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Dec 3, 2009

Noam Chomsky




Also see, Noam Chomsky-A Tale Of Two Hemispheres

Thanks. I just got back from Brazil where they don't have any fire codes and if you think this is uncomfortable you should see a meeting there -- people packed so tight that there was a good question whether the oxygen level would suffice. Fortunately, there wasn't a fire or it would have been a huge catastrophe.

Well, the title, you noticed, had a question mark after it and the reason for the question mark is that whatever has been happening for the past several months and is going on now, and however you evaluate it -- like it, hate it, or whatever -- it's pretty clear that it cannot be a war on terror. In fact, that's close to a logical necessity, at least if we accept certain pretty elementary assumptions and principles, so let me try to make those clear at the outset.

The first principle guideline, if you like, is that we ought to, I will try and I think that we should, bend over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to the United States government whenever it's possible. So, that if there is any dispute about how to interpret something, we will assume they're right.

The second guideline is that we should take very seriously the pronouncements of leadership especially when they are made with great sincerity and emotion. So, for example, when George Bush tells us that he is the most devoted Christian since the Apostles, we should believe him, take him at his word and we should therefore conclude that he certainly has memorized, over and over again, in his Bible reading classes and in church, the famous definition of "hypocrite" that's given in the gospels. Namely, the hypocrite is the person who applies to others standards that he refuses to apply to himself. So if you are not a hypocrite you assume that if something is right for us then it's right for them and if it is wrong when they do it, it is wrong when we do it. That is really elementary and I assume that the President would agree and all of his admirers as well. So those are the principles that I would like to start with.

Well, a side comment. Unless we can rise to that minimal level of moral integrity we should at least stop talking about things like human rights, right and wrong, and good and evil, and all such high afflatus things because all our talk should be dismissed, in fact, dismissed with complete repugnance unless we can at least rise to that minimal level. I think that's obvious and I hope there would be agreement on that, too.

Well, with that much in place -- just that much for background -- let me formulate a thesis. The thesis is that we are all total hypocrites on any issue relating to terrorism. Now, let me clarify the notion "we." By "we," I mean people like us -- people who have enough high degree of privilege, of training, resources, access to information -- for whom it is pretty easy to find out the truth about things if we want to. If we decide that that is our vocation, and in the case in question, you don't really have to dig very deep, it's all right on the surface. So when I say "we," I mean that category. And I definitely mean to include myself in "we" because I have never proposed that our leaders be subjected to the kinds of punishment that I have recommended for enemies. So that is hypocrisy. So if there are people who escape it I really don't know them and have not come across them. It's a very powerful culture. It's hard to escape its grasp. So that's thesis number one, we are all total hypocrites, in the sense of the gospels, on the matter of terrorism. The second thesis is stronger, namely, that the first thesis is so obvious that it takes real effort to miss it. In fact, I should go home right now because it is obvious. Nevertheless, let me continue and say why I think both theses are correct.

Well, to begin with, what is terrorism? Got to say something about that. That is supposed to be a really tough question. Academic seminars and graduate philosophy programs and so on -- a very vexing and complex question. However, in accordance with the guidelines that I mentioned, I think there is a simple answer, namely, we just take the official U.S. definition of terrorism. Since we are accepting the pronouncements of our leaders literally, let's take their definition. In fact, that is what I have always done. I have been writing about terrorism for the last twenty years or so, just accepting the official definition. So, for example, a simple and important case is in the U.S. army manual in 1984 which defines terrorism as the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature.

Well, that seems simple, appropriate. A particularly good choice because of the timing: 1984. 1984, you will recall, was the time that the Reagan Administration was waging a war against terrorism. Particularly what they called state-supported international terrorism a "plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself" in a "return to barbarism in the modern age" -- I'm quoting [Secretary of State] George Shultz who was the administration moderate. The other guideline is that we will keep to the moderates, not the extremists.

So that's 1984, Reagan had come into office a couple of years earlier. His administration had immediately declared that the war against terrorism would be the focus of U.S. foreign policy and they identified two regions as the source of this plague by depraved opponents of civilization itself -- Central America and the Middle East. And there was quite wide agreement on that and so, in 1985, for example -- every year the Associated Press has a poll of editors on the most important story of the year -- and in 1985, the winner was Middle East terrorism. So they agree. Right towards the end of that year, 1985, Shimon Peres, Israel's Prime Minister, came to Washington and Reagan and Peres denounced the evil scourge of terrorism, referring to the Middle East. Scholarship and experts also agree.

There is a huge literature for the last twenty years on terrorism, particularly state-supported international terrorism. We don't have time review it but a good illustration, which I will keep to, is the December 2001 issue of the journal Current History, a good and serious journal. Its article called "America at War" includes leading historians, specialists and experts on terrorism and they identify the 1980s as the era of state-sponsored terror, agreeing with the Reagan Administration. I agree with that, too. I think it was the era of state-sponsored international terrorism. One leading author, Martha Crenshaw, says that in that era the United States adopted a pro-active stance to deter the plague. Mostly, it's about the Middle East but Central America is occasionally mentioned. ... One or two authors or co-authors from the Brookings Institution describe the U.S. Contra War against Nicaragua as a model for ... U.S. support for the Northern Alliance in the current phase of the war against terrorism. The seeds of contemporary terrorism however are much deeper, though.

The major historian in the group -- David Rapoport, the leading academic specialist on terrorism, editor of the Journal of Terrorism and so on -- he points out that it goes back to -- the origins of modern terrorism, like Osama bin Laden -- it goes back to the early 1960s and I am quoting him now, when "Vietcong terror against the American Goliath ... kindled the hopes that the Western heartland was vulnerable ..." I won't comment on that but, just as an exercise, you might try to find a historical analog to that statement somewhere. I'll just leave it at that. Without commenting, if you check through the scholarly literature you'll find the same story all the time, virtually no exceptions.

The world agreed with the Reaganites, too. In 1985, right after Reagan and Peres had denounced the evil scourge of terrorism, the General Assembly passed a resolution condemning terrorism, and in 1987, it passed a much stronger resolution and a much more explicit one denouncing terrorism in all its forms and calling on all states to do everything they can to fight against the plague and everything you like. It's true that that wasn't unanimous. There was one abstention, namely Honduras, and two votes against -- the usual two. They gave their reasons for voting against the major UN resolution on international terrorism, namely, both states -- the United States and Israel -- pointed to the same paragraph as the reason for their negative vote. It was a paragraph that said that nothing in the present resolution could in anyway prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the United Nations Charter, of people forcibly derived of that right ... particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation, or could deprive them of the right to obtain support for others in these ends in accord with the charter with the United Nations. That was the offending paragraph, and it is easy to understand why it raised a serious problem for the United States and Israel. The African National Congress was identified officially as a terrorist organization in the United States and South Africa was officially an ally. But the phrase "struggle against colonial and racist regimes" plainly referred to the struggle of the ANC against the apartheid regime. So that's unacceptable. The phrase "foreign occupation," everyone understood, referred to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, then in its 20th year, extremely harsh and brutal from the beginning and continuing only because of decisive U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support that runs up to the present. So, obviously, that was unacceptable. So therefore it was 153 to 2 with one abstention. So it wasn't totally unanimous. It wasn't reported and it has disappeared from history. You can check to find out. Incidentally, that's standard practice. When the master says something is wrong, it's down the memory hole, doesn't get reported and it's forgotten. But it's there, if you want to look, you can discover it, I'll give you the sources if you like.

Well, Reagan at that time, let's recall, he and Peres were talking about the evil scourge of terrorism in the Middle East. George Shultz didn't entirely agree. He thought that what he called the most alarming manifestation of state-sponsored terrorism was frighteningly close to home. Namely, it was a "cancer ... in our land mass," a cancer right nearby that was threatening to conquer the hemisphere with a "revolution without borders" -- a rather interesting propaganda fabrication, revealed to be a fraud instantly, but always used repeatedly afterwards, even by the same journals that explained why it was a total fabrication. It was just too useful to abandon. And this is also interesting, if you think about it, the fabrication had a certain element of truth in it, an important element of truth. We can come back to that if you like. Anyhow, this cancer in our land mass was threatening to conquer everything, openly following Hitler's Mein Kampf, and we plainly had to do something about that.

There is a serious day in the United States called Law Day -- elsewhere in the world it is called May Day -- May 1st, a day for the support of the struggles of the American workers for an eight hour day. But in the United States, it's a jingoist holiday called Law Day. On Law Day 1985, President Reagan declared a national emergency because the government of Nicaragua constitutes "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States..." That was renewed annually. George Schultz informed Congress that we must cut the Nicaraguan cancer out and not by gentle means, things are too serious for that. And so, to quote Schultz -- recall, the administration moderate, the "good cop" -- to quote Schultz, he said: "Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table." He condemned those who advocate "utopian legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations, the World Court while ignoring the power element of the equation." I'll avoid quoting hard-liners. At that time, the United States was exercising the "power element of the equation" with mercenary forces based in Honduras attacking Nicaragua. They were under the supervision of John Negroponte who was just appointed to run the diplomatic side of the diplomatic component of the current war on terror as the UN ambassador. The military component of the current war on terror is Donald Rumsfeld who at that time was Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East -- the other place where the plague was raging through 1985. In fact, the United States at that time was also blocking "utopian, legalistic means" that were being pursued by the World Court, the Latin American countries and others, and it continued to block those means, right until the end, until the final victory of its terrorist wars throughout Central America.

Well, how was the war against state-sponsored terrorism waged in those two regions by the people who in fact are leading the new phase? (So pretty close historical continuity, not just those two, of course.) Well, just to illustrate, let's pick the peak year, the worst year, 1985 in the Middle East, top story of the year. So who wins the prize for the worst acts of terrorism in the Middle East in 1985? Well, I know of three candidates, maybe you can suggest a different one. One candidate is a car bombing in Beirut in 1985, The car was placed outside a mosque. The bomb was timed to go off when people were leaving to make sure it killed the maximum number of people. It killed, according to the Washington Post, 80 people. It wounded over 250, mostly women and girls leaving the mosque. There was a huge explosion so it blew up the whole street, killing babies in beds and so on and so forth. The bomb was aimed at a Muslim sheik who escaped. It was set off by the CIA in collaboration with British intelligence and Saudi intelligence and specifically authorized by William Casey, according to Bob Woodward's history of Casey and the CIA. So that is a clear-cut example of international terrorism. Very unambiguous and I think it is one of the candidates for the prize for the peak year of 1985.

Another candidate surely would be the so-called Iron Fist operations that Shimon Peres' government was carrying out in occupied southern Lebanon in March of 1985. This is in southern Lebanon, which was under military occupation in violation of the Security Council order to leave, but with U.S. authorization. The Iron Fist operations were targeting what the high command called "terrorist villagers" in southern Lebanon. It included many massacres and atrocities and kidnapping of people for interrogation and taking them to Israel and so on. It reached new depths of calculated brutality and arbitrary murder, according to a Western diplomat familiar with the region, who was observing. There was no pretense of self-defense, rather it was openly undertaken for political ends. It was conceded, it wasn't even argued. So that's a clear case of international terrorism although here we might say that it is aggression. I'll call it just "international terrorism" in line with the principle that we bend over backwards to give the United States the benefit of the doubt. Of course, this is a U.S. operation: Israel does it because they are given arms, aid and diplomatic support by the United States. So we will decide to call this just "international terrorism," not the much more serious war crime of aggression. The same, incidentally, was true of the much worse operations of 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon and killed maybe twenty thousand or so people, again with crucial U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support. The U.S. had to veto a couple of Security Council resolutions to keep the slaughter going, provide the arms, and so on, for it. So it's a U.S.-Israeli invasion, if we are honest. The goal was to install a friendly regime in Lebanon and oust the PLO, which would help persuade the Palestinians to accept Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza. That's actually accurate and I have to compliment the New York Times in saying that on January 24th. As far as I know, this is the first time in mainstream U.S. literature that anyone has dared to say what was absolutely common knowledge in Israel and in the dissident literature 20 years ago. I was writing this in 1983 just using Israeli sources but it couldn't penetrate U.S. commentary. You might check and see. As far as I know, this was the first breakthrough. I am not sure the reporter understood what he was saying. But anyway he did say that. James Bennet, January 24th, prize for James Bennet for telling the truth after 20 years. And it's true and, of course, it's a textbook illustration of international terrorism. This time we have to bend over backwards pretty far to call it international terrorism because it is hard to say why this isn't overt aggression -- the kind of action for which U.S. and Israeli leaders should be subjected to Nuremberg trials for real serious war crimes. But, again, let's keep to the guidelines and let's say it's only international terrorism. Well, that's the second example, the Iron Fist operations.

Third, the only other example from 1985 that I know of took place two days before Shimon Peres arrived in Washington to join Reagan in denouncing the evil scourge of terrorism. Shortly before that, Peres sent the Israeli air force to bomb Tunis killing 75 civilians, torn to shreds with smart bombs. It was all rather accurately and graphically depicted by a highly respected Israeli reporter in the Hebrew press in Israel and corroborated by other sources. The United States cooperated with that by withdrawing the Sixth Fleet so that they did not have to inform their ally, Tunisia, that the bombers were on their way, presumably getting refueled on the way. So that's the third candidate. I don't know of any other candidates that even come close to being candidates... Incidentally, George Schultz, the moderate, immediately after the bombing, he telephoned the Israeli Foreign Minister to say that the United States had considerable sympathy for this operation but he backed away from open support for massive international terrorism or maybe aggression when the Security Council unanimously condemned the attack as an attack of armed aggression. The United States again abstaining against that.

So those are the top three cases that win the prize for 1985, to my knowledge, and again I'll assume that these are just international terrorism so we are not calling for Nuremberg trials. Just more "international terrorism" by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" and examples which are pretty hard to miss, remember, because these are the peak stories of the year for international terrorism in the Middle East. There are three perfect examples. In fact, the only three major examples that I know of. However, they aren't candidates. In fact, they are not even in the running. They are not competitive. The examples that are in the running are, for example, cited in the Current History issue, to which I referred, which does discuss 1985 and gives two examples of the evil scourge of terrorism, namely the hijacking of TWA 847, killing one American Navy diver and the hijacking of the Achille Lauro which led to the killing of Leon Klinghoffer, a crippled American -- both surely terrorist atrocities. Those are the two examples that are in the running, that are memorable, that count for international terrorism. Well, the hijackers for the TWA plane claim -- correctly, in fact -- that Israel was regularly hijacking ships in the international waters in transit between Lebanon and Cyprus, killing people and kidnapping others, taking them to Israel, either for interrogation or simply as hostages, keeping them in jail for years. Some people are still in jail without charges but that doesn't justify the hijacking on the assumption, which I accept at least, that violence is not legitimate in retaliation against even worse atrocities or as preemption against future atrocities. Violence is not legitimate in such cases so we can dismiss those claims though they are in fact correct. Incidentally, the U.S.-Israeli hijackings -- and remember, if Israel does it, we are doing it -- those hijackings are also out of the historical records. Occasionally, you find a reference to them in the bottom of a column on something or other but they are not part of the history of terrorism. The hijackers of the Achille Lauro claimed that this was retaliation for the bombing of Tunis a couple of days earlier. Well, we dismiss that with contempt on the same principle, namely, violence is not justified in retaliation or preemption. Assuming that we can rise to the minimal, moral, level that I mentioned earlier -- if we are not confirmed hypocrites, in other words -- then some consequences follow about other acts of retaliation and preemption but that's too obvious to talk about so I will just leave it for you to think about. Well, that's 1985, the peak year of international terrorism in the Middle East.

As a research project, you might see if I have left out anything that is a competitor for the prize that I am not aware of. None are mentioned in the literature on terrorism. As I said at the beginning, you don't really have to work very hard to see these things. You have to work very hard not to see them. It takes a really good education to miss this. 1985 was, of course, not the first or the last act of international terrorism in the Middle East. There are many others that are very important. For example, in 1975, Israel, meaning Israeli pilots with U.S. planes and U.S. support, in December 1975, they bombed a village in Lebanon killing over 50 people. No pretext was offered but everybody knew what the reason was. At that time, the UN Security Council was meeting to consider a resolution which was supported by the entire world with marginal exceptions -- only one crucial exception, the United States, which vetoed the resolution -- calling for a diplomatic settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, incorporating UN 242 and all of its wording of the main resolution, security and territorial integrity and all those nice things on the internationally recognized border. The offending part of this one was that it also referred to Palestinian national rights and that's not acceptable to the United States. It rejected them then and it rejects them now, contrary to a lot of nonsense that you read. The U.S. vetoed the resolution. That continued year after year and is still going on now, of efforts of diplomatic settlement, which the U.S. has unilaterally blocked. Israel does not have a veto at the Security Council so they reacted to the debate by bombing Lebanon and killing about 50 people without a pretext. That's not in the annals of international terrorism either. The U.S. supported both of them, lots of deaths, hundreds of thousands of people driven out and so on. Clinton had to back off his support for the 1996 invasion after the Qana massacre, over a hundred people in a UN refugee camp. At that point he said, "can't handle this any more, you better leave." There was no pretext of self-defense in this case. This is just outright international terrorism or maybe aggression. And it continues.

So let's go up to the current intifada, which broke out on September 30th of year 2000. In the first couple of days, there was no fire from Palestinians, some stone throwing, but Israel was in fact using U.S. attack helicopters to attack civilian apartment complexes and so on, killing and wounding dozens of people in the first few days. The Clinton Administration responded to this by, I'll borrow our President's phrase, by "enhancing terror." You recall President Bush condemned the Palestinians for "enhancing terror" last month, so I'll use his phrase in line with the guidelines. The Clinton Administration committed itself to enhancing terror on October 3rd by making a deal for the biggest shipment in a decade of military helicopters to Israel along with spare parts for the Apache attack helicopters that were sent a couple of weeks earlier. That's enhancing terror. In the days right after, these helicopters were being used to murder and wound civilians, attacking apartment complexes and so on. The press cooperated by refusing to report this. Note: not failing to report it -- refusing to report it. It was specifically brought to the attention of editors and they simply made it clear that they were not going to report it. There is no question about the facts, incidentally, but to this day it has not been reported, except in the margins. That policy continues.

Skip to December 2001. George Bush was condemning the Palestinians for enhancing terror and he contributed in the conventional ways to enhancing terror, in crucial ways, in fact. On December 15th, the UN Security Council debated a European-initiated resolution, calling on both sides to reduce violence and calling for the introduction of international monitors to assist in monitoring a reduction of violence. That's a very important step. That was vetoed by the United States. ... It's hard to think of any other interpretation for this. The press didn't have to bother giving an interpretation. The press didn't have to bother giving an interpretation because it was barely reported. It then went to the General Assembly where it wasn't reported at all and there was an overwhelming vote supporting the same resolution. This time, the United States and Israel were not entirely isolated in opposition as several Pacific Islands joined in -- Nauru and one or two others. So, therefore, not the usual splendid isolation. I don't recall that that was reported. About ten days before that there was another major contribution to enhancing terror. The Fourth Geneva Conventions, according to the entire world, literally, outside of Israel, applied to the occupied territories. The United States refuses, it doesn't vote against this when it comes up in the United Nations, it abstains. I presume the reason is the United States doesn't want to take such an open blatant stand in violation of fundamental principles of international law, particularly because of the circumstances under which they were enacted.

If you recall, the Geneva Conventions were established right after the Second World War in order to criminalize the acts of the Nazis, so saying they don't apply is a pretty strong statement. However, outside of the United States and Israel, the whole world agrees. The International Red Cross, which is the agency responsible for applying and interpreting them, agrees. In fact, as far as I am aware, there is no further question about this. Switzerland, which is the responsible state, called a meeting of the High Contracting Parties for the Geneva conventions -- that is, those like the United States that are legally obligated by treaty to enforce them, a high solemn commitment -- called a meeting on December 5th in Geneva and the meeting took place and passed a strong resolution determining that the Geneva conventions do apply to the occupied territories which makes illegal just about everything that the United States and Israel do there. They went through the list -- settlements, displacements and everything that goes on. The United States boycotted the session. They got another country to boycott them, Australia. According to the Australian press, under heavy U.S. pressure, Australia joined in boycotting them. If the U.S. boycotts it, it's like a negative vote at the Security Council or the General Assembly. It doesn't get reported and it's out of history. But that's another important step to enhancing terror. All this took place, incidentally, in the midst of a twenty-one day truce, a one-sided truce. The Palestinians weren't carrying out any acts but a couple of dozen Palestinians were killed, including a dozen children. That was right in the middle of these efforts to enhance terror... Maybe that's an unfair interpretation and there is some other motive that I'm not thinking of but that's what they look like to me. You can think about that.

In any event, international terrorism in the Middle East certainly continues and has a long history and if you look over the record, of course, it is mixed and complicated but I think you will find that the balance is pretty much along the lines that I described, in fact, the balance reflects the means of violence available, as it usually does. If you look around at terror, in fact, that's why, in the whole range of terror, state terror is far worse than individual terror for the obvious reason that states have means of violence that individuals don't have, or groups. And that's what you find if you look, I think, overwhelmingly. It is commonly said that terrorism is a weapon of the weak. That's completely false, at least if you accept the official U.S. definition of terror. If you do that, then terror is overwhelming the weapon of the strong, like most other weapons. Well, that's history but all of this stuff is out of history. History is what is created by well-educated intellectuals and it doesn't have to have any resemblance to that thing called "history" by naive people and if you check this, I think you will find this true.

Well, that's the Middle East. Let's turn to Central America, the other main focus of the plague by depraved opponents of civilization itself. Here, I will be brief because the core parts are uncontroversial, at least, uncontroversial among people who have minimal regard for international law and international institutions and so on. Actually, the size of that category is very easily estimated, namely, ask yourself how often what I'm about to say has appeared in the discussions about the evil plague of terrorism in the past five months. Huge flood, but how much has been devoted to some uncontroversial cases, again, uncontroversial if you think the World Court and Security Council and international law have some significance. Well, in 1986, the International Court of Justice condemned the United States for international terrorism -- "unlawful use of force" -- in its war against Nicaragua. Again I am going to keep to the guidelines, bend over backwards, and allow this to be interpreted just as international terrorism, not the war crime of aggression. So we will call it "international terrorism." The court ordered the United States to terminate the crimes and to pay substantial reparations, millions of dollars. Congress reacted by instantly escalating the war by new funding... Nicaragua took the matter to the Security Council, which debated a resolution calling on all states to observe international law, mentioning no one but everyone knew who was meant. The U.S. vetoed it. Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly which passed similar resolutions in successive years. The United States and Israel opposed and in one year they got El Salvador [to join them].

All of this is out of history. It has to be. It is just inconsistent with their preferred image of what history is supposed to be and, as I say, you can check how much these uncontroversial cases have been referred to recently. And remember who were the individuals responsible: people like Negroponte, proconsul of Honduras, Rumsfeld, special envoy to the Middle East, and so on, plenty of continuity. The U.S., as I said, reacted by escalating the war and for the first time giving official orders to its mercenary forces to attack what are called "soft targets." That's what the Southern Command called them, "soft targets," meaning undefended civilian targets like agricultural cooperatives and so on. That was known and it was discussed in the United States. It was considered legitimate by the "Left," so Michael Kinsley who represents the "Left" in the mainstream debate, in an interesting article -- he was then editor of the New Republic -- in which he said that, we shouldn't be too quick to condemn State Department authorization for attacks on undefended civilian targets because we have to apply pragmatic criteria. We have to carry out "cost benefit analysis" and see whether, as he put it, the amount of blood poured in is compensated by a good outcome, namely, democracy. What we will determine to be democracy and what that means you can see by looking at the states next door like El Salvador and Guatemala which were okay democracies. And if it passes our test, then that's it, okay. So, in other words, international terrorism is fine -- assuming it meets pragmatic criteria, now across the spectrum, Left or Right among "we" -- that is educated and privileged intellectuals, not the [general] population, of course.

In Nicaragua, the population had an army to defend it -- it was bad enough, tens of thousands of people killed, the country practically devastated, may never recover -- but it had an army to defend it. In El Salvador and Guatemala, that wasn't true, the army was the state terrorists. The U.S.-supported state terrorists, they were the army. There was no one to defend the population and, in fact, the atrocities were far worse. Also, they are not a state so they could not go to the World Court or the Security Council to follow legal means -- of course, without any effect, because "we," people like us, have determined that the world is going to be ruled by force, not by law. And since we have the power, as long as we determine that, a state that tries to follow legitimate means of responding to international terrorism doesn't having anything to do. But that's our choice, nobody else's choice. You can't blame anyone else on that. There was, however, popular resistance, not elite resistance, but popular resistance to the atrocities there so that the U.S. had to resort to an international terrorist network -- an extraordinary international terrorist network.

Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states, we're big guys. So the terrorist network consisted of Taiwan, Britain, Israel, Argentina -- at least, as long as it was under the rule of the neo-Nazi generals, when they were unfortunately removed, they fell out of the system -- Saudi Arabian funding, quite a substantial international terrorist network, never been anything like it. In contemporary terms, we might call it an "Axis of Evil," I suppose. The outcome -- again keeping to the guidelines: we believe our leaders -- was hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered and millions of orphans and refugees, every conceivable atrocity, the region devastated. The single uncontroversial case, Nicaragua, which was the least of them, that alone far surpasses the crimes of September 11th -- and the others suffered far worse. Again we are bending over backwards and giving the U.S. the benefit of the doubt so we are only calling it international terrorism organized by depraved opponents of civilization itself. Well, that's the second major area, Central America.

All of this, however, is off the record, too. [In] the Current History journal -- and it's typical in this respect -- nothing that I have just referred to is mentioned. Nor is it in the whole scholarly literature, in fact, except way out at the margins. You can check and see it just doesn't count. The '80s are described as the era of state-sponsored international terrorism but they are not referring to any of these things. The U.S. was trying to prevent state-sponsored international terrorism by taking "pro-active" means like the most massive international terrorist network that's ever been known. That's very typical of the scholarly literature, journalism and, again, you can do a check. There has barely been a word on any of this as the second phase of the war on terrorism has been declared once again with pretty much the same people and every reason to expect some more [similar] outcomes.

Well, from all of this an obvious conclusion follows: there is an operational definition of terrorism, the one that is actually used -- it means terror that they carry out against us -- that's terrorism, and nothing else passes through the filter. As far as I know, that's a historical universal, I can't find an exception to that. You might try. For example, the Japanese in China and Manchuria [claimed they] were "defending" the population against Chinese terrorists and going to create an earthly paradise for them if they could control the terrorists. The Nazis in occupied Europe [claimed they] were "defending" the "legitimate" governments like Vichy and the population from the terrorist partisans who were supported from abroad, as indeed they were. They were run from London, Poland and France and so on. ... Also, as far as I am aware, this is virtually universal among intellectuals, educated folks like us. Apart from statistical error, this is the line that they take. Now, it doesn't look that way in history, but you have to remember who writes history.

That ought to leave you with a little skepticism. If you look at actual history, not the one that's written, I think you will find that this is the case and I could even maybe suggest it as a research topic to some enterprising graduate student who aspires to a career as a taxi driver. Just to continue to the present, let's just take the last couple of months. September 11th was a perfectly clear example of international terrorism, no controversy about that so we don't have to waste time on it. What about the reaction? Well, it turns out the reaction is also an uncontroversial case of international terrorism. Again, let's keep to the guidelines -- we'll just listen to what our leaders say. So, on October 11th, President Bush announced to the Afghan people that we will keep bombing you until you hand over people who we suspect of terrorist acts although we refuse to provide any evidence and we refuse to enter into any negotiations for extradition and transfer -- a clear case of international terrorism.

On October 28th, the British counterpart, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, who is the chief of the British defense staff, took it a step further. Remember, getting rid of the Taliban regime was not a war aim -- that was an afterthought. Three weeks after the bombing began, that [aim] was added, presumably so that intellectuals would have something to feel good about or something, I don't know. Anyway, three weeks after the bombing, that was added as a new war aim and Admiral Boyce announced to the Afghan people accordingly, I think this was the first mention of this war aim, that we will continue bombing you until you change your leadership. First, that was all very prominent, page one of the New York Times in both cases. Two, both cases are textbook illustrations of international terrorism, if not aggression, but we are still bending over backwards, and it's all off the record by usual convention. We're doing it so it doesn't count. It's only when "they" carry out what we officially define as "terrorism" that it counts.

Well, it's easy to go on but let me just return to the weak thesis: there can't be a war against terrorism as terrorism is defined in official U.S. documents, it's a logical impossibility. This is a small sample of illustrations -- you can go on easily -- but it's enough to show that that can't be true. Well, that's the weak thesis. What about the strong thesis, that it is all so entirely obvious that it would be embarrassing to talk about it because it's all right on the surface, nothing hidden about any of this? Everything that I mention is perfectly well known, you don't have to penetrate anything to discover it. No obscure sources, nothing, just the obvious evidence. And you can easily add to it, there's a ton of literature about it for the last twenty years but that literature also can't be discussed because it comes out with the wrong conclusion. So it's treated the same way terrorism is in our intellectual culture. Again, choice, not a necessity. So we end up with a kind of dilemma. If we are not honest, forget it. If we are honest, there's a dilemma. One possibility is just to acknowledge that we are total hypocrites and then to at least have the decency to stop talking about human rights, right and wrong and good and evil and so on and say "we are hypocrites and we have force and we are going to run the world by force, period. Let's forget about everything else." The other option is harder to pursue but it's imperative. Unless we would like to contribute to still worse disasters that are likely to lie ahead.



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Posted: Dec 3, 2009 1:43pm
Nov 27, 2009

The Economic Crisis and What Must be Done: The Cook Plan By Richard C. Cook The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19th century progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

In 1929 the bankers plunged the nation into the Great Depression by constricting the money supply. With Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the nation struggled through the decade of the 1930s but did not pull out of the Depression until the industrial explosion during World War II.

After the war came the Golden Age of the U.S. economy, when the working man, protected by strong labor unions, became a true partner in the prosperity of the industrial age. That era lasted a full generation. The bankers were largely spectators as Americans led the world in exports, standard of living, science and space exploration, and every measure of health, longevity, and culture.

Roosevelt had kept the bankers subservient to the interests of the economy at large. The Federal Reserve was part of the New Deal team, and interest rates were held at historic lows despite a large federal deficit. One main impact was the huge increase in home ownership. After World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed home ownership to grow further and millions of veterans to attend college. The influx of educated graduates led to productivity growth and the emergence of new high-tech industries.

But the bankers were laying their plans. In the early 1950s they got the government to agree to allow the Federal Reserve to escape its subservience to the U.S. Treasury Department and set interest rates on its own. Rates rose throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the interest rate hikes of 1968, the economy was slowing down. Both federal budget and trade deficits were beginning to replace the post-war surpluses. High interest rates were the likely cause.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon removed the dollar’s gold peg, allowing the huge inflation resulting from oil price increases that the international bankers engineered through control of U.S. foreign policy when Henry Kissinger was national security adviser and secretary of state. Nixon’s opening to China resulted in early agreements, also overseen by banking interests, to begin to transfer U.S. industry to overseas producers like China which had cheap labor costs.

By the mid-1970s, the U.S. had been taken over by a behind the scenes coup-d’etat that included events in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy that could only have been instigated by the highest levels of world financial control. In the election of 1976, David Rockefeller succeeded in placing fellow Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter in the White House, but Carter upset the banking community, thoroughly Zionist in orientation, by working toward peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I was working in the Carter White House in 1979-80. Unbeknownst to the president, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, another Rockefeller protégé, suddenly raised interest rates to fight the inflation the bankers had caused by the OPEC oil price deals, and plunged the nation into recession. Carter was made to look weak and uninformed and was defeated in the election of 1980 by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. It was through the “Reagan Revolution” that the regulatory controls over the banking industry were lifted, mainly in allowing the banks to use their fractional reserve privileges in making mortgage loans.

Volcker’s recession shattered American manufacturing and hastened the flight of jobs abroad. Under the “Reagan Doctrine,” the U.S. military embarked on an unprecedented mission of world conquest by attacking one small nation at a time, starting with Nicaragua. Global capitalism was also on the march, with the U.S. armed forces its own private police force. With the invasion of Iraq under George H.W. Bush in 1991, mainland Asia was revealed as the principle target.

The economy was floated by productivity gains through computer automation and a huge sell-off of assets through the merger-acquisition bubble of the late 1980s which ended in a recession. This resulted in the defeat of Bush by Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. Clinton was able to create another bubble through a strong dollar policy that attracted foreign capital.

The dot-com bubble that resulted lasted all the way through to the crash of December 2000. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force led the way in the destruction of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, whereby the international bankers took over the resource wealth of the entire Balkan region, and the U.S. military gained forward bases for further incursions into Asia.

Do we need to say that none of this was ever voted on by the American electorate? But they bought into it nevertheless, both with their silence and through participation in a generally favorable job market in the emerging service occupations, particularly finance.

By the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, the U.S. was facing a disaster. $4 trillion in wealth had vanished when the dot.com bubble collapsed. NAFTA caused even more American manufacturing jobs to disappear abroad. The Neocons who were moving into key jobs in the Pentagon knew they would soon have new wars to fight in the Middle East, with invasion plans for Afghanistan and Iraq ready to be pulled off the shelf.

But the U.S. had no economic engine available to generate the tax revenues Bush would need for the planned wars. At this moment Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve stepped in. Over a two year period from 2001-2003 the Fed lowered interest rates by over 500 basis points. Meanwhile, the federal government removed all regulatory controls on mortgage lending, and the housing bubble was on. $4 trillion in new home loans were pumped into the economy, much of it through subprime loans borrowers could not afford.

The Fed began to put on the brakes in 2003, but the mighty work of re-floating a moribund economy had been accomplished. By late 2006 another recession loomed, but it would take two more years before the crisis of October 2008 brought the entire system down.

The impact on the job market was immediate and profound. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, the U.S. was mired in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the worst recession since the Great Depression was picking up speed. In order to prevent total disaster, the Bush administration ended its eight years of catastrophic misrule with a flourish, by allocating over $700 billion in financial system bailouts to cover the bad loans the banks had been making since Greenspan gave the housing bubble the green light.

It is now November 2009. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, unemployment has soared from 7.9 percent to 10.2 percent. A few hundred billion dollars were allocated for “stimulus” purposes, but most of that went to pay unemployment benefits and to keep state and local governments from laying off more employees.

A fraction has been distributed for highway improvements, but largely through the bank bailouts the federal deficit has been running at an annual rate of $1.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, with the national debt now topping $12 trillion. Ironically, those Americans who still have productive jobs continue to grow in efficiency, with productivity up over five percent in the last year.

So much federal money has been spent that the Obama administration has been struggling to make its health care proposals budget-neutral through a raft of new taxes, fees, and penalties, and by announcing in recent days that the government’ first priority must now shift to deficit reduction. The word “austerity” has been mentioned for the first time since the Carter administration. Yet Congress voted $655 billion in military expenditures to continue fighting in the Middle East. A U.S. military attack on Iran, possibly in conjunction with Israel, would surprise no one.

So where do we now stand?

At present, the Federal Reserve is trying to prevent a total economic collapse. Interest rates are near-zero, to the chagrin of foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, and close to half of new Treasury debt instruments have been bought by the Federal Reserve itself as a way of providing free money for federal government expenditures.

But the U.S. economy shows no signs of coming back, with no economic driver emerging that could bring it back. For all the talk about alternative energy, there has been no significant growth of any home-grown industry that could possibly make up so much lost ground in either the short or the long-term.

The industries in the U.S. that are holding up are the military, including arms exports, universities that are attracting large numbers of students from abroad, especially China, and health care, especially for the aging baby boomer population. But the war industry produces nothing with a long-term economic benefit, and health care exists mainly to treat sick people, not produce anything new.

None of this provides a foundation that can bring about a restoration of prosperity to 300 million people when the jobs of making articles of consumption are increasingly scarce. On top of everything else, since government inevitably looks to its own requirements first, the total tax burden continues to increase to the point where the average employee now pays close to 50 percent of his or her income on taxes of all types, including federal and state income taxes, real estate taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, government fees, etc. Plus the cost of utilities continues to rise steadily and threatens to skyrocket if cap-and-trade legislation is passed.

The Obama administration has no plans to deal with any of this. They have projected a budget for 15 years hence that shows the budget deficit decreasing and tax revenues going way up, but it is all lies. They have no roadmap for getting us there and no plans for following the roadmap if it portrayed a realistic goal. And yet the U.S. military is still trying to conquer Asia. It is madness.

And it is madness because the big decisions are not made by the U.S., by Congress, or by the Obama administration. The U.S. has, for half-a-century, been marching to the tune played by the international financial elite, and this fact did not change with the election of 2008. The financiers have put the people of this nation $57 trillion in debt, according to the latest reports, counting debt at the federal, state, business, and household levels. Interest alone on this debt is over $3 trillion of a GDP of $14 trillion. Failure of our political leadership to deal with this tragedy over the past three decades is nothing less than treason.

But then again, at some point the decision was made that the U.S. and its population would be discarded by history, the economic status of the nation reduced to a shadow of what it once was, but that its military machine would be used for the financial elite’s takeover of the world until it is replaced by that of some other nation. All indications are that the next country up to bat as military enforcer for the financiers is China.

There you have it. That, in my opinion, is the past, present, and future of this nation in a nutshell. Great evils have been done in the world in the last century, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Except…. and that’s what each person caught up in these travesties must decide. What are you going to do about it?

In mulling over this question, it would be wise to recognize that the dominance of the financial elite has largely been exercised through their control of the international monetary system based on bank lending and government debt. Therefore it’s through the monetary system that change can and must be made.

The progressives are wrong to think the government should go deeper in debt to create more jobs. This will just create an even deeper hole of debt future generations will have to crawl out of.

Rather the key is monetary reform, whether at the local or national levels. People have lost control of their ability to earn a living. But change could be accomplished through sovereign control by people and nations of the monetary means of exchange.

This control has been stolen. It is time to take it back. One way would be for the federal government to make a relief payment to each adult of $1,000 a month until the crisis lifted. This money could be earmarked for goods and services produced within the U.S. and used to capitalize a new series of community development banks. I have called this the "Cook Plan."

The plan could be funded through direct payment from a Treasury relief account without new taxes or government borrowing. The payments would be balanced on the credit side by GDP growth or be used by individuals to pay off debt. It would be direct government spending as was done with Greenbacks before and after the Civil War without significant inflation.

Another method increasingly being used within the U.S. today is local and regional credit clearing exchanges and the use of local currencies or “scrip.” Use of such currencies could be enhanced by legislation at the state and federal levels allowing these currencies to be used for payment of taxes and government fees as well as payment of mortgages and other forms of bank debt. The credit clearing exchanges could be organized as private non-profit regional currency co-operatives similar to credit unions.

These would be immediate emergency measures. In the longer run, sovereign control of money and credit must be returned to the public commons and treated as public utilities. This does not mean exclusive government control to replace bank control. As stated previously, it would be done in partnership between government and private trade exchanges. Nor does it mean government takeover of business, industry, or the banking system, though all should be regulated for the common good and fairly taxed.

This program would lead to a new monetary paradigm where money and credit would be available by, as, when, and where needed, to facilitate trade between and among legitimate producers of goods and services. In this way trade and commerce will come to serve human freedom, not diminish it as is done with today’s dysfunctional partnership between big government trillions of dollars in debt and big finance with the entire world in hock.

Such a change would be a true populist revolution.

Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public policy issues. He is an advisor to the American Monetary Institute on its model monetary reform legislation soon to be introduced in Congress. His latest book is We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. His website is www.richardccook.com.

Nov 14, 2009

I've been looking at this whole New World Order business for a while. Once you start researching there is no denying the existence of a concerted well organized plan that has been in play for a long, long time.

Read:
Tyrants
Liars
New World Order
The State and Depopulation


What I also can't ignore is people in modern industrial societies ability to be OK with the state of the world. I don't mean to say that the majority of the world are cold blooded killers, but they're willing to support, or at least allow, the killers a more or less free reign as long they can still get their fix.

Read:
The People Who Killed The World
Why Cant We Stop


I see two forces at work in this selfish apathy. One being that people all get hooked on things just like any alcoholic or drug addict. It's just the way we're wired. People can get addicted to TV. There are people who don't like to sleep without the TV on. People who have a great need for social acceptance can replace the lack of the real thing with the TV. It's a form of the, "I'm part of something", syndrome. The same thing happens with affiliation with political parties and groups. Recently, or maybe not so recently, there has been a big "law and order" group surge. It is using TV to indoctrinate people. Rahm Emanuel's (Rahm Emanuel Bio) recent rise to the fore front of administrative politics will see the organization of civilian forces that will police the masses as the Nazi Brown Shirts once did. This is a handy creation if you need a pliable obedient populace that won't, and with the right laws - can't - interfere. Similar components of members in these groups are fear and a tendency toward blaming others.

Read:
The End Of Reason
Belief
One Nation Under Law


The other reason for this seeming inability to learn from history and listen without filters is the dulled dumbed down brain. There are a lot of what we used to refer to as dimwits in the world today. Less than optimal brains are more likely to react to fear and are susceptible to superstition, religious and political postulating, This is also part of the design.

Read:
Idiocracy
Get Educated
Making Fear
History
God
Chemical Dumbing Down


As the result of all this observation - I'm wondering: Maybe depopulation is the solution. I'm not willing to join the people culling the herd. The only thing I can think of to do is to keep putting the information in front of whatever audience I can attract. But I'm not so sure that the depopulation people with the success of their venture aren't shooting themselves in the foot. Once the numbers are down to what the sustainable environmentalist purports - who will be left?

Will they be the fighters? The ones with the best DNA? We know that the globalist bankers have nothing on the DNA pool. At least I don't think they do. A lot of their lineage once believed in intermarriage as a way of keeping bloodlines pure. We've known that's a bad idea. So I wonder what will happen after the genocide is complete.

One thing for sure, there will be no denying the facts. Everyone left will no the score. Will the same apathy and laziness remain? After it's done what will be the master plan? The master plan now is to absolute rule. At the moment there probably isn't a supreme ruler. It may be the queen of England. I guess I need to check out what Icke and Tsarion say about it. Actually I've never heard them say, "This is their Supreme Leader". Well I'd be interested in any opinions as to the probably of the elite succeeding in their depopulation plan and what might be the result once completed. I've added a Drupal platform so that I can let people post relevant news stories - you can gain access this tool at News at dgswilson.com. As of today it's about a week old and I've put a few things there but it's not a big deal yet - needs people. Also if you could bookmark these pages to social networks I'd greatly appreciate it.

If you're new to this sport you can see videos I've hosted below:
Ziegeist
The Obama Deception
Codex Alimentarius
CFR Controlled Media
Freedom Force International
The Fall of the Republic


Nov 11, 2009

The problem with a democratic system is there is only ever the public to blame for any policy. Nothing is possible in a Democracy without, at some stage, a vote. Any free societies continued freedom depends on an informed clear headed population. What we have a lot of today is a type of weepy emotional dependency. We also like to blame others for our conditions. As a result we're in the death throws as a nation. This doesn't bother me. But if it bothers you, if you like being a free nation, if you like being able to say, I'm an American, then you may want to get involved in some groups working to make a difference. Dennis knows, but nobody listens. Soon we won't have Dennis to tell us, as he's on a "Peoples Party" hit list.
Posted on Nov 8, 2009

 

By Rep. Dennis Kucinich

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies—a bailout under a blue cross.

By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress’ blog, Think Progress, states, “since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.” Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks’ hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy—in which most Americans live—the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street.

This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.

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Posted: Nov 11, 2009 11:04am
Oct 15, 2009

War Against the Weak...

Russell L. Blaylock, M.D.

 http://www.russellblaylockmd.com/

see John Taylor Gatto video at Watching Society ( scroll to video )

 One characteristic of the collectivists is that when a particular term becomes unpopular, such as the word socialism, they create a succession of more socially friendly terms. For example, in the 1800s they did not shy away from the term socialism, but as people began to understand that socialism was a form of social control and engineering, they dropped the term for more acceptable terms such as liberalism, progressivism and collectivism. The socialist promoting a government-run health care system did likewise. Knowing that the term socialized medicine was frightening to a great number of people, they began to use such terms as national health care, universal health insurance and now single payer system. I find it ironic that no one asks these socialists, who is that mysterious single payer? Should the public consider this for even a moment, they would quickly realize that the single payer is the taxpayer and the administrator of the system is the government via an army of bureaucrats. The socialist has, over the years, become quite adept at selling his wares. It was the Italian communist Antonio Gramsi and earlier the Fabian socialists, who understood that most of the West would never bring about socialism (communism) by violent revolution as had Russia. Rather, they would be more successful by a piecemeal implementation of socialist programs disguised as social reform or as they termed it “change” (this term had been used by the socialist long before Obama). If you read the socialist literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, you will see that a great many men of tremendous social influence and in positions of power, especially in the universities, were promoting most of the programs now being openly discussed—such as population control, eugenics, abortion, social engineering and social control, of course to be administered by elite groups of the “wise”. The ultimate goal was a destruction of the private ownership of property. Many today think these are all new terms and programs. Powerful intellectuals such as Voltarie, Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, d’Alembert, Condorcet and Turgot set the stage for the subsequent intellectual leaders of the socialist revolution, Marx, Engles, Proudhon, Lenin and Hitler. As stated, it was the brilliance of the communist Antonio Gramsi that taught the radical revolutionaries that they could never succeed by violence alone—society would have to be tricked into accepting socialist ideas. The central core of collectivist ideology is best stated by Eric Voeglin in his scholarly book, From Enlightenment to Revolution, when he states: In its outline we see the idea of mankind dominated by a chosen people which embodies the progressive essence of humanity. In historical actuality that would mean a totalitarian organization of mankind in which the dominating power would beat down in the name of mankind and freedom everybody who does not conform to the standards. In other words, they believed that society contained men of such vision and anointed wisdom, that it is they who should design all of society and the duty of the people is to follow their stated plans for this new society. This is why Nancy Pelosi boldly states that people are to do what she says and becomes angry when citizens reject the socialist health care plan. They just do not understand, in her mind, their role as her subjects and as the vassals of the collectivist system. In the collectivist mind, the people (the masses in socialist jargon) must be made to adhere to “the plan” because, like children, they do not understand that it is good for them. If they can be made to take their medicine, later they will be thankful. As Voegelin states: “…man is no end in himself but merely an instrument to be used by the legislator. This is the new basic thesis for collectivism in all its variants, down to the contemporary totalitarianism.” The great Austrian economist von Mises stated that a man is a socialist in proportion to his contempt for the common man. That is, man becomes merely a cog in the all-embracing wheel of government. How Socialized Medicine Arose in Western Societies: Building the Foundation This subject is actually far to large to cover in any detail in this short paper, but as with most philosophical and ideological systems, the groundwork had been laid many years before they appeared to the general public. The Fabian Socialists in England and the United States were writing numerous tracts and scholarly books promoting the idea of such a system of health care in the mid to early 1800s. With their position in influential positions, such as educational institutions, as popular writers (H.G. Wells) and politically connected individuals, they were able to move the intellectual elite in the direction of socializing health care. But, the real opportunity came with the war—that is World War II. One learns from reading history that all great political change comes during a crisis—the greater the crisis, the greater the opportunity for radical change. For example, the greatest social changes came with the War for Southern Independence, the Great Depression, World Wars I & II, the burning of the Reichstach and Russia’s involvement in wars with Japan. In each case there was a call for massive social planning and social engineering. The idea of social engineering and social control became the obsession of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies as far back as the early 1920s. In her book, The Molecular Visions of Life, a detailed history of the rise of molecular biology, Lily E. Kay states: By the time of the launching of the molecular biology program, the Rockefeller philanthropies had considerable experience with eugenics. … they did support eugenics projects, such as the sterilization campaign of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene to restrict breeding of the feeble-minded. The Rockefeller philanthropies also acted in the area of eugenics through the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSL) and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM). The BSH was incorporated in 1913 for the purpose of “the study, amelioration, and prevention of those social conditions, crimes and diseases which adversely affect the well being of society, with special reference to prostitution and the evils associated therein.” She goes on to explain that the BSH had a 30 year history of promoting, via educational material and other projects, population control and birth control—all long before it became universally accepted and funded by the federal government. If one studies the power of the Rockefeller family and the Carnegies they find that their influence and control of education was extensive and ever growing. By massive funding of selected institutions, such as Cal Tech, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and especially the University of Chicago, as well as using their powerful influence to assure their people were appointed as department heads and presidents of these prestigious universities, they guided the direction of research toward a &ldquorogressive” direction—that is, toward social engineering. It was primarily through their control of the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the General Education Board (founded in 1903) that they, in essence, promoted and controlled their “science of man” research, which was a way to mold people in the image imagined by the wise elite. Those considered unfit, were to be eliminated by eugenic methods, both positive and negative. All of this activity was setting the stage for an eventual acceptance by the public of their ideas concerning the social engineering of man, the core of which was eugenics. This would require intense, massive educational efforts. Through his General Education Board, Rockefeller was able to design the education of the population from cradle to grave. John Dewey’s new ideas on education were heavily supported by foundation money, all from the shadows. It is also instructive to note that Margaret Sanger, a virtually unknown person at the time, was also heavily funded and promoted by Rockefeller money, which brought her to great prominence. Remember, Sanger was primarily a eugenicist—her books and later work clearly indicates that she had little concern for poor, pregnant women. In her book, The Cruelty of Charity she states that charity should be discouraged because we want these people to die, even if by starvation. Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. This financial support by the great foundations explains the phenomenal growth of Planned Parenthood and why the clinics are strategically placed in poorer neighborhoods. It is interesting to note that the “charming” Southern girl was considered “borderline feebleminded” and should be a target for forced sterilization by the state. It gets even worse. An ophthalmologist by the name of Lucien Howe, who was the president of the American Ophthalmologic Society at the time, became obsessed with controlling blindness and started a campaign to sterilize blind people and prevent marriage between the blind, even though only 7% of blindness was hereditary. He was also the president of the Eugenics Research Association. In 1918 he initiated a census of all blind people in America and found that 90% had no blind relatives. In conjunction with the AMA and the Eugenics Research Office, Dr. Howe drafted a law that would permit the government to prohibit marriage between people with imperfect vision and to either isolate these unfortunates or forcibly sterilize them. It also encouraged neighbors to turn in those who were suspected to have “imperfect vision”. Notice how the criteria quickly went from hereditary blindness, to any blindness to even those wearing glasses. We see this in a great deal of future socialist legislation. They present a worse case to gain the sympathy of the public and it quickly becomes an all encompassing program to include virtually everyone or a large targeted group (Like the elderly). Dr. Howe and the AMA’s justification for such a draconian program was that taxpayers were spending far too much money on blind people—the money could be better spent on other medical projects. You will notice that this is the same justification for Obama’s health plan—that the young can benefit more from the health care dollar we are spending on those who are older or those with chronic conditions. On April 5, 1921 this frightening idea was introduced as Bill # 1597 in the New York legislature. Fortunately, it did not pass. Dr. Howe and his backers failed to give up. Next they proposed having the State Board of Health and schools hunt down defective members of families having blind or vision-impaired children. He also proposed that the law have a provision that would allow imprisonment of the visually impaired. He even submitted a bill that would require the “unfit” to post a bond with state health officials for $14,000 (equal to $130,000 today) which would be forfeit should they become pregnant. It is instructive to note that the Carnegie Foundation was sponsoring Dr. Howe’s efforts and formulating deportation specifics for these “unfit” members of society. The only reason his plans were not eventually implemented is that he died. Even today the American Ophthalmology Association awards a Lucien Howe Medal for service to the profession and mankind. (See Edwin Blacks’ well-researched book—War Against the Weak, for more details.) It is important to keep in mind that these were not a small group of deranged psychopaths of no real influence, these were men and women in very powerful positions, educated in some of our finest institutions and strongly connected to the politically powerful. Most important is their support by the powerful, enormously wealthy tax-exempt foundations—especially the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and the Laura Spelman Foundation. They poured millions of dollars into educational propaganda, flooding schools; appointed believers in eugenics to high positions in universities and strongly supported political candidates that were true believers, such as Theodore Roosevelt. It also included the superrich such as E.H. Harriman, the railroad magnate and his wife; James Wilson, secretary of the Department of Agriculture (1910); Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (the cereal king); Irving Fisher, an economist from Yale University; professors of medicine from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Emory and Johns Hopkins, and the list goes on an on. The lesson here is that when the intellectuals and elite put their stamp of approval on an idea, it can lead to monstrous policies that can ruin the lives of millions. As the title to Richard Weaver’s most important book says—Ideas Have Consequences. The great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises in his book, Bureaucracy stated that: It is remarkable that the educated strata are more gullible than the less educated. The most enthusiastic supporters of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism were the intellectuals, not the boors. The people in the Obama administration, and those operating this government from the shadows, are driven by equally dangerous ideas, which to them, as with the early eugenicists, seem reasonable and logical. They truly believe that reducing human populations worldwide is critical and is an emergency. This means that the elite must decide who lives and who dies, but unlike Hitler, Stalin and Mao, they will do it, in their mind, in a more compassionate, subtle way. Yet, the victims will be just as dead as those placed in gas chambers, executed in Stalin’s gulags or slaughtered by Mao’s cultural revolutionary gangs. War Crisis Sets the Tone During war, governments are allowed to execute emergency measures that would never be allowed during peacetime—that is, until today. This can entail, controlling movement of citizens, food rationing, rationing critical war material and even dictating professions. My father told me that during World War II, you could not move without the government’s permission and changing jobs was controlled as well. People were given food and gas ration tickets. In the UK food was severely rationed, near starvation levels. The people tolerate this as necessary to win the war, but they expect it to end when the war ends. One of the first socialized medical systems arose in post-war England. The rational was that war planning had been a success in winning the war and supplying critical essentials so it surely would work during peacetime. One can forgive the British for their foolishness because no Western nation had really experimented with a planned society on such a grand scale. There is no excuse today, since there are so many examples of failure and harm to the public by socialized medicine. To really get a grasp on the effects of national planning, a code word for socialism, one should read the book by John Jewkes—Ordeal by Planning, written in 1948. For example, he shows the fallacy of the efficiency of wartime planning. He says: Great Britain is one very good illustration of this point. They have produced virtually nothing; almost all technical development in war-time came from the private firms; Government technical experts frowned on nearly every one of the crucial new devices for improving aeronautical performance until the persistence of the entrepreneur settled the dispute beyond doubt. The history of the appalling delay in tank development is another excellent illustration of what a technical bureaucracy is capable. Edmund Burke has said wisely-“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion”. People in England were sold the disastrous National Health Service based on the illusion that they would receive their health care free, just as we are hearing today. Of course, nothing in this world is free—someone must pay. The delusion is that the wealthy will be the ones to pay—which is a tried and true prescription of the left. Of course two things eventually happen—the “rich” run out of money and two, they find ways to evade the taxes and shift them below. Another delusion is that this health care proposal can actually reduce overall medical cost by streamlining administrative methods and cutting the fat out of actual care. After all, who knows more about fat than the government? One would have to be one of Dr. Howe’s feebleminded to believe that the government can do anything at a lower cost than a free market. Examine any government program, no matter how small or large, and you will observe an exponential growth in cost over time. Medicare and Medicaid cost have increased exponentially since they were originally created and the cost continues to escalate. And in every case the proponents swore that cost would not increase. Those who expressed warnings concerning these programs were attacked viciously—as are those at the townhall meetings. Cecil Plamer, in his book examining the history of British Socialism—The British Socialist Ill-fare State, notes: The written or printed word is quite another story. The critical condition of contemporary British socialism can be measured by the socialist government’s intemperate disapproval of criticism from any quarter whatsoever. Others have noticed this propensity of the socialist to react violently when any portions of his grandiose plan is attacked or even questioned. Jewkes, for example, notes that—“For the more threatened it is by failure, the more savage will be the efforts to make it succeed at any cost”. And of course, it extends into their fear of failure. Jewkes again notes—“ For to the politician, a public confession of failure is tantamount to political suicide. The aim must always be, therefore, to cover up mistakes at all cost.” This is a major problem with all socialist plans—as they begin to fail, the more desperate the creators become, not only hiding mistakes, but by making the system more and more oppressive and unbearable. Every failure is not seen as a fault of the plan but sabotage by either their political enemies or uncontrollable forces—such as the doctors or hospital administrators. Each failure calls for more controls. This is the origin of progressive rationing. Every HMO, PPO and collectivist medical care system has experienced this. In the beginning services were abundant, doctors were happy and patients were cared for. But soon, costs begin to mount. This calls for more controls and rationing of services. It also calls for an ever-increasing bureaucracy. As in this plan, they see the biggest enemy as being the specialist—the surgeon, the ophthalmologist, the cardiologist and the endocrinologist. To prevent too many referrals they make the primary care physician (a fancy name for a general practitioner) the triage officer, but they limit the number of specialist referrals he can make each month—if he goes over that limit he is punished financially. This tends to make the primary care physician treat complex cases that he should be referring to a specialist—this can cost lives. My uncle was in an HMO and when he had his stroke he contacted me to see what he should do. I asked him what his CT scan showed. He said they didn’t do one. When I asked why, he said that they told him it wasn’t covered. A brain scan is essential for every stroke patient, since the stroke may be an intracranial bleed, an AVM or even a hemorrhagic tumor. He paid for the CT scan out of his own pocket. When I was in England in the 1980s, I picked up my morning paper-The London Times and there was a headline in which the National Health Service was bragging that it had reduced the waiting period for common elective surgeries from 2 years to 18 months. They were proud of it. Canada is no better. I recently spoke to a fellow from Canada and I made a comment about the Canadian health system and he quickly replied that all those stories about it being bad were myths. He said people in accidents can be seen right alway. I replied that was true no matter the system, but what about elective surgeries and complex treatments. He chuckled and said—“Well of course if you want something special you will have to wait.” He then told me that he had just taken his father, a retired physician, to the hospital for his heart and was on one of the upper floors of the hospital. His father collapsed and no one was around to help. Worse, none of the elevators were working. He remarked—“What kind of hospital doesn’t have working elevators?” Then he said his father whispered to him—“ Get me the hell out of here before they kill me.” This is a major finding in socialized medical care systems that people grow up in—they think the terrible health care they are getting is the norm. Just as with my uncle, he did not know that not getting a CT scan could have cost him his life—he thought he had gotten good health care. All Socialized Planning Requires Progressive Rationing Those of us who have studied socialist planning know that all such plans are sold to the public as being of low cost or even as paying for itself. Then several years later, the costs have risen so rapidly that new regulations have to be implemented to control the ever-escalating cost. The politicians began to panic when the public begins to complain loudly and this forces them to find ways to reduce the services being provided without causing more complaints. One thing health care economists know is that the most expensive care is among the elderly—they have the most complex problems and usually multiple problems. They also have the greatest number of complications during treatments, mainly because they often have poorer healing ability and a fragile constitution. Over fifty percent of health care cost is from caring for those over sixty-five years old. With a growing number of elderly (nearing 50% of the population) the health bureaucrat sees financial disaster looming on the horizon—it’s much like the eugenics and population control fanatics. They see an exploding population as bringing disaster to the world. Both see as the answer reducing the number of people, especially those over age sixty-five, otherwise soon the world will be overcrowded. The number crunchers in government and the think tanks knew that the ever rising number of people living past 70 years was bankrupting the social security system. Now they see it as overwhelming the health care system. In both cases the answer is to reduce the population in question and do it so it doesn’t appear to be murder by the government. Rationing of health care is the perfect answer for these of this mind set. It allows deniability and can be continuously tightened. Because the cost of the national health care system will grow massively, it will also free up more money to buy votes from those who will be voting, especially those who are paying little or no taxes. They see the elderly much in the same way the Defense Department sees the injured soldier—he has served his purpose and is of no further use to the military and, more importantly in their eyes, he is now a liability. The elderly, likewise, have payed taxes all their lives, added considerably to the society in many ways and many have defended their country in time of war, but now they are of little use to the government—worse, they have become a liability. Knowing they cannot easily pass a euthanasia law or just have them rounded up and exterminated, they use the medical care system to speed them along to their deaths. It is done by making critical care difficult to access. By using primary care physicians as triage officers and limiting access to specialists, more elderly with complex illness and the very ill will die sooner. When I was in the military, I could not prescribe second or third generation drugs, only 1st generation. For example, I tried to write a prescription for Lodine for a patient but was told that it was not on the list of permitted drugs. I finally asked what was allowed—indocin they told me. A drug that is associated with frequent stomach pains and bleeding complications as well as liver and kidney damage. As further rationing progresses, you will not be seen even by a primary care doctor, instead you will see a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistance. They have been talking about this for years. Much of the advanced diagnostic equipment will also be rationed, being limited for only approved patients and the waiting list will continuously grow. PET scanners, many MRI units and complex cardiac testing technology will be limited to special regional centers and anointed medical centers. The privileged&mdasholiticians, international banking elite and those in foundations and other elitist institutions, will have access to the highest quality medical care and instrumentation without a wait—after all they are the elite—the chosen. The rest of us will patiently wait in line for our turn and those who survive the wait may have access. We have had enough experience with progressive rationing to know that it rarely attains its stated goal, it creates enormous strains on health care delivery and ultimately results in harmed patients. A few examples will help illustrate this. During the 70s, Joseph Califano, then head of HEW, pushed through a number of bureaucratic regulations designed to control hospital cost, which he targeted as the main problem area of rising health care cost. These appeared as utilization review, PSRO regulations, certificate of need rules imposed on states, pre-admission screening and other tinkering. An economic review revealed that instead of saving money it merely shifted spending to other areas, such as bureaucracy and administrative cost. Its main impact was to make treating patients much more difficult for physicians. In a normal economy a contract is between the person seeking a service and those providing the service—that is the patient and the doctor. Suddenly, hundreds of people and agencies were standing between the patient and the doctor, making health care decisions not based on what was best for the patient, rather what would make the bureaucrat and politician look good, what would give the appearance of reducing cost and providing quality and mainly, how would it all be perceived by the always confused media. I can remember dealing with these new bureaucracies. To admit a patient for a condition that all thinking physicians would agree needed admitting would require me to speak to a number of clueless bureaucrats, struggling to make them understand the urgency of the situation. They never understood medical reasoning, rather they spoke of rules, regulations and conditions that had to be met. To go through this with each patient was frustrating, aggravating and time consuming—but the bureaucracy doesn’t really care—they are “just following orders”. In addition, we had the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) reviewing hospitals, adding and ever-expanding list of conditions for approval. I remember a very humorous episode that happened in my hospital. We had just constructed a new hospital to replace the antiquated older hospital and the JCAH rules for that year said that the ICU had to have a window. The thinking at that time was that the fire department would need access to the unit. So, the compliant hospital put in a window. The next year, the JCAH reviewers passed through on review and spotted the window. They asked—“Why is there a window in the unit?” The surprised hospital administrator stated that it was required by last year’s JCAH rules. The arrogant reviewer shook his head in disgust and said—“ No, the new rules say there can be no window—cover it up.” The incredible reasoning was that a despondent patient might leap out of the window. The hospital spent more money to meet the new requirement. Those experienced with bureaucracies known that often one department rule contradicts another’s rule and that the hapless victim (the doctor or hospital administrator) is left trying to find out whom to obey. Penalties for disobeying rules can be devastating. As the bureaucracy grows the regulations began to grow like crab grass. As the economists F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises have pointed out so many times, in a free economy each intrusion by the government necessitates an ever-expanding array of new regulations to deal with the disruptions cause by the last intervention. The process never ends, but what we see is that slowly the system becomes more and more oppressive and dictatorial and the penalties become increasingly severe. A case in point is an ophthalmologist in California who had a patient in his seventies who was nearly blind from cataracts. The surgeon operated on the man and restored his sight. A competing ophthalmologist turned him in to the Medicare bureaucracy and he was arrested for abusing a Medicare patient—that is, he dared restore useful sight to the man. The Government’s case was based on the idea that the old man wasn’t working and therefore did not need to see—a white stick with a red tip would have been much cheaper. In other words, as with this present administration, the man was not worth the cost. The surgeon was not just fined a huge sum of money he was sent to prison for 10 years for “abusing a federal patient”. The abuse was giving him his sight. This was a young doctor with a number of small children. He was used as a warning to other recalcitrant doctors not to spend too much money saving “useless eaters” as National Socialist classed these unfortunates. Remember the earlier quote by John Jewkes concerning a failing government plan—“ For the more threatened it is by failure, the more savage will be the efforts to make it succeed at any cost.” Obama has assured the public that his health plan will solve all problems and save tremendous amounts of money—as it falls far short of this goal, he will turn to ever more desperate rationing methods to save it. And as Jewkes noted, being politicians, they will also do all in their power to hide the monstrous effects of the rationing. Few in the public know of all the horror stories associated with the rationing plans that have been implemented so far, yet they are abundant. Another brilliant plan the rationing bureaucracy had was to limit the number of expensive technologies available to doctors. They reasoned that if every hospital has a CT scanner it would be over utilized. Their answer was to set up certificate-of-need (CON) boards in each state that would decide who could get the technology. Most hospitals figured ways to get around the regulation—mostly by using politically connected individuals. My senior partner served on the board of the CON organization, so our hospital always got what it wanted. But, what if the plan had worked? Let’s say I practice at a hospital that does not have a scanner. The only one allowed in town is at the medical university. My patient needs a scan rather urgently. Under the Obama plan, I would first have to apply to the regional government office for permission to see if there is really a need—and, of course, I will be speaking to a young person with no knowledge of neurosurgery. They search the long list of indications and finally agree—that is, after a number of phone calls and endless pleading. The next step is that I have to have transportation approved from my hospital to the anointed scanning center. More haggling, searching the thousands of pages of regulations and hanging on the line waiting to be transferred to the next bureaucrat in charge of transportation ensues. Finally, all of this is approved. But then I discover that the waiting list at the university is very long and my patient will have to wait behind the university’s urgent cases. Meanwhile my patient is deteriorating steadily. No amount of pleading will move the process forward—it all falls on deaf ears. I know this because I have experience similar frustrations, even with the limited regulations in place now. If my patient is still alive, they are finally transferred to the regional scanning center, where they spend hours waiting in the hallways to be scanned. Then I have to arrange for them to be transported back to my hospital. Now, the report for the scan will take days or even weeks to be read, since the doctor reading the scan will have a stack of scans to review from his own institution as well as all surrounding hospitals and doctor’s offices. This is how it works in Canada and England. The only reason the Canadian system survives is because the medical system in the United States cares for many of their really sick patients. The US scanners in the boarder states work overtime scanning Canadian patients because the wait to be scanned in Canada is so long. We act as the Canadian government’s relief valve, but then what is going to happen when we are strapped with a similar system? I predict both will end up bankrupt. Just our experiment with Medicaid and Medicare alone has been a financial disaster—it is in debt to the tune of 36 trillion dollars, more than the entire GNP of hundreds of nations and costs continues to grow exponentially. The more controls added to the system, that is the more regulations and impediments to access will mean necessarily more dead people, mostly the sickest and the oldest. But then, isn’t that what they have been calling for over 100 years, as quoted earlier? What is ironic about this administration is that those who are making these decision have a long written record of involvement in the population control movement and have expressed, as did the President, that the elderly have lived long enough and that the medical dollar would be better spent on the younger. This of course pits the younger generation against the older. Despite the fact that the socialist bristle at being compared to National Socialist, that is exactly what the German National Socialist government did. It has been noted that in German schools children were given math lessons in which they were asked to calculate how many housing units could be purchased for the young with the money used to treat the elderly, the chronically ill and the infirm. This sounds very close to what Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel states regarding providing too much health care to the “hopeless” and those at the end of their lives. Here are some quotes from the good doctor: “Medical care should not be given to those who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” “Unlike (health care) allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not discrimination.” “Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or the effects on others.” Dr. Emanuel was appointed by the President as the “health czar” and as his chief advisor on designing America’s health care. He is one of many powerful and politically connected individuals who accept the socialist idea that some members of society are of less value than others and that a person’s worth is gauged by his “social worth”. Yet, more important, that it is the duty of the government’s social engineers to correct this problem—that is, to remove these undesirables. If you can no longer work or are retired, pay little or no taxes and receive any federal benefits, you are deemed to be of no value to society—again, as the National Socialist labeled them—you are a “useless eater”. Who Owns Society? The question must be asked—Who owns society? Are we allowed to live in this country only at the behest of the government or a selected group of wise servers who shall decide our worth? Are we to be judged as worthless life, as a social liability because those with power deem it so? Even a perfunctory examination of the thoughts of our founding leaders will answer that question. Nowhere is it stated or even implied that we must show our worth to the elite of the government or be eliminated, even if we are exterminated humanely. I do not wish that my grandmother remained with our family as long as possible because she carries out some useful function to the family, or to the city or the county or the state or the nation. If a person chooses to spend their retirement years just sitting on a porch drinking lemonade, wiling the day away reminiscing about their lives—that is their business and they deserve all the protections guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They do not exist solely by the grace of those with the power of the government and they do not deserve to be eliminated at the whim of the socialist planners. As I read Edwin Black’s book, The War on the Weak and Lily Kay’s book-The Molecular Vision of Life, I was overwhelmed with anxiety, knowing that powerful men, the intellectuals and men of vision, were using that power and vision to redesign man in their image and to create a society that conforms to their utopian plan. Even the pastors were joining in this move to create a designed society. In a sermon called “Qualifying for Survival”, Reverend Robert Freeman in the 1920s told his audience in Pasedena’s Presbyterian church: Theologians are ready to make large concessions to the theories set forth in the Origins of the Species …in the world of men these two things are true: there are those who survive despite unfitness, and there are those who, though marked by an initial unfitness, make themselves fit to survive. There are the ragweed and the rattler; the mosquito and the despicable housefly in humanity, which although they make no beneficent contributions to life, they only poison and destroy, continue to exist.” It is of note that California, from the 1920s until the 1940s, led the nation in sterilization of the insane, feeble-minded, the unfit and the “morally degenerate”. The idea that such a monstrous plan of designing human society by forced sterilization, prevention of marriages, incarcerations in holding camps and even proposals for extermination through abortions had actually been in place so early in our country’s history is frightening enough, but as Dr. Kay points out these manipulators of mankind did not stop, they merely changed the names of their organization and programs and redirected it toward more advance biological ways to bring about their dream of a perfect society. Massive funding of these projects continues to this day by major tax-exempt foundations and many powerful intellectuals continue to write about the need to eliminate the “unfit”. Obama’s chief health advisor is one of these people. Linus Pauling, a two-time winner of the Nobel Prize and who held a position on the board of the Ford Foundation, in 1968 even publicly promoted a policy very similar to that of the National Socialist in Germany, when he stated: There should be tattooed on the forehead of every young person a symbol showing possession of the sickle-cell gene or whatever similar gene…It is my opinion that legislation along this line, compulsory testing for defective gene before marriage, and some form of semi-private display of this possession, should be adopted.” In the conclusions to her book, Dr. Kay states: This view has persisted into the 1990s, backed by the institutional and commercial interest that dwarfed the millions of dollars of the Rockefeller Foundation….This dialectical process of knowing and doing, empowered by a synergy of laboratory, boardroom, and federal lobby, has sustained the rise of molecular biology into the twenty-first century. In other words, they always intended for these political systems of social control and social engineering to be implemented into society by specific legislation. Population control and the weeding out of undesirables and the unfit were central to this process. Reality versus Socialist Dreams Any careful study of socialist planning brings one to the conclusion that they do not live in reality, but rather, in a dream world of their own making. I’m sure they still put their lost teeth under their pillow, fully expecting to be rewarded for their faith by the Tooth Fairy. One of the great myths is that it is the free market system of medical care that needs fixing. We have not had a fully free market in this country since the Great Depression. If one carefully examines the present health care mess one immediately sees that it is the product of a litany of previous meddling by the government—so called, ad hoc socialism. One of the often cited problems is that people lose their insurance coverage when they change jobs or lose their jobs, yet no one bothers to ask the question—Who created the idea that companies should provide heath insurance coverage? The answer is the same people who are now asking for more government intervention—the intellectual collectivists and unions. Today 63% of the insured are receiving their health care coverage through their employers. In an excellent article appearing in the American Spectator by Philip Klein, he shows that government policy even affected the cost of health care for the 6% who have their insurance independent of their employers. This is because the social engineers decided to pass laws in most states requiring insurance companies to offer only comprehensive plans that covered such things as pregnancy benefits, in vitro fertilization and treatment of morbid obesity, etc, etc. He sites statistics from the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, which found that states are requiring some 2000 benefit mandates nationwide, adding a whopping 20 to 50% to the cost of the policy. The Obama plan adds even more such mandates and if your policy does not contain them you, will be forced to accept the socialist plan. If younger, healthier people were able to buy only catastrophic coverage or even stripped down basic plans, health care cost would plummet. The article also cites studies that show that in 2007 the cost of all government health care at all levels increased health care spending by 1 trillion dollars. Today, 31% of people’s health care is paid for by government programs (taxpayers). Another way collectivist meddlers have forced up medical care cost outside the market is the litigation explosion. I remember when I was first going into private practice, I was being recruited by a neurosurgeon from California. He told me that my starting salary would be $50,000, but that my malpractice cost would be $50,000 a year—in other words, I would be working for nothing. Some surgeons today are paying well over $100,000 a year in malpractice premiums. This means specialists have to charge their patients’ insurance companies more to cover a part of this cost, and it goes up each and every year. The litigation boom also changed the way physicians practiced medicine. Instead of ordering tests and admitting patients based on medical necessity, we were instructed by our malpractice insurers to order every tests conceivable and if there is a doubt—admit the patient. Not only did this result in a massive direct increase in cost but it also resulted in a great number of unnecessary procedures and surgeries. If you do, for instance, a chest X-ray and find a small shadow on the film, you must do more tests or risk being sued should something be overlooked. This requires a CT or MRI scan, which can cost several thousand dollars. If you still are not absolutely sure all is well, you must do a guided biopsy of the suspicious shadow. One of the complications of a lung biopsy is a collapsed lung. Now things get real expensive. The patient’s lung collapse and he is rushed to the ICU, the most expensive place in the hospital. A chest tube is inserted and days of intensive care ensues. Because of a chest X-ray, which really never needed to be done, the patient almost dies and ends up with a hospital bill costing close to $100,000. This is defensive medicine, which is now extensively practiced in this country. This scenario actually happened in one of the hospitals I worked in. Defensive medicine not only results in a massive increase in health care expenses each year, but it subjects patients to unnecessary cancer treatments, expensive scans, invasive procedures and prolonged hospitalizations. How did this all come about—the collectivist intellectuals flooded the media with stories of both real and alleged medical malpractice and insisted that patients undergo better diagnostic workups. The attorneys just saw an opportunity to make a killing, and like vultures, descended for the feeding. The lesson, as F.A Hayek has stated repeatedly, is that every time the government planner tampers with the market, it causes a number of disruptions that can increase cost or result in problems of supply. This, in the mind of the collectivist, demands more intervention, which again creates more misallocation of resources. Soon we have system that looks like a diagram of the New York subway system. In the United States, we view the individual as important and attempt to provide everyone with the best medical care we can deliver. Under socialism, the individual doesn’t matter—what matters is the plan and society as a whole—the masses. Under such a system, individuals are mistreated, abused, frustrated and forgotten—they just don’t matter. Mr. Klein cites several cases of medical abuse in countries with socialized medical care. For example, the British Healthcare Commission found between 400 and 1,200 people had died as a result of what they characterized as “appalling care” at the hospitals in Straffordshire. Even more shocking is the case of a man injured in a traffic accident in Japan, who was turned away by 5 emergency rooms because they were overcrowded. Worse was a woman from Osaka who died after being denied emergency care by 30 hospitals. Many Eastern European countries are abandoning their socialist health care systems for private care and dissatisfaction continues to grow worldwide. Only those with minor health problems like the system, because they have the illusion of “free health care” and usually the wait to see a doctor is not that long. It is the seriously ill, those with complex diseases and diseases requiring the care of a specialist that are in real danger. What the healthy young do not appreciate is that one day they may find themselves in this category. No one is cataloging the horror stories, deaths and agony caused by the rationing common in socialist health care systems. It is safe to say that hundreds of thousands die unnecessarily every year under such systems due to neglect and purposeful rationing to prevent access. Kline also cites the case of actress Natasha Richardson, who suffered a head injury while skiing in Quebec. Even though she was conscious shortly after the accident, she was not rushed to the nearest hospital by helicopter, but rather endured a two and a half hour ambulance ride to the trauma center in Montreal. Why was there no helicopter available? Daniel LeFrancois, “director or Quebec’s prehopsital care told the Montreal Gazette that helicopters were expensive, and they weren’t used because medical resources were allocated according to the ‘biggest gain for the biggest need’.” With traumatic brain hemorrhages time is critical—but then she was just an individual. I had a friend from Louisiana relate the following story to me concerning a friend’s experience in the British socialist medical care system: My wife has a friend in Monroe with a daughter in Medical school. She went to England to do a rotation there because she wanted to see what socialized medicine was like...and she found out first hand. She was there for a few weeks and took pneumonia. They admitted her in the hospital and she didn't see a doctor for 6 days. She was not given any medication. After 6 days she called her mother in the Monroe and told her what was happening. She asked her mother to come get her. Her mother caught a flight and went to the hospital to find her daughter still there with no medication and no doctor visit. The mother asks one of the medical students about her chart and they informed her they were at the nurse's desk so she marching up there and finds the chart. The nurse says...you can't look at her chart and calls the administration. The person in charge comes to the room and informs the mother the chart is private and she has no right to look at it. The mother informs them the information is her daughters' and she has a right to it. The mother takes her daughter out of the hospital and catches a flight back to the States. When they get to Houston they call ahead to Monroe to have ambulance at the airport to take her to the hospital. The Elite Are Different If one studies how we came to this dangerous idea of social control and human engineering, he will find that it is based on the Gnostic idea that some men are born far wiser than the common rabble and they are destined to rule. It is a paternalistic view that the populace (the masses in Marxist jargon) have no idea of the great questions that face mankind and that the wise of society must force them to obey to save society as a whole. They are viewed as small children, that is, ones not privy to the wisdom of their parents. One thing always present when it comes to the elite members of a socialist system--the elite never come under the rules they impose on others and this is not just self preservation, but the idea that the wise do not need to be controlled, after all, they have a superior intellect and moral understanding—they, as Thomas Sowell says, are the anointed. One of the other prime ideas of socialism is egalitarianism as an article of faith. Remember in school when a child was caught chewing gum, and the teacher would scold them by saying—“I hope you bought gum for everyone in the class.” –I think the socialist never got over this. In real politics the prime motive is less philosophical. Take for example, the social security system. The justification given for the program was that the elderly will not save enough money during their earning years to be able to live comfortably in their later years, therefore the government must forcibly take a portion of their money and store it away for them. If we think about it, there are several problems with providing this “supplemental income” to a person based purely on age—that is, those fortunate enough to reach age 65 years. It has been shown that in truth the older person is the richest class in the United States—most own their homes, cars and have significantly fewer bills than younger citizens. We also know that there is a great disparity of this wealth, with some having millions and other lesser sums. So, why not design the system based on need rather than age—in other words target only those below a certain income? Because then the number of recipients would be far lower, hence fewer voters voting in gratitude. The same holds true for Medicare—why give it to everyone once they reach age 65 years, why not have it based on actual need? Again, it would be far less expensive and would be less of a lightening rod for voting. This is also the driving force for most politicians voting for such plans—suddenly the public’s health care, in essence—life and death—is in the hands of politicians. With each election, decisions are going to be based on who will provide even greater funds and coverage for the various plans and who are its enemies. This is why England cannot get rid of its fraudulent and inefficient health care system—that, and the fact that it is supported by 1.4 million health-care bureaucrats—the third largest employer in the world. This is also why those who say we have to do something about the 45 million (the number keep growing in their mind) uninsured. Even though many of these include the 18 million who do not want health insurance, 8.4 million youth who feel they are invulnerable, 12.6 million illegals who shouldn’t even be here, 8 million children whose parent have not signed them up and 3.5 million eligible for Medicare who have just not bothered to sign up, a total of 42.5 million who should be of no concern to the government. Granted, some of the 18 million who chose not to get insurance do so out of family budget constraints. This is a far smaller number than what is being proposed for new coverage by this government—that is, the remainder of the American population. If you wanted to help these young families—just give them a tax break—after all it’s their money anyway—it’s as if the government just didn’t steal it in the first place. The socialists in our government are hungry for every cent the population earns to pay for other socialist schemes—so significant tax breaks are not even an option. Even though politics drives the politician, many of the designers of these socialist programs are dedicated to egalitarianism, these are the intellectual socialists (an oxymoron). We also observe, as stated earlier, that they never include themselves in this egalitarianism. Harry Schwartz, a member of the New York Times editorial board gives a poignant example of their arrogance and elitist attitude. He tells us that when Joseph Califano was head of HEW he insisted that his staff always remain on call 24 hours a day. One of the physicians working on his staff managed to get permission to take his family on a vacation. He was almost at his destination hundreds of miles away when he gets a call from Califano’s staff that the “boss”” needs him right away. He turns around, drives all the way back, goes running up to the boss’ office to see what terrible crisis has exploded. Califano greets him and says—“ Hey, look Joe. I got this tennis elbow. What can you do for me?” You may be asked to wait in line for months or even years, but the “boss” gets seen in his office by his own personal physician. In the Soviet system, the politburo members had expensive dachas on the Black Sea, shopped at special stores stocked with the best Western foods and items and lived in lavish apartments or houses, while the ordinary Russian stood in line all day to get a pair of shoes, often settling for a pair that were of different sizes. Some are more equal than others. This is why the Congress has its own retirement system and will have its own, high quality, no-waiting health care system—it was the only way the designers could get them to support socialist systems for the “masses”. Conclusions The history of socialism, also called collectivism, should teach us that it is extremely elitist, looks upon the common man with disgust and secretly plans to manipulate the population like chess pieces—the people are viewed as mere cogs in an all embracing wheel of the state. Socialism consist of a number of grandiose plans, each designed to create a “better world”. These plans are sold with utopian promises to the public and any dissension is met with violent attacks. It has been said that if you cannot answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost—you can still call him vile names. We see this with the vicious attacks upon townhall attendees and any who even question the new &ldquolan”. Socialism is all about compulsion and regimentation and has no room for dissension—your duty is to do as you are told by the enlightened wise ones. A review of the National Health Act in England, demonstrates that they used many of the same tactics as are being used today. The doctors, and especially their medical societies, were told by its chief architect, Aneurin Bevan that if they helped bring the plan about, they would be included in the decision-making process. They believed him and paid for that error ever since. He promised that he would put them on decision-making boards, which he did. It was all a ruse. In truth, they spent valuable time drafting proposals that would make sure quality was preserved and bureaucracy was minimized. Their suggestions were merely place in a file cabinet and never looked at again. While the doctors were busy drafting proposals, Mr. Bevan was creating the real plan, which was heavy in progressive rationing, regimentation of physicians and controls. The AMA not only has failed to support the private-practicing physician, in my opinion, it has betrayed him at every step. Coding was and is one of the biggest nightmares in the doctor’s practice. Did the AMA fight to stop it? The answer is a resounding—No! Not only that, the AMA has made a windfall profit selling coding manuals, which are updated every few months. In this battle, once again they are silent. Why? Because they want to participate in the system—it can be very lucrative. Why physicians continue to belong to the AMA and provide them with money is a mystery to me. The socialists use emotional cases to sell their plans—a poor single mom with a pre-existing disease that is denied health insurance is displayed. It’s not that she is denied health care—everyone in America that can use a phone can get health care. Emergency rooms are free entrances to all health care. It is illegal to deny them health care in all 50 states. But, if they want to buy health insurance, they will have to pay and meet requirements. I hear politicians and leftist cry that 45 million Americans are without health care, that is a lie. Ironically, the health -care they will get with this socialist plan, over time, will be no better than just going to the emergency room—certainly the service will be much faster with ER visits. They deny that rationing will be used and that quality will be higher. Over 40 years of tinkering with the Medicaid and Medicare programs using every description of quality assurance method has not changed quality of health care in any significant way. They tell the doctor that regimentation will not be used, yet they have already drafted treatment and diagnostic protocols that every physician will be forced to follow or face heavy fines, a loss of license or even criminal penalties. Who makes these protocols?—compliant elitist physicians from medical centers and the AMA, people of the same mind-set as doctor Ezekiel Emmanuel. Every promise and assurance will be given and when the plan actually is implemented, especially as it is fine-tuned after enactment, everything you were assured would not be done, will be done—severe, progressive rationing, regimentation of physicians, abortions, forcing people to give up their current health plans and death counseling. In each instance, the government will tell people that they were forced to do it because of some form of sabotage from the plan’s enemies. Their favorite scapegoat is the physician. When you hear Obama telling you that unscrupulous physicians are doing amputations on diabetics and making $45,000 he is lying—not mistaken—lying. Most of these amputations are done on poor people with advanced diabetes. Most are on Medicaid and this program doesn’t even pay 20 cents on the dollar and they would never even pay close to what a surgeon would charge a private-pay patient for the same procedure. The actual reimbursement for the surgeon is $750 to $1500. What would Mr. Obama and his cronies have the surgeon do—nothing? Failing to amputate a gangrenous leg is a death sentence—but then that is what they want anyway. It would save the state a lot of money. While it is true that some surgeons will do unnecessary surgery just to pad their income, most surgeons are highly skilled, principled men and women. They, unlike doctor Emanuel, uphold the Hippocratic oath. Do they think the unscrupulous surgeons among our profession will just disappear under his plan?—no, they will be sitting on the decision-making boards and bureaucracies that dominate other physicians—that is their nature. They, unlike principled physicians, will do anything to remain on top. As the program evolves it will get worse and worse, because it will quickly fail in most of its objectives. The more it fails the more desperate the planners will become. More scapegoats will be hunted down and slaughtered on the public square for effect. Controls will tighten, physicians will try to leave in droves and the government will make it a crime to quit (called unlawful quitting of profession in socialist systems); the elderly and chronically ill will die in increasing numbers, while the government blames the deaths on medical mysteries, physician corruption or a need for tighter regimentation. As the economy worsen, which they can engineers with their Federal Reserve friends, people will be more accepting of such things as euthanasia on the elderly and terminally ill, the insane, the feeble-minded and the chronically ill. To really understand how these things progress, just observe Dr. Kevorkian. In the beginning, he chose terminal cases that were so pitiful many agreed he was doing a humane thing. Then he moved to people who were fully awake but who faced a strong prospect of dying in the near future. More began to question his judgment. Then he included a woman who was depressed—not terminally ill, or comatose—depressed—and he killed her. We see this in all such programs—just as I outlined in the beginning of this paper. First, it was the mentally subnormal, the severely feeble-minded, the dangerously insane and then it moved to include borderline feeble-minded—that is, women who were “charming” or who were merely illiterate, but had a capacity to learn. Then there was Dr. Howe, a prominent ophthalmologist who started by advocating the sterilization of those with hereditary blindness, then all of the blind and finally those who wore glasses. I has been said that the easiest time to stop totalitarianism is in the beginning, once it is established it becomes all but impossible to reverse. This may be our last opportunity to save this republic.

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Posted: Oct 15, 2009 8:39am
Oct 12, 2009

from John Taylor Gatto

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue8.htm

With conspiracy so close to the surface of the American imagination and American reality, I can only approach with trepidation the task of discouraging you in advance from thinking my book the chronicle of some vast diabolical conspiracy to seize all our children for the personal ends of a small, elite minority.

Don’t get me wrong, American schooling has been replete with chicanery from its very beginnings.*

Indeed, it isn’t difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you’ll miss the real horror of what I’m trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway—without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I’m correct, we’re in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

Who are the villains, really, but ourselves? People can change, but systems cannot without losing their structural integrity. Even Henry Ford, a Jew-baiter of such colossal proportions he was lionized by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, made a public apology and denied to his death he had ever intended to hurt Jews—a too strict interpretation of Darwin made him do it! The great industrialists who gave us modern compulsion schooling inevitably found their own principles subordinated to systems-purposes, just as happened to the rest of us.

Take Andrew Carnegie, the bobbin boy, who would certainly have been as appalled as the rest of us at the order to fire on strikers at his Homestead plant. But the system he helped to create was committed to pushing men until they reacted violently or dropped dead. It was called "the Iron Law of Wages." Once his colleagues were interested in the principles of the Iron Law, they could only see the courage and defiance of the Homestead strikers as an opportunity to provoke a crisis which would allow the steel union to be broken with state militia and public funds. Crushing opposition is the obligatory scene in the industrial drama, whatever it takes, and no matter how much individual industrial leaders like Carnegie might be reluctant to do so.

My worry was about finding a prominent ally to help me present this idea that inhuman anthropology is what we confront in our institutional schools, not conspiracy. The hunt paid off with the discovery of an analysis of the Ludlow Massacre by Walter Lippmann in the New Republic of January 30, 1915. Following the Rockefeller slaughter of up to forty-seven, mostly women and children, in the tent camp of striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado, a congressional investigation was held which put John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the defensive. Rockefeller agents had employed armored cars, machine guns, and fire bombs in his name. As Lippmann tells it, Rockefeller was charged with having the only authority to authorize such a massacre, but also with too much indifference to what his underlings were up to. "Clearly," said the industrial magnate, "both cannot be true."

As Lippmann recognized, this paradox is the worm at the core of all colossal power. Both indeed could be true. For ten years Rockefeller hadn’t even seen this property; what he knew of it came in reports from his managers he scarcely could have read along with mountains of similar reports coming to his desk each day. He was compelled to rely on the word of others. Drawing an analogy between Rockefeller and the czar of Russia, Lippmann wrote that nobody believed the czar himself performed the many despotic acts he was accused of; everyone knew a bureaucracy did so in his name. But most failed to push that knowledge to its inevitable conclusion: If the czar tried to change what was customary he would be undermined by his subordinates. He had no defense against this happening because it was in the best interests of all the divisions of the bureaucracy, including the army, that it—not the czar—continue to be in charge of things. The czar was a prisoner of his own subjects. In Lippmann’s words:

This seemed to be the predicament of Mr. Rockefeller. I should not believe he personally hired thugs or wanted them hired. It seems far more true to say that his impersonal and half-understood power has delegated itself into unsocial forms, that it has assumed a life of its own which he is almost powerless to control....His intellectual helplessness was the amazing part of his testimony. Here was a man who represented wealth probably without parallel in history, the successor to a father who has, with justice, been called the high priest of capitalism....Yet he talked about himself on the commonplace moral assumptions of a small businessman.

The Rockefeller Foundation has been instrumental through the century just passed (along with a few others) in giving us the schools we have. It imported the German research model into college life, elevated service to business and government as the goal of higher education, not teaching. And Rockefeller-financed University of Chicago and Columbia Teachers College have been among the most energetic actors in the lower school tragedy. There is more, too, but none of it means the Rockefeller family "masterminded" the school institution, or even that his foundation or his colleges did. All became in time submerged in the system they did so much to create, almost helpless to slow its momentum even had they so desired.

Despite its title, Underground History isn’t a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it’s a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty-five to thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn’t one of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people in conversation. I’ll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own experience to bear on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal before you and I promise your money’s worth. It isn’t important whether we agree on every detail.

A brief word on sources. I’ve identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I’ve avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to those who do not.

This is a workshop of solutions as well as an attempt to frame the problem clearly, but be warned: they are perversely sprinkled around like raisins in a pudding, nowhere grouped neatly as if to help you study for a test—except for a short list at the very end. The advice there is practical, but strictly limited to the world of compulsion schooling as it currently exists, not to the greater goal of understanding how education occurs or is prevented. The best advice in this book is scattered throughout and indirect, you’ll have to work to extract it. It begins with the very first sentence of the book where I remind you that what is right for systems is often wrong for human beings. Translated into a recommendation, that means that to avoid the revenge of Bianca, we must be prepared to insult systems for the convenience of humanity, not the other way around.

END

*For instance, for those of you who believe in testing, school superintendents as a class are virtually the stupidest people to pass through a graduate college program, ranking fifty-one points below the elementary school teachers they normally "supervice," (on the Graduate Record Examination), abd about eighty points below secondary-school teachers, while teachers themselves as an aggregate finish seventeenth of twenty occupational groups surveyed. The reader is of course at liberty to believe this happened accidentally, or that the moon is composed of blue, not green, cheese as is popularly believed. It's also possible to take this anomaly as conclusive evidence of the irrelevance of standardized testing. Your choice.

 



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Posted: Oct 12, 2009 2:03pm
Oct 8, 2009

Don't Forget to Dream My main "Earth Life" interest is ending the monetary system. I've written some short essays on this subject and collected some ideas from others. It's my judgment that when we make the switch from a monetary based society to a resource based society 90% of the negative aspects of our lives will disappear. Other troubles, like those that we have as a result of monetary based education and religious teachings, would fade away with the new education system (whatever form it takes). I really don't have a complete list of the things that would "go away" in my head right now. I just thought of this a minute ago and decided to start writing. I'm really hoping that people will add things as they think of them. But I'll start a list and just see where it goes...

I could keep going with that all day. What I find when I start to think about this is it's hard to come up with a problem that isn't rooted in the monetary system - it's laws and regulations. Even the idea of lack is due to the monetary system. Like I've mentioned before the first step toward something different is the idea of something different. Too many people stop at, "I don't see how that would work", and, with them, that's as far as it goes. The key word in the previous statement is "see". What is seeing? Can people not see if they want to see? We can see anything we want, any time we want. We just have to start. If people want to see an end to the horrid nonsense in the world they have to put forth some effort. This effort I refer to, when compared to the effort people put into surviving the monetary system, is minuscule. The reality of the development, or manifestation, of the world around us is this: It all started inside our heads. Nothing, out there, got there without someone first "seeing it". The world of things is the tangible result of peoples visionary efforts. How hard is it to daydream? Piece of cake right? What if we all daydreamed the same dream? How long before the tangible result appeared - out there? I've said that we can stop all the governments of the world whenever we decide we've had enough simply by withdrawing our cooperation. Why don't we do it? Two reasons are obvious 1) we don't believe it 2) we're scared. Both reasons are a direct result of the monetary system. So what do we do? What can anybody do, right now, regardless of their lack of belief and fear? Making our Daydreams work for us Let's take a typical daydream involving anyone's imagined vacation get away. Where are we? Let's pretend we're on a cruise. Let's simply change a few things about how got there and how we're traveling. Let's pretend we're there because people love building big ships (and they do). They design big ships because that's there vision (they enjoy it). In the resource based economy they'd get together with people who design clean power systems (Free Energy), scientist working with new carbon based materials used in transportation, cooks, pilots etc. who are on the ship because they enjoy the ocean. You are there as part of the resource based society you now live in. Your vacations are no longer limited to a few weeks a year because through the intelligent use of technology people have a lot of free time. You didn't pay for the cruise because there is nothing to pay for or pay with. You are there because you're a human being and part of the world society. You don't need a passport or visa and no one will stop you at customs. You can get off where you like and have a place to stay for as long as you like in any part of the world you wish to explore. It's not necessary to believe this for it to have a profound effect on the world. If we shift our daydreams from a monetary based world to a resource based world it will produce a very helpful vision. It is this vision that will change the world. There are a lot of people doing this and all that's needed is the desire for a sane and enjoyable life. Check out the world shift network and explore some ideas for living Outside The Monetary Box. When you have ideas go ahead and post them here. If you know places where people are doing good and doing things differently share them. People need these visions. Don't forget to dream....
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Posted: Oct 8, 2009 8:03am
Sep 30, 2009
Victims of Fantasy


  I wanted to put a link here today to a video about the Swine Flu Media Push. I did, it's at the bottom. But I know this isn't the most important story. It isn't the whole story so it really can't be looked at and dealt with holistically. The real story is "Why would anyone believe anything the Government or it's media outlet says"?.


Why do they? The answer is - because they want to. Why would they want to? OK, security, it's nice to have something to believe in, something we can count on and something that provides a sense of hope. Fine, but still, after a while, after the flagrant, belligerence, of government and government officials ignoring the nations finances and it's people - why does anyone continue to support it. This support has headed way out in the direction of complete insanity. Going so far as to support and rationalize death by war, torture and financial ruin. These are things we support - Now. These are the things a lot of people are OK with. There is nothing in the main stream media that suggests a nation in revolt. How does the human brain do this? Why does it believe - in the face of overwhelming evidence - that it is not supporting it's own destruction?


 Even people on the activist teams are supporting government domination. Every time they sign a petition or appeal the congress they're saying, "You're in control, you're the power...". That's all they need. As long as people continue to give their power to the governments the governments will continue to do what they have been doing - following their own agenda. Believe me - the government didn't grow to the size and strength it is today by asking permission - it took that power from the people. We can't gain control over our lives by asking the power centers for permission. We have to take control of our lives, make our way - on our own - or die at the end of a leash.


I'm not an activist by modern terms. I am an individualist. I do what I do because I decided to. I am in no way swayed by public opinion or government decree. I hold no allegiance to god or country. I am of no religion and am affiliated with no race, clan, group, tribe or party. I have no need for any of that.


What I do, on a personal level, when I want to change something about myself, is find out how I ended up where I am. That's a little cloudy huh? I don't want to spend a lot of time here so - muddle, or not. The point is - if we want to understand how we, as a nation of people, got to the place where we can continue to believe in some thing that is constantly revealing itself as patently incapable of serving the public interest - we need to study our own history. In this case U.S. history. This can be done on our own - if we're the equivalent of a Cicero or a Noam Chomsky - for the rest of us we'll need the help of others. This help in deciphering the past isn't available in schools or any other government agency. It comes from people who are interested in a better world. I guess if I had to adopt a purpose in life it would be to aid those people in delivering their message.

This is a temporary assignment I've given myself. I don't want to do it forever, or even for a long period of time. I doubt that any of us do. There just is no sane alternative at the moment. So once again I'm here in the morning providing links to information. One message I'd like to deliver, again, today is that all this turmoil and nonsense that is created by the worlds governments is temporary and will come to an end very soon. This is information we can get from those people who have been watching and charting the galactic process. This watching has been going on for thousands of years. There is in turn, thousands of years of evidence and science behind it and it's freely available to all.


A great place to start this study is the Mayan Calendar. You can also see what people like Drunvalo Melchizedek has to say about the fast approaching future.


The way out of all the troubles and nonsense of today - all the horrors and loss of war and manipulation that results from the geopolitical, end of oil, resource grab - is so easy, it's seems ridiculous: All these abominations rely on one thing; our participation. The answer is to - not participate. Not to fight, not to beg, not to vote or petition - that's all participation and drives the engine of destruction - we can simply stop. That's enough from me for now ~ The following is from the industrious few who put the information together. Feel free to add your favorite resources here....

The Century of the Self

The Untold History of Controlling the Masses Through the Manipulation of Unconscious Desires "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized." - Edward Bernays

To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

 The Freud dynasty is at the heart of this compelling social history. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; Edward Bernays, who invented public relations; Anna Freud, Sigmund's devoted daughter; and present-day PR guru and Sigmund's great grandson, Matthew Freud. Sigmund Freud's work into the bubbling and murky world of the subconscious changed the world. By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal.

VIDEOS:

The Century of the Self

The Swine Flu Conspiracy

Ralph Nader
Sep 23, 2009

Visit Addiction In The 21st Century "In the mid 1970s, a former member of Air Force Intelligence brought an audiotape to me. He told me that the tape had been sabotaged and asked me to recover the information on it. Since at the time I was building advanced electronics for recording studios and outdoor concerts, I had the knowledge and ability to undertake the challenge. The following is a transcript from that tape." Tommy Cichanowski “None of us have all the pieces of the puzzle. Realizing this, we can keep an open mind and learn from the work of others.” — Dr. John V. Milewski — Money, Medicine and Madness... Lecture by: G. Edward Griffin http://dgswilson.com/index.php/topic,57.0.html Author of "World Without Cancer: The Story of Vitamin B–17" "....the legal battle to establish the physician's right to use laetrile or vitamin therapy" "Mr. G. Edward Griffin, who was one of the founders of the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy. This will hardly come as a surprise to many of you who have come to expect to find Ed Griffin in the forefront of any special battle involving the preservation of individual freedoms. Mr. Griffin has become well known because of his unique talent for researching obscure and difficult topics and then presenting them in clear, concise terms that all can understand. But, perhaps, you are not aware of how young he was when he first displayed his talent for work in serious matters affecting the country. Ed was just 15 when he delivered a speech on Patrick Henry at the annual national oratorical contest sponsored by the Hearst newspapers, and won first prize. During his senior year in high school, he was master of ceremonies of his own CBS radio network program, "Make Way For Youth". Then he was awarded a "Regions Alumni Scholarship" to the University of Michigan, where he received his Bachelor of Arts Degree. In addition to two years in the Army, Mr. Griffin served as a radio announcer news commentator, assistant TV director and insurance man before commencing his career as an author, narrator and producer of documentary films and books, which has established his national reputation. Among these, many familiar to most of you, are the "OSHA Controversy", "The Capitalist Conspiracy More Deadly Than War", "The Grand Design", "The Great Prison Break", "The Fearful Master" and most recently, "A World Without Cancer". He is now the President of "American Media", a publishing and film production company in Southern California, where he lives with his wife and four children." Dr. John Richardson The first time I was introduced to the subject of Laetrile or vitamin therapy in the control of cancer, was when I was on a short fishing trip with Dr. John Richardson, a physician in San Francisco, who as you probably know, is in the forefront of the legal battle to establish the physician's right to use laetrile or vitamin therapy or anything he wishes to use, in the treatment of his patients. Because he was using laetrile last year he was arrested by the FDA, and he is taking this case to the courts. I think he stands an excellent chance of winning but, of course, that remains yet to be seen. The whole purpose, the initial trigger behind the formation of the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy was to rally nationwide support behind not only Dr. Richardson but other physicians who hopefully would have the courage to join with him and challenge the establishment, if you will, the bureaucracy, in the right for a physician to have freedom of choice in this regard. At Any rate, I have known John for quite a while, and we were on this fishing trip up in Oregon. If you ever have the chance to meet this man you will recognize immediately that he is a very intense person. I was trying to enjoy the babbling stream, the fresh air, the green trees, the blue sky and he brought his brief case with him. I can assure you that his brief case was not loaded with fishing gear. He brought papers and manuscripts, books and charts and statistics, and he kept talking to me about a control for cancer that he had discovered and he was using it on his patients and low and behold he was saving lives of men and women who previously he would have had to tell that they were terminal and there was nothing more he could do. He kept telling me about this and I had really no particular interest in it. I was glad to hear it but I had about as much interest in learning the technical medical details as you or I might have in listening to an engineer talking about internal stresses in girder bridges. You know, these are things of great fascination to the engineer or the physician, but to the layperson it was not too interesting. Finally he began to tell me about the fact that “they” were suppressing this. “They” wouldn't let him use it, “they” were harassing him. I thought all of a sudden, good grief, John. Why he is becoming paranoid and I turned to him, and I remember very distinctly, I said, "Wait a minute, who are “they” John? Do you mean to tell me that there are people in the medical profession or in government or anywhere in the world who are so low and so crass, so mean, as to deliberately withhold a control for cancer?" And I didn't realize it at the time, but with the asking of that question my curiosity was already aroused and I was launched even then on an investigative research project that was to take me two or two and a half years, and it led me to the discovery of one of the most amazing stories of the twentieth century. This is a story in which the science of cancer therapy is not nearly as complicated as the politics of cancer therapy. This evening I am forced, because of the limitation of time, to assume that you are familiar with the science of Vitamin B–17 or laetrile. Now I realize that this may not be a safe assumption for many of you because I'm sure not all of you have see our film "World Without Cancer". If you have not seen the film, or if you are not familiar with the scientific question, all I can do is to tell you to do so as soon as possible. But just so we start off on a common footing let me give you in a sentence or two a summary description of what the science of cancer therapy involves. Our research has led us to the realization that cancer is simply a deficiency disease, like scurvy, pellagra and pernicious anemia. It is caused by the lack of an essential food compound in modern man's diet. It is not caused by a virus or some mysterious toxin. It is caused by the lack of something. And the ultimate solution for the control of cancer, therefore, simply is to restore this essential food element to our daily intake. Now that, in a nutshell, is what this science is all about. [ This lack of proper nutrients, which are responsible for maintaining our natural immune system, or other sources of stress, activates a "Pleomorphic" virus that has been proven conclusively to bring about most cancerous conditions — Tommy Cichanowski ] This substance is known by several names as you already have been told in the introductory remarks this evening. It is known as Amygdalin when it is found in nature. As such, under the name of Amygdalin, it has been listed in the Standard Pharmathera for over a hundred years. It is identified and known for all this time, listed as a non-toxic. It has been used experimentally on a wide variety of ailments in every country of the world. It is particularly well known in Asia, but also definitely known in the United States and Europe. When it is described by nutritionists, it usually is referred to as nitrolosides. In its purified and concentrated form used specifically for cancer therapy, the form developed by Dr. Ernest T. Crebb, Jr., it is known as Laetrile. I think the best way to describe this substance is simply to call it what it really is. It is a vitamin and it is vitamin B–17. That is how it will be known in the future — Vitamin B–17, because it is found in that grouping of vitamins known as the B–complex, of which there are some twenty-four fractions. It is found in that grouping of vitamins when it is found in natural foods. And since it was the seventh one to be isolated and identified, it is properly known as Vitamin B–17, and one last thing, just to give you a little more information about it, it is found in over 1,2000 edible plants around the world, most of which you wouldn't dream of eating: grasses, Johnson grass, Tunis grass, arrow grass, and things like that. It is also found in the foods of primitive man, primitive cultures which even today are noted for their lack of cancer. There are many cultures in the world including the Akkadians(?) on the Black Sea, the Hunzakut of Northwest Pakistan, the Hopi and Navaho Native Americans, the traditional Eskimo, and groups like this in Africa, Latin America and all around the world which traditionally are cancer free, or relatively cancer free. And in every case, ladies and gentlemen, when you examine the natural diets of these cancer free populations you always find that the degree to which they are free of cancer is the same degree to which their foods are rich in vitamin B–17. There are no exceptions to that statement. Now the science of cancer therapy, as I have mentioned, is an open and shut case. We could, in the film "World Without Cancer" and in other studies, go into the laboratories and experiments that have been conducted. We could explain the theory behind it, we could analyze the case histories of men and women who have been literally brought back from the edge of the grave, almost hopeless cases and all of that. That is an open and shut case. There is really no longer, or should no longer be any controversy about it. The controversy now centers around the politics and it is to that subject that I would like to address he remainder of my remarks this evening. So to repeat, the purpose of this presentation is not to discuss the science of cancer therapy, but to review at least the highlights of the politics of cancer therapy, and to answer to the best of my ability that very interesting question, "Who are “they” John?" Now the politics of cancer therapy can be understood only in light of two grim and shocking realities and here they are. These are the two blocks into which my remarks will be divided: One, the scientific basis for the opposition against laetrile or B–17 has been blatantly dishonest — and we'll prove that. And the second reality is that the hidden source of this scientific corruption is a financial political interlock that constitutes the largest and most powerful cartel the world has ever known. Keep Readinghttp://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/history/griffin.htm

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Sep 22, 2009

“When Ralph Nader speaks…not enough people listen…” Democracy Now interview with Ralph Nader http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/21/ralph_nader_on_the_g20_healthcare AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Ralph. Well, let’s start on the economy, on this year anniversary of the collapse, and where you think we have come to in this year. RALPH NADER: Well, President Obama is engaging in political progressive talk, but [...]

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