, political institutions as well as the relative strength of market – state relations. A turn toward greater liberalization and deregulation of financial markets, as appears most likely could heighten class conflicts and provoke an economic crisis which will likely strengthen opposition to the market.

Russia Faces the Crises

The post-Soviet decade (1990-1999) witnessed the greatest peacetime human catastrophe: life expectancy fell from 66 years to 58 years in the course of three years, with over 3 million Russians dying prematurely, as newly minted capitalist oligarchs plundered the economy and public treasury[30]. Incumbent dictator Yeltsin literally bombarded the opposition led parliament in buttressing his regime. He was elected President in 1996 thanks to oligarchical media manipulation, gangster dominated regional electoral processes and massive State and private funding. Over a trillion dollars of public resources, from diverse sectors including oil, gas ,banks and transport, were seized by thugs and oligarchs for a fraction of their value[31]. Living standards plunged, pensioners suffered extreme hardships and many were evicted from public housing in choice locations.

At the height of the neo-liberal onslaught over 60% of the Russian population fell below the poverty life – the greatest decline since the end of WW II. Russia fell from co-equal world superpower to a vassal state of the Euro-US Empire.

With the advent of the Putin era, at the onset of the new century, Russia began a rapid and steep recovery. During the first decade of the 21st century poverty was reduced to less than 20% of the population. Wages and salaries were paid on time and increased by over 90%. The Russian economy grew by nearly 8% per annum and its trade surpluses led to foreign reserves exceeding 300 billion dollars, Russia regained its status as a respected power in the international political arena, forming part of the rising BRIC quartet (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Putin, while not reversing the privatization or prosecuting the oligarchic elites for illicit enrichment, did limit their stranglehold over public policy. For his pursuit of Russian national interests and opposition to US missile encroachment on its borders, he was targeted by the western media as “hardline”[32]. For winning elections and imposing some restraints on the western funded and influenced propaganda – think tanks, NGOs and media outlets he was dubbed “authoritarian” by the imperial mass media. Nevertheless, Putin’s stabilization and state promoted prosperity marginalized the western backed opposition and received the popular backing of close to two-thirds of the electorate.

The election of President Putin with over 60% of the vote in 2012 was a major blow to the western backed opposition intent on turning the clock back to the Yeltsin era … Putin promised a more independent policy and less collaboration in backing US promoted uprisings and sanctions against Russian allies like Syria and trading partners like Iran. Putin has turned toward greater trade and diplomatic ties with China. Russia benefits from the rise in oil prices, exceeding $120 a barrel. The crises of the EU and weakening of NATO makes Obama’s planned missile placements pointed at Russia less palatable and more a provocation.

The western media backed opposition, despite its financial clout failed to degrade Putin’s image: its investment boycotts went nowhere and they were thoroughly beaten in the Presidential elections by a big margin. The recession has not weakened the Russian economy .Putin continues to rely on public ownership and greater dependency on overseas oil giants and oligarchs to sustain growth, an unstable and contradictory coalition.

The Transition 2011 – 2012: From Regional Stagnation and Recession to World Crises

The year 2011 laid the groundwork for deepening the crises of the European Union. The crises began with the recession in the Eurozone, stagnation in the US and the outbreak of mass protests against the brutal austerity programs that slashed living standards on a continent wide scale. The events of 2011 were a dress rehearsal for a new year of popular rebellions and general strikes. Moreover, the escalation of Zionist orchestrated war fever against Iran in 2011 led to brutal sanctions and the greater likelihood of the biggest regional war since the US-Indo-Chinese conflict. The electoral campaigns and outcomes of Presidential elections in the US and France offer no relief or alternatives – neither of the leading candidates offers an alternative to the deepening global conflicts and economic crises.

During 2011 the Obama regime announced a policy of military confrontation with Russia and military encirclement of China .His policies are designed to undermine Russia’s strategic defense and degrade China’s rise as a world economic power. In the face of a deepening economic recession and with the decline of overseas markets, especially in Europe, Washington perversely and aggressively pursues policies limiting lucrative export to the China market and the inflow of its investments. The White House effort to disrupt China’s trade and investments in Asia, Africa and elsewhere has been a dismal failure. In fact China has replaced the US as the principle aid beneficiary in Latin America and even the Caribbean. US efforts to exploit China’s internal ethnic and popular conflicts and to increase its military presence off China’s coastline has only encouraged China to increase its defense budget by 12% annually and to increase its investments in domestic security and social programs. A major provocation or fabricated offshore incident in this context is not to be excluded. US failed efforts to stem the rise of China has led to rabid chauvinist calls by right-wing pundits for a costly new ‘Cold War’. Obama’s Far East military build-up has provided the framework and justification for a large-scale, long-term costly confrontation with China. This is a desperate effort to prop up declining US influence and strategic positions in Asia. However, the US military “quadrangle of power” – US-Japan-Australia-South Korea – with satellite support from the Philippines is not match to China’s deepening trade, investment and currency ties with regional partners in Asia, and its growing financial links with Latin America and Africa. Washington’s military build-up exists in an economic vacuum, devoid of any new economic initiatives .It only serve to exacerbate the domestic fiscal deficit, while its military bases, troop emplacements, and arms spending add to the balance of payments deficit.

The austerity programs imposed in Europe, from England to Latvia to southern Europe took hold with a vengeance in 2012. Massive public sector firings and reduced private sector salaries and job opportunities, led to a year of permanent class warfare and regime challenges. The ‘austerity policies’ in Southern Europe were accompanied by debt defaults resulting in substantial bank losses in France, Germany and England. The British financial ruling class successfully pressured the Conservative/Liberal coalition regime to increase regressive taxes, reduce corporate taxes, privatize public health and education and repress popular unrest. A new tough neo-Thatcherite style of autocratic rule based on greater police powers over private communications has been legislated. The opposition Labor-trade union alliance has relied on vacuous verbal protest while tightening the leash on the rebellious rank and file. The regressive socio-economic policies put in place from 2008 to 2012 throughout Europe have set the stage for new non-elected technocratic and police-state regimes which in turn lead to more acute social confrontations. The second decade looms as a “lost decade” for workers and unemployed youth with no future.

The Coming Wars that Ends America “As We Know It”

The impossible demands that the Israeli regime dictated when the P-5 plus one announced the opening of a new round of negotiations with Iran have become the bases for Washington’s ‘non-negotiable demands’. Israel, via Washington, demands that Iran dismantle its newly built multi-billion dollar modern nuclear research center at Fordo, stop all uranium enrichment, destroy what they call “military grade enriched material”, (uranium enrichment to 20%) and allow permanent and pervasive International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring of all Iranian defense facilities[33]. No country among the over one hundred engaged in nuclear research is subject to these conditions. In fact, Iran is well within the parameters of international law and the non-proliferation agreement – while Israel rejects any international inspection of its nuclear weapons stockpile and never signed the non-proliferation agreement.

The Iranians propose to negotiate the terms of enrichment limiting the quantity, level of enrichment and inspection. But certainly and justifiably they will not destroy their advanced research facilities, nor end all enrichment. In other words the Israeli-Zionist-Washington position is devised specifically to sabotage a reasonable compromise that assures the peaceful usage of Iran’s nuclear program. The purpose is to create a pretext for claiming that “negotiations” were “tried” but failed and that a military attack is “justified”.[34]

Under Obama, as with his predecessor, the US has demonstrated its unyielding embrace of the doctrine of foreign policy by unilateral fiat in pursuit of a unipolar world.

Washington rejected a negotiated settlement of the Libyan crises: it backed an all-out air and maritime war, marked by military success and the total destruction of its economy, society and political order[35].

US and its NATO satraps and Gulf state clients demand that the Syrian government unilaterally curtail its military defense of the country while they continue to provide arms, financial aid and mercenaries to the armed opposition. In effect the US backs a unilateral cease fire to facilitate the advance of their client mercenary “rebels”[36].

The US, alone and without a single supporting country, insisted that Cuba be excluded from the “summit of the Americas” in Cartagena Colombia in April 14-15, 2012[37]. The attending countries made it clear to Obama that this will be that last summit in which Cuba will be excluded[38]. A unilateral US veto over Latin America’s progressive policies is dead and buried. In contrast the US, the Euro zone and Israel ally with the most retrograde regimes, like the Gulf petrol-dictators in pursuit of their colonial wars. Policies rejected by the major power in Asia (China, India) Latin America (Brazil, Argentina) Africa (South Africa) and Russia. In other words, despite growing international isolation and the tremendous chaos and destruction which colonial wars bring in their wake, the Zionist-militarist-Wall Street complex that rules the US and therefore NATO, refuses to reflect and reconsider the realities of the 21st century. Washington fails to recognize a multi-polar world, that colonial wars destroy empires and that an imperial policy dictated by a minority elite aligned to a racist-military-colonial regime can only lead to disasters.

Obama has laid the groundwork for a new and bigger war in the Middle East by relocating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrating them against Iran. To undermine Iran, Washington is expanding clandestine military and civilian operations against Iranian allies in Syria, Pakistan, Venezuela and China. The key to the US and Israeli bellicose strategy toward Iran is a series of wars in neighboring states, world- wide economic sanctions , cyber-attacks aimed at disabling vital industries and clandestine terrorist assassinations of scientists and military officials. The entire push, planning and execution of the US policies leading up to war with Iran can be attributed to the Zionist power configuration occupying strategic positions in the US Administration, mass media and ‘civil society’. Even the financial press highlights the political influence of Jewish money in the election and selection of presidential candidates and policy makers: The Financial Times highlights the role of the 1% Jewish power elite in its tittle article “The Jewish Vote: Small segment but a big role in raising funds”[39]. Equally important, it is public knowledge that leading Israeli backed and Zionist run foundations play a deciding role in designing US and Euro- zone sanctions policy toward Iran, which prejudices their economies. According to the Financial Times “Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (sic) who helped write the latest sanctions bill admits that there is a risk oil prices could rise even further”[40]. A systematic analysis of policymakers designing and implementing economic sanctions policy in Congress finds prominent roles for leading Zionists such as Waxman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Levin, Cantor, Berman and their numerous camp followers. Dennis Ross in the White House, Jeffrey Feltman in the State Department and David Cohen in the Treasury, ensure that the White House toes the Israeli line. The Obama regime, in the midst of the presidential re-election campaign, is especially beholden to multi-millionaire Zionist fund raisers and takes its cue from the ‘52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization. Combined they raise over 50% of the Democratic party campaign funds. The Israeli-US Zionist strategy is to encircle Iran, weaken it economically and attack its military. The Iraq war is the US “model” for its current build up for an attack on Iran. Israel is the principle political and military beneficiary of the Iraq and Libyan wars as is the case in the current proxy war against Syria. These wars have destroyed Israel’s adversaries or are in the process of doing so. But the economic, political and human cost to the US has been enormous: trillions of dollars in war debts have bled the US treasury, without any economic returns, as US oil profits have been sacrificed in Iraq and Iran.

Economic sanctions, which were designed to create domestic discontent in Iran, are the principle weapon of choice. This policy has backfired as it boosted the price of oil by 20% in 2012, undermining any economic recovery in the EU and the US. The global sanctions campaign which engaged the energies of the major Jewish-Zionist lobbies succeeded as the Obama regime followed with an escalation of financial sanctions. The US-NATO- Israeli regimes have faced no opposition from the mass media, Congress or the White Office. The zionist power configuration (ZPC) is even virtually exempt from criticism by most progressive writers, peace movements and leftist grouplets – with a few notable exceptions. The past year’s re-positioning of US troops from Iraq, the dispatch of aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, the economic sanctions and the rising pressure from Israel’s “lobby” in the US increases the likelihood of war in the Middle East. This likely means a “surprise” aerial and maritime missile attack by US-Israel forces. Israel’s pretext of an “imminent nuclear attack” and White House claims that the “failure” of Iran to negotiate in good faith will be faithfully transmitted by the Israeli lobby to their lackeys in the US Congress and to the western public for consumption and transmission to the rest of the western world. Contrary to Israeli leaders this will not be a limited war: Iran is capable of sustaining a prolonged war, extending across the Gulf region. Iran is capable of crossing borders into Iraq aided by its Shi’a allies”. It can paralyze the flow of oil in the Hormuz Straits. It can send missiles into the Saudi oilfields. A US-Israeli war on Iran will be destructive, bloody, prolonged war which could provoke a global depression. The US will bear the direct military cost by itself and the rest of the world will pay a dear economic price. The Zionist promoted US war will convert the recession of 2008- 2012 into a major depression and probably provoke mass upheavals.

Conclusion

The world configuration of power in the new decade is far more complex than the designation concocted by the leading banking houses[41]. For example, the “BRICs” includes a truly global power, China, a center of manufacturing, science and growth; Russia a military power highly dependent on energy exports and lacking a competitive manufacturing sector; Brazil is a commodity-dependent export economy suffering economic stagnation; and India where three quarters of the populace live at a or below $3 a day. The decline of the US-EU axis is not accompanied by a new multi-polar global power configuration. The crises engendered by neo-liberalism in the West is accompanied by its growth in Asia, especially China, India, South Korea and Indonesia. The decline of neo-liberalism is not accompanied by the rise of socialism: in Southern Europe, authoritarian rightist regimes buttress the crises-racked neo-liberal order by imposing policies by fiat and by criminalizing the social movements and civil disobedience and by centralizing executive power. By ignoring financial speculation as the detonator of the crises and the state bailout of the banks for the high indebtedness, the regimes perversely blame popular social program for the crises and impose harsh anti-popular austerity programs which lower living standards and increase profits. The debate between neo-liberals and neo-keynesians focuses on ‘austerity’ versus ‘spending’ – neither of which faces the class bases of state policy and the class relations which define economic costs and benefits. What is clear throughout the prolonged socio-economic crises is the impermeability of the state: despite mass disaffection, repeated general strikes and multitudinous and demonstrations, the capitalist state ignores majoritarian interests and persists in imposing savage retrograde reductions in living standards. Capitalist rule in the West is based on a reversal of seventy years of social gains. The reality of growing immiseration replaces the idea of social progress. We have passed from the so-called “golden age” of post-World War II capitalism to the long night of the “dark ages” of capitalism, an epoch of decay and descent into barbarism.

All indications point to the second decade of the 21st century being an epoch of unrelenting economic crises spreading outward from Europe and the US to Asia and its dependencies in Africa and Latin America. Catastrophic imperial and proxy wars accelerate the continued decay of the US empire and facilitate the rise of Asia as the epicenter of world capitalism and as the site for rising class conflict. The crisis in capitalist class rule is truly global and is spilling over into sharpening inter-imperialist trade confrontations. Colonial wars are undermining any efforts to ameliorate this crisis. Prolonged economic crises and a never ending downward spiral in living standards, fueled by class based austerity programs designed to reduce wages and social benefit and increase profits. In response emerging mass social movements are playing a dominant role within the anti-capitalist opposition. Direct action is gradually overshadowing electoral politics, moving over time from protests and rebellions, toward overt struggles for state power.

Professor James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. Dr. Petras received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. You can visit his website here.

Notes:

[1] On the continuing recession in the euro zone especially in Greece, see Financial Times, 2/16/12, p.2.

[2] Financial Times, 12/15/11, p. 3.

[3] BBC Business News, 4/2/12.

[4] LaJornada, 4/12/12.

[5] Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Decline (Little, Brown: 2012)

[6] Financial Times, 2/16/12.

[7] ibid

[8] LaJornada, 4/10/12, and Financial Tines 1/11/12, p.7.

[9] Financial Times 3/2/12

[10] International Monetary Fund “Projections for Growth 2012”, March 2012.

[11] Financial Times, 4/11/12, p. 6.

[12] ibid

[13] Financial Times, 12/12/11, p. 1.

[14] Financial Times, 12/15/11, p. 1

[15] Earthlink news 2/6/2012

[16] BBC News 2/13/2012

[17] Executive Order – National Defense Resource Preparedness, March 16, 2012; Stephen Lendman, “Police State America”, www.FreedomsPhoenix.com

[18] Financial Times 12/16/2011 p 3

[19] Financial Times 12/16/2011 p6

[20] James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press, Atlanta 2006).

[21] James Petras, “On Bended Knee: Zionist Power in American Politics” in James Petras War Crimes in Gaza (Clarity: Atlanta 2010) pp. 69 -104

[22] James Petras, “US-Israeli War on Iran: The Myth of Limited Warfare”, Axis of Logic, 4/15/2012; New York Times, 3/21/2012; Financial Times, 3/24/2012 p 7. http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=1894

[23] Chinaworker.info 3/18/12.

[24] Financial Times 2/29/12, p. 13.

[25] “A Bumper Year for Chinese Science” Science Vol. 335, March 9, 2012, p. 1156.

[26] Dexter Roberts “Chinese Premier Wen Jialao Talks Like a Bold Reformer”, Bloomberg Business Week, 4/4/12.

[27] Editorial Financial Times, 4/13/12, p. 8.

[28] Martin Hart-Landsberg, “China and Neoliberalism” http://media.1clark.edu

[29] Martin Wolf, “China is Right to Open Slowly”. Financial Times, 2/29/12, p. 13.

[30] David Hoffman, The Oligarchs (Public Affairs: New York 2002).

[31] Hoffman op. cit. Part Two, pp. 177 – 324.

[32] The entire western press including the New York Times: the Financial Times, to the Washington Post and El País, Le Monde have waged a savage propaganda campaign against Putin and in defense of the Yeltsin era, overlooking the enormous differences in quality of life.

[33] BBC News, 4/5/12.

[34] Financial Times, 3/6/12, p. 9.

[35] BBC News, 4/15/12.

[36] BBC News, 4/16/12.

[37] LaJornada 4/16/12.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Financial Times 3/6/12, p. 9.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Claudio Katz “El ajedrez global de la crisis” http://www.lahaine.org/index.php?p=27426, p. 7.

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“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.” – General Douglas MacArthur

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This morning Glenn Greenwald had an excellent and very timely article at Salon titled Crime Boasting for Profit. I encourage you to read the entire article and pay close attention to his well-made points on how the known CIA criminal Jose Rodriguez was able not only to escape accountability for his widely public criminal conduct, but was also permitted to ‘wrap his conduct in the banner of heroism as a highly-paid Simon & Schuster author’:

Rodriguez thus joins a long line of Bush officials — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, et. al — who not only paid no price for the crimes they committed, but are free to run around boasting of those crimes for profit. That’s what happens when the most politically powerful officials are vested with immunity for their illegal acts. Both the criminals and their crimes become normalized. They feel free not only to admit their crimes openly but to justify and glorify them, because they know they will never be held accountable for them. Instead of having to explain himself as a criminal defendant, Rodriguez is instead permitted to wrap his conduct in the banner of heroism as a highly-paid Simon & Schuster author.

This case and Greenwald’s article brings up a very significant topic I’ve been meaning to write about and discuss here at Boiling Frogs Post. For years I have closely watched and investigated cases of self-proclaimed phony government whistleblowers and critics-especially those from the Intel communities,  who have easily obtained their uber secretive bosses’ blessings and approval, and have secured seven-figure publishing deals, sometimes even before actually (and supposedly) blowing the whistle or publicly voicing their supposed criticism.

Let me tell you with 100% certainty, based on personal experience, and relying on hundreds of legit government whistleblower cases I have come to know intimately: There is no way in hell, let me capitalize it here, in ‘HELL,’ a true government whistleblower, especially those from Intel agencies such as the CIA, can clear a manuscript/book and obtain the agency’s blessing to publish it. Even without a single classified word in the manuscript-book. No way. Similarly, there is no way in ‘HELL’ for a genuine truth-teller, aka whistleblower, to obtain a seven-figure or even six-figure offer from now-dying mega corporate publishers. No way. Not a chance. Impossible.

Let me show you what happens when a real whistleblower, a genuine truth-teller or critic attempts to get the ‘blessing’ of his or her agency, aka the required pre publication review:

I’ll go down memory lane and present CIA’s Frank Snepp’s case from the 1970s:

The CIA attempted to stop Snepp from publishing his book. He accused the CIA of ruining his career and violating his First Amendment rights. The CIA, in return, claimed Snepp had violated his employment agreement by speaking out. He enlisted the help of the American Civil Liberties Union in his defense. In the end, the CIA won a court verdict against Snepp and attached the royalties from Decent Interval.

…

Now back to the present with the most recent case involving the CIA officer who can only be identified under the pseudo name Ishmael Jones:

Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the Eastern District of Virginia ruled at a June 15 hearing (pdf) that the CIA officer, who goes by the pseudonym “Ishmael Jones,” would be held liable for publishing his 2008 book “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture” in the face of a refusal by the CIA’s Prepublication Review Board to clear the volume for publication.

…

But defense attorney Laurin Mills countered that the CIA breached the agreement first by failing to complete the review of Mr. Jones’ manuscript in a timely fashion and then issuing a “bad faith denial.” “I think after 18 months of going through the [prepublication review] process, with them denying him the right to publish anything but footnotes,… and going six months through an appeal process where the Government’s own regulations say they’re supposed to complete it in a month, he exercised his rights under the First Amendment to publish this.”

…

A copy of the June 15 hearing transcript was obtained by Secrecy News. The court ruling was first reported by Josh Gerstein in Politico on June 28. Frank Snepp presented a gripping account of his legal battle with CIA in the 1999 book “Irreparable Harm.”

…

Allow me to present my own publication clearance journey dealing with the DOJ-FBI criminals who have been trying to block my book unconstitutionally and illegally:

Washington, D.C. April 10, 2012. Today, the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) revealed that the FBI required employees to sign employment contracts that are illegal under Federal law. The NWC launched the investigation in response to a nearly yearlong campaign by the FBI to prevent the publication of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ new book, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story.

On April 26, 2011, Ms. Edmonds followed official procedure and submitted her manuscript to the FBI for pre-publication clearance. Under the terms of her employment agreement and controlling regulations, the FBI was required to review and approve the submission within thirty (30) days. Instead of complying with the law, the FBI intentionally stalled the approval process for over 341 days and has still refused to “clear” the book for publication.

…

And here is a video clip from RT’s interview with my attorney discussing the case:

As you know I can list many other cases of blocking, persecuting and even prosecuting government truth-tellers for publishing, or even attempting to publish, their books. It is a fact. It has been a constant reality. It has been a recurring theme-over and over again. So when you see a phony SOB who is marketing himself (and his book) as a whistleblower/truth-teller totally free and unchallenged by his bosses and agency, you are looking at a government and or establishment backed operative. Without a doubt. With no exception.

Ain’t no one gonna get away with publishing a high-dollar book by assuming ‘Anonymous’ as his name. Unless- he is a lying SOB operative. Unless- The bosses want his book to be out there and believed.

Then there is the other equation in these cases: The Mega Publishers offering mega dollars. In the coming days I am going to write about this in depth at my book site’s blog, and share my first-hand experiences with Mega Publishers-Government-Establishment collusion, but let me tell you this much here:

Ain’t no way a real government whistleblower/truth-teller/critic is going to be offered mega dollars for telling the truth, nothing but the whole truth, by mega publishers. No way. It has not happened. It is not happening. And it won’t happen.

Who is the world’s best-known real whistleblower? Do you think he was ever offered mega dollars by mega publishers? The answer is ‘No.’ Never.

So when you see mega dollars dished out by mega publishers for a book by someone who claims to be a real critic, a truth-teller or a whistleblower, you know you are looking at a lying phony false flag operating SOB managed by the corrupt powers-establishment and tasked with misguiding and misinforming the public.

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Move out of home, go to school, get a loan, graduate, get a job, pay your taxes, get a mortgage, buy a house, get married, have kids, grow old, and die. My generation, and those that follow, are incapable of meeting the expectations that are held up for us to meet. The world we are living in is far different from those generations which preceded us. Using Canada as an example, this episode examines the coming economic crisis, developing social youth movements, and the failure of expectations for the youth in Canada, North America, and the world at large. The game is rigged, and we are set up to fail. The time has come for the youth to understand the world we are inheriting, and to make a choice: do we passively accept a suffering existence, or do we actively create something new? Older generations must also realize that they can no longer coddle and pressure their children to do as they did, but must also accept the realities of the world, and work with the youth in creating something new. So, will we be a lost generation, or a creative generation?

Listen to the podcast show here (Subscribers only):

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BFP Nightly Quote

“If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.” – Joseph Sobran

International Newsworthy

US Slaps New Sanctions on Iran-Syria

Iranian Oil Industry Hit by Cyber Virus “Viper”

Half of Iran Tanker Fleet Storing Oil at Sea

…

Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard

US Makes a Pact with Afghan Puppets

Final Price Talks in May for TAPI Pipeline

Pakistan: Gilani Son Named in Ephedrine Scam

Balochistan Quagmire

…

Iraq-Kurdistan Chief: PM Must Not Obtain F-16s

Bahrain: Massive Pro-Democracy Rally Defies US-Backed State

Israel Denies it has Access to Azeri Bases

…

Egypt’s NGO Crackdown: Gagging Democracy or National Self-Defense?

Global Companies Gather in Post-War Libya on Energy Industry

Nigeria: Shell Assessing $4 Billion Oil Project

South Sudan: ‘Sudan Has Declared War’

…

Russia-Kyrgyzstan Sign Military Base Lease Deal

Tajikistan Closer to Russian Bases Deal

Tony Blair Stars in Kazakhstan Promo Video

…

The French Road to Perdition

German Military Rethinks Exporting Democracy

MI6 Set Up Fake Mosque in Europe to Attract Muslim Extremists

National Newsworthy

Obama’s New Infrastructure for Intervention

New US Spy Service Targets Iran-China

Glencore: A Giant among Giants

GAO Urges Obama to Cancel Wasteful Medicare Experiment

The Journalist: DHS Top Terrorist?

Confirmed: Feds Coordinating Brutal Crackdown on Occupy Protests

Ron Paul Wins Minnesota Delegates by a Landslide

Noteworthy Editorials

Paul Craig Roberts: How Liberty Was Lost

Paul Pillar: Buying Our Way Out of Conscription

Glenn Greenwald: Federal Judge Complicity

Tony Cartalucci: Pentagon Fears Global Technological Progress

The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: BFP EyeOpener Report- Spotlight Baluchistan: Minerals, Pipelines & Terrorists in the Imperial Great Game

Video 2: Israeli Night Raid-Three Children Arrested

Video 3: Funding Terror- US Behind Crimes of Bahraini Regime

Podcast 1: Corbett Report- Eric Draitser on Baluchistan & Pipeline Politics

Podcast 2: Corbett Report- The Regulation Trap

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This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting Baluchistan, Minerals, Pipelines and terrorists in the Imperial Great Game of think tanks, policy “experts,” human rights groups and Washington insiders calling for support of terror groups in the region.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here (Subscribers Only):

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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BFP Nightly Quote

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”—George Bernard Shaw

International Newsworthy

Suspected Cyber-Attack Hits Iran’s Oil Sector

Iran’s Trade Partners Act to Avoid US Sanctions

Iran Claims Data from US Drone ‘Used to Spy on Osama’

Jimmy Carter Warns against War with Iran

…

Afghanistan: NATO to Use Russian Route for Supplies

Kabul Attacks Show Intel Failure in Afghanistan

US May Use Military Means in Afghanistan until 2024

Pressurizing Pakistan on Taliban Attacks

Pakistan Seeks New IMF Loan

…

US-Turkey-Iraqi Kurds Join Hands

Bahrain Deports Channel 4 News Team for Covering Protest Rally

Turkey Says Israel Not Welcome at NATO Summit

Computers of Syrian Activists Infected with Trojan

…

US Extends Military Advisers’ Mission in Central Africa

Arms Smuggling from Libya Threatens Africa

Egypt: Doubts Grow over Military Rulers’ Agenda

Egypt Cancels Gas Pact with Israel

The Sudans Put China in a Policy Bind

US Warns of Possible Terror Attacks in Kenya

…

NATO Baltic Buildup Threatens Belarus & Russia

Azerbaijan: Anti-Government Protesters Rally in Baku

Kyrgyzstan: Joint Kyrgyz-Russian Venture Now Main Manas Fuel Supplier

More than 11 Militants Killed in Dagestan-Chechnya

National Newsworthy

Police State: US Skies to be Full of Drones

Pentagon Wants Spy Troops Posing as Businessmen

Ron Paul Attacks CISPA in Urgent Call to Oppose ‘Big Brother’ Bill

DOJ Sought Cover-Up on FBI Scandal

Military Clashes with US Spies over Outsourcing of Satellite Surveillance

Obama Bundlers Hauled more than $33 Million Last Quarter

Noteworthy Editorials

Glenn Greenwald: Surveillance State Evils

Tom Burghardt: Global Spying- Washington’s Weaponized Data System

Eric Margolis: US-Israel Stoke ‘Rogue’ Nuclear State

Philip Giraldi: The Disappearing Terrorists

Paul Pillar: Wiping Out

Philip Weiss: Bernard Lewis Revises Bernard Lewis

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: BFP EyeOpener Report- Education & National Security

Video 2: Muslim Brotherhood Tool of CIA

Video 3: Corbett Report- New World Next Week

Video 4: Syrians Refuse to Dance to Foreign Tune

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Fleetwood Mac was one of the most celebrated bands of all time. Stevie Nicks’ voice, choice of music and persona took the band to unheard of levels. Nicks is still out there singing and performing with various younger artists. This performance, back in 1976, of Rhiannon is probably her best ever…an incredible intensity and the power of Stevie. There’s some pretty phenomenal performances by the rest of the band too. This week’s BFP/Jamiol Music pick requires some decibels. So folks crank it up and enjoy…and make sure you stay ’til the very end. PJ

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What is a Revolution? Is it desirable? How do we get there? Far from the idea of usurping power – whether violently or peacefully – or promoting a single politician to a position of power with the hope of “revolutionizing” society, a true revolution is a coordinated and globally expansive idea of solidarity backed up with creation action: not designed to take or destroy power, but to create a new system entirely, one which would make the present power structures irrelevant. Understanding the institutional nature of our society is important in understanding how power structures mutually reinforce one another. Through this understanding, we can – and must – challenge through critique and creative action, each and every existing power structure by creating people-based alternatives, which themselves mutually reinforce each other. This is not a simple or short-sighted program of revolution, but a long process. Elites think and plan for the long-term, and so should we.

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Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here (Subscribers Only):

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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You got the news on my coming book, and some of you already have a copy. Then, you got the press release from NWC, and after that the video clip of my attorney’s interview with RT. I know many of you are wondering: what’s going on?! What  next?! Trust me, I for one have been quite dizzy for a while with events unfolding one after another-behind the scenes. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen next since I am on the same boat as the rest of you, but I can tell you what I am planning to do. And I am ‘determined.’ Can’t you tell? Here is a brief list of my plans and schedule (that is, without any divine or evil sources’ interventions):

My book website will be ready, live and active next week: http://classifiedwoman.com

I am still offering our BFP package here.

I am planning to and still working on releasing the print version via Amazon, and e-books versions via Kindle and Nook, by the second week of May – unless our government decides to reenact Fahrenheit 451.  I intend to publish this book as an American citizen armed with my First Amendment and validated even by our government’s own no-longer-followed laws and regulations. Doing otherwise would be ‘Un-American.’ I will leave being Un-American to our despotic rulers and those who choose to remain docile and silent.

I am also planning to write a blog series on the behind-the-scenes experiences and adventures in getting this book published. It was one thing to fight the despots in the government, but I had no intention of engaging in a major fight with corporate mega publishers on their version of censorship. I gladly turned my back, and took the alternative road. I have been determined to practice what I’ve been preaching all along. Doing that included undertaking an alternative publication venue (independently and proudly self-published!) and using alternative media-news-forums to reach out. Anyhow, I have tons to expose (Corporate Publishers-Government-Political Party Orgy). Please stay tuned.

This coming week I will be busy with getting ready for my next battle(s), finalizing my final publication steps and website, and maybe have a few days to take a  breather and concentrate on my sweet and handful daughter. Of course we will have our usual EyeOpener video report, podcast, toon and articles.

And finally, I want to thank those of you who have been so supportive of this book and what it took (and still takes) to make it a reality. It’s been a roller-coaster ride and a battle. I wish more people would take a stand and challenge despotism-censorship-intimidation. Then again, we would not be in this place if they did. This is why I respect every single one of you, my supporters, the members of the irate minority, and I am grateful for all your support.

This week’s BFP Jamiol music pick has 2 things going for it. First off, it’s a request from Sibel and secondly it’s a song performed by Solomon Burke aka “King Solomon.” Burke also earned the title “the Muhammad Ali of soul” for his ability to transcend Gospel, R&B and Soul.

Tonight we listen to Solomon Burke singing his masterpiece None of us are Free from his Don’t Give Up on Me album to which Sibel adds “When one of us is jailed/gagged/classified/tortured/stripped of constitution/liberties, think Manning, think Drake, think …, none of us are free….” Indeed. PJ

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In Part 1 of this series, I examined the elite assault on education – through the Chamber of Commerce, right-wing think tanks, and the Trilateral Commission – which arose in response to the massive social and political activist movements of the 1960s. The threat of popular democratic participation – that is, active and activist participation of the population in the decision-making process of a community or nation – was too much to bear. The fact that a significant degree of this activism had been mobilizing from the universities was enough reason for elites to declare a “crisis of democracy” and demand more apathy, complacency, and pacification from the population, more authority for themselves, and more control over the society as a whole. The result of this was neoliberalism – globally and locally – in government, the media, and the schools. The “Crisis of Democracy” was that there was too much of it. The solution, therefore, was to deconstruct democracy.

The emergence and spread of education – both mass public and university – is generally considered to be the result of the Enlightenment ideals and the emergence of democracies. The idea was that education was developed and designed for the purpose of enlightening individuals, spreading literacy and fostering intellectual pursuits which would yield for the benefit of the whole of society, a benevolent institution. Indeed, there are these elements to the history of education; but like with most things, there are other, deeper, elements to the story. So it begs the question: what is the purpose of education?

The spread of ‘mass education’ of primary and secondary education from the Prussian system in the 18^th century was designed to socialize the population into a state-structured ideology (taking the monopoly of education away from the religious and community institutions and into the hands of the emerging nation-state). The aim, therefore, of mass – or public – education was not a benevolent concept of expanding and sharing knowledge (as is purported in liberal thought), but rather as a means to foster patriotism and support the state system in preserving the social class structures. In 1807, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the founding philosophers of this system, explained that educated was the means toward fostering patriotism, as “universal, state-directed, compulsory education would teach all Germans to be good Germans and would prepare them to play whatever role – military, economic, political – fell to them in helping the state reassert Prussian power.”[1] As British philosopher Bertrand Russell explained:

Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.[2]

It was in the promotion of state formation and patriotism that European nations, one after the other, developed mass schooling systems. In the United States, mass schooling was not directed toward the political process of ‘state formation’, but rather the cultural process of ‘nation-building’ in the 19^th century. In the 19^th century, the United States remained largely rural and nonindustrial, and thus, “the apparatus of state control was extremely weak in most communities.” As Meyer et. al. argue: in the American Journal of Sociology:

The spread of schooling in the rural North and West can best be understood as a social movement implementing a commonly held ideology of nation-building. It combined the outlook and interests of small entrepreneurs in a world market, evangelical Protestantism, and an individualistic conception of the polity.[3]

In early 19^th century United States, many worried about “a new industrial feudalism supplanting the old order.” For such reformers, the complex circumstances in which they found themselves – of a society in which the old ideas and institutions were disappearing and new ones were emerging – could best be addressed by the common school, “serving all citizens, stamping them American and unifying the nation.”[4] This was, in itself, a desire for ‘social control’ in a socially disruptive circumstance of rapid change in all realms of human activity. As Robert H. Wiebe explained, “the instruments of control were themselves the means of improvement,” and schools were viewed as “assimilating, stabilizing mechanisms.” By the 1830s, school reformers “were urgently seeking a new national cohesion, a source of uniquely American wholeness.” The focus on socializing children was of the utmost concern. As one reformer stated, children “must be taken at the earliest opportunity, if the seeds of good are to be planted before the seeds of evil begin to germinate.” Thus, “the role of the educator was to construct a model environment around the child.”[5]

In the early 20^th century, most Americans began to view “education as a task specifically of the schools rather than of a general society, a reflection of both the school’s expertise and a modern society’s rational differentiation of functions.” The institutional structure of schools became nationalized and more state-oriented than previously:

Central agencies of education, professionalization and publicity – the major teachers colleges and accrediting agencies, a revitalized National Education Association and a lengthening list of professional journals – set the agenda for discussion and the boundaries of debate throughout the land.[6]

The lower levels of education are directed at producing “general outputs for society,” while the higher levels may actually reflect and affect “socially and politically constituted authority.” In short, the lower levels produce the masses, while the higher levels may produce the managers. The university system is the dominant form of higher education in the world, far outweighing other forms of educational institutions that have existed through history. Universities emerged during the medieval period in Europe, which have been described as “corporations having close relations with both Church and State but possessing considerable independence in relation to each.”[7]

With the universities of medieval Europe, as sociologists Ramirez and Meyer explained, “a more promising strategy considers the relationship between centralized authority and the rise of universities,” as situations of political decentralization tended to favour the establishment of universities.[8] The university which arose during the Medieval period (1150-1500) was a corporation, a guild of masters and scholars, or professors and students. This was the era in which Western civilization was rapidly developing, and this “new and uniquely Western institution resulted from a combination of powerful societal trends.” These trends, wrote John. C Scott in the Journal of Higher Education, included “the revival of mercantilism, growth of cities and the urban middle class, and bureaucratization, along with the 12^th-century intellectual renaissance.” Thus:

As European society became more complex, the universal Roman church, secular governments, and municipalities required educated priests, administrators, lawyers, physicians, and clerks for business. Fulfilling this social demand were the universities, which were clearly oriented toward teaching and the learned professions.[9]

There were student-controlled universities, predominantly in the south, such as the Bologna University, as well as universities of faculty governance, such as with the University of Paris. By 1500, the faculty-controlled university became dominant. The aims of the Medieval university was the pursuit of knowledge, “divine truth and learning,” focusing on the areas of law, medicine, and theology. Monarchs and others increasingly relied upon such learned men for their advice in matters of state and court systems, foreign affairs and diplomacy. At the undergraduate level, students came from all social classes and generally studied liberal arts. At the graduate level, however, “students pursued the higher disciplines of theology, medicine, and law. Most alumni served the church, state, or municipality in various capacities.” Save Russia, most of Europe had universities by the end of the Middle Ages, with roughly 80 in the region by then. Predominantly chartered by the Roman church, or by monarchs, these pseudo-autonomous institutions “were subject to the authority of popes, monarchs, local bishops, dukes, or municipalities, depending upon the country and century.”[10]

The medieval university had a cosmopolitan nature, seen as a place of “universal knowledge” which was tied to the “universal ideology of Christendom,” and was not tied to any particular nation-state, largely developing prior to the centralization of nation-states. Scholars traveled all across Europe to the great medieval universities, from Bologna to Paris, to Oxford and Toledo, reflecting their cosmopolitan nature. As sociologist Gerard Delanty wrote in the journal, Social Epistemology:

At first the scholars were generally monks but later they were increasingly secular and became absorbed into the centralization and absolutist state. With the rise of the territorial nation-state from the seventeenth century onwards, the university became increasingly more and more nationalized and gradually lost its transnational character. With this went a decline in its ecclesiastical function: knowledge became a free-floating discourse to be used for domination or emancipation… As an institution the university owed its tremendous power to the fact that it originated at a time when the moral and political power of the Church was in decline but when the modern state system had not yet emerged.[11]

Thus, “the university found itself in a powerful position and could monopolize the field of knowledge.” As the ‘Age of Reason’ descended upon the West, the universal ideology of Christendom that was so paramount in the medieval period shifted to one of rationalizing logic and experimental science. The Reformation and scientific revolution “greatly facilitated this shift in the function of the university.” The university became the institution of knowledge, and as a result, was able to resist both church and state. However, in the transition into the modern period, with the rise of the nation-state, the state quickly sought to ally with the university, which increasingly came under state patronage. The state, whether the British Restoration government or French Absolute state, viewed the universities “as important institutions in the administration of society.”[12]

As the nation-states developed, particularly in England, Spain, and France, the relative autonomy of the first universities started to be eroded. As one academic wrote, “universities throughout Europe in the course of the fifteenth century tended in the same direction – towards the nationalization of Paris as of all other universities.” The University of Paris, then, became subservient to the crown and, thereafter, universities increasingly became national institutions with the mission of “service to the state.”[13]

The role for universities in training a new governing elite became increasingly important as the schools came under the control of new nation-states, municipalities and principalities: “Kings therefore emphasized the acquisition of advanced, secular knowledge and technical skills by students – future public servants – in order to build up efficient state bureaucracies.” Close advisers to kings, princes, and republics would also be expected to be men with legal training from the universities. This era marks the transition from the medieval university to the early modern university:

the early modern university was far more socially responsive than the medieval university because of humanist professors’ emphasis on ethical values for themselves and their students. Early modern universities continued to expand as a movement while making solid scientific and scholarly contributions. The newly consolidated state began to increase visitations, intervention, regulation (curriculum, subjects taught, and publications allowed), and appointment of chancellors.[14]

This was also the era in which these institutions increasingly moved toward professionalization in the modern sense, armed with a new “sociopolitical mission” as “an ideological arm of the state.” As one writer explained it, “The state protects the action of the University; the University safeguards the thought of the state.” Between 1500 and 1800, the university in Europe experienced an enormous expansion, even into Russia, which was untouched by the medieval university, and Europe had roughly 190 universities existing during this period. This era of early modern civilization, with the growth of the nation-state, and the imperial expansion into the New World, the Spanish even put in place state-controlled colonial universities across Latin America, the first of which was founded in Santo Domingo [today Haiti and the Dominican Republic] in 1538. These universities, overtly serving a colonial agenda, “prepared missionaries and jurists for the settlement of the New World.”[15]

With the Enlightenment came a new form of nation-state, the Liberal Nation-State, which further influenced the changing nature of the university during this era. The Enlightenment era saw the further development of the university “under the auspices of the central and national state providing it with a system of knowledge, which was at the same time a system of power.”[16] The aim was to put these universities “to work for the new liberal State and its economic needs.”[17]

Fichte, who was considered one of the intellectual fathers of the Prussian mass schooling system, was also influential in the move toward a modern university system, and his goals were quite similar. Just as mass schooling was established to serve the state, Fichte felt that “the academics should be the new spiritual leaders of society.” The main difference between this Enlightenment model of the university and the medieval one was marked by the shift from city to nation. As the Enlightenment had different effects in different nations, the relationship that developed between the nation and the university was different in each case. In Germany, the university became the cultural center of the nation, while in France its focus was more on producing an actual core of civil servants. In each case, however, the aim of the university was to serve the nation in some capacity, whether functionally, ideologically, culturally, or all of the above.[18]

With the development of the American university system, we still see the objective of serving the nation as inherent in this Enlightenment idea of the ‘modern university.’ In America, the new schools were replacing the old, ill-equipped and elitist colonial colleges. The establishment of universities became a core mission of the founders, as ten key founders also founded academic institutions, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Wythe, Benjamin Rush, William S. Johnson, William R. Davie, Abraham Baldwin, and Manasseh Cutler. Thus, many of the schools had inherent within them a ‘nationalizing’ mission, a mission to serve the nation, though it may not be explicitly the State.[19]

At the turn of the 20^th century, there was a great debate on the missions of the new distinctly American universities. There were profound social, political, and economic changes that had occurred in the post-Civil War period, as America experienced its Industrial Revolution, rise of the corporations, and with that, the Robber Baron industrialists, who increasingly took over the political culture of the nation, which was increasingly centralizing, increasingly imperialistic, and with the labour class exponentially distrustful, resentful and resistant to the new dominant capitalistic powers that emerged. This was further checked by an increasingly educated middle class, informed largely by the rapid new developments in communications and technology, who were also becoming wary of the excesses of Big Business, but at the same time, worried about the threat of rebellion from the lower classes. In short, it was a socially explosive situation, in what came to be known as the Progressive Era, as middle class reformers took the stage in advocating and implementing major social reforms to establish a more stable, lasting society. Thus, the new modern American universities were to combine the ideals of research, teaching, and public service, as many believed the schools should “advance basic knowledge and provide the technical expertise required by a modern industrial society.”[20] Thus, as Scott wrote:

Faculties in the new applied sciences, emerging social sciences, and even an important minority in the humanities believed strongly in the social utility of their disciplines. Professors in the social sciences were often committed to public service. To this end, schools of political science were established at Columbia, Michigan, and Wisconsin during the 1880s and 1890s. At the same time, within departments of economics and sociology, there were devotees of social utility. Psychology, which was then a part of philosophy, also developed a faction devoted to utility (pragmatism). Social scientists served their society in the capacity of experts, which also involved research. By 1900, the “useful” university was establishing such untraditional fields of study as business administration, physical education, sanitary science, and engineering.[21]

The Robber Baron industrialists of the late 19^th century – Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor, Vanderbilt, Harriman, etc. – were unquestionably the dominant powers in the country. They controlled the economy, hundreds of corporations, had hundreds of millions or billions in wealth, the banks, bought the politicians, directed foreign policy into an increasingly imperialistic direction, and thus, they saw it as essential to cement their control over society through social institutions, as the masses were hateful of them and needed to be properly controlled. Social control became the major concept of interest for elites and middle class reformers.

In this era of social control, education became increasingly important, not only in terms of mass schooling, which experienced many reforms, but also in terms of the university system. As Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1889, at the top of the list of “charitable deeds” to undertake was “the founding of a university by men enormously rich, such men as must necessarily be few in any country.” It was in this context, of robber barons seeking to remake education, that we see the founding of several of America’s top universities, many of which were named after their robber baron founders, such as Stanford (after Leland Stanford), Cornell (after Ezra Cornell), and Johns Hopkins, who owned the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.[22] This new class of industrialists, who emerged out of the Civil War in America, “challenged the position of the old propertied, pre-industrial elite. This struggle crystallized in particular around the reform of the educational system that had legitimated the old elite’s domination.”[23] The modern university was born out of this struggle between elites, with the old educational system based upon religious and moral values, “and the making of gentlemen,” while the “new education” focused on “the importance of management or administration” as well as “public service, [and] the advancement of knowledge through original investigation.”[24]

John D. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago in 1891, and the President of the University, “initiated a new disciplinary system, which was enormously influential.” Ultimately, it “led to the formation of the department structure of the American university, which was internationally unique,” and was later exported around the world “with the help of American foundations.”[25] This disciplinary system consisted of separating politics from economics (rejecting the notion of ‘political economy’ and its ‘ideologies’), as ideology was “deemed unscientific and inappropriate in social sciences and political scientists have increasingly seen their function as service to the powerful, rather than providing leadership to populist or socialist movements.”[26]

There was an obvious desire to “foster the teaching of practical knowledge and skills serving the development of commerce and industry, against the prevailing academic traditions.” However, it also allowed for “a way of diagnosing the social upheavals caused by the accelerated shift from a still largely agrarian society to an industrial mass society” of which they were the dominant class. In particular, the labor unrest of the 19^th century was especially prevalent in the minds of the dominant class. Since “social reform was inevitable,” these industrialists “chose to invest in the definition and scientific treatment of the ‘social questions’ of their time,” and subsequently, they “promoted reformist solutions that did not threaten the capitalistic nature of the social order,” and instead constructed a “private alternative to socialism.”[27] In other words, it marked the construction of a highly corporatist society, merging state and corporate power through institutions, individuals, and ideology.

The Social Sciences and Social Control

The concept of ‘social control’ emerged from the developing field of sociology as a discipline in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. As sociologist Morris Janowitz wrote in the American Journal of Sociology, “in the emergence of sociology as an intellectual discipline, the idea of social control was a central concept for analyzing social organization and the development of industrial society.”[28] Social control is largely viewed as forms of control which reduce coercion, and thus, enhance consent to the system or organizations in question. Even a society with an effective system of social control would require a structure of coercion, but depending on how advanced the social control system is, the less need there would be for coercion. Hence, the societies which are the most advanced in social control would also be less dependent upon internal methods of coercion. Thus, it was within liberal democratic states that both the study and implementation of social control became most effective. In this sense, the question was “whether the processes of social control are able to maintain the social order [hierarchy] while transformation and social change take place.”[29]

Sociology largely emerged from the University of Chicago (founded by John D. Rockefeller), with the world’s first department of sociology founded in 1892. The sociologists who rose within and out of the University of Chicago made up what was known as the ‘Chicago School of Sociology.’ The school developed the most influential sociologists in the nation, including George Herbert Mead and W.I. Thomas, two scholars who had profound influence on the development of the concept of ‘social control,’ and sociologists became “reform-oriented liberals, not radical revolutionaries or conservative cynics.”[30]

The new industrial elite accumulated millions and even hundreds of millions by the end of the 19^th century: Andrew Carnegie was worth roughly $300 million after he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan in 1901, and by 1913, John D. Rockefeller was estimated to have a personal worth of $900 million. It was with Rockefeller that we see the development of the scientific notion of philanthropy.[31] Rockefeller had founded the Institute for Medical Research in 1901, the General Education Board (GEB) in 1903, and the Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm in 1909. Rockefeller, however, wanted to consolidate his philanthropic enterprise as he had his industrial oil enterprise, and so in 1909 he decided he wanted to establish one great foundation, which “would be a single central holding company which would finance any and all of the other benevolent organizations, and thus necessarily subject them to its general supervision.”[32] In 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation received a charter of incorporation from the State of New York.

Between 1881 and 1907, Andrew Carnegie had contributed over $40 million to establishing more than 1,600 libraries in the United States alone, but it was after selling Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $300 million that Carnegie began to look at philanthropy on a much larger scale. In 1902, he founded the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and in 1904, founded the Carnegie Corporation of Washington, of which the mission was, “to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigation, research and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind,” much like the original mission statement of the Rockefeller Foundation created some years later, “to promote the well-being of mankind.”[33] Carnegie founded, in 1911, the Carnegie Corporation, chartered by the New York State legislature.[34]

These philanthropic foundations, and the many others that appeared in and around the same time, and thereafter, were largely imbued with the idea of “science in the service of society” as a goal for the foundation, basing its actions upon a new rationality brought on by the scientific revolution, and by the notions of reform pushed forward in the Progressive Era, based largely upon the concept of scientific social planning “to problems that educators, the new sociologists, social workers, and political scientists found important.” However, as the wealth of the foundations and the positions of their patrons attracted criticisms, a Congressional commission was on industrial relations (founded to settle a matter related to a brutal repression of a mining strike by a Rockefeller-owned mining company) expanded its scope to deal with the general issue of the foundations. The Walsh Commission, as it was known (after its founder, Frank P. Walsh), was formed in 1914, and Walsh explained the inclusion of the foundations in the commission by postulating that:

the creation of the Rockefeller and other foundations was the beginning of an effort to perpetuate the present position of predatory wealth through the corruption of sources of public information… [and] that if not checked by legislation, these foundations will be used as instruments to change to form of government of the U.S. at a future date, and there is even a hint that there is a fear of a monarchy.[35]

In 1916, the Walsh Commission produced its final report, the Manly Report (after the research director, Basil M. Manly), which concluded that the foundations were so “grave a menace” to society, that “it would be desirable to recommend their abolition.” No such actions were taken.[36]

David Nugent, an anthropologist at Emory University, wrote a rather lengthy article for the academic journal, Identities, on the role of foundations in shaping the social sciences. Nugent takes a look at the development of the social sciences in relation to the construction of an American Empire. As such, the shaping of the social sciences was designed, at least in part, with an aim to facilitate the emergence and maintenance of a large, globally expanding empire, but an empire unlike previous ones, with no official overseas colonies; rather, it was to be an informal global empire. Globally expansive and locally administered colonies were to replaced with globally expansive and locally applicable social sciences. In order for the empire to spread its military and commercial might across the world, first, the ideas at the heart of the empire must proliferate globally. Imperialism is not merely a political or economic endeavour; it is, and arguably more importantly, a socio-cultural process.

The colonization of the Americas and Africa by the European powers – with their political apparatus and for the benefit of their commercial and financial appendages – would not have been possible without the powerful social and cultural imperialism of the missionaries, whose ‘gospel’ debased traditional local cultural, spiritual, and religious practices and introduced new conceptions of morality, values, truth, justice, and knowledge. The social sciences then, presented the world with a form of imperialism focused on the construction of a new form of knowledge by which to understand, define, categorize, and change our world. The new missionaries spreading this new gospel were the dominant American foundations, most notably, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, later to be joined by a plethora of others, including the Ford Foundation.

Nugent divides the construction of the social sciences in America, and indeed around the world, into three specific time periods; periods which are defined by economic crises and major geopolitical shifts taking place within those parts of the world which the United States seeks to dominate and control. The first period Nugent identified is what he referred to as the “Formation of Overseas Empire,” from 1900-1940. This period was preceded with an economic depression in 1893 and ended with World War II, though the most rapid changes in the social sciences occurred between World War I and World War II. The second period Nugent identified, the “Consolidation of Overseas Empire,” covered the period of 1943 to 1972, responding to the Depression in the 1930s, the ending of World War II and the subsequent decolonization of the so-called ‘Third World,’ and came to an end with the end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1972, signaling a new phase of rapid economic changes. The third major period then, the “Reconstruction of Overseas Empire,” took place roughly between 1972 and 2001, which began with the recession of the early 70s, marking profound changes across the Third World, the emergence of neoliberalism, and advanced into the 21^st century.[37]

Nugent rightly points out that, while the sponsors of the social sciences, namely, the major foundations, produced such knowledge with specific purpose and intent in establishing and re-enforcing hegemony, empire, domination, social engineering, and social control, it would be a mistake to brand all social science knowledge as being in the service to such interests. Indeed, Nugent wrote, “each of the three period generated a small body of progressive scholarship alongside a much larger corpus of conventional knowledge.”[38]

In the period between World War I and World War II, just as the foundations were themselves emerging, their initial focus in education was in financing the reorganization of major universities in the United States, and almost simultaneously, “they also oversaw sweeping changes in the organization of the social sciences – in the aims, methods, and means of evaluating research, in the background, training, and professional activities of the practitioners, and in the institutional processes that underwrote the production of knowledge.”[39] In this period, both Western scholars in North America and Europe, as well as non-Western scholars in Africa, the Americas, and even in China, were concerned with studying the ways in which North Atlantic industrial capitalism and European imperialism had been “shaping regional and local arenas around the globe, in undermining indigenous economic and socio-political forms, in precipitating enormous population movements, and in stimulating novel cultural configurations and new forms of political affiliation.”[40]

While the Rockefeller philanthropies (including the General Education Board, the Laura-Spellman Rockefeller Memorial, and the Rockefeller Foundation) as well as the Carnegie Corporation were the most influential in this process, they were joined by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and eventually several prominent think tanks (which they also created), such as the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. It was not merely within the United States that these foundations organized and funded the social sciences, but in fact across much of the English-speaking world as a whole, and indeed, well beyond it. Much of their finances went to helping various organizations reform and accommodate these new forms of knowledge; however, the foundations also created several new institutions to achieve their goals in the social sciences or to focus on the specific goal of altering particular institutions. As Nugent noted:

during a period when nation-states were the main arbiters of cultural messages and capital flows, the social science infrastructure that Rockefeller, Carnegie and the other foundations helped to construct was largely independent of (though in no way in conflict with) national controls. In the long run, this infrastructure promoted a “flexible accumulation of knowledge” on a global scale, and in the process helped bring into being an international public sphere of social science knowledge.[41]

This task of “social control” was envisioned by the foundations as consisting in “helping the masses ‘adjust’ to the rigors of industrial life and representative democracy.” The problems with social control that erupted in this era were identified by the foundations as being caused by a number of factors, including the deteriorating condition of the cities, a lack of understanding of the immigrant populations and democratic institutions, resulting in the breakdown of social order. Thus, as Nugent wrote, “the result was a sweeping program of social change and control.”[42]

A Rockefeller Foundation report acknowledged that many people in the world had already been subjected to the “enormously damaging effects… of industrial activity,” and saw it as necessary to alter the “radically false views of life and radically false views of nature” by many of these people. To bring these people into the modern age, foundations agreed, they needed to effect “almost a social revolution,” and to offer these people “training in new forms of political and social organization.” John D. Rockefeller, Jr., articulating the purpose of the Rockefeller Foundation, explained that it would offer “the best of Western civilization, not only in… science but in mental development and spiritual culture.” Science, of course, was the basis upon which the foundations were created: to not only advance the sciences within their own fields, but to advance the principle of the “scientific management” of society. Wicliffe Rose, a professor who was involved in managing several different Rockefeller philanthropies, wrote in a memorandum for Rockefeller officials in 1923:

All important fields of activity… from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and technique of modern science… Science is the method of knowledge. It is the key to such dominion as man may ever exercise over his physical environment. Appreciation of its spirit and technique, moreover, determines the mental attitude of a people, affects the entire system of education, and carried with it the shaping of a civilization.[43]

In the 1920s, the Rockefeller interventions in the social sciences were almost exclusively undertaken by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), named after John D. Rockefeller’s wife after her death. The Rockefeller Foundation, following the public exposures of the Walsh Commission, primarily maintained itself to funding medicine and public health. Beardsley Ruml, who became director of the LSRM in 1922, was largely responsible for the Rockefeller move into the social sciences, as the LSRM had been primarily concerned with social welfare prior to Ruml’s directorship. On top of the social sciences, Ruml directed the LSRM into funding public administration, and Ruml felt that, “the route to advancing human welfare was through scientific social research,” and thus, “means had to be devised to bring the social scientist into intimate contact with social phenomena.” The main idea was that the social sciences should elevate to establish an equal relationship with that of the natural sciences by making them more “scientific,” and thus, more efficient and able to handle social problems.[44]

Two general scientific objectives were established for organizing the social sciences, the first of which was, “to increase for the scientist and scholar the possibilities of immediate personal observation of the social problems or social phenomena which were under investigation,” and the second objective was to promote inter-disciplinary research. To undertake this, Ruml set out two specific programs of action:

First, the creation of institutional centers in various parts of the world that would with Rockefeller money embody scientific teaching and research. Collaborative research was to be encouraged through the specific research grants to these institutions. These centers would therefore not only be creative institutions but would also serve as a model for the development of the social sciences generally. Second, Ruml began an extensive fellowship program which was designed to complement the training provided by the institutional centers and increase the number of able people working in the field.[45]

Ruml also saw the need to strengthen existing institutions, notably, the elite American universities, which would become “institutional centers of social research.” Edmund E. Day, director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Social Sciences program from 1928-1937, explained in 1930 that the plan was to develop “within each country of any importance some center which would fructify the local situation and influence other institutions within the same sphere of scientific influence, then within the larger regional centers.” Focusing on the United States and Europe, the LSRM stated in 1926 that its main policy was directed at establishing 12 or 15 centers of social science research around the world, one specific center in each major European country, (University of Stockholm, Deutsche Hochscule für in Berlin, and the London School of Economics), and several in the United States. The LSRM was merged into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929, which adopted the same agenda established by Ruml in seeking to cultivate through such institutions “a scientific approach to social problems.”[46]

Through the fellowship program, established at the LSRM by Ruml in 1923, students in Europe and Australia were often brought to study in the United States, with the favoured subject within the social sciences being economics, considering it was the closest to establishing itself along the lines of the physical sciences. As the Rockefeller Foundation prepared to incorporate the LSRM into its institutional structure, Edmund E. Day took over as director of the Social Sciences from Ruml in 1928, with the new Social Science division becoming a “formal organization,” just as the Foundation’s other major divisions of medicine, natural science, and the humanities. In 1930, Day wrote that, “what we have to do is to establish in the social sciences the scientific tradition and the scientific habit of mind,” and thus, the Foundation should work to strengthen “certain types of interest and certain habits of thought.” Naturally, this would be “thought” which would be in the “interest” of the Foundation, itself. The aim in doing this was to “coordinate the scientific attack upon social problems,” as education professor, Donald Fisher, wrote in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism. Edmund Day saw the potential for the social sciences to engage in “human engineering,” and stated quite bluntly: “the validation of the findings of social science must be through effective social control.”[47]

In 1932, the Foundation put emphasis on the support for creating a field of “International Relations,” within Political Science, as well as “the planning and control of economic structures and economic process.” In the area of “International Relations,” the Rockefeller Foundation hoped to “promote understanding among nations and to reduce the friction which may lead to warfare,” which, combined with the program of “Economic Control” was hoped to prevent any future “crisis of capitalism.” A 1934 Rockefeller Foundation committee of trustees produced a report on the Social Sciences Division, explaining, “we now have the opportunity to see whether we cannot assist in applying to concrete problems of our social, political and industrial life some of the ideas and data which research all over the world is rapidly developing.”[48]

In 1932-33, as the Board was considering the proposals of reform in education, all the programs were subject to the ultimate approval of the Board of Trustees of the GEB, which at the time included 15 individuals, all of whom were white, male protestants, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his 27 year old son, John D. Rockefeller, III, and most of whom had been educated at Ivy League schools or the University of Chicago, which had been founded by John D. Rockefeller. Nine of the fifteen trustees were also academics, and seven of them had been senior administrators at major educational institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, N.Y.U, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Other members of the trustees included Owen Young, Chairman of the Board of General Electric, as well as banker Arthur Woods, and Raymond Fosdick, a Wall Street lawyer who would later become President of the Rockefeller Foundation. By 1931, the GEB’s survey of education emphasized three major fields of concentration:

1) the study of the learning process and the mental, physical, and moral development of the individual; 2) the problem of “preparing the individual for vocations and leisure”; and 3) the means for relating education to an evolving society, that is education which would “insure the active adaptation of the individual to the changes which may come in his social, physical and aesthetic environments.”[49]

It was Edmund E. Day, the new director of the Social Science Division, who assumed the greatest leadership in coordinating national reform of education, having previously been an economics professor at Dartmouth, Harvard, and was Dean of the School of Business Administration at the University of Michigan, when he subsequently led the social sciences division at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial until its incorporation into the Rockefeller Foundation between 1928 and 1930, at which time he assumed his role as director of the Social Sciences Division within both the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board. Day was responsible for articulating and selling the ideas of educational reform to the Board of Trustees, which he did in 1932 in a memorandum entitled, “Cultural Adjustment to a Changing World.” In regards to the social upheavals of the early Depression years, Day wrote in 1933 that, “Industrialism and urbanism… are new forces of tremendous power, neither of which has been brought under sensible control. The way out is not yet evident, and a prolonged period of readjustment is presumably unavoidable.” Day acknowledged that “prevailing social ideas and ideals in the United States were seriously out of accord with current social forms and forces,” however, he argued, the answer did not lie in reforming the social world to meet the needs of the individual, but in adjusting the individual to the social world. As Day wrote, “we must look chiefly to the school for the major efforts toward cultural adjustment of the individual, since the school is a social instrumentality with a uniquely flexible adaptability and with a primary responsibility to meet this need.” Thus, the school could “set the individual in satisfactory general relation to the world in which he lived.”[50]

Between 1919 and 1940, the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other major philanthropies provided roughly $3.2 million of support for the social sciences in British universities, and a further $1.7 million for “independent organizations which were closely tied to the universities.” The two major Rockefeller philanthropies at the time, the LSRM and the RF, provided roughly 95% of these expenditures. Thus, it was American philanthropy, and principally the Rockefeller foundations which were directly responsible for the development of British social sciences in this period. Only in the late 1930s did British philanthropy pick up the slack from the Rockefeller foundations.[51]

Rockefeller money was also pivotal in the establishment of the London School of Economics (LSE), which “had become an important world centre of the social sciences,” in large part due to the involvement of Rockefeller philanthropies. The Rockefeller foundations selected the LSE specifically for support because in the early 1920s, it was the most advanced center of social sciences in Britain, and could thus serve as a model for the rest of British institutions. Further, the director of the LSE, Lord William Beveridge (also a member of the British Eugenics Society), “shared with Rockefeller philanthropy the same conception of the way in which the social sciences should develop,” specifically in terms of utilizing the “natural scientific approach” to social problems. Also important to note as to why the LSE was chosen, was its strategic location in London, at the heart of the world’s most powerful and globally expanded empire at the time.[52]

Between 1923 and 1939, the LSRM and the Rockefeller Foundation provided the LSE with over $2 million, during which time the school expanded rapidly, becoming “the leading centre of research in the Social Sciences” in the British Empire. Building expansions, the establishment of the leading research library in Britain, acquisition of land, equipment, and a dramatic increase in full-time teachers from 26 in 1923 to 76 by 1937, was largely due to Rockefeller support. Rockefeller money in particular ensured the development of anthropology, international relations, and social biology, and student enrollment also dramatically increased with large grants from Rockefeller philanthropies for postgraduate research and teaching. Thus, by the end of the 1930s, the LSE had “become an international centre training many foreign students.” Grants also contributed to expanding and supporting publications by LSE faculty, with an enormous amount of books and articles emerging as a result of this support, and supported the creation of journals run out of the school as well.[53]

Rockefeller money also flowed into developing the social sciences at Oxford, funding research lecturers for Human Geography, African Sociology, Colonial Administration, Public Administration, and Public Finance, with more money flowing into forming a training program for the social sciences as well as research groups in the area of Economics, Colonial Administration, and Studies of Native Populations, subjects explicitly related to maintaining Britain’s imperial status. Rockefeller foundations also expanded a fellowship program into every university in Britain, granting a total of 108 fellowships in the social sciences to British citizens between 1924 and 1940, and “by far the largest number were awarded to economists,” with Political Science following behind, and subsequently sociology and history, and only 8 anthropology fellowships.[54]

In 1946, a British government report surveying the state of British universities concluded that the social sciences, which had received no prior support from government sources, presented as many possibilities of generating applicable knowledge as did the natural sciences, and were thus worth of government support in order to advance the social sciences in the “national interest.” A committee was subsequently established to handle government subsidies of the social sciences, and in the 1950s, the British social sciences experienced a major “boom,” advancing what was begun with Rockefeller money so that it became state sanctioned, and, in effect, a new socially constructed reality of higher education in Britain: “the social sciences had become a recognized part of the university curriculum.”[55] As professor of education Donald Fisher wrote:

Indeed Rockefeller philanthropy prepared the way for the post-World War II developments in Britain not only in terms of the increased spending by government but also with respect to what was regarded as important in the social sciences. Rockefeller philanthropy had determined which subjects should be studied, which research questions should be answered, and which methods should be utilized to answer these questions.[56]

This era marked the emergence of what has been referred to as “technocratic liberalism,” whereby social problems were addressed (in large part by the state, or at least state sanction) through the technical application of programs of social engineering: “the one best way,” the most efficient, effective, and “scientific” approach to understanding and addressing social problems. This was the task taken up by the “rational reformers” of the era, emerging out of the Progressive period, in which the techniques of the social sciences were used to create a system of “social control.” These social engineers– social scientists, technocratic reformers, experts, philanthropists, etc. – felt that society could “control its collective destiny in contrast to drifting with the tides… even while working toward the management of the many by the few.”[57]

The notion that the social sciences were to be used in the application of and for the purpose of ‘social control’ is not an abstract theoretical interpretation of the Foundation’s policies; it was, in fact, stated policy. In 1933, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, wrote that the Foundation’s policies:

… were directed to the general problem of human behavior, with the aim of control through understanding. The Social sciences, for example, will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control; the Medical and Natural sciences propose a closely coordinated study of sciences which underlie personal understanding and personal control. Many procedures will be explicitly co-operative between divisions. The Medical and Natural Sciences will, through psychiatry and psychobiology, have a strong interest in the problems of mental disease [emphasis added].[58]

The influence of the major philanthropic foundations is exerted in a plethora of ways, including, wrote political scientist Joan Roelofs:

creating ideology and the common wisdom; providing positions and status for intellectuals; controlling access to resources for universities, social services, and arts organizations; compensating for market failures; steering protest movements into safe channels; and supporting those institutions by which policies are initiated and implemented… [F]oundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society’s attention.[59]

Foundations engage in “considerable collaboration” with networks of nonprofits (which they create and fund), corporations, international organizations, and government entities at the local, state, national and international levels. Foundations effectively “blur boundaries” between the public and private sectors, while simultaneously effecting the separation of such areas in the study of social sciences. This boundary erosion between public and private spheres “adds feudal elements to our purported democracy, yet it has not been resisted, protested, or even noted much by political elites or social scientists.”[60] As foreign policy strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski indicated, the blurring of boundaries “serves United States world dominance”:

As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial setting for the exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony involves a complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power and influence.[61]

In the early twentieth century, the Walsh Commission warned that, “the power of wealth could overwhelm democratic culture and politics,”[62] and the Final Report stated, “that foundations would be more likely to pursue their own ideology in society than social objectivity.”[63] The Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation, from their origins, immediately began cooperating heavily with one another, coordinating activities and planning agendas. That the financial weight of these two institutions – and with the Ford Foundation to enter the scene with an even larger endowment – the coordinated influence over higher education yielded an immense power for the owners of foundations in the construction of ideology and knowledge. In providing the funding, they have the power to direct the efforts of scholars and academics, to create entire disciplines and schools of thought, to fund conferences, academic journals, publications, and think tanks. The fact that the role of philanthropic foundations in the construction and management of the educational system itself is so little known is a sign of the subtle, yet pervasive power structures that exists within academia.

Rather than looking at it from a conspiratorial view, however, look at it historically. Just as the Kings and Queens of Europe supported the development of universities in order to furnish managers and technocrats for their dynastic empires, so too do the modern dynastic powers – in this case, banking families – seek to tie the direction and purpose of higher education close to their own interests, and for the same reasons. It is not conspiratorial precisely because of the nature of the social phenomena itself: there are far too many social actors at play, dynamic and interactive and reactive relationships between different individuals, institutions, and ideas. Resistance and problems always emerge, even for the most dominant of powers and institutions. Thus, the financial-dynastic powers must be pragmatic in their approach, willing to reform, change, reorganize and regroup. Simply because it is not well known is not reason enough to think it a ‘conspiracy theory.’ The facts are known, just not widely disseminated.

The next part of this series further takes up the question – what is the purpose of education? – and adds to it: what is – and what should be – the role of intellectuals in society? In particular, the focus will be on the roles of radical versus technical intellectuals, within educational institutions and the society as a whole: from the ancient prophets, to Walter Lippmann, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Noam Chomsky, this dichotomy of intellectuals has existed in society for a great deal of human history. What are the implications this could have for today’s college crisis and class warfare?

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project.

Notes

[1] Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli, “The Political Construction of Mass Schooling: European Origins and Worldwide Institutionalization,” Sociology of Education (Vol. 60, January 1987), page 5.

[2] Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (Unwin Paperbacks, London: 1952), page 62.

[3] John W. Meyer, et. al., “Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870-1930,” American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 85, No. 3, November 1979), page 592.

[4] Robert H. Wiebe, “The Social Functions of Public Education,” American Quarterly (Vol. 21, No. 2, Part 1, Summer 1969), pages 147-148.

[5] Ibid, pages 149-150.

[6] Ibid, page 157.

[7] Francisco O. Ramirez and John W. Meyer, “Comparative Education: The Social Construction of the Modern World System,” Annual Review of Sociology (Vol. 6, 1980), page 377.

[8] Ibid, pages 378-379.

[9] John C. Scott, “The Mission of the University: Medieval to Postmodern Transformations,” Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 77, No. 1, January/February 2006), page 6.

[10] Ibid, pages 6-7.

[11] Gerard Delanty, “The Idea of the University in the Global Era: From Knowledge as an End to the End of Knowledge?” Social Epistemology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1998), page 6.

[12] Ibid, pages 6-7.

[13] John C. Scott, “The Mission of the University: Medieval to Postmodern Transformations,” Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 77, No. 1, January/February 2006), page 10.

[14] Ibid, page 11.

[15] Ibid, page 12.

[16] Gerard Delanty, “The Idea of the University in the Global Era: From Knowledge as an End to the End of Knowledge?” Social Epistemology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1998), page 7.

[17] José-Ginés Mora, “Governance and Management in the New University,” Tertiary Education and Management (Vol. 7, No. 2, 2001), page 97.

[18] Gerard Delanty, “The Idea of the University in the Global Era: From Knowledge as an End to the End of Knowledge?” Social Epistemology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1998), page 9.

[19] John C. Scott, “The Mission of the University: Medieval to Postmodern Transformations,” Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 77, No. 1, January/February 2006), pages 15-16.

[20] Ibid, pages 23-24.

[21] Ibid, page 25.

[22] Nicolas Guilhot, “Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic Management of the Social Sciences,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 33, 2007, page 448.

[23] Ibid, page 450.

[24] Ibid, page 451.

[25] Erkki Berndtson, “Review Essay: Power of Foundations and the American Ideology,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 33, 2007, page 583.

[26] Ibid, page 584.

[27] Nicolas Guilhot, “Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic Management of the Social Sciences,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 33, 2007, page 452.

[28] Morris Janowitz, “Sociological Theory and Social Control,” American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 81, No. 1, July 1975), page 82.

[29] Ibid, page 85.

[30] Anthony J. Cortese, “The Rise, Hegemony, and Decline of the Chicago School of Sociology, 1892-1945,” The Social Science Journal (Vol. 32, No. 3, 1995), page 237.

[31] Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1982), pages 26-28.

[32] Ibid, pages 28-29.

[33] Ibid, pages 30-31.

[34] Ibid, pages 32-33.

[35] Ibid, pages 33-35.

[36] Ibid, pages 46-47.

[37] David Nugent, “Knowledge and Empire: The Social Sciences and United States Imperial Expansion,” Identities (Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2010), pages 2-3.

[38] Ibid, page 3.

[39] Ibid, page 4.

[40] Ibid, pages 5-7.

[41] Ibid, pages 9.

[42] Ibid, pages 9-10.

[43] Ibid, pages 10-11.

[44] Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1982), pages 234-235.

[45] Ibid, page 235.

[46] Ibid, pages 235-236.

[47] Ibid, pages 236-237.

[48] Ibid, page 238-239.

[49] Charles D. Biebel, “Private Foundations and Public Policy: The Case of Secondary Education During the Great Depression,” History of Education Quarterly (Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1976), pages 6-8.

[50] Ibid, pages 10-11.

[51] Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1982), pages 239-241.

[52] Ibid, page 241.

[53] Ibid, pages 244-245.

[54] Ibid, pages 245-247.

[55] Ibid, pages 248-251.

[56] Ibid, pages 252-253.

[57] Dennis Bryson, “Technocratic Liberalism and Social Science,” Radical History Review (Vol. 64, 1996), pages 119-120.

[58] Lily E. Kay, “Rethinking Institutions: Philanthropy as an Historigraphic Problem of Knowledge and Power,” Minerva (Vol. 35, 1997), page 290.

[59] Joan Roelofs, “Foundations and Collaboration,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 33, 2007, page 480

[60] Ibid.

[61] Ibid, page 481.

[62] Ibid, page 483.

[63] Erkki Berndtson, “Review Essay: Power of Foundations and the American Ideology,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 33, 2007, page 580

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In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a bizarre Obama Administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will “help” Kosovo to join NATO as well as the European Union. She made the pledge after a recent Washington meeting with Kosovan Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Washington where she praised the progress of the Thaci government in its progress in “European integration and economic development.”^[1]

Her announcement no doubt caused serious gas pains among government and military officials in the various capitals of European NATO. Few people  appreciate just how mad Clinton’s plan to push Kosovo into NATO and the EU is.

Basic Kosovo geopolitics

The controversial piece of real estate today called Kosovo was a part of Yugoslavia and tied to Serbia until the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 demolished what remained of Milosevic’s Serbia and  opened the way for the United States, with the dubious assist of EU nations, above all Germany, to carve up the former Yugoslavia into tiny, dependent pseudo states. Kosovo became one, as did Macedonia. Slovenia and Croatia had earlier split off from Yugoslavia with a strong assist from the German Foreign Ministry.

Some brief review of the circumstances leading to the secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia will help locate how risky a NATO membership or EU membership would be for the future of Europe. Hashim Thaci the current Kosovo Prime Minister, got his job, so to speak, through the US State Department and not via free democratic Kosovo elections. Kosovo is not recognized as a legitimate state by either Russia or Serbia or over one hundred other nations. However, it was immediately recognized when it declared independence in 2008 by the Bush Administration and by Berlin.

Membership into the EU for Kosovo would be welcoming another failed state, something which may not bother US Secretary Clinton, but which the EU at this juncture definitely can do without. Best estimates place unemployment in the country at as much as 60%. That is not just Third World level. The economy was always the poorest in Yugoslavia and today it is worse. Yet the real issue in terms of the future of EU peace and security is the nature of the Kosovo state that has been created by Washington since the late 1990’s.

Mafia State & Camp Bondsteel

Kosovo is a tiny parcel of land in one of the most strategic locations in all Europe from a geopolitical standpoint of the US military objective of controlling oil flows and political developments from the oil-rich Middle East to Russia and Western Europe. The current US-led recognition of the self-declared Republic of Kosovo is a continuation of US policy for the Balkans since the illegal 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Serbia—a NATO “out-of-area” deployment never approved by the UN Security Council, allegedly on the premise that Milosevic’s army was on the verge of carrying out a genocidal massacre of Kosovo Albanians.

Some months before the US-led bombing of Serbian targets, one of the heaviest bombings since World War II, a senior US intelligence official in private conversation told Croatian senior army officers in Zagreb about Washington’s strategy for former Yugoslavia. According to these reports, communicated privately to this author, the Pentagon goal already in late 1998 was to take control of Kosovo in order to secure a military base to control the entire southeast European region down to the Middle East oil lands.

Since June 1999 when the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) occupied Kosovo, then an integral part of then-Yugoslavia, Kosovo was technically under a United Nations mandate, UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Russia and China also agreed to that mandate, which specifies the role of KFOR to ensure an end to inter-ethnic fighting and atrocities between the Serb minority population, others and the Kosovo Albanian Islamic majority. Under 1244 Kosovo would remain part of Serbia pending a peaceful resolution of its status. That UN Resolution was blatantly ignored by the US, German and other EU parties in 2008.

Germany’s and Washington’s prompt recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February 2008, significantly, came days after elections for President in Serbia confirmed pro-Washington Boris Tadic had won a second four year term. With Tadic’s post secured, Washington could count on a compliant Serbian reaction to its support for Kosovo.  

Immediately after the bombing of Serbia in 1999 the Pentagon seized a 1000 acre large parcel of land in Kosovo at Uresevic near the border to Macedonia, and awarded a contract to Halliburton when Dick Cheney was CEO there, to build one of the largest US overseas military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, with more than 7000 troops today.

The Pentagon has already secured seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania on the Black Sea in the Northern Balkans, including the Graf Ignatievo and Bezmer airbases in Bulgaria and Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania, which are used for “downrange” military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Romanian installation hosts the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force–East. The US’s colossal Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and the use and upgrading of Croatian and Montenegrin Adriatic harbors for US Navy deployments complete the militarization of the Balkans.[2]

The US strategic agenda for Kosovo is primarily military, secondarily, it seems, narcotics trafficking. Its prime focus is against Russia and for control of oil flows from the Caspian Sea to the Middle East into Western Europe. By declaring its independence, Washington gains a weak state which it can fully control. So long as it remained a part of Serbia, that NATO military control would be politically insecure. Today Kosovo is controlled as a military satrapy of NATO, whose KFOR has 16,000 troops there for a tiny population of 2 million. Its Camp Bondsteel is one of a string of so-called forward operating bases and “lily pads” as Donald Rumsfeld called them, for military action to the east and south. Now formally bringing Kosovo into the EU and to NATO will solidify that military base now that the Republic of Georgia under US protégé Saakashvili failed so miserably in 2008 to fill that NATO role.

Heroin Transport Corridor

US-NATO military control of Kosovo serves several purposes for Washington’s greater geo-strategic agenda. First it enables greater US control over potential oil and gas pipeline routes into the EU from the Caspian and Middle East as well as control of the transport corridors linking the EU to the Black Sea.

It also protects the multi-billion dollar heroin trade, which, significantly, has grown to record dimensions in Afghanistan according to UN narcotics officials, since the US occupation. Kosovo and Albania are major heroin transit routes into Europe. According to a 2008 US State Department annual report on international narcotics traffic, several key drug trafficking routes pass through the Balkans. Kosovo is mentioned as a key point for the transfer of heroin from Turkey and Afghanistan to Western Europe. Those drugs flow under the watchful eye of the Thaci government.

Since its dealings with the Meo tribesmen in Laos during the Vietnam era, the CIA has protected narcotics traffic in key locations in order partly to finance its covert operations. The scale of international narcotics traffic today is such that major US banks such as Citigroup are reported to derive a significant share of their profits from laundering the proceeds. 

One of the notable features of the indecent rush by Washington and other states to immediately recognize the independence of Kosovo is the fact that they well knew its government and both major political parties were in fact run by Kosovo Albanian organized crime.

Hashim Thaci, Prime Minister of Kosovo and head of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, is the former leader of the terrorist organization which the US and NATO trained and called the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, or in Albanian, UCK. In Kosovo crime circles he is known as Hashim “The Snake” for his personal ruthlessness against opponents.

In 1997, President Clinton’s Special Balkans Envoy, Robert Gelbard described the KLA as, “without any question a terrorist group.” It was far more. It was a klan-based mafia, impossible therefore to infiltrate, which controlled the underground black economy of Kosovo. Today the Democratic Party of Thaci, according to European police sources, retains its links to organized crime.

A February 22, 2005 German BND report, labeled Top Secret, which has since been leaked, stated, “Über die Key-Player (wie z. B. Haliti, Thaci, Haradinaj) bestehen engste Verflechtungen zwischen Politik, Wirtschaft und international operierenden OK-Strukturen im Kosovo. Die dahinter stehenden kriminellen Netzwerke fördern dort die politische Instabilität. Sie haben kein Interesse am Aufbau einer funktionierenden staatlichen Ordnung, durch die ihre florierenden Geschäfte beeinträchtigt werden können.“ (OK=Organized Kriminalität). (Translation: “Through the key players—for example Thaci, Haliti, Haradinaj—there is the closest interlink between politics, the economy and international organized crime in Kosovo. The criminal organizations in the background there foster political instability. They have no interest at all in the building of a functioning orderly state that could be detrimental to their booming business.”[3]

The KLA began action in 1996 with the bombing of refugee camps housing Serbian refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. The KLA repeatedly called for the “liberation” of areas of Montenegro, Macedonia and parts of Northern Greece. Thaci is hardly a figure of regional stability to put it mildly. 

The 44 year old Thaci was a personal protégé of Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the 1990s, when he was a mere 30-year old gangster. The KLA was supported from the outset by the CIA and the German BND. During the 1999 war the KLA was directly supported by NATO. At the time he was picked up by the USA in the mid-1990s, Thaci was founder of the Drenica Group, a criminal syndicate in Kosovo with ties to Albanian, Macedonian and Italian organized mafias.  A classified January 2007 report prepared for the EU Commission, labeled “VS-Nur für den Dienstgebrauch” was leaked to the media. It detailed the organized criminal activity of KLA and its successor Democratic Party under Thaci.

A December 2010 Council of Europe report, released a day after Kosovo’s election commission said Mr Thaci’s party won the first post-independence election, accused Western powers of complicity in ignoring the activities of the crime ring headed by Thaci: “Thaci and these other ‘Drenica Group’ members are consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime,” the report said. “We found that the ‘Drenica Group’ had as its chief – or, to use the terminology of organised crime networks, its ‘boss’ – the renowned political operator … Hashim Thaci.” [4]

The report stated that Thaci exerted “violent control” over the heroin trade. Dick Marty, the European Union investigator, presented the report to European diplomats from all member states. The response was silence. Washington was behind Thaci.[5]

The same Council of Europe report on Kosovo organized crime accused Thaci’s mafia organization of dealing in trade in human organs. Figures from Thaçi’s inner circle were accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys that were sold on the black market. In one case revealed in legal proceedings in a Pristina district court in 2008 organs were said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000.[6]

The question then becomes, why are Washington, NATO, the EU and inclusive and importantly, the German Government, so eager to legitimize the breakaway Kosovo? A Kosovo run internally by organized criminal networks is easy for NATO to control. It insures a weak state which is far easier to bring under NATO domination. Combined with NATO control over Afghanistan where the Kosovo heroin controlled by Prime Minister Thaci originates, the Pentagon is building a web of encirclement around Russia that is anything but peaceful. 

The Thaci dependence on US and NATO good graces insures Thaci’s government will do what it is asked. That, in turn, assures the US a major military gain consolidating its permanent presence in the strategically vital southeast Europe. It is a major step in consolidating NATO control of Eurasia, and gives the US a large swing its way in the European balance of power. Little wonder Moscow has not welcomed the development, nor have numerous other states. The US is literally playing with dynamite, potentially as well with nuclear war in the Balkans.  

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. He is a contributing author at BFP and may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net where this article was originally published.

Endnotes:

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Longtime 9/11 activist and 9/11 Truth News contributor Jon Gold joins us to discuss his recently released autobiographical book 9/11 Truther: The Fight for Peace, Justice and Accountability. Mr. Gold shares with us the catalyst that put him on the path to 9/11 activism and truth seeking, the common obstacles and challenges encountered by devoted 9/11 truth-seekers, the many still-unanswered questions involving the terrorist attacks on September 11, and the importance of continuing the quest for truth and justice. His book is currently available at Amazon .

Listen to the preview Here
 

Here is our guest Jon Gold unplugged!

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Last week, Edward Lazear wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with the uplifting title “The Worst Economic Recovery in History.”  Lazear noted that many people have referred to our latest recession as the worst recession since the Great Depression.  He then proceeded to make the case that, while we may technically be in an economic recovery, our current recovery is not only the worst since World War II, it is even worse than the recovery in the Great Depression.

That’s a tough one to beat.  According to Federal Reserve data, it took 88 months (about 7 years) for industrial production in the United States to muddle through the Great Depression and get back to its previous peak level in August 1929.  We’ve only had 51 months since the December 2007 peak in industrial production before our latest recession, and we still aren’t back to that December 2007 peak yet.  This is bad, to be sure, but on this basis it’s hard to say our latest recovery is “even worse” than the slow one after the Great Depression, because we just haven’t had the time yet.

But Lazear was making his case in terms of growth rates during the recovery.  On that basis, in the 32 months since the latest economic “trough,” industrial production growth has averaged 0.4% per month.  This is about one-third the average growth rate in the 32 months following the March 1933 trough at the bottom of the Great Depression.

With the slow growth in recent years, we are seriously lagging the recovery performance after 11 recessions since World War II.  Here we are, 51 months (over four years) after the beginning of the latest recession, and industrial production is only at 96% of where it was back at the December  2007 economic peak.  Business cycle experts ‘officially’ deem that our latest recession ended in June 2009, and things have been on an uptrend since then.  But the last two years have been abnormally sluggish ones, in light of how bad the recession was.  For example, 51 months after the peak of ten previous recessions, we’ve never had industrial production below where it was when those 10 previous recessions got underway.

Industrial production is a statistic produced by the Federal Reserve to measure output in a wide variety of industries, as well as in  the aggregate.  In turn, industrial production is included in the Conference Board’s index of coincident indicators.  This index is designed, in theory, to replicate overall economic activity with relatively timely data.  (The Conference Board also produces indexes of lagging economic indicators as well as leading indicators.)  The Federal Reserve’s industrial production index relies on data from units of physical production, where available, but these data are not available on a timely basis for many industries.  So the Fed also relies on estimates of physical production, with those estimates based in important part on historical relationships between employment levels (where data are available) and physical output.

In our latest recession, the Fed’s current estimate show industrial production hitting a bottom in June of 2009, coincident with the NBER ‘experts’ view that this was indeed the trough in the latest recession.  So industrial production behaved like a coincident indicator, as it should, at least in theory.

But another member of the Conference Board’s coincident indicators has been behaving badly, at least for a coincident indicator – and this behavior helps illuminate how bad things have been.  Historically, total nonfarm payroll employment has been viewed as another coincident indicator.  Total employment tends to peak when the overall economy peaks, and it tends to bottom out when the overall economy starts growing again.  But in our last two recessions, and particularly our latest, total employment has not recovered like it has in the past.

For example, after the 2001 recession ‘officially’ ended in November 2001, total employment continued to decline for six consecutive months, despite its ‘coincident indicator’ status.  And after our latest Big Nasty officially ended in June 2009, total employment continued to decline for eight consecutive months.  Since the June 2009 official end of the latest recession, total employment has risen at an average monthly rate of only 0.05%.  During economic recoveries, total employment tends to rise faster than the long-term average growth rate, but since June 2009, total employment has risen less than one-third the average long-term growth rate.

In explaining our weak performance, Lazear asserted that threats of higher taxes, an increasing regulatory burden, and higher government spending have been important growth impediments.  He also spoke of a failure to pursue ‘aggressive trade policies.’  One thing he didn’t mention specifically, but likely has been a major weight, has been uncertainty over health care reform and its impact on business hiring decisions.

I’m all for a critical look at “Democratic” policies and their effects leading to our latest Great Recession and measly recovery.  But I’m also for a critical look more broadly.  We have had 133 months since George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001.  A longer story, but here is a look at the growth in the number of jobs in the U.S. over the 627 133-month intervals we have had since January 1960:

The job-producing ability of the U.S. economy has been through the wringer since 2000.  A variety of factors are at work, including national security policy.  We will explore some of these factors in future articles.

# # # #Bill Bergman has 10 years of experience as a stock market analyst sandwiched around 13 years as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an M.B.A. as well as an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 1990. Mr. Bergman is currently working with Social Movement Sciences LLC, a new enterprise developing evaluation and funding services for not-for-profit organizations.

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What is Black Power? When, where, how, and why did it emerge? Taking a look at the Civil Rights movement in the broader context of a Black Liberation Movement, we must examine the concept of Black Power, and look to the revolutionary philosophers of action who both articulated the concept, and actively sought to mobilize and manifest it in the form of empowering communities and creating alternatives. With the ideas and actions of Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton and Angela Davis – among many many others! – we see a profoundly complex, indigenous, grassroots and globally-connected revolutionary movement emerge in the United States in the 1960s, led by young, black leaders, male and female, speaking out against the racism, imperialism, exploitation and domination of the American empire at home and abroad, historically and presently, from Harlem to Haiti to Hanoi.

The Black Panther Party was a particularly active component of the black power movement, organizing free breakfasts, medical care, and education for ghetto residents and children. So threatening to the power structure was the Black Power movement, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once declared the free breakfast program to be the “greatest internal threat to the United States.” A look at the Black Power movement helps us understand why it was so threatening back then, and why it’s important to remember today.

Listen to the podcast show here (Subscribers only):

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BFP Nightly Quote

“By 1990, publishers of mass circulation daily newspapers will finally stop kidding themselves that they are in the newspaper business and admit that they are primarily in the business of carrying advertising messages.” – A. Roy Megary

International Newsworthy

Iran Talks Have Right Mix for History

Iran Halts Oil Flow to Germany

US Steps Up Intel & Sabotage Missions inside Iran

US Training of Iranian Terrorist Group

…

Night-Raid Deal in Afghanistan Symbolic Only

Pakistan: No Decision Yet on NATO Supply

Hazara Muslims Call for Strike in SW Pakistan

Balochistan Challenges to ISI

…

Foiling Peace: The Imperial “Friends” of Syria

McCain & Lieberman Meet with Syrian Rebels in Turkey

West Uses Syria to Hit China-Russia-Iran

Saudi Pipeline Blown Up in Yemen

Bahrain: The Key to Saudi-Qatari Servitude

…

Kony 2012: Cable Shows US Permission Required for Key Ugandan Combat Operations

Somalia: ‘Newly Liberated Areas’-What Comes Next?

Michael Corleone of Libya?

Egypt: Court Suspends Constitutional Assembly

Mali Mess: ‘Unintended Consequence’ of Libya ‘Intervention’

Sudan Halts Negotiation with South

…

Russia Bans Transit of NATO Heroin through its Territory

Russia: Putin Sends Fasting Astrakhan Protesters to Court

Georgia Shows Off New Drone

…

UK Terror Suspects Can be Sent to the US

Swedish Academy Won’t Take Back Poet’s Award for Criticizing Israel

Former Greek Defense Minister Arrested over Money Laundering

National Newsworthy

CIA Wins Fight to Keep MPs in Dark on Rendition

US ‘Waging War’ on Whistleblowers

The FBI’s Effort to Keep a Whistleblower’s Book from Being Published

New US Spy Satellite Could Include ‘Domestic Surveillance’

ACTA: The State of Play in the US

DHS & Navy Award Contract to Hack into Gaming System

Chicago NATO Summit: Fortress-Like Security

Cryptome: US Boosts Middle East Oil Deals in Israel

Noteworthy Editorials

Francis Boyle: The Nobel Peace Prize- A Front for NATO Warmongering

Pepe Escobar: What’s Going On at the Turkish-Syrian Border?

Tom Engelhardt: The Afghan Syndrome

Chris Floyd: Perverts in Power

The Liberal Betrayal of Bradley Manning

J Street & Israel Lobby

The Outing of Deep Throat

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: BFP EyeOpener Video Report- A Brief History of Israeli Spying on America

Video 2: Obama Administration Hunts Government Whistleblower

Podcast 1: Corbett Report- Crossing the Rubicon with Eric Shine

 Podcast 2: Peter B Collins Show- Sibel Edmonds’ Attorney on FBI’s Illegal Censorship

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This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by SUBSCRIBING, and by ordering our EXCLUSIVE BFP DVD .

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting a brief history of Israeli spying on the US which spans a number of decades and into the heart of the most sensitive data and material in the American government, the lack of action by the US Congress, and the absence of real reportage by the US media when it comes to this consistent and ongoing betrayal.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here (Subscribers Only):

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“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” – Heinrich Heine

International Newsworthy

US: Warship in Waters Near Iran Only ‘Routine’

Iran Busts Israeli Terror Group

Iran Offers Possible Nuclear Compromise

Iran Cuts Oil Export to Spain

Sanctions against Iran= Hara-Kiri by the Europeans

…

Afghanistan: Foreigners Blamed for Graft in Reconstruction Schemes

Two Afghan Suicide Attacks Claim 15 Lives

Weapons Smugglers Thrive in Chaos of Western Pakistan

Afghan Endgame Has Pakistan Shuttering

…

Syrian Rebels Using Turkish Refugee Camps as Base

Syria: Turkey Claims Deliberate Attack on Refugee Camp

Syria’s “Rogue Islamist Opposition”: US-NATO’s New Lie for Regime Change

George Soros Targets Syria

Fugitive Iraqi VP Arrives in Turkey

Israel Eyes Iraq’s F-16s & Worries

UAE Detains Six Activists Critical of Rulers

…

Wikileaks: Kony 2012 Creators Spied for Uganda

Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood Chooses Chaos

Egypt Court Suspends Constituent Assembly

Libya’s Oil Could Leave the Country on a Slippery Slope

Nigeria: Fertile Ground for Balkanization

Somalia: Blast Kills at Least 12

Mali: Boko Haram in Northern Mali City of Gao

…

Saakashvili : Testing of Georgian-Made Drone Planned

Azerbaijan Does Not Recognize Presidential Elections in South Ossetia

Uzbekistan: Tashkent Demands Place in the Sun

…

UK: Government Approved Rendition of Libyan Military Figure

DIPs & Skunk Oil to Repel Rioters in Britain

MI6 Officer Murder Inquest to be Held in Secret

National Newsworthy

DOJ-FBI Attempt to Hold Sibel Edmonds’ Book Hostage- Illegally & Unconstitutionally

Obama’s Backdoor “CyberSecurity” Wiretap Bill Threatens Political & Private Rights

FBI Fears American Universities ‘Swarming with Spies’

Pentagon: 9/11 Suspect KSM to Go to Court in May

Media Group Files Challenge to Keep Guantanamo Court Open

White House Rejects President Peres’ Plea to Release Jonathan Pollard

White House Warns Media on North Korea

US Aid to Israel Equals $4.9 Million a Day for 64 Years

Seven Rules for Recording Police

TSA Whistleblower: Body Scanners Routinely Fail

Judge Hammers Wells Fargo

Noteworthy Editorials

Pepe Escobar: Surrender Now or We’ll Bomb You Later!

Glenn Greenwald: State-Dominated Media & Iran

Paul Craig Roberts: What’s ObamaCare?

Paul Pillar: Pluralism in Egypt

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away?

The Mythical Sino-Islamic Nexus

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: James Corbett-The Secret Service on 9/11

Video 2: OAS HR Organization Agrees to Hear Gitmo Case

Video 3: Cameron Offers Guns for Glory in Japan

Podcast 1: Peter B Collins Show- Jason Leopold on the Origins of John Yoo’s Torture Memo

Podcast 2: Corbett Report- From Hiroshima to Fukushima with Dr. Anthony J Hall

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The following press release was issued today by my attorneys and the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC). For the full release visit their website at http://www.whistleblowers.org

Washington, D.C. April 10, 2012. Today, the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) revealed that the FBI required employees to sign employment contracts that are illegal under Federal law. The NWC launched the investigation in response to a nearly yearlong campaign by the FBI to prevent the publication of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ new book, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story.

On April 26, 2011, Ms. Edmonds followed official procedure and submitted her manuscript to the FBI for pre-publication clearance. Under the terms of her employment agreement and controlling regulations, the FBI was required to review and approve the submission within thirty (30) days. Instead of complying with the law, the FBI intentionally stalled the approval process for over 341 days and has still refused to “clear” the book for publication.

…

The NWC is also releasing documentation confirming that the FBI required employees, including Ms. Edmonds, to sign the illegal contracts that allowed the FBI to censor issues of “public policy” it found embarrassing.  According to Ms. Edmonds attorney, Stephen M. Kohn, “the controlling law strictly limits government’s ability to censor its employees. Agencies like the FBI may require pre-publication review of its employees’ writings, but may only censor classified or secret information.  The government may not censor books or other writings on ‘policy’ grounds.  The FBI’s employment contract with Ms. Edmonds is overreaching and illegal.”

Additional documents demonstrate that the agency acted illegally to prevent Ms. Edmonds from publishing a manuscript that might embarrass the agency.

The book in question, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, discusses Ms. Edmonds’s experience as an FBI Language Specialist who discovered and blew the whistle on serious security breaches and cover-ups at the Washington Field Office. The FBI fired Ms. Edmonds for making protected disclosures about the misconduct she observed and later invoked the “state’s secret” privilege to suppress her story.

An independent investigation by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General confirmed her allegations and the illegality of her termination. However, the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege in 2002 in order to have Ms. Edmonds’ whistleblower claims dismissed and to protect the government from embarrassment.

In recognition of her work to expose intelligence failures, Ms. Edmonds received the 2006 First Amendment Award, presented by the PEN American Center and Newman’s Own.

Stephen M. Kohn, Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center, also stated:

The FBI must stop harassing Sibel Edmonds. The law is crystal clear on the government’s ability to censor federal employees and contractors. When reviewing their writings, the government has the single ability to strike classified or secret information. The government may not censor a book based on “policy.” Here, the FBI has invented new powers for itself, violating the Constitution. Congress should investigate all employment agreements drafted by the FBI to ensure that they are legal and not designed to censor speech protected under the First Amendment.

…

Links:

Manuscript cover letter to FBI

Illegal employment agreement (excerpt)

Notification of stalled FBI review process

Honesty Without Fear radio show (hear the interview live or download the program)

Boilingfrogspost.com (Sibel Edmonds blog)

We are now offering a very limited number of advanced signed copies of Classified Woman to Boiling Frogs Post readers and supporters worldwide. In addition to the book you will receive a one-year subscription to Boiling Frogs Post and a copy of our recently released DVD containing our CIA Series, Bonus Episodes, and Jamiol Toon Gallery. All that for $100.

BFP Nightly Quote

“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.” – John Hay

International Newsworthy

US Gives Iran ‘Last Chance’ Warning

Second US Aircraft Carrier in Gulf

Iran Will Not Accept Any Precondition to Nuclear Talks

Surge in Secret US Surveillance of Iran: Real Agenda=Regime Change

Exiled Son of Shah of Iran Calls for Israel’s Help

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Afghanistan: Locals Deny End to Drug Trade in Afghan Province

Afghanistan Takes Control of Night Raids

Pakistan: Zardari Urges NATO to Put Narcotics on their Agenda

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: Benefactor of Pakistan?

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Imperial Powers Manipulate Syrian “Peace Plan” to Prepare for All Out War

Armed Rebels Surrender to Syrian Army

Turkey Warns of ‘Steps’ if Syria Mayhem Doesn’t End

Yemen: Joint US Drones-Yemeni Warplanes Kill 24

Israel’s Special Forces Preparing for Mass Lebanon Occupation

The Untold Suffering of Palestinian Children

…

Egypt-Israel Gas Pipeline Hit for the 14th Time

Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood Files Last Minute Back-Up Candidate

Libya-US Probe Oil Firms

Mali: President Issues Resignation

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Georgia Readying for New War with Russia?

Azerbaijan: Two Killed in Operation against Alleged Extremists

Tajikistan: On Afghanistan’s Heroin Highway

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UK: Liberal Democrats Prepared to ‘Kill’ Government Surveillance Plans

Mystery Deepens over Death of UK Intel Expert in China

National Newsworthy

Special Report: Rendition Ordeal that Raises New Questions about Secret Trials

110 K Active US Troops ‘on Prescribed Meds’

Homeland Security in Texas Accused of Faking Inspection Reports

CISPA: New Internet Bill Could Practically Shred the First Amendment

Netflix Creates Pro-SOPA Super PAC

Cops Can Request a Copy of your Complete Facebook Activity

Noteworthy Editorials

Rick Rozoff: Mali- U.S. Africa Command’s New War

Paul Pillar: Hostages in Iran

Assassination by Drones

False Prophets of Nuclear Proliferation

Obama Wreaks Duplicity

BFP Nightly Video-Audio

Video 1: They Hate Us for our ‘Freedom’? Think again

Video 2: Corbett Report- New World Next Week

Video 3: Syrian Journalist: CNN & Al Jazeera Falsifying Events in Syria

Podcast 1: Boiling Frogs Show Presents William Engdahl on US-Israel’s Iran Hysteria & Oil Bubble

Podcast 2: Corbett Report-9/11 Transparency

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On April 7 Fox News Chicago reported on Occupy Chicago’s march through the city’s downtown, the Loop, recording that hundreds of protesters chanted “End the war, tax the rich” during part of the group’s Chicago Spring actions throughout the city “as the movement prepares for NATO.”

Earlier in the day Occupy activists received training for the anti-NATO march and other activities to be held on May 20 and 21 as the military bloc and its leaders descend on the Windy City, including preparing for arrests and other harassment they may be subjected to by the Rahm Emanuel administration. The main march on May 20 and other anti-NATO activities are being organized by the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda with the participation of Occupy, the United National Antiwar Coalition, the American Friends Service Committee, the 8th Day Center for Justice and other peace and social justice organizations. Three weeks before, the Chicago Tribune reported that Occupy leaders from around the nation met in St. Louis to “set their sights on their biggest target of the spring — the NATO summit in Chicago,” with Occupy representatives from Chicago urging their counterparts in attendance from twenty other cities to plan for the Chicago summit and actions to be held against it with their respective general assemblies.

The decision by the Barack Obama White House to shift the venue of the Group of 8 summit originally scheduled to be held in Chicago as well, on May 18-19, to Camp David was heralded as a victory for the movement against war and militarism, corporate domination of the economy and the political process, and draconian infringements on civil liberties locally and nationally.

Washington intended to take the wind out of the sails of upcoming mass protests by decoupling opposition to the G8 from that to NATO, but has instead left one salient target, and that the more dangerous of the two – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – as the lightening rod for people’s anger and protest.

The global agendas of NATO and what the G8 represents – unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable Western-dominated institutions which also include the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, etc. – are much closer, in fact are inextricably linked, than may at first be apparent.

Fox News, cited above, is the preferred propaganda outlet of the 1% and the main channel through which it indoctrinates the general populace with its corporate, militarist and misanthropic dogmas. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch through its parent company News Corps. (News Corporation).

Four years ago Murdoch received the Atlantic Council of the United States’ Distinguished Business Leader Award at the organization’s Annual Awards Dinner.

The Atlantic Council of the United States is the control center and prototype for some sixty comparable groups around the world pushing NATO expansion and, in nations not yet full member states, integration into the alliance.

In recent years recipients of its annual rewards have also included Alan Greenspan, Colin Powell, George H.W. Bush, Tony Blair, current Central Intelligence Director David Petraeus, former top NATO military commander and U.S. National Security Advisor General James Jones, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, current Central Command chief General James Mattis, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger.

On May 3 the Atlantic Council will hold its fiftieth anniversary Annual Awards Dinner to honor U.S. European Command commander and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis (Distinguished Military Leadership Award) and Chairman of the Board and CEO of Coca-Cola Muhtar Kent (Distinguished Business Leadership Award).

The day after Rupert Murdoch received the 2008 Distinguished Business Leadership Award, he published a column (a version of his acceptance speech) in the Wall Street Journal, which he also owns, entitled “Enlarging the Atlantic Alliance.” Hailing the 28-member military bloc as having “ensured the advance of democracy from the Atlantic to the Urals,” he advocated its expansion beyond the “accident of geography” to include nations as far afield from the North Atlantic as his native Australia, Israel, Japan and Colombia.

In the last case he praised “brave and innovative president” Álvaro Uribe, who before stepping down from his post in 2010 had officiated over the longest counterinsurgency war in the world, one intensified to a new order of magnitude in 1999 when the Clinton administration pushed Plan Colombia through Congress, which made the nation the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid.

Shortly before leaving office, President George W. Bush awarded Uribe the U.S.’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. On June 29 of 2009 President Barack Obama hosted Uribe at the White House and not long afterward it was announced that the Pentagon planned to deploy troops to seven air and naval bases in Colombia.

Murdoch was no doubt satisfied.

The month after Obama and Uribe met to establish the first major U.S. military bases in South America, NATO announced that a Group of Experts would be convened to discuss and plan its new Strategic Concept, which was formally adopted at NATO’s last summit in Lisbon, Portugal in November of 2010. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chaired the group; its co-chairman was Jeroen van der Veer, who until June 30, 2009 was chief executive officer of Royal Dutch Shell. The connection between the West’s military, energy and corporate interests could not have been made more transparent.

The twelve-member Group of Experts or Wise Men toured several nations in Europe and North America promoting NATO’s new global doctrine for the 21st century.

As part of the buildup to the Lisbon NATO summit and the ratification of the new Strategic Concept, on October 1, 2009 Lloyd’s of London – which identifies itself as “the world’s leading insurance market” – hosted a conference introduced by its chairman, Lord Peter Levene, and keynoted by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Referring to NATO’s “third millennium” Strategic Concept, Lord Levene of Portsoken pronounced: “Our sophisticated, industrialised and complex world is under attack from a myriad of determined and deadly threats. If we do not take action soon, we will find ourselves, like Gulliver, pinned to the ground and helpless, because we failed to stop a series of incremental changes while we still could.”

According to the NATO website, he addressed a gathering of “200 high-level representatives from the security and business community.”

The day before, The Daily Telegraph published a column co-authored by Levene and Rasmussen titled “Piracy, cyber-crime and climate change – bringing NATO and insurance together.”

Its contents included:

“We share a common goal – to adopt a fresh approach to managing risk…[W]e believe that the time has come for a much more open and more systematic collaboration between government and business when it comes to managing risk.

“We have already made a start: industry leaders, including those from Lloyd’s, have been involved in the current process to develop NATO’s new guiding charter, the Strategic Concept; indeed, the vice-chair of the group is the former chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer.”

“We must be prepared to think the unthinkable. Lloyd’s developed its 360 Risk Insight programme and its Realistic Disaster Scenarios, and NATO its Multiple Futures project, precisely to lift our eyes from the present and scan the horizon for what might be looming.”

Rasmussen elaborated on the above theme at the conference at Lloyd’s on October 1:

“Let me begin by thanking Peter Levine for hosting us in this very impressive building. This is my first time here, but it is the second time that NATO and Lloyd’s have come together to discuss emerging security challenges. And while a security Alliance and an insurance market might not seem to have too much in common, another look makes it clear that we do: managing risk. We are both focused on predicting threats, taking steps to reduce their likelihood, and, when necessary, managing the effects. Which is why it makes sense that we are doing this together.

“It also makes sense because the challenges we are looking at today cut across the divide between the public and private sectors.”

The NATO chief also presented his idiosyncratic (and hardly altruistic) interpretations on climate change and energy efficiency:

“Rising sea levels will have a clear effect on the ability of our armed forces to do their jobs. Look at Diego Garcia. It is an important logistical hub, including for this country; it is also only a few feet above sea level at its highest point. A one metre rise in sea levels and most of it would be flooded. We need to assess the impacts that these kinds of events would have.”

“We can also look, within NATO countries, at doing something concrete: increasing the fuel efficiency of the military vehicles in our national inventories. Militaries are the largest vehicle owners in any country. Improving efficiency would have clear benefits: saving big money on fuel; reducing national carbon emissions; and improving the range and effectiveness of our forces in the field. If we could make real progress in this area, we could also help reduce our overall dependence on foreign sources of fuel, which is a big part of sustainable energy security.”

In fact the leader of the largest military alliance in history identified no fewer than seventeen non-military issues that NATO, in collusion with its international business and financial partners, is prepared to address.

In Rasmussen’s own words, they are:

Piracy Cyber security/defense Climate change Extreme weather events – catastrophic storms and flooding Sea levels will rise Populations will move…in large numbers…always into where someone else lives, and sometimes across borders Water shortages Droughts Food production is likely to drop Arctic ice is retreating, for resources that had, until now, been covered under ice Global warming CO2 emissions Reinforcing factories or energy stations or transmission lines or ports that might be at risk of storms or flooding Energy, where diversity of supply is a security issue Natural and humanitarian disasters Big storms, or floods, or sudden movements of populations Fuel efficiency, reduc[ing] our overall dependence on foreign sources of fuel

Regarding piracy, not surprisingly the main topic discussed by Lloyd’s Levene and NATO’s Rasmussen at the London conference, the jointly-authored column mentioned above complained that it (an obvious reference to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden) “has cost businesses and insurers hundreds of millions of dollars so far.”

A few weeks before the London Conference NATO launched Operation Ocean Shield, a successor to Operation Allied Protector, a naval operation off the Horn of Africa which in recent weeks was extended until the end of 2014. In no small part to guarantee that Lloyd’s of London’s insurance settlements are decreased.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, Royal Dutch Shell and other major Western oil companies, and international insurance concerns, in addition to private security firms like DynCorp and Academi (former Xe and Blackwater) and construction contractors Kellogg Brown & Root and Halliburton, have a friend they can count on: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military enforcement wing of the West’s 1%.

Rick Rozoff is an investigative journalist based in Chicago and has been an active opponent of war, militarism and intervention for over 40 years. He manages the Stop NATO e-mail list , and is the editor of Stop NATO, a website on the threat of international militarization, especially on the globalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Rozoff has a graduate degree in European literature.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by SUBSCRIBING, and by ordering our EXCLUSIVE BFP DVD .

William Engdahl returns to our show to discuss the continuing tension with Iran driven by Israel and US propaganda, the effect of the war rhetoric in creating the ideal backdrop for a massive speculative spike in oil, and the role of key banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan along with oil majors such as BP in manipulating this new oil price bubble since last Autumn. He talks about MEK and its high-level guardian angels in Washington, the recent Kony 2012 hysteria as a major AFRICOM & US State Department manipulative propaganda campaign to undermine Chinese influence in Central Africa, and more!

F. William Engdahl is an American-German freelance journalist, historian, and economic researcher. He has a degree in engineering and jurisprudence from Princeton University and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm, and has been working as an economist and free-lance journalist in New York and in Europe. Mr. Engdahl is the author of several books including A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order, and may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

Listen to the preview Here
 

Here is our guest William Engdahl unplugged! (Subscribers only)

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The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO, and the European Union — or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Muammar Gaddafi’s rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn’t know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004. Iraq and Libya were the two most modern, educated and secular states in the Middle East; now all four of these countries could qualify as failed states.

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

Assad actually appears to have a large measure of popularity, not only in Syria, but elsewhere in the Middle East. This includes not just fellow Alawites, but Syria’s two million Christians and no small number of Sunnis. Gaddafi had at least as much support in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The difference between the two cases, at least so far, is that the Holy Triumvirate bombed and machine-gunned Libya daily for seven months, unceasingly, crushing the pro-government forces, as well as Gaddafi himself, and effecting the Triumvirate’s treasured “regime change”. Now, rampant chaos, anarchy, looting and shooting, revenge murders, tribal war, militia war, religious war, civil war, the most awful racism against the black population, loss of their cherished welfare state, and possible dismemberment of the country into several mini-states are the new daily life for the Libyan people. The capital city of Tripoli is “wallowing in four months of uncollected garbage” because the landfill is controlled by a faction that doesn’t want the trash of another faction. Just imagine what has happened to the country’s infrastructure. This may be what Syria has to look forward to if the Triumvirate gets its way, although the Masters of the Universe undoubtedly believe that the people of Libya should be grateful to them for their “liberation”.

As to the current violence in Syria, we must consider the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining the anti-government forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.

Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, reported that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” Opposition groups including the Syrian National Council, the Free Syrian Army and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights began disseminating “claims that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre,” and declared that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor added that any suggestions of massacres are unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”

Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, reported in a December 2011 email on a meeting she attended at the Pentagon about Syria: “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [Special Operation Forces] teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” We know of Bhalla’s comments thanks to the 5 million Stratfor emails obtained by the Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed on to Wikileaks.

Human Rights Watch has reported that both Syrian government security forces and Syria’s armed rebels have committed serious human rights abuses, including kidnappings, torture, and executions. But only the Holy Triumvirate can get away with the sanctions they love to impose. Assad’s wife is now banned from traveling to EU countries and any assets she may have there are frozen. Same for Assad’s mother, sister and sister-in-law, as well as eight of his government ministers. Assad himself received the same treatment last May. Because the Triumvirate can.

On March 25, the US and Turkish governments announced that they were discussing sending non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, implying quite clearly that until then they had not been engaged in such activity. But according to a US embassy cable, revealed by Wikileaks, since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria as well as the London-based satellite TV channel, Barada TV, run by Syrian exiles, that beams anti-government programming into the country. The cable further stated that Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

Regime change in Syria has been on the neo-conservative wish list since at least 2002 when John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called the two states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 Bolton said that the United States should have overthrown the Syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein. Amongst Syria’s crimes have been their close relations with Iran, Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Palestinian resistance, and Russia, and their failure to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan and Egypt; all this constituting evidence to the Holy Triumvirate of Syria, like Aristide, being “uppity”.

The clinical megalomania of the Holy Triumvirate can scarcely be exaggerated. And never prosecuted.

A closing word from Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister for United States affairs:

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more than any other country. But the US always feels unsafe or insecure about other countries. … I suggest the United States spend more time thinking about how to make other countries feel less worried about the United States.

William Blum is an American, historian and critic of United States foreign policy. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II. He has described his life’s mission as: “If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It’s causing so much suffering around the world.“Mr. Blum can be reached through his website http://killinghope.org .