Yochanan Visser als Crimineel 35

Yochanan Visser met petje van het Joods Nationaal Fonds, een organisatie die betrokken was en is bij de diefstal van Palestijns land.

Yochanan Visser,

De weerzin tegen de Israelische terreur groeit. Fatsoenlijke burgers in het Westen beginnen dwars door de zionistische propaganda heen te prikken. De vraag is nu: wat is uw reactie hierop? U en de uwen kunnen die omslag niet blijven negeren. Leest u deze reactie van de bekende kunstenaar Brian Eno eens:

An Experiment in Provocation

Stealing Gaza

COUNTERPUNCH

By BRIAN ENO

It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better

than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as

oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked

"Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the

Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw

ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've

forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the

Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing

teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated

military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the

right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every

chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion

that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of

Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While

there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements.

While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of

military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they

can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into

which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million

people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity,

food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate

them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why

would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under

attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the

helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks

and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains

of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then

you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a

terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an

accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing

their homeland.

Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.

http://www.counterpunch.org/eno01022009.html

Yochanan Visser, wordt het niet tijd dat u en de uwen stoppen met de terreur tegen de Palestijnse bevolking?

In afwachting van uw antwoord:

Stan van Houcke

Journalist/schrijver

Amsterdam

Yochanan Visser is a Dutch-language analyst for the Israel Facts Group (www.israelfacts.eu), a European media watchdog organization, as well as manager of Israel Facts Monitorgroup and www. israelfacts. eu. He lives in Efrat, Israel.

Nederland en Afghanistan 242

Mark Steel: Here's one soldier who told the truth about this war
L/Cpl Glenton's crime was to say we were making matters worse

Wednesday, 6 January 2010

Politicians and newspapers love to revere a war hero from Afghanistan, so it's strange that they haven't got round to Lance-Corporal Joe Glenton. When Joe went out there he must have been warned he could end up being held in captivity, but he can't have expected that would mean getting locked away by the British Army.

His crime was to conclude that the war was making matters worse, and it was immoral to carry on fighting, and to say this publicly. So they put him in a military jail, presumably to stop him doing it again. Leave this dangerous felon at liberty and he might refuse to fight in the Congo, in Kashmir, in a re-enactment of the Battle of Bosworth; who knows what danger he'd be to the public.

Joe Glenton might have escaped arrest if he'd been prepared to keep his opposition to the war quiet, rather than speak about his experience openly. Because, as a soldier, he's not supposed to air an opinion about the war. But every week there are reports in which soldiers tell us we're slowly winning, and none of them get court-martialled. So the real crime wasn't to voice an opinion but to voice the wrong opinion.

In any case Army leaders make statements about every aspect of the war, to the extent that Richard Dannatt, head of the whole force, criticised the Government just before announcing his allegiance to the Tories. Maybe there's a formula that goes, "Officers of the rank of Captain or above shall he be entitled to thoughts. (However, ranks down to Sergeant-Major may be permitted certain impulses, at the rate of up to three per calendar month)."

It must be hard for a soldier not to hold an opinion on the war, when they can see they're often arming one set of warlords against another, to the extent we call the ones we like the "Moderate Taliban". Presumably these are the ones who say "One tower was fine, but we shouldn't have done the two".

There must be signs all round the barracks saying "You are ordered not to notice that the honest government you're risking your lives to defend fiddled the election so blatantly the UN ordered it to be re-run – or that the heroin production you were told you'd be eliminating has gone up – or that many of the civilians you're here to protect want you to leave. You must also be careful not to remember that one of the reasons given for the war was to capture Bin Laden, which we never did. Therefore anyone who sees him must not notice him, as this will serve to dampen morale."

This might be why Joe described his time in the barracks since his imprisonment by saying "The response was fantastic. Soldiers shook my hand and patted me on the back. One guy said, 'You're saying what everyone else is thinking'. Talking to soldiers in other units, you get the impression that people are questioning why we're in Afghanistan."

This questioning has spread through every layer of society, to the extent that the audience for a recent Question Time in Wootton Bassett, the town that lines the streets for each returning dead soldier, warmed to the arguments of anti-war campaigner Salma Yaqoob. So the politicians and supporters of the war must be thankful to Anjem Choudary, who's planned a march through Wootton Bassett for his group called Islam4UK.

To give him credit, no one could accuse Islam4UK of pandering to Middle England. If one of his supporters suggested "Maybe we should call ourselves Islam4UK, except for Surrey", he'd probably say "If you're going soft you can sod off and join the Liberal Democrats". Next week, you assume, he'll announce a parade demanding the ritual slaughter of all kittens live on Blue Peter.

The march allows supporters of the war to define the situation as sensible Britain versus militant Islam. But sensible Britain is turning against this war.

Joe Glenton has recently been released on bail, and his court martial takes place in three weeks, around the time another participant in war will be giving his evidence. So the rules seem to be that if you tell a lie to start a war, you're called up seven years later for a polite inquiry. And if you tell the truth to stop a war you're likely to get banged up. To someone somewhere I presume this all makes sense.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-heres-one-soldier-who-told-the-truth-about-this-war-1858857.html

De Israelische Terreur 1100

Terwijl in de polder nagenoeg iedere kunstenaar, politicus en autoriteit die z'n geld verdient met mensenrechten zich muisstil houdt, spreken hun collega's in de grote mensenwereld zich wel uit, zoals Brian Eno:

An Experiment in Provocation

Stealing Gaza

COUNTERPUNCH

By BRIAN ENO

It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better

than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as

oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked

"Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the

Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw

ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've

forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the

Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing

teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated

military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the

right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every

chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion

that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of

Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While

there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements.

While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of

military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they

can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into

which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million

people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity,

food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate

them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why

would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under

attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the

helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks

and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains

of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then

you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a

terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an

accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing

their homeland.

Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.

Het Neoliberale Geloof 495

Three top Wall Street banks to award $49.5 billion in year-end bonuses

By Barry Grey
5 January 2010

The US media has been virtually silent on the colossal year-end bonuses for 2009 that will shortly be handed out by major American banks and financial firms. This is doubtless a deliberate response by the corporate-controlled media to popular anger over the financial gains reaped by Wall Street executives, who have been bailed out at taxpayer expense while working people have been left to face depression levels of unemployment and mounting home foreclosures, hunger and poverty.

A brief article published on the inside pages of the business section of the January 1 New York Times (“With Bigger Bonuses, An Upside for Banks”) notes in passing that the three top Wall Street banks will pay out an estimated $49.5 billion in cash bonuses and stock awards.

Those banks—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley—received a combined $45 billion in cash under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in October of 2008. Along with the rest of the banks, they have benefitted from trillions of dollars in nearly interest-free loans, debt guarantees, securities purchases and other subsidies from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.

The government has further underwritten bank profits and surging bonuses by keeping interest rates at near-zero and pumping trillions of dollars of cheap credit into the financial markets, while placing no restrictions on the ability of the banks to resume the speculative practices that precipitated the financial crash of 2008.

Meanwhile, the American people have lost $11 trillion in wealth, primarily through the collapse of home values. For their part, the banks have sharply curtailed lending over the past 15 months, draining more than $3 trillion of credit from the economy.

In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration, with the support of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, sought to sell the bailout to the public on the grounds that it would enable the banks to resume lending. However, the TARP law imposed no strings on the bailed out banks, allowing them to do with the money what they wanted, without even requiring that they tell the government how they were using their cash windfalls.

The curtailment of lending by the banks has played a major role in deepening and prolonging the recession. Instead of increasing credit to businesses and consumers, the banks have made large—in some cases, record—profits through speculative trading in stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.

The same article in the Times cites Robert Willens, an accounting and tax analyst in New York, who estimates that US banks will hand out $200 billion in total compensation, a figure that does not take into account the hedge fund industry.

To place this sum in perspective, it is roughly equal to the annual median salary of 4 million American workers.

All of the major banks have been allowed by the Obama administration to repay their TARP cash injections, thereby freeing them from minor restrictions on executive pay imposed on banks that continue to hold TARP money.

According to Willens, the banks will reap $80 billion in tax savings from the $200 billion in compensation, since most employee compensation is a tax deductible expense under existing tax laws. The biggest tax break will go to Goldman Sachs, which expects to award its employees a record $23 billion in bonuses. Goldman will save about $9 billion in federal income taxes on the bonuses it pays out for 2009.

Altogether, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley will gain nearly $20 billion in tax breaks from their employee compensation this year.

Indicative of the year-end bonanza for bankers, the Times reported in a separate article on January 1 that Wells Fargo, the fourth largest US bank by assets, which received $25 billion in TARP cash, plans to pay its top four executives a combined $25 million in bonuses. These are to be paid entirely in stock options, rather than cash.

In awarding the bonuses in stock rather than cash, Wells Fargo is following the example of other big banks, including Goldman Sachs. Under prodding from the administration, banks are paying a greater portion of executive compensation in deferred stock, supposedly to tie pay awards to long-term growth rather than short-term gains. However, as the Times points out, “If banks… continue to rebound from the financial crisis, their shares—and the executive payouts—could surge.”

Since the government has made clear that it will impose no genuine reforms or restrictions on the banking industry, and will spend unlimited sums to protect the wealth of the Wall Street elite, the bankers have every reason to believe that stock bonuses will prove more lucrative than cash.

The government’s undiminished commitment to rescuing Wall Street was underscored on Christmas eve, when the Treasury announced that it was removing a $400 billion cap on government aid to the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and approving cash pay packages of $6 million each to the CEOs of the government-controlled firms.

Surging bank profits and bonuses go hand in hand with a dizzying rally on the US stock market. In a year that saw the permanent destruction of millions of jobs, all three major US stock indexes recorded massive increases. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 2009 up 18.8 percent for the year. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index surged 23.5 percent, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq rose 43.9 percent.

From their lows in early March, the stock indexes recorded even more staggering gains in a “rally many investors had not seen in their lifetime,” according to the January 1 Washington Post. The Dow rose 59 percent, the S&P 500 soared 65 percent and the Nasdaq was up 79 percent.

Financial stocks were up 15 percent for the year, including Bank of America, whose share price quadrupled from its March low. Ford stock increased 532 percent from its low point in March.

In all, the value of US stocks increased by $5.6 trillion from the market’s nadir, the resulting windfall going disproportionately to the wealthiest investors.

A major factor in the stunning rebound in the financial markets was the refusal of the government to impose any serious reforms in the wake of the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a year-end review on January 4: “But more than a year after Lehman Brothers, American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Washington Mutual collapsed or were saved by the government and financial markets swooned, it is striking how little on Wall Street has changed.”

The scale and character of the government bailout was summed up aptly by Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, in a review of recent books on the financial crash. Writing in the December 27 Washington Post, Johnson said, “The Wall Street executives kept their jobs, their bonuses and their pensions; they benefitted from unprecedented rule changes and unlimited monetary and fiscal support; and their firms became even bigger and more dangerous to the economic health of society…

“The executives of our largest banks ran their firms into the ground, taking excessive risks that even now they fail to understand fully. But, as these individuals saw it, unless they personally were saved on incredibly generous terms, the world’s economy would grind to a halt.”

The Obama administration and the Democrats, no less than Bush and the Republicans, agreed that their chief mission was to rescue the personal fortunes of these executives and the financial oligarchy they represent.

Zie: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/bonu-j05.shtml

Het Neoliberale Geloof 494

Key Theme In Interview With ShadowStats' John Williams - (You Guessed It)
Hyperinflation And The Death Of The US Economy

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/key-theme-interview-shadowstats-john-williams-you-guessed-it-hyperinflation-and-death-us-eco

If you thought John Williams, who a month ago prophesied that the US could
be facing hyperinflation as soon as 2010, has changed his tune, think
again. In an interview conducted by Phil Maymin of the Fairfiled Weekly,
the man who has made a business out of debunking the government's data
fabrication machine, dishes out some very hard to swallow truths about the
US economy and where the fiat world is headed. As always, Williams'
perspectives are debate-worthy by all, whether inflationist or
deflationist: in a field of media sycophants, JW is not afraid to speak
what we all know, yet rarely wish to acknowledge.

Maymin: So we are technically bankrupt?

Williams: Yes, and when countries are in that state, what they usually do
is rev up the printing presses and print the money they need to meet their
obligations. And that creates inflation, hyperinflation, and makes the
currency worthless.

Obama says America will go bankrupt if Congress doesn't pass the health
care bill.

Well, it's going to go bankrupt if they do pass the health care bill, too,
but at least he's thinking about it. He talks about it publicly, which is
one thing prior administrations refused to do. Give him credit for that.
But what he's setting up with this health care system will just accelerate
the process.

Where are we right now?

In terms of the GDP, we are about halfway to depression level. If you look
at retail sales, industrial production, we are already well into
depressionary. If you look at things such as the housing industry, the new
orders for durable goods we are in Great Depression territory. If we have
hyperinflation, which I see coming not too far down the road, that would be
so disruptive to our system that it would result in the cessation of many
levels of normal economic commerce, and that would throw us into a great
depression, and one worse than was seen in the 1930s.

What kind of hyperinflation are we talking about?

I am talking something like you saw with the Weimar Republic of the 1930s.
There the currency became worthless enough that people used it actually as
toilet paper or wallpaper. You could go to a fine restaurant and have an
expensive dinner and order an expensive bottle of wine. The next morning
that empty bottle of wine is worth more as scrap glass than it had been the
night before filled with expensive wine.

We just saw an extreme example in Zimbabwe. ... Probably the most extreme
hyperinflation that anyone has ever seen. At the same time, you still had a
functioning, albeit troubled, Zimbabwe economy. How could that be? They had
a workable backup system of a black market in U.S. dollars. We don't have a
backup system of anything. Our system, with its heavy dependence on
electronic currency, in a hyperinflation would not do well. It would
probably cease to function very quickly. You could have disruptions in
supply chains to food stores. The economy would devolve into something like
a barter system until they came up with a replacement global currency.

What can we do to avoid hyperinflation? What if we just shut down the Fed
or something like that?

We can't. The actions have already been taken to put us in it. It's beyond
control. The government does put out financial statements usually in
December using generally accepted accounting principles, where unfunded
liabilities like Medicare and Social Security are included in the same way
as corporations account for their employee pension liabilities. And in
2008, for example, the one-year deficit was $5.1 trillion dollars. And
that's instead of the $450 billion, plus or minus, that was officially
reported.

Wow.

These numbers are beyond containment. Even the 2008 numbers, you can take
100 percent of people's income and corporate profit and you'd still be in
deficit. There's no way you can raise enough money in taxes.

What about spending?

If you eliminated all federal expenditures except for Medicare and Social
Security, you'd still be in deficit. You have to slash Social Security and
Medicare. But I don't see any political will to rein in the costs the way
they have to be reined in. There's just no way it can be contained. The
total federal debt and net present value of the unfunded liabilities right
now totals about $75 trillion. That's five times the level of GDP.

What can we, the people, do to stop the government from, you know, taking
all our money?

We should have acted 20 years ago. There's not much you can do at this
point to prevent the eventual debasement of the dollar. This involves both
sides of the political spectrum. It's not limited to the Republicans or the
Democrats. They've both been very active in setting this up.

What can individuals do?

The only thing individuals can do now is look to protect themselves. I wish
I could see a way, but shy of severe slashing of the social programs that
is so politically reprehensible and would create such problems and social
unrest, I don't see that as a practical solution.

If you're a young 20- or 25-year-old guy or gal, would you move to another
country? What would you do?

We still have a great country. We're going through a period of economic
pain. It's happened before. This is the kind of thing that's taken us
decades to get into and it will take us decades to get out. Although the
hyperinflation is going to be limited largely to the U.S., the economic
downturn will affect things globally. I can't tell you how things will go
with a hyperinflationary Great Depression, which is where I see things
going.

It's the type of thing that will tend to lead to significant political
change. People tend to vote their pocketbooks. You could have the rise of a
third party. You could even have rioting in the streets. I'm not formally
predicting that — anyone can run these different scenarios. For the
individual, what you need to do, from an investment standpoint, look to
preserve your wealth and assets. Don't worry about the day-to-day
fluctuations in the markets. What I'm talking about here is over the long
haul...

[Gold is] going to be highly volatile, as will the dollar, over the near
term, but longer term, physical gold I would look at as a primary hedge for
preserving the purchasing power of your wealth and assets. Maybe some
physical silver. Get some assets outside the U.S. dollar. I might even look
to move some assets physically outside the United States. The key here is
to look at a longer range survival package, battening down the hatches, and
preserving your wealth and assets during a very difficult time. Once you're
through that, you'll have some extraordinary investment opportunities, and
I can't tell you what it's going to be like on the other side of this
crisis.

Dr. Phil Maymin is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering
at NYU-Polytechnic Institute.

Reflexmatige Angst

Consensual Paranoia: The War Against Terrorism, McCarthyism, and the Case of US Air Force Lieutenant Milo Radulovich By Carl K. Savich Introduction: Consensual Paranoia What causes mass hysteria, fear, and panic? It is the perception of danger and fear that is the cause. A perception is a sensory or sense impression, or image we create in our own minds. The danger may not be real at all, but illusory. But the perception of danger is what leads to fear, insecurity, and a sense of danger that sets in motion psychological mechanisms.

Fear and panic lead to consensual paranoia, a primordial tribal psychological need to find an enemy or a scapegoat that a tribe seeks to destroy. Invariably, the tribe, society, nation, or government seeks to create a bipolar opposition, that is, a division between US and Them, the Tribe against the Enemy/Other, the Good Us against the Evil Them. This is a primal/fundamental psychological need that is an evolutionary vestige from when man was animalistic in evolutionary development. So while a regressive and infantile orientation, it is nevertheless a basic and primary orientation. We create tribal, societal, and national solidarity by delineating our tribe, the Good Tribe from the Other Tribe, the Evil Tribe, the Tribe of Strangers/Foreigners/Aliens whom we know nothing about.

Ignorance induces fear, xenophobia, induces a sense or perception of danger, induces paranoia, an imaginary or illusory impression of danger or threat. The need to find an Enemy, the need to create a bipolar opposition, Us versus Them, is a primordial animalistic impulse that goes back to when mankind was in a primitive, tribal state. In primeval times, man perceived the unknown and strangers as dangerous and as a threat. This was an almost unthinking reflex or instinct that was motivated by self-preservation. As man evolved, his reasoning faculty evolved to the point where reasoning overrode this primitive reflex.

But governments and political leaders and nations continue to exploit this primitive human psychological orientation to foment war. Aggregations of individuals into crowds, groups, religious groups, nationality and ethnic groups, must be motivated and incited to act. To do this, reason becomes secondary and governments and political leaders resort to the primordial impulses of the herd or tribe or crowd/mob, to a regressive or backward psychological orientation. Fear and insecurity must be engendered in the tribe/clan/nation. Concomitantly to fear and danger and insecurity the impulses of hatred and anger and intolerance are engineered. Governments and political leaders self-induce this irrational fear, paranoia, to advance national objectives. Invariably, a consensual paranoia is fomented and results, creating Outsiders versus Insiders, Us versus Them, the Good versus the Evil, the Free World versus the Communist bloc, “Freedom” versus “the Axis of Evil”, Christians versus Jews versus Muslims versus Hindus. The psychological mechanism is the same/identical in every case, consensual paranoia, a paranoia needed to foment hate, racism, bigotry, intolerance, and war, that is, the killing of others. Reason becomes degraded while a primordial paranoia is self-induced.

A perception of danger and of threat leads to intolerance and racism. The perception is what is needed to induce the paranoid orientation needed to kill. The danger or threat may be illusory or imagined, but it is only the sense of danger that is needed, the danger need not be real or present at all. Projection and transference then allow us to project or impute our worst vices onto a chosen enemy or scapegoat. What is the origin of a scapegoat? The term “scapegoat” was coined in 1530 by English religious reformer William Tyndale for a primal worldwide psychological mechanism for expiation of sin and crime. A scapegoat is a group, individual, nation, ethnic group, or religious group upon whom the crimes, sins, mistakes, or guilt of others is placed upon or imputed to. The term is derived from Late Latin caper emissaries, emissary goat, which is a translation of the Hebrew word azazel, name of a desert demon, or ezozel, a goat that escapes or leaves. In Leviticus 16:7-26, the Jewish high priest Aaron confessed the sins of the people of Israel over the head of a goat which was then let loose into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement. Transference or projection whether unto a goat, onto a nation, people, or religious group, or individual, thus serves a psychological function, a primordial and universal function.

The War against Terrorism

The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC and the subsequent Anthrax attacks created a panic and hysteria in the US not seen since the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The 9/11 attacks resulted in approximately 3,000 deaths and the destruction of the twin World Trade Center Towers and outlying buildings and areas and considerable damage to the Pentagon building and the downing of a third hijacked plane in Pennsylvania with the loss of all life on board. The attack was an unprecedented assault on the US mainland, perceived as impregnable and immune to attack. The shock the attack caused was massive and deep, resulting in panic and hysteria. The impact was psychological. An emphasis on national security emerged as an overriding focus. A “war on terror” or “war against terrorism” was declared by President George W. Bush. Invariably, individual rights and liberties were sacrificed for national security.

Throughout American history, during times of crisis and perceived threats or dangers from outside the country, a patriotic/nationalist hysteria or panic emerged. During the Civil War, Edward Everett Hale published “The Man Without a Country”, whose protagonist was Philip Nolan, a man who had forsaken his country. The story extolled the virtues of unity over secession and patriotism over independence. The story was reissued during the Spanish-American War in 1898 to stir up patriotic fervor. Waves of ultra-patriotism and ultra-nationalism were engendered which were manifested in flag waving, the singing of the Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful and The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the display of the symbolic colors of red, white, and blue of the American flag. This was a crude form of jingoism. Following 9/11, Irving Berlin’s anthem “God Bless America” from 1938 and the World War II period was revived. Moreover, moral superiority was maintained by claiming that justice and morality was on our side and by invoking the slogan that “In God We Trust”, that God too was on our side. It was a fight between good, us, and evil, them, between Freedom, and the “Evil” or the “Evil Doers” or “the Axis of Evil”. The dichotomy is a primordial archetype of the psychology of enmity. Every nation, people, and country seeks to gain the moral high ground by invoking God. German soldiers, for instance, wore on their belt buckles the slogan “Gott mit uns”, God is with us. In all wars, all combatants claim moral superiority over the others.

Fear and insecurity results in consensual paranoia. The Salem Witch Trials resulted from the consensual paranoia and panic caused by fears of a French and Indian attack. Salem was settled by Puritans, who had a rigid and austere moral code. The Salem witch-hunt hysteria began when a slave and two other women were accused of witchcraft. In the ensuing panic and hysteria, hundreds of persons were arrested. Many accused were tried using “spectral evidence”, evidence gleaned from voices which the accused and accusers heard. Nineteen were hanged as witches. Then there was the Red Scare of the 1920s, following the establishment of Bolshevik Russia in 1917 and the spread of Marxist/Communist/Socialist movements to the United States. In the North there was legalized racial discrimination and segregation, “separate but equal”, as established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In the South, there was Jim Crow and KKK terror enforced by lynchings. There were race riots in Detroit in 1943 and 1967 and in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. In 1921 a race riot erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma in “The Negro Wall Street” whereby 35 districts were burned and looted by white vigilantes and police and National Guard troops which resulted in 36 to 300 people killed and 800 injured. Over 6,000 blacks were interned/held for eight days due to the “Negro uprising”. The Tulsa Riots were covered up by the media and government. In times of perceived threat, there have been eruptions of mass hysteria and intolerance and violence.

Lees verder: http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/savich/savich5.html

Het Neoliberale Geloof 493

How Main Street Got Shafted While Wall Street Bounced Back
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog. Posted January 5, 2010.

Unless you work on Wall Street, you've probably had a hard year. Don't expect 2010 to be any better. Tools

In September 2008, as the worst of the financial crisis engulfed Wall Street, George W. Bush issued a warning: "This sucker could go down." Around the same time, as Congress hashed out a bailout bill, New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the leading Republican negotiator of the bill, warned that "if we do not do this, the trauma, the chaos and the disruption to everyday Americans' lives will be overwhelming, and that's a price we can't afford to risk paying."

In less than a year, Wall Street was back. The five largest remaining banks are today larger, their executives and traders richer, their strategies of placing large bets with other people's money no less bold than before the meltdown. The possibility of new regulations emanating from Congress has barely inhibited the Street's exuberance.

But if Wall Street is back on top, the everyday lives of large numbers of Americans continue to be subject to overwhelming trauma, chaos and disruption.

It is commonplace among policymakers to fervently and sincerely believe that Wall Street's financial health is not only a precondition for a prosperous real economy but that when the former thrives, the latter will necessarily follow. Few fictions of modern economic life are more assiduously defended than the central importance of the Street to the well-being of the rest of us, as has been proved in 2009.

Inhabitants of the real economy are dependent on the financial economy to borrow money. But their overwhelming reliance on Wall Street is a relatively recent phenomenon. Back when middle-class Americans earned enough to be able to save more of their incomes, they borrowed from one another, largely through local and regional banks. Small businesses also did.

It's easy to understand economic policymakers being seduced by the great flows of wealth created among Wall Streeters, from whom they invariably seek advice. One of the basic assumptions of capitalism is that anyone paid huge sums of money must be very smart.

But if 2009 has proved anything, it's that the bailout of Wall Street didn't trickle down to Main Street. Mortgage delinquencies continue to rise. Small businesses can't get credit. And people everywhere, it seems, are worried about losing their jobs. Wall Street is the only place where money is flowing and pay is escalating. Top executives and traders on the Street will soon be splitting about $25 billion in bonuses (despite Goldman Sachs' decision, made with an eye toward public relations, to defer bonuses for its 30 top players).

The real locus of the problem was never the financial economy to begin with, and the bailout of Wall Street was a sideshow. The real problem was on Main Street, in the real economy. Before the crash, much of America had fallen deeply into unsustainable debt because it had no other way to maintain its standard of living. That's because for so many years almost all the gains of economic growth had been going to a relatively small number of people at the top.

President Obama and his economic team have been telling Americans we'll have to save more in future years, spend less and borrow less from the rest of the world, especially from China. This is necessary and inevitable, they say, in order to "rebalance" global financial flows. China has saved too much and consumed too little, while we have done the reverse.

In truth, most Americans did not spend too much in recent years, relative to the increasing size of the overall American economy. They spent too much only in relation to their declining portion of its gains. Had their portion kept up -- had the people at the top of corporate America, Wall Street banks and hedge funds not taken a disproportionate share -- most Americans would not have felt the necessity to borrow so much.

The year 2009 will be remembered as the year when Main Street got hit hard. Don't expect 2010 to be much better -- that is, if you live in the real economy. The administration is telling Americans that jobs will return next year, and we'll be in a recovery. I hope they're right. But I doubt it. Too many Americans have lost their jobs, incomes, homes and savings. That means most of us won't have the purchasing power to buy nearly all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. And without enough demand, the economy can't get out of the doldrums.

As long as income and wealth keep concentrating at the top, and the great divide between America's have-mores and have-lesses continues to widen, the Great Recession won't end -- at least not in the real economy.


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Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is Supercapitalism.

Zie: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144922/how_main_street_got_shafted_while_wall_street_bounced_back/