The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
Both lessons hit home.
Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.
Franklin Roosevelt. Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies. April 29, 1938
Op 31 oktober 1936 verklaarde president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in het Amerikaanse Congres over zijn Second New Deal:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred…
The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House — by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.
74 jaar later, op 21 april 2010 berichtten Amerikaanse kranten:
While Goldman Sachs' lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman's chief executive visited the White House at least four times.
White House logs show that Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein traveled to Washington for at least two events with President Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign received $994,795 in donations from Goldman's employees and their relatives. He also met twice with Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers…
Goldman is retaining former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig as a member of its legal team. In addition, when he worked as an investment banker in Chicago a decade ago, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel advised one client who also retained Goldman as an adviser on the same $8.2 billion deal.
Goldman's connections to the White House and the Obama administration are raising eyebrows at a time when Washington and Wall Street are dueling over how to overhaul regulation of the financial world.
Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, said that 'almost everything that the White House has done has been haunted by the personnel and the money of Goldman… as well as the suspicion that the White House, particularly early on, was pulling its punches out of deference to Goldman and its war chest.'
Nu in het Westen de financiële en economische elite de macht heeft weten te veroveren, is belangrijk te weten dat
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment banking firm that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients.
Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and is headquartered at 200 West Street in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City, with additional offices in international financial centers. The firm provides mergers and acquisitions advice, underwriting services, asset management, and prime brokerage to its clients, which include corporations, governments and individuals. The firm also engages in market making and private equity deals, and is a primary dealer in the United States Treasury security market. It is recognized as one of the premier investment banks in the world.
Former Goldman executives who moved on to government positions include: Robert Rubin and Henry Paulsonwho served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively; Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank; Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of Canada 2008–13 and Governor of the Bank of England from July 2013 and Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australia…
Involvement in the European sovereign debt crisis
Goldman is being criticized for its involvement in the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009. In September 2009, Goldman Sachs, among others, created a special credit default swap (CDS) index to cover the high risk of Greece's national debt. The interest-rates of Greek national bonds have soared to a very high level, leading the Greek economy very close to bankruptcy in March and May 2010 and again in June 2011. Lucas Papademos, Greece's former prime minister, ran the Central Bank of Greece at the time of the controversial derivatives deals with Goldman Sachs that enabled Greece to hide the size of its debt.[142] Petros Christodoulou, General Manager of the Public Debt Management Agency of Greece is a former employee of Goldman Sachs. Mario Monti, Italy's former prime minister and finance minister, who headed the new government that took over after Berlusconi's resignation, is an international adviser to Goldman Sachs. So is Otmar Issing, former board member of the Bundesbank and the Executive Board of the European Bank. Mario Draghi, the new head of the European Central Bank, is the former managing director of Goldman Sachs International. António Borges, Head of the European Department of the International Monetary Fund in 2010–2011 and responsible for most of enterprise privatizations in Portugal since 2011, is the former Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs International. Carlos Moedas, a former Goldman Sachs employee, is the current Secretary of State to the Prime Minister of Portugal and Director of ESAME, the agency created to monitor and control the implementation of the structural reforms agreed by the government of Portugal and the troika composed of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Peter Sutherland, former Attorney General of Ireland is a non-executive director of Goldman Sachs International. These ties between Goldman Sachs and European leaders are an ongoing source of controversy…
Danish utility sale
Goldman Sachs's purchase of an 18% stake in state-owned Dong Energy—Denmark's largest electric utility—set off a 'political crisis' in Denmark. The sale—approved in January 30, 2014—sparked protest in the form of the resignation of six cabinet ministers and the withdrawal of a party (Socialist People's Party) from Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt's leftist governing coalition. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, 'the role of Goldman in the deal struck a nerve with the Danish public, which is still suffering from the aftereffects of the global financial crisis.' Protesters in Copenhagen gathered around a banner 'with a drawing of a vampire squid—the description of Goldman used by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone in 2009.' Opponents expressed concern that Goldman would have some say in Dong's management, and that Goldman planned to manage its investment through 'subsidiaries in Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and Delaware, which made Danes suspicious that the bank would shift earnings to tax havens.'
Libya investment losses
In January 2014, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) filed a lawsuit against Goldman for $1 billion after the firm lost of 98% of the $1.3 billion the LIA invested with Goldman in 2007. Goldman made more than $1 billion in derivatives trades with the LIA funds which lost almost all their value but earned Goldman $350 million in profit. In August 2014 Goldman dropped a bid to end the suit in a London court.
De gerenommeerde Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Matt Taibbi schreef in de Rolling Stone van 5 april 2010 over 's werelds machtigste 'multinationale investeringsbank' het geruchtmakende artikel 'The Great American Bubble Machine,'waarin hij het volgende uiteenzette:
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention…
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy…
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ('Goldman's superhero status was left intact,' says market analyst Eric Salzman, 'and an investment banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.') The very next day, Paulson green-lighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict of interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. 'In the past it was an implicit advantage,' says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. 'Now it's more of an explicit advantage.'
Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 — with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses — off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 — which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. 'They cooked those first quarter results six ways from Sunday,' says one hedge fund manager. 'They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit.'
Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout…
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an 'environmental plan,' called cap-and-trade.
The new carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Grexit lijkt me niet alleen onvermijdelijk, maar ook wenselijk, hoe groot en onvoorspelbaar de geopolitieke gevolgen ook kunnen zijn. Griekenland kan domweg niet meedoen met de toppers. De eurozone moet sterk en stabiel zijn.
Weliswaar 'staat een lange periode van ellende te wachten, enorme inflatie bijvoorbeeld. Het Europese project zal ook een stevige dreun krijgen. Maar in elk geval komt er een eind aan de tragedie die nu maar blijft voortduren,' aldus de miljonair Mak in zijn pleidooi om de neoliberale Europese Unie van 'Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel' overeind te houden. Een decennium eerder wist dezelfde Geert Mak in zijn zo geprezen bestseller In Europa (2004) na 1115 pagina's nog te vertellen dat 'Europa als economische eenheid... een eind op weg' was, niet beseffend dat al sinds eind jaren zeventig het neoliberalisme via deregulering, privatisering, allerlei belastingvoordelen voor grote concerns en het speculeren met niet bestaande miljarden een diepe economische crisis onvermijdelijk had gemaakt. Die brak dan ook vier jaar later in volle hevigheid uit. Maar omdat in Nederland de zogeheten 'politiek-literaire elite' en haar poldermodel tot op het bot gecorrumpeerd zijn geraakt ging Mak's nonsens er even onweersproken in als Gods woord in een ouderling. De Volkskrant wist te melden dat Mak's Reizen zonder John ‘een monumentaal boek,’ was, uitgerust ‘met een schat aan informatie’ die ‘qua betrouwbaarheid’ het ‘met gemak [wint]’ van Steinbeck's Travels without Charley (1962), terwijl NRC Handelsblad meende dat 'Mak Steinbeck afschminkt,' want volgens Mak en de 'kwaliteitskrant' was 'Steinbeck vooral aan het jakkeren [was] op amfetamine' waardoor hij 'eerder het contact met Amerika [vermeed] dan dat hij het zocht. Vele ontmoetingen onderweg zijn waarschijnlijk uit zijn dikke schrijversduim gezogen.'
Hoe 'betrouwbaar' Mak's oordelen zelf zijn, kan worden afgemeten aan zijn opportunisme en conformisme, zijn tegenstrijdige uitspraken, zijn verlangen het establishment te behagen, zijn leugens en zelfbedrog, én, niet te vergeten, aan zijn voorspellingen, die hij bijvoorbeeld uitsprak aan de vooravond van de herverkiezing van Obama in 2012, toen de historicus van het volk plechtig verklaarde:
het is beter voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.
Een opmerkelijke uitspraak voor iemand die volgens eigen zeggen decennia geleden had besloten niet 'meer een potje te gaan preken. Ik ging het oordeel neerleggen bij de lezer.' Desondanks begon mijn oude vriend vervolgens over van alles en nog wat publiekelijk een 'oordeel' uit te spreken. Zijn uitspraken zijn bovendien maar al te vaak in strijd met de werkelijkheid. Zo constateerde de kritische Amerikaanse auteur Tom Engelhardt op 28 mei 2013 het volgende:
At the National Defense University (NDU) last Thursday, President Obama, so media reports and editorials assured us, gave a speech in which he promised to dial back the war on terror as a 'global' operation, curtail U.S. drone operations abroad, and launch another effort to whittle down, if not close, Guantanamo. But a careful look at the text of his speech indicates that he still accepts the most basic premises of the previous administration: that we are 'at war'; that the country, despite visible evidence to the contrary, is in 'wartime'; and that, when a president decides it’s necessary, this planet will remain a global free-fire zone for drones, special operations forces, or whatever else he choses to throw at it. He may even, reports Jonathan Landay of McClatchy News, have quietly expanded the categories of human beings that U.S. drones can attack…
In the meantime, America’s global warring has resulted in a significant destabilization of the Greater Middle East. (The present Syrian disaster would have been unimaginable without the U.S. invasion of Iraq.) It’s also resulted in the growth of an ever larger secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military, the special operations forces -- 10,000 of whom are now in Afghanistan alone -- and the launching of a series of drone wars and assassination campaigns across a significant swath of the planet. These, from a White House that has taken on ever more power to do as it pleases in foreign and military policy, the president now claims to be curtailing and bringing under his version of the rule of law, largely because they haven't been working out so terribly well. Finally, there’s the spread of the al-Qaeda franchise into areas Washington has helped unsettle, which, as the president indicated, ensures that our 'war' cannot end any time soon. Think of it as a Mobius strip of self-justifying conflict.
Op zijn beurt verklaarde de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Eugene McCarraher tijdens de lezing The Heavenly City of Business in 2012:
President Obama has done nothing to curb the drive for global hegemony – nor does he intend to, for he has always subscribed, in his lissome and idealistic way, to the tenets of covenant economics. When candidate Obama told Fortune in june 2008 ‘I still believe that the business of America is business,’ he was both announcing the ideological foundation of his presidency and proclaiming his faith in the Civilization of Business. No one who bothered to consult the ample record of Obama’s votes, publication, and interviews should have been surprised by his fealty to finance capital, his escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or his reassertion of imperial prerogative when he claimed the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo – the latter being the one indisputably audacious act of his career. As a senator, as a candidate, and as chief executive, Obama has never strayed from the central assumptions of empire as a way of being: the right and duty of the United States to control events around the world, and the centrality of corporate capitalism to the promise of American life.
Als mainstream-opiniemaker verdedigt Geert Mak, net als Barack Obama, het gewelddadige neoliberale globalisme. Daarom deugt in zijn ogen Obama en Poetin niet. Waar een held is, moet een schurk zijn. Het simplistisch wereldbeeld van de domineeszoon is gebaseerd op het manicheïsme. Net als voor zijn vader Jezus Christus de Verlosser van het Kwaad was en Judas Iskariot de vlees geworden Duivel, zo vertegenwoordigt voor zoon Geert de VS het Goede en Rusland het Kwaad. Daarentegen zijn opvallend veel spraakmakende Amerikaanse intellectuelen wel kritisch over hun eigen geschiedenis en de geclaimde nobele motieven van hun politieke en economische elite. Zo beschrijft de Amerikaanse auteur Mark Stein in zijn boek American Panic. A History of Who Scares Us and Why (2014) de oorsprong van de meedogenloze Amerikaanse agressie:
Of all the political panics in American history, none has been more deadly than that which fueled the ethnic cleansing of the people who populated what is now the United States prior to the arrival of European. Far more unarmed Native American women, children, and elderly were killed in the United States all the people killed in the nation's other political panics combined. The treatment of Native Americans provides insight into a fundamental question regarding political panic: When is violence against a group of people an act of panic as opposed to an act of war?
Form the colonial era through the nineteenth century, whites often viewed Native Americans as a threat to the expansion of settlements believed necessary for economic and political security. One of the first such conflicts was the Pequot War (1637-38). In that war, panic clearly surfaced when the colonists surrounded a fortified Pequot encampment and, recognizing the danger of charging into it, opted to burn it and kill anyone who tried to escape the flames -- including women, children, and the elderly.
Precies hetzelfde gebeurt vandaag de dag nog steeds zodra Amerikaanse vliegtuigen de 'vijand' met bommen en kogels bestookt, en daarbij talloze burgerslachtoffers veroorzaken. De Amerikanen zijn tijdens hun voortdurende oorlogen geenszins terughoudend bij het vernietigen van hun tegenstanders, maar willen eigen doden en verminkten tot een minimum beperken, zoals de bombardementen op Irak, Afghanistan en nu weer op Syria aantonen.
Zie: http://airwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/airwars-cause-for-concern-civilians-killed-by-coalition.pdf
Met betrekking tot het buitenlands beleid van president Obama stelde de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Jeffrey Nall begin 2010:
Of all the political panics in American history, none has been more deadly than that which fueled the ethnic cleansing of the people who populated what is now the United States prior to the arrival of European. Far more unarmed Native American women, children, and elderly were killed in the United States all the people killed in the nation's other political panics combined. The treatment of Native Americans provides insight into a fundamental question regarding political panic: When is violence against a group of people an act of panic as opposed to an act of war?
Form the colonial era through the nineteenth century, whites often viewed Native Americans as a threat to the expansion of settlements believed necessary for economic and political security. One of the first such conflicts was the Pequot War (1637-38). In that war, panic clearly surfaced when the colonists surrounded a fortified Pequot encampment and, recognizing the danger of charging into it, opted to burn it and kill anyone who tried to escape the flames -- including women, children, and the elderly.
Precies hetzelfde gebeurt vandaag de dag nog steeds zodra Amerikaanse vliegtuigen de 'vijand' met bommen en kogels bestookt, en daarbij talloze burgerslachtoffers veroorzaken. De Amerikanen zijn tijdens hun voortdurende oorlogen geenszins terughoudend bij het vernietigen van hun tegenstanders, maar willen eigen doden en verminkten tot een minimum beperken, zoals de bombardementen op Irak, Afghanistan en nu weer op Syria aantonen.
Zie: http://airwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/airwars-cause-for-concern-civilians-killed-by-coalition.pdf
Met betrekking tot het buitenlands beleid van president Obama stelde de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Jeffrey Nall begin 2010:
When President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace prize some in the peace movement noted the irony of awarding such a prize to a man overseeing multiple wars and hundreds of military bases around the world. What was most horrifying about Obama being awarded the peace prize was the content of his acceptance speech in which he defended the utility and morality of violence and war. Rather than merely ignoring the legacy of peacemakers before him, Obama used the speech as a full-frontal assault on the very philosophical tenets of nonviolence advocated by Gandhi and Rev. King.
Standing on the world’s stage, receiving a prize for peace, Obama stared straight into the eyes of Reverend King’s legacy and declared not hostility but rather his loyalty to militarism. Rev. King called for America to 'get on the right side of the world revolution' by undergoing a 'radical revolution of values.' Obama defended the American exceptionalism which has and continues to color U.S. militaristic violence in a divine shade of ineffability. Dismissing the hundreds of thousands left dead from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama described the U.S. as the world’s great savior which never does wrong. 'Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.' As if tearing out pages from reality and replacing them with the most egregious doublespeak Obama stated plainly: 'America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.'
Gezien Obama's Orwelliaanse 'waarheden' kan het niemand echt verbazen dat de president in 2012 meer dan een miljard dollar van de economische elite ontving voor zijn herverkiezingsfonds, natuurlijk niet om een 'change we can believe in' te verwezenlijken, maar juist om de belangen van de gevestigde orde te beschermen. De kritische Amerikaanse blogger Arthur Silber merkte in dit verband op:
I have been discussing certain of these themes for several years. I point you in particular to an article from May 2009: 'Obama and the Triumph of the American Myth.' The second, major part of that essay, 'Torture and the American Project,' sets forth many of the facts of American history that Obama steadfastly refuses to acknowledge and, as Nall observes, blatantly lies about. Obama announced his dedication to the propaganda of American Exceptionalism on a comprehensive scale in his widely praised speech on race; see 'Obama's Whitewash' for the details.
In 'Obama and the Triumph of the American Myth' stelt professor Nall:
Given the fundamentalist fervor with which the U.S. ruling class maintains and burnishes the national mythology, an exercise in which the majority of 'ordinary' Americans join with equal enthusiasm (for such dedication to onanistic joys will forever find many followers), Barack Obama was inevitable. It was dangerous enough when truth was the enemy; truth was to be destroyed, but there remained a barely discernible acknowledgment that the truth still existed. With the ascension of Obama the Marketer, Obama the Fulfiller of Dreams, Obama the Commander of Illusion, the lie occupies the most prominent national space. Once installed, the lie grows daily and hourly. The smallest remaining tatters of truth are pushed always farther to the edges, until they vanish into the growing swamp of pain, suffering and death. To search for the truth in these circumstances is to sentence oneself to ridicule and hatred. To speak the truth is to render oneself irrelevant and invisible.
Dit laatste is de belangrijkste reden waarom een publiek debat over de werkelijkheid in het Westen nooit mogelijk is zolang de commerciële massamedia worden beheerst door gecorrumpeerde opiniemakers als Geert Mak. Voor hem geldt dat de Amerikaanse terreur waarbij merendeels burgerslachtoffers vallen 'beter' is 'voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap,' en de rest is slechts 'collateral damage.' Het is allemaal onderdeel van de 'Change We Can Believe in' en 'Hope,' de verkiezingsleuzen waarmee Obama in 2008 aan de macht kwam en waar Mak en de Makkianen niet zonder kunnen. In verband met de lengte stop ik hier. De volgende keer meer.
Een guitig ogende Geert Mak met zijn wantrouwend kijkende Mietsie. Mak: 'Russia is on the move again.'
“THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING“
September 18, 2015
The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” So echoed the cry this week from the Pentagon, the US media and Republican candidates for president.
How silly. It seems the Russians have sent six tanks to Syria, some medium artillery and a bunch of military technicians to two bases on Syria’s coast near Latakia. According to Republican warmongers, the wicked Soviets…ooops, sorry, Russians…are intervening militarily in the five-year old Syrian War and planning new bases in the strategic Mideast nation.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The United States has about 800 bases and military installations around the globe. Russia has only a handful of small bases near its borders.
The exception is in Syria where Russia has had a small naval supply/repair facility in Tartus and an electronic listening post for almost 50 years. Moscow has long been Syria’s principal foreign ally and arms supplier.
While the US ruled almost the entire Mideast – what I call the American Raj – Syria was regarded as a limited Soviet/Russian sphere of influence. No more.
Washington ignited Syria’s civil war by infiltrating anti-government forces from Lebanon and Jordan. Over the past five years, the US, along with Israel, France, Britain and Saudi Arabia, has armed, financed and directed Syria’s anti-Assad regime rebels. The Saudis unleashed their secret weapon against Damascus, the Syrian-Iraqi Islamic State movement.
The West’s objective in Syria was to overthrow its government, because it is closely allied to Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Russia. President Bashar Assad’s secular government in Damascus is just managing to hold off the rebels and mobs of fanatical jihadists sent by the Saudis and Washington – which pretends to be fighting the Islamic state. In fact, the Islamic State, or IS, is a tacit American ally.
Astoundingly, it appears that few in Washington’s power circles appear to have imagined that US machinations in Syria would eventually provoke a Russian response.
Republican candidates like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina appeared to be itching for war with Russia. They are creatures of America’s chief neocon, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Most non-Americans must have been horrified to observe such warmongering and pandering to Israel’s far, far right.
One wonders if these amateur strategists could name more than one Syrian city. Or if they understand that Syria is as close to Russia as New York is to Columbus, Ohio? Does anyone remember that in the 19thCentury Russia claimed to be defender of Mideast Christians? This week, President Vladimir Putin re-asserted this claim, saying he wanted to protect the Levant’s 2 million Christians who are now gravely threatened by IS.
Why can the US have military bases in places like Djibouti, Okinawa, Diego Garcia, Uganda, Somalia, Qatar, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bulgaria, Japan, Italy, Romania, Pakistan, Iraq and Spain, to name a few, while it’s a big no-no for Russia to dare have a very small base in Syria?
Because the Empire says no.
Russia’s military budget is one tenth that of the United States. Combined with its rich allies like Europe and Japan, the US accounts for 70% of world military spending. The only real threat Russia poses to US security will come if Washington’s ham-handed blundering in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine provoke a direct clash with Russia’s military forces. The West is fortunate to have the cautious, sober Vlad Putin in the Kremlin. He has already averted a US-Russian war in Syria and is calling again for direct US-Russia talks on the growing crisis.
But did anyone really think that the very tough Putin would do nothing while the US and its allies tore Syria apart?
How stupid and arrogant was this. Imperial hubris married to arrant ignorance.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/09/eric-margolis/the-russians-are-coming-the-russians-are-coming/
1 opmerking:
2nd most popular name for Israeli boys this past year was the Hebrew term the army used for killing 500+ kids in Gaza. Eitan. 'What's in a name' mag geen naam hebben...
Bekendmaking
'Op 10 december 2015, de internationale dag van de mensenrechten, zal de eerste Mensenrechtenagenda van Amsterdam worden bekendgemaakt.'
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