BLOWBACK 
We were the first to
propose a Flow Kennedy Postage
stamp for American
 A True Patriot
Flow Kennedy Esq 2001
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October 07, 2001 12:36 AM Subject: best of the imc stories over the last week
this is a great service that one guy does on his own.
>> Independent Media Center - webcast news.url <<
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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 2 Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 15:45:56 EDT From: Date: Wed Oct 10, 2001 12:33am
Subject: FW: Theory about Sept. 11
I have NEVER come to this list with a plea that you must read something. I do so now.
This retired Special Forces Master Sergeant, Stan Goff,
has got it ALL figured out.
I agree with his analyses completely and was just starting to write my own oil piece.
Please, for the love of freedom and our future, read the following essay. Now!
Mike Ruppert "From The Wilderness" www.copvcia.com Subject: FW: Theory about
Sept. 11 Another interesting article. A couple of years ago Stan Goff wrote in the Raleigh
NC paper about his experiences in Colombia.
Well, I don't know how new it is, it's the first I've seen it... I'm very resistant to conspiracy theories,
but there are aspects of this one that I find compelling. Also, if you read down to the end, even
though it's rather long, the discussion of the attack already begun on socialist and anti-globalization
groups is worth reading.
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I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That doesn't cut much for those who will only accept the
opinions of former officers on military matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable
of grasping the nuances of doctrine.
But I wasn't just in the army, I studied and taught military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor
at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point.
And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's mission is to teach. We offer advice
and assistance to foreign forces. That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing
a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with a sister service.
Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have
to say that the story we hear on the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable.
The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after September 11th, does not support
the official line or conform to the current actions of the United States government.
But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its underlying premises. I'm not at all
surprised about the Republican and Democratic Parties repeating these premises.They are simply two
factions within a single dominant political class, and both are financed by the same economic powerhouses.
My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies himself with the left, has been the tacit acceptance
of those premises by others on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score some morality points.
Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what this de facto administration is doing now
is a "response" to September 11th. Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion, neither of these is sound.
To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th, but to last year or further.
A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than his name and the behind-the-scenes
pressure of his powerful father-a former President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil man-is
systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost. Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle
mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American
voter base.
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This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude
of the story has been suppressed by the corporate media to this day. In a decision so lacking in legitimacy,
the Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be used as
a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United States to a man who loses the popular vote
in Florida and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000. This de facto regime then organizes
a very interesting cabinet. The Vice President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of
Defense.
The National Security Advisor is a director on the board of a transnational oil corporation and
a Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man with no diplomatic experience whatsoever,
and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting appointment is Donald
Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals.
He and Cheney were featured as speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business Leaders
Forum. So the consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum, the former Soviet Union, and the military.
Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general trajectory of US foreign
policy as far back as the Carter Administration, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern
and South Asian fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations. Not just because this klavern
has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that worldwide
oil production is peaking as we speak,and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous decline
that will completely change the character of civilization as we know it within 20 years.
Even the left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is available. And, no,
alternative energies and energy technologies will not save us. All the alternatives in the world can not
begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it more
than aresource, and the drive to control what's left more than an economic competition.
I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former Soviet Union is probably high on that
agenda,and in fact has a powerful synergy with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds vast
untapped resources that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear challenger in the region.
We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet with military credentials, which
makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a military General Staff. All this way before September 11th.
Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO might have expected
consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace
dividend and all that.
But it didn't.
It expanded directly into the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union,and
contributed significant forces to the devastation of Iraq-a key country in the world oil market, over
which control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.
NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the controlling interest in it.
It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty quickly.
Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the US and Germany
began a systematic campaign of destabilization there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan
in that campaign.
NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the
further containment of the former Soviet Union,and the future pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to
Western European markets through Kosovo.
You see, this is important to understand, and people-even those against the war talk-are tending to
overlook the significance of it. NATO is not a guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian
organization. It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner. And it can no longer claim to be a
defensive alliance against European socialists. It is an instrument of military aggression.
NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans
through the Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The US military has already taken
control of a base in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a
very logical extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and has beenin motion for two decades.
Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle
Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly
where they need to go to pursue that agenda.
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Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more importantly,the Central Asian Republics
of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan,Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan borders Russia. Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea,
whose oil the Bush Administration dearly covets. Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base
of operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing control over the
South Asian Republics,which will begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing
a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that senior American
officials were warning them as early as mid-July that military action for mid-October was being
planned for Afghanistan. In 1996,the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability
of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before the House Subcommittee
on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian
Ocean.
Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been
on the table, possibly as early as five years ago,I can't help but conclude that the actions we are
seeing put into motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda.
I'm absolutelysure of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale,that are now
taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.
It defies common sense. This administration is lying about this whole thing being a "reaction"
to September 11th. That leads me, in short order, to be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided
evidence that someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient. Which also
leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what actually did happen on September 11th,
and who actually is responsible.
The so-called evidence is a farce. The US presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the
evidence, and of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred to the attacks on
the World Trade Center, and those points were conjectural. This is a bullshit story from beginning
to end.
Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking for courtroom dramas could tear
this story apart like a two-dollar shirt.But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically. But then,
as we should know by now, their role is to legitimize.
This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when you begin to appreciate
the complexity and synchronicity of the attacks. As a former military person who's been involved
in the development of countless operations orders over the years, I can tell you that this was a
very sophisticated and costly enterprise that would have left what we call a huge "signature".
In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.
So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this. That can be a question
about the efficacy of the government's intelligence apparatus. That can be a question abou
various policies in the various agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this action.
And it can also be a question about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the event, and
that foreknowledge is being covered up. To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of
conspiracy nuts is premature. And there is a history of this kind of thing being done by national
political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt.
The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed to act
to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World War II.
I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of
Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Follow along: Four planes get hijacked and
deviate from their flight plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked
between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time .
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Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going
to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.
By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President
is glad-handing teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center, Bush is settling
in with children for his photo ops at Booker Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked
simultaneously, an event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the worlds best
know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in Chief.
No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center building. At 9:05,
Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly
turns somber" according to reporters.
Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting?
No.
He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet fucking goat,
and continues this banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled
point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.
Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force?
No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the
United States what they already have figured out; that there's been an attack by hijacked
planes on the World Trade Center.
There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled
to defend anything yet?
No.
At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is
still ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.
The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target,
and that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has
already flown South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky at
over 400 nauts.
At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked
by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in
the sky over Alexandria and DC.
Now, the real kicker. A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school
for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last
7,000 feet in two-and-a - half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical
wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this
building at 460 nauts.
When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was
added that they received further training on a flight simulator.
This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I- 40 at rush hour by buying her a
video driving game. It's horse shit!
There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal ball is not working today, so I can't
say why. But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff that we are all supposed to
follow blindly into some ill-defined war on terrorism is criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid.
And at the worst, if more is known or was known, and there is an effort to conceal the facts, there
is a criminal conspiracy going on.
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Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence of crises from which they were
temporarily rescued by this event. Whether they played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that
they have at the veryleast opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome their lack of legitimacy,
to shift the blame for the encroaching recession from capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate repressive measures
domestically and silence dissent. In many ways, September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.
And given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term scenario within which to establish fascistic
control measures at home and abroad as a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that
we are entering based on the end of oil. This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored.
In fact,the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially. It's kind of a latter day
McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North Carolina,on the 17th of September, and
though not a single person on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and every person there offered
either condolences and prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of America."
Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one can only guess) . Now Herr Ashcroft is fast
tracking the biggest abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation after the
Oklahoma City bombing-which by the way hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application of the racist death penalty.The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group
has ever acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs .
Some socialists and! ! anti-globalization groups have already been identified by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not a single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally declared unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush regime was facing. World wide resistance
to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to coerce nations in the periphery, we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance remains military action.
For a global economic agenda, there is always a corresponding politicaland military agenda.The focal
point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but they have already scripted this as a
worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism. It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization, and
the drug war thing was being discredited in any case.
Leftists are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia,
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last
few years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they are not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination of their societies by transnational
corporations.
That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting terrorism.
It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this one, by allowing them to get away with
rushing past the question of who did what on September 11th. If the official story is a lie, and I think the
circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this question, then we really do need to know what
happened. And we need to understand concretely what the motives of this administration are.
And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but where the larger social forces
that underwrite our situation right now are headed. I do not think this administration is engaged in the
deliberative process of a political grouping that is on top of their game. They are putting together some
very deliberative technical solutions in response to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly out of their control.
Like clear cutting.
There's a very smart technology being employed to do a very dumb thing.What they are responding to
is not September 11th, but the beginning of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil
production, the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the
empire.
This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans' security, which they are perfectly
justified to worry about. The actions being prepared by this administration will not only not enhance
our security, it will significantly degrade it. Military action against many groups across the globe, which
is what the administration is telling us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of backs against
the wall. That can't be very secure. The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles of
war on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're inclined to view this from a
position of moral and political neutrality.
And the people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining oil reserves are subject to
destabilization for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences-but loss of access to critical
energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan,
a nuclear power in an active conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another nuclear
power. The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford to ignore nukes.
And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the security of anyone who is critical of
the government or their corporate financiers, and we already know that the real threats are against
populations that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens. There is a very real
threat right now of creeping fascism in this country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies.
Historically those enemies have included leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed sectors.
This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet the public discourses of
anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism. And while there
is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media, and the government is already beginning to openly re-instate racial profiling. It is only a short step from there to go after other groups. We have long been prepared by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution and corresponding psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.It's for all these reason, I say emphatically that we can not acceptanything from this administration; not their policies nor their bullshit stories.
What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight back against them, openly, is right now,
before they can consolidate their power and their agenda. Once they have done that, our job becomes
much more difficult.The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion,needs to understand
its critical roles here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a
broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture.
And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then
take political power. Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not faced with a
choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism. And what we can least afford
are denial and timidity.
Stan Goff
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I strongly recommend, for anyone who wants to find further background material on the issues herein
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Merkle" <danm@msfseattle.com To: "Brian Hill (E-mail)"
<bhill@igc.org; "Robert Siegel" <bob@msfseattle.com Sent: Sunday,
October 07, 2001 12:36 AM Subject: best of the imc stories over the last week this is a great service that
one guy does on his own.
<<Independent Media Center - webcast news.url
_______________________________________________
www-features mailing list www-features@lists.indymedia.org
----- End forwarded message -----
_______________________________________________
imc-nyc-print mailing list imc-nyc-print@lists.indymedia.org
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Narco News Publishes Sgt. Stan Goff on Immediate History
... The So-Called. Evidence Is a Farce. By Stan Goff. Stan Goff Joined the US Armed
Forces in 1970 and Left in 1996. ... Stan Goff Speaks. Master Sgt. author of. ...
Narco News Publishes Transcript of Stan Goff Interview by Mike ...
... Be Up Front". The Stan Goff Interview. By Mike McCormick. Stan Goff Joined the
US Armed Forces in 1970 and Left in 1996. ... Stan Goff Speaks. Master Sgt. author of. ...
[ More results from www.narconews.com ]
How they did it
The Bush Family Oligarchy Funding the
Hitler Project
September 28, 2001
After
Eugenics: More alive than
ever by Robert Lederman
(extensive documentation to support
the statements in this essay will be
found at the website)
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Sign Up with NY Times click > to Read the Review
Chapter 1 In Chinese*, Dutch, English, Italian,
Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
(C) 2000 Hernando de Soto All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-465-01614-6
CHAPTER ONE
#The Mystery of Capital Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
By HERNANDO DE SOTO Basic Books
The Five Mysteries of Capital
The key problem is to find out why that sector of society
of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist,
should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the
rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the
whole of society? ... [Why was it that] a significant rate
of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors
and not in the whole market economy of the time?
—Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce
The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. The fall of
the Berlin Wall ended more than a century of political competition
between capitalism and communism. Capitalism stands alone as the only
feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy. At this moment in
history, no responsible nation has a choice. As a result, with varying
degrees of enthusiasm, Third World and former communist nations have
balanced their budgets, cut subsidies, welcomed foreign investment, and
dropped their tariff barriers.
Their efforts have been repaid with bitter disappointment. From Russia
to Venezuela, the past half-decade has been a time of economic
suffering, tumbling incomes, anxiety, and resentment; of "starving, rioting,
and looting," in the stinging words of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. In a recent editorial the New York Times said, "For much of
the world, the marketplace extolled by the West in the afterglow of
victory in the Cold War has been supplanted by the cruelty of markets,
wariness toward capitalism, and dangers of instability." The triumph of
capitalism only in the West could be a recipe for economic and political
disaster.
For Americans enjoying both peace and prosperity, it has been all too
easy to ignore the turmoil elsewhere. How can capitalism be in trouble
when the Dow Jones Industrial average is climbing higher than Sir
Edmund Hillary? Americans look at other nations and see progress, even
if it is slow and uneven. Can't you eat a Big Mac in Moscow, rent a
video from Blockbuster in Shanghai, and reach the Internet in Caracas?
Even in the United States, however, the foreboding cannot be
completely stifled. Americans see Colombia poised on the brink of a
major civil war between drug-trafficking guerrillas and repressive militias,
an intractable insurgency in the south of Mexico, and an important part of
Asia's force-fed economic growth draining away into corruption and
chaos. In Latin America, sympathy for free markets is dwindling: Support
for privatization has dropped from 46 percent of the population to 36
percent in May 2000. Most ominously of all, in the former communist
nations capitalism has been found wanting, and men associated with old
regimes stand poised to resume power. Some Americans sense too that
one reason for their decade-long boom is that the more precarious the
rest of the world looks, the more attractive American stocks and bonds
become as a haven for international money.
In the business community of the West, there is a growing concern that
the failure of most of the rest of the world to implement capitalism will
eventually drive the rich economies into recession. As millions of
investors have painfully learned from the evaporation of their emerging
market funds, globalization is a two-way street: If the Third World and
former communist nations cannot escape the influence of the West,
neither can the West disentangle itself from them. Adverse reactions to
capitalism have also been growing stronger within rich countries
themselves. The rioting in Seattle at the meeting of the World Trade
Organization in December 1999 and a few months later at the
IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C., regardless of the
diversity of the grievances, highlighted the anger that spreading capitalism
inspires. Many have begun recalling the economic historian Karl Polanyi's
warnings that free markets can collide with society and lead to fascism.
Japan is struggling through its most prolonged slump since the Great
Depression. Western Europeans vote for politicians who promise them a
"third way" that rejects what a French best-seller has labeled L'Horreur
économique.
These whispers of alarm, disturbing though they are, have thus far only
prompted American and European leaders to repeat to the rest of the
world the same wearisome lectures: Stabilize your currencies, hang
tough, ignore the food riots, and wait patiently for the foreign investors to
return.
Foreign investment is, of course, a very good thing. The more of it, the
better. Stable currencies are good, too, as are free trade and transparent
banking practices and the privatization of state-owned industries and
every other remedy in the Western pharmacopoeia. Yet we continually
forget that global capitalism has been tried before. In Latin America, for
example, reforms directed at creating capitalist systems have been tried
at least four times since independence from Spain in the 1820s. Each
time, after the initial euphoria, Latin Americans swung back from
capitalist and market economy policies. These remedies are clearly not
enough. Indeed, they fall so far short as to be almost irrelevant.
When these remedies fail, Westerners all too often respond not by
questioning the adequacy of the remedies but by blaming Third World
peoples for their lack of entrepreneurial spirit or market orientation. If
they have failed to prosper despite all the excellent advice, it is because
something is the matter with them: They missed the Protestant
Reformation, or they are crippled by the disabling legacy of colonial
Europe, or their IQs are too low. But the suggestion that it is culture that
explains the success of such diverse places as Japan, Switzerland, and
California, and culture again that explains the relative poverty of such
equally diverse places as China, Estonia, and Baja California, is worse
than inhumane; it is unconvincing. The disparity of wealth between the
West and the rest of the world is far too great to be explained by culture
alone. Most people want the fruits of capital—so much so that many,
from the children of Sanchez to Khrushchev's son, are flocking to
Western nations.
The cities of the Third World and the former communist countries are
teeming with entrepreneurs. You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern
market, hike up to a Latin American village, or climb into a taxicab in
Moscow without someone trying to make a deal with you. The
inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm, and an
astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing. They can
grasp and use modern technology. Otherwise, American businesses
would not be struggling to control the unauthorized use of their patents
abroad, nor would the U.S. government be striving so desperately to
keep modern weapons technology out of the hands of Third World
countries. Markets are an ancient and universal tradition: Christ drove the
merchants out of the temple two thousand years ago, and Mexicans were
taking their products to market long before Columbus reached America.
But if people in countries making the transition to capitalism are not
pitiful beggars, are not helplessly trapped in obsolete ways, and are not
the uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional cultures, what is it that prevents
capitalism from delivering to them the same wealth it has delivered to the
West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a
bell jar?
In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block
that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its
inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity
of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the
capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the
poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no
matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that
characterize a capitalist economy.
I will also show, with the help of facts and figures that my research
team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia,
Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, that most of the poor
already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism.
Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of savings among
the poor is, in fact, immense—forty times all the foreign aid received
throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that
the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of
all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal
and the Aswan Dam. In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the
total assets of the poor are more than one hundred fifty times greater than
all the foreign investment received since Haiti's independence from
France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget
to the level recommended by the United Nations—0.7 percent of
national income—it would take the richest country on earth more than
150 years to transfer to the world's poor resources equal to those they
already possess.
But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land
whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated
businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and
investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are
not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into
capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people
know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and
cannot be used as a share against an investment.
In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every
piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property
document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all
these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational
process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material
existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most
important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a
mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a
link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the
collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and
universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities
(like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in
secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and
makes them generate capital.
Third World and former communist nations do not have this
representational process. As a result, most of them are undercapitalized,
in the same way that a firm is undercapitalized when it issues fewer
securities than its income and assets would justify. The enterprises of the
poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds
to obtain new investment and finance. Without representations, their
assets are dead capital.
The poor inhabitants of these nations—five-sixths of humanity—do
have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and
create capital. They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds;
businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of
these essential representations that explains why people who have
adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear
reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their
domestic capitalism work.
This is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of
why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and
draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human
mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist
but cannot see. Not everything that is real and useful is tangible and
visible. Time, for example, is real, but it can only be efficiently managed
when it is represented by a clock or a calendar. Throughout history,
human beings have invented representational systems—writing, musical
notation, double-entry bookkeeping—to grasp with the mind what
human hands could never touch. In the same way, the great practitioners
of capitalism, from the creators of integrated title systems and corporate
stock to Michael Milken, were able to reveal and extract capital where
others saw only junk by devising new ways to represent the invisible
potential that is locked up in the assets we accumulate.
At this very moment you are surrounded by waves of Ukrainian,
Chinese, and Brazilian television that you cannot see. So, too, are you
surrounded by assets that invisibly harbor capital. Just as the waves of
Ukrainian television are far too weak for you to sense them directly but
can, with the help of a television set, be decoded to be seen and heard,
so can capital be extracted and processed from assets. But only the
West has the conversion process required to transform the invisible to the
visible. It is this disparity that explains why Western nations can create
capital and the Third World and former communist nations cannot.
The absence of this process in the poorer regions of the
world—where two-thirds of humanity lives—is not the consequence of
some Western monopolistic conspiracy. It is rather that Westerners take
this mechanism so completely for granted that they have lost all
awareness of its existence. Although it is huge, nobody sees it, including
the Americans, Europeans, and Japanese who owe all their wealth to
their ability to use it. It is an implicit legal infrastructure hidden deep within
their property systems—of which ownership is but the tip of the iceberg.
The rest of the iceberg is an intricate man-made process that can
transform assets and labor into capital. This process was not created
from a blueprint and is not described in a glossy brochure. Its origins are
obscure and its significance buried in the economic subconscious of
Western capitalist nations.
How could something so important have slipped our minds? It is not
uncommon for us to know how to use things without understanding why
they work. Sailors used magnetic compasses long before there was a
satisfactory theory of magnetism. Animal breeders had a working
knowledge of genetics long before Gregor Mendel explained genetic
principles. Even as the West prospers from abundant capital, do people
really understand the origin of capital? If they don't, there always remains
the possibility that the West might damage the source of its own strength.
Being clear about the source of capital will also prepare the West to
protect itself and the rest of the world as soon as the prosperity of the
moment yields to the crisis that is sure to come. Then the question that
always arises in international crises will be heard again: Whose money
will be used to solve the problem?
So far, Western countries have been happy to take their system for
producing capital entirely for granted and to leave its history
undocumented. That history must be recovered. This book is an effort to
reopen the exploration of the source of capital and thus explain how to
correct the economic failures of poor countries. These failures have
nothing to do with deficiencies in cultural or genetic heritage. Would
anyone suggest "cultural" commonalities between Latin Americans and
Russians? Yet in the last decade, ever since both regions began to build
capitalism without capital, they have shared the same political, social, and
economic problems: glaring inequality, underground economies,
pervasive mafias, political instability, capital flight, flagrant disregard for
the law. These troubles did not originate in the monasteries of the
Orthodox Church or along the pathways of the Incas.
But it is not only former communist and Third World countries that
have suffered all of these problems. The same was true of the United
States in 1783, when President George Washington complained about
"banditti ... skimming and disposing of the cream of the country at the
expense of the many." These "banditti" were squatters and small illegal
entrepreneurs occupying lands they did not own. For the next one
hundred years, such squatters battled for legal rights to their land and
miners warred over their claims because ownership laws differed from
town to town and camp to camp. Enforcing property rights created such
a quagmire of social unrest and antagonism throughout the young United
States that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Joseph Story,
wondered in 1820 whether lawyers would ever be able to settle them.
Do squatters, bandits, and flagrant disregard of the law sound familiar?
Americans and Europeans have been telling the other countries of the
world, "You have to be more like us." In fact, they are very much like the
United States of a century ago when it too was an undeveloped country.
Western politicians once faced the same dramatic challenges that leaders
of the developing and former communist countries are facing today. But
their successors have lost contact with the days when the pioneers who
opened the American West were undercapitalized because they seldom
possessed title to the lands they settled and the goods they owned, when
Adam Smith did his shopping in black markets and English street urchins
plucked pennies cast by laughing tourists into the mud banks of the
Thames, when Jean-Baptiste Colbert's technocrats executed 16,000
small entrepreneurs whose only crime was manufacturing and importing
cotton cloth in violation of France's industrial codes.
That past is many nations' present. The Western nations have so
successfully integrated their poor into their economies that they have lost
even the memory of how it was done, how the creation of capital began
back when, as the American historian Gordon Wood has written,
"something momentous was happening in the society and culture that
released the aspirations and energies of common people as never before
in American history." The "something momentous" was that Americans
and Europeans were on the verge of establishing widespread formal
property law and inventing the conversion process in that law that
allowed them to create capital. This was the moment when the West
crossed the demarcation line that led to successful capitalism—when it
ceased being a private club and became a popular culture, when George
Washington's dreaded "banditti" were transformed into the beloved
pioneers that American culture now venerates.
* * *
The paradox is as clear as it is unsettling: Capital, the most essential
component of Western economic advance, is the one that has received
the least attention. Neglect has shrouded it in mystery—in fact, in a series
of five mysteries.
The Mystery of the Missing Information
Charitable organizations have so emphasized the miseries and
helplessness of the world's poor that no one has properly documented
their capacity for accumulating assets. Over the past five years, I and a
hundred colleagues from six different nations have closed our books and
opened our eyes—and gone out into the streets and countrysides of four
continents to count how much the poorest sectors of society have saved.
The quantity is enormous. But most of it is dead capital.
The Mystery of Capital
This is the key mystery and the centerpiece of this book. Capital is a
subject that has fascinated thinkers for the past three centuries. Marx said
that you needed to go beyond physics to touch "the hen that lays the
golden eggs"; Adam Smith felt you had to create "a sort of waggon-way
through the air" to reach that same hen. But no one has told us where the
hen hides. What is capital, how is it produced, and how is it related to
money?
The Mystery of Political Awareness
If there is so much dead capital in the world, and in the hands of so many
poor people, why haven't governments tried to tap into this potential
wealth? Simply because the evidence they needed has only become
available in the past forty years as billions of people throughout the world
have moved from life organized on a small scale to life on a large scale.
This migration to the cities has rapidly divided labor and spawned in
poorer countries a huge industrial-commercial revolution—one that,
incredibly, has been virtually ignored.
The Missing Lessons of U.S. History
What is going on in the Third World and the former communist countries
has happened before, in Europe and North America. Unfortunately, we
have been so mesmerized by the failure of so many nations to make the
transition to capitalism that we have forgotten how the successful
capitalist nations actually did it. For years I visited technocrats and
politicians in advanced nations, from Alaska to Tokyo, but they had no
answers. It was a mystery. I finally found the answer in their history
books, the most pertinent example being that of U.S. history.
The Mystery of Legal Failure: Why Property Law Does Not
Work Outside the West
Since the nineteenth century, nations have been copying the laws of the
West to give their citizens the institutional framework to produce wealth.
They continue to copy such laws today, and obviously it doesn't work.
Most citizens still cannot use the law to convert their savings into capital.
Why this is so and what is needed to make the law work remains a
mystery.
The solution to each of these mysteries is the subject of a chapter in
this book.
* * *
The moment is ripe to solve the problem of why capitalism is triumphant
in the West and stalling practically everywhere else. As all plausible
alternatives to capitalism have now evaporated, we are finally in a
position to study capital dispassionately and carefully.
(C) 2000 Hernando de Soto All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-465-01614-6
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FUNWITHPARANOIA | Transmogrification | Funwithparanoia3 | eyeofthebeholder | Anarchy Joe | FunWithAnarchy | PreWW3 | POSTWW2 | Conflict of Honor | Brusselsproutings | GNP at work | OldPlanet | BLOWBACK | AntI Nuke Links | GRAILCHASERZ | fine print | fine print 2 | UB MANIFES | the new America | TrueColorz
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below the bar
Subject: what we know about el ghazala in tunisia Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 08:21:30 -0800
From: chris
To: <ming>
Africa struggles to get online March 15, 2002 Posted: 12:00 AM EST (0500 GMT)------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (Reuters) -- It may take all day to phone Ghana
from the country next door, but if you want the latest news from a shadowy
group of rebels fighting in remote West African jungles, you can always go
to their Web site.
Small ads, chat rooms, government propaganda, dissident tracts, soccer scores,
news, horoscopes, lonely hearts, pornography and racist rants -- Africa's Web
sites have it all.
And Ghana in West Africa is playing host this week to a showdown among the
global gatekeepers of the Internet -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN).
At one the plushest hotels in one of the world's poorest countries,
the nonprofit body that oversees the use of the global computer
network has to decide who should run the Net.
But for many in Africa the cyberwar taking place by Ghana's palm-fringed
beaches is far removed from their daily grind.
And like many of the continent's young nations, struggling to develop stable
political systems and falling ever further behind Western economies, the
Internet faces a host of obstacles getting a foothold in the world's poorest
continent.
Long way to go
More and more people are logging on in Africa. In 1995, there were 1.2
Internet hosts in South Africa for every 1,000 people. Five years later there
were 8.4.
Cybercafes are sprouting like mushrooms in cities and Internet service
providers (ISPs) proliferate. In Kenya, 40 ISPs serve a modest 40,000
Internet users and you can get hooked up in hours in Ivory Coast.
But despite the leaps made in the last few years,
only a tiny proportion of the more than 800 million
people in Africa have access to the Internet.
A study by research group NUA Internet Surveys put Internet users
worldwide at 513 million. But just four million were in Africa, and more
than half of them in one country, South Africa.
And there is a long way to go. The bottom 28 countries in the United Nations
human development league, which ranks 162 countries, are all in Africa and
the highest score among them is 0.2 hosts for every 1,000 people in Senegal
and Zambia.
The continent's highest proportion of Internet users is in the Seychelles with 7.6
percent, or 6,000 users. In Seattle, home of software behemoth Microsoft, 60
percent of the population have access to the Internet at home.
Wired magazine has identified 46 "technology hubs" in the world -- places
where knowhow, finance and opportunity converge -- based on numbers of
corporate offices, venture capitalists, business startups, universities and
research labs.
Africa had two: El Ghazala in Tunisia and Gauteng in South Africa, ranked 45
and 46 respectively.
New needs the old
A new innovation, the Internet has failed to take off in Africa for simple
reasons. Two older inventions -- electricity and the phone -- are absent from
large swathes of the continent.
Even in capital cities such as Accra in Ghana, where the Internet is a handy
way of by-passing the country's poor international phone service, power cuts
hamper computer use.
Oliver Fortuin, head of IBM's PC division in South and Central Africa said one
of the biggest obstacles to IT growth -- except in South Africa -- was limited
telecoms infrastructure.
The poorest continent on the planet has just two percent of the globe's
telephone lines and for many, access to clean water, healthcare or education
would come top of any wish list.
"Africa can't leapfrog the technology because it doesn't have the capital
required to invest in the infrastructure," he said. "Africa is three to four years
behind the technology curve in terms of infrastructure, as the start-up costs are
high."
Information and communications technology was highlighted by the African
Development Bank as a key infrastructure -- along with water, energy and
transport -- desperately in need of private sector funding to help Africa
develop.
Cost constraints
Optimists argue that Africa's tardy development provides both an opportunity
to learn from the mistakes of the West and to use new innovations to kick start
development
The Internet is a powerful tool as it has few barriers to participation and
provides access to such a depth of information that the transfer of knowledge,
notably in key areas for Africa such as health and education, can be
accelerated.
For example, remote Internet centers have been set up at refugee camps in
Tanzania to provide long-distance health and education advice to those fleeing
from Burundi.
But few should expect home Internet use to take off anytime soon. The
technology costs too much.
In Ivory Coast, one of the more affluent countries in West Africa a decent
computer costs about $1,000, well above the annual per capita income. The
minimum monthly wage is $40.
IBM says its revenue base in West Africa has doubled in each of the last three
years, but most clients are multinationals and fears of political instability
continue to crimp investment.
"We're not going to see big growth in pervasive computing, where everything is
connected, in the next 18 months in Africa," said Fourtin.
Copyright 2002 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
|
Note from R4D
Hitler Joseph Garbles & Dr. Joseph Mengele
In this world where book & film titles are as moronic as the names
given to horses at the race track I wish to remember or recognize
that I remember something about WW2 and the hidious Eugenics
and torturing experiments of Hitlers policies as carried out by
Dr. Joseph Mengele.
As I see it Michael Jackson ,Jacks, Jocco, The Kid, The king of Pop
what ever you call him "the kid " bleached with a (bleached) dream
is Dr. Joseph Mengele final triumph .
Hitler Joseph Garbles & Dr. Joseph Mengele
Thanks to a Inbread xenophobic Eurocentric Nation White Bread
Anti black America fetish of Dr. Joseph Gerbles, Mengele and Hitler
These guys meant business Race as religion ...
"The most important American political event in those preparations for Hitler was the infamous 'Third
International Congress on Eugenics,' held at New York's American Museum of Natural History August 21-23,
1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. 9 This meeting took up the stubborn
persistence of African-Americans and other allegedly 'inferior' and 'socially inadequate' groups in reproducing,
expanding their numbers, and amalgamating with others. It was recommended that these 'dangers' to the 'better'
ethnic groups and to the 'well-born,' could be dealt with by sterilization or 'cutting off the bad stock' of the 'unfit.'
"Italy's fascist government sent an official representative. Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of
'Entertainment' for the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker on
'racial purity,' W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly held the delegates
spellbound with his account of the struggle to stop race-mixing and inter-racial sex in Virginia.
"The Congress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother; she had paid for the founding of
the race-science movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the
Galton National Laboratory in London. She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races by old
George Herbert Walker--they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes a fascination with 'breeding
thoroughbreds' among horses and humans. 10
"Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi
ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting. 11 The most famous among those transported was Dr.
Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where the
Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire floor with his eugenics 'research.' Dr. Rudin had
addressed the International Federation's 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on 'Mental Aberration and Race
Hygiene,' while others (Germans and Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit. Rudin had
also led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C.
"At the Harrimans' 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin was unanimously elected president of
the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Rudin as founder of the German
Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder, Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Ploetz.
"As depression-maddened financiers schemed in Berlin and New York, Rudin was now official leader of the
world eugenics movement. Components of his movement included groups with overlapping leadership, dedicated
to:
-sterilization of mental patients ('mental hygiene societies');
-execution of the insane, criminals and the terminally ill ('euthanasia societies'); and
-eugenical race-purification by prevention of births to parents from 'inferior' blood stocks ('birth control
societies').
"Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these British-American-European groups
called openly for the elimination of the 'unfit' by means including force and violence. 12." 11.
+++++++++++++++++++ http://watch.pair.com/reich.html ++++++++++++++++++++++
|
[Nazi War Criminal of the "Angel of Death of Auschwitz," Dr. Joseph Mengele ]
[ http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&q=nazi+DR ]
Today In History www.mightycool.com/historyspotlight/06061985.shtml
... of the "Angel of Death of Auschwitz," Dr. Joseph Mengele. ... at Nuremberg, and was the
last major Nazi war criminal to die in Spandau under highly ...
"He doesn't have to Marry a white Girl He "is" a white Girl Just like
Jesus! As famous and “pretty”.
We all have free will, right nobody put a gun or a Chip to his head right!
Or he did it to him self !
This nation and it's pursuit of "HIGH CULTURE" is apparently
only capable Copying and copy-cating others or Self Parody.
Preparing for a 1/2 baked sequel.
In the Blue eyed Disney Cartoon fantasy which is a blatant fraud
foisted on all kids like burger meat .
Ok OK I can't spell !!! this previous txt
was bad Ok OK!
below the bar
Note from R4D
In a world where film titles are as moronic as the names given to horses
at the race track I wish to remember or recognize that I remember WW2
and the Eugenics and torturing experiments of Hitler policies as carried
out by Mingler as I see it Michael Jackson ,Jacks, Jocco, The Kid, The
king of Pop what ever you call him the kid bleached with a (bleached)
dream is Minglers final triumph . Thanks to a xenophobic Eurocentric
nation America is Dr. Minguler ,Or he did it to him self ! This nation and
it's pursuit of HIGH CULTURE is apparently only capable of Parody. Preparing for a sequel.He doesn't have to Marry a white Girl He "is"
a white Girl Just like Jesus! As famous and “pretty”.
|
I have an Idea to use the WWW, how about a Web Site that mentally Un Hooks people from here Brain Washing .. Like a World Facts map"With a map linking All of the Sites world wide
so people can research this stuff and get good grades in school some thing but still showing in
light way the serious scary stuff we all know about but never discuss.( This might even use the
Chat Room feature ? ) Or a WWW that actually proposes that commercial exploitation of a com-mercial & neat as the original corporate stuff so the mascot "speaks" with the authority
of the featured creature as an example Exxon's Tiger or Tony the Tiger (Kellogg's Corn Flakes
Creial Mascot ) says "Hey kids did you know that my Boss made$$ Billion Last year and I
really gotta Live Like (Show Photo) this even though I help him earn it, as a spokes Critter
don't you think I deserve a Better Life ? & Working conditions We Tigers are an Endangered
Species and are nearly extinct ! Wild life funds and most charitable Org's. are over worked
under staffed or afraid and don't act like we Tigers are a Priority once We Die Out we will
only be A Dam Cartoon !!
Us we the two most famous Product Critters in out Native Lands Ok .. That Would Be
GGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRrrrrrrEEEEeeAAAAAAaaaaaaTTTTTTtttttttt!! "
A Degree in Dabbling
If you're stuck in a rut with nothing to do,
then set up a studio where you can scratch
your artistic itch. Find a quiet corner of the
house where you can let your creative juices
flow.
Every master artist needs plenty of supplies.
Make sure you're stocked up on colored paper,
glue, cardboard, magic markers, crayons,
paint, string and anything else you'll need.
Now you're ready to concoct some cool creations. Grab a few empty milk jugs and juice
cans to make your own action figures. With homemade clay, craft an army of menacing
figures with paper-clip horns andspaghetti-noodle hair.
BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that
senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July that
military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan. In
1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability
of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before
the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was
crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.
Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a portion of
Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as five years ago,I can't
help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are
part of a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutelysure of that, in fact.
The planning alone for operations, of this scale,that are now taking shape,
would take many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.
And it can also be a question about whether or not there was
foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge is being
covered up.
To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy
nuts is premature. And there is a history of this kind of thing being done by national political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling
Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed to act to
stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger
to enter the World War II.
I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about
the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Follow along:
Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the while
on FAA radar.
The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time.
Who is notified?This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not
notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.
By aroun
This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored.
In fact,the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially.
It's kind of a latter day McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, on the 17th of September, and though not a single person on
the panel excused or justified the attacks, and every person there offered either
condolences and prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within two days
as "enemies of America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation
(to where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the biggest
abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation
after the Oklahoma City bombing-which by the way hasn't resulted in anti-
terrorism but in the acceleration of the application of the racist death penalty.
The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group has ever
acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs.
Some socialists and! ! anti-globalization groups have already been identified
by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not a single shred of evidence
that they have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds me of the
Smith Act that was finally declared unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a
lot of people served a hell of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush regime was
facing. Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which
is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the threat
of sanctions has been used to coerce nations in the periphery, we have to
understand that the final guarantor of compliance remains military action.
For a global economic agenda, there is always a corresponding political and
military agenda.
The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but they
have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism.
It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization, and the drug war thing was
being discredited in any case. Leftists are regaining power and popularity in
Venezuela,El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina.
Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few years. The empire is beginning
to unravel. We can hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they are
not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination of their societies
by transnational corporations. That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are
supporting terrorism.
I
There's a very smart technology being employed to do a very dumb thing.
What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning
of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil
production, the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide
recession, and the unraveling of the empire.
This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans'
security, which they are perfectly justified to worry about. The actions being
prepared by this administration will not only not enhance our security, it will
significantly degrade it.
Military action against many groups across the globe, which is what
the administration is telling us quite openly they are planning to do,
will put a lot of backs against the wall. That can't be very secure.
The concept of war being touted here is a violation
of the principles of war on several counts, and will
inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're
inclined to view this from a position of moral and
political neutrality.
And the people who are now in possession of half the
world's remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization
for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences-but
loss of access to critical energy supplies is certainly within the
realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan,
a nuclear power in an active conflict with its neighbor, and we will
be provoking Russia, another nuclear power.
The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans
can ill afford to ignore nukes.
And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat
to the security of anyone who is critical of the government
or their corporate financiers, and we already know that the
real threats are against populations that can easily be
scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.
There is a very real threat right now of
creeping fascism in this country, and that
phenomenon requires its domestic enemies.
Historically those enemies have included
leftists, trade unionists, and racially and
nationally oppressed sectors.
This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being
used to quiet the public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism,
of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism.
And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim
xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media,
and the government is already beginning
to openly re-instate racial profiling.
It is only a short step from there to go after
other groups.
We have long been prepared by the
ideologies of overt and covert racism,
and racism as both institution and
corresponding psychology in the
United States is nearly intractable.
It's for all these reason, I say emphatically that we can not acceptanything
from this administration; not their
policies nor their bullshit stories.
What they are doing is very, very dangerous,
and the time to fight back against them, openly,
is right now,before they can consolidate their
power and their agenda. Once they have done
that, our job becomes much more difficult.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=++protest+imf+%26+world++bank+class+act+&btnG=Google+Search
1 [10/03/2002 7:11:48 PM]
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