'Lords of a Feudal New World Order'
                                  (from " '9/11' " / Facing Our Fascist State)

 

‘We have about 60% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of it’s population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.’

George F. Kennan, chief of Policy Planning for the United States’ State Department, on February 24, 1948.

 

‘I say, when your heart turns cold
It cause your soul to freeze
It spreads throughout your spirit
Like a ruthless, feeling disease
The walls, the walls that once were down Now stand firm and tall

Safe from hate, love, pain, joy, Until you feel nothing ...
You forget ideals
And turn off the reason

To make sure the product gets sold”
Tupac Amaru Shakur, “When Ure Heart Turns Cold”

 

​

‘We are witnessing the creation of a supranational control of the world's necessities. The old notions of sovereignty no longer govern the facts.’
Walter Lippmann, N Y Times columnist, 1917
 

‘Earth's population will be forced to colonize two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week.’

Mark Townsend and Jason Burke on a World Wildlife Fund report, the Observer, Britain, 7/7/02

 

                                                       Still Coming Down On Sunny Days

Who are these people who use terror--or “tear’r” in President G. W. Bush’s faux tough-Texan pronunciation--so coldly for ‘geopolitical’ ends--ends that we must now perceive are as crazy as they are greedy, arrogant, and both murderous and suicidal?
 

During the 2000 U.S. Presidential campaign, media in Europe reported that George W. Bush and Al Gore descend from Kings of England.
 

On October 17, 2000 Reuters News Service wrote: ‘ “It is now clear that Mr Gore and Mr Bush have an unusually large number of royal and noble descents," said Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage. "In point of fact, never in the history of the United States have two presidential candidates been as well endowed with royal alliances.” ’

By being a descendant of Edward I, the first King of England, the

Reuters agency wrote, ‘George W. Bush is also a cousin of former US president Richard Nixon, who resigned from the White House in 1974 for his part in the Watergate scandal.

Al Gore, however, Reuters wrote, ‘does have direct links to the holy Roman Empire.’

Reuters explained about the Democrats’ candidate: ‘He is a descendant of Roman Emperors Louis II, Charles II and Louis I and is therefore also a direct descendant of Charlemagne--the eighth-century Emperor.

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The problem is, Gore's Charlemagne links also make him a cousin of George W Bush.’

So the Bush and Gore families--like the Dupont, Hearst, Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Warburg, ... families--have generations of practice with privilege. Terms and concepts such as ‘vassals’ and ‘tributaries’ appear to them parts of a natural order, whether ‘New World’ or old, and "just another day's work."

Let’s now have a closer look at the history of the United States’ ruling elitists since the turn into the 20th century. We’ll see how often people’s natural compassion for one another and love of homeland have been duped into Wars that serve the interests of a few. Much of this history is told in Joel Andreas’ excellent, comicbook-like Addicted to War, co-published by AK Press and Frank Dorrel.

The United States’ reach for global power effectively began in 1898 with the so-called Spanish-American War.

Four years earlier, in 1894, Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut stated forthrightly: “I firmly believe that when any territory outside the present territorial limits of the United States becomes necessary for our defense or essential for our commercial development, we ought to lose no time in acquiring it.”

In 1897 Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was both more specific and more general. “Teddy” said: “I would welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.”

By 1898 Spanish troops were losing to natives’ armed struggle in Cuba and the Phillipines. Claiming to support said natives’ desire for independence, the United States declared war on Spain.

Spain gave up both territories after little fighting by U.S. forces. The United States then declared the Phillipines, Puerto Rico and Guam to be its colonies.

Filipinos resisted their new boss. In 1900 Mark Twain, Vice- President of the Anti-Imperialist League, wrote: ‘I have seen that we do not intend to free but subjugate the Philippines. And so I am an anti-imperialist.’ At least 600,000 Filipino people were killed by U.S. forces between 1898-1914.

As for Cuba, the Platt Amendment, authored by the Senator from Connecuticut, declared that the U.S. was to decide Cuba’s foreign and financial policies; was to have a military Base in Cuba forever; and was to have the option of invading Cuba with its Marines whenever it chose.

The United States invaded Cuba four times in the next 35 years.

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Tambien, it invaded Haiti and Panama twice, Mexico three times, Colombia and the Dominican Republic four times, Nicaragua five times and Honduras seven times.

Every one of these invasions served U.S. Corporations. United Fruit wanted bananas, Anaconda wanted copper, Standard Oil wanted oil, and they all wanted "no problem" from the native workers whose labor brought forth these fortunes-building resources.

General Smedley Butler led many United States Marines’ invasions from the turn-of-the-century forward.

In 1934 the retired Marine General wrote: ‘I spent 33 years and 4 months in active miltiary service. I spent most of my time as a high- class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Domincan Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.’

Brown Brothers Harriman, a merger of British and U.S. investment- banking firms, you’ll remember, was the firm for which Prescott Bush, great-grandfather of GWB, was Managing Director during its service to Nazi Germany, Standard Oil and General Motors during World War II.

Standard Oil, we know, was the main fount of the Rockefeller family fortunes.

Both World Wars also profited the U.S. ruling-class.

As the sinking of the Maine in Havana’s harbor prompted mass outrage in the United States and this nation’s entry into the Spanish- American War, the forewarned sinking of the Lusitania by Germany, causing 128 U.S. civilian deaths, prompted mass outrage in 1915.

Financier J.P. Morgan especially needed the U.S. to enter World War I. Billions of dollars of U.S. capitalists’ debt were at stake along with whatever might be their share of the colonial world. The then U.S. Ambassador to England, W.H. Page, said that entering this war was “the only way of maintaining our present pre-eminent trade status.”

130,274 U.S. soldiers died in World War I. More than
20 million people were killed by this World War altogether.

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(Let’s glance now at a revealing sidelight. In 1924 the aforementioned W. H.--Walter Hines--Page, co-founder of the Doubleday & Page publishing firm, had a School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University funded in his name by then U.S. Vice-President Charles Gates Dawes. Charles Gates Dawes endowed this School with money that he won as recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize. Charles Gates Dawes won his Peace Prize for his role in extracting capital from Germany after World War I. And the crippling of German society from this extraction of capital set the stage for Nazis’ rise in the latter 1920s.)

Much of U.S. business and media celebrated Fascism in the 1930s. TIME and Charles Lindbergh praised Mussolini’s " ‘Corporate State.’ ”. Henry Ford and the Rockefeller family funded Hitler from the 1920s forward. Many of the United States’ key corporate institutions (General Motors, the Chase Bank, the Union Bank, General Electric, ...) trafficked profitably with Nazi Germany as World War II and the Holocaust proceeded.

We know that the Rockefeller-run Chase Bank solicited Nazi accounts in France as late as 1944.

Prescott (“Press”) Bush, father of GHWB and grandfather of GWB, came into collaboration with Nazis through his father-in-law, George Herbert (“Bert”) Walker, an early fan of the message and potentials of Adolf Hitler.

Ex-boxer Bert Walker had previously taken his banking business from St. Louis, Missouri to the address of 1 Wall Street and partnership with the richer blue-blood Averill W. Harriman. Averill Harriman’s father, the railroad magnate William, was a protege and ally of John D. Rockefeller’s.

From 1926 onward Bert Walker, Prescott Bush and Averill Harriman joined with German industrialist/banker Fritz Thyssen in funding Adolf Hitler’s small but growing National Socialist Party. Their funding--much of it funneled or laundered through the Hamburg Amerika (HAPAG) shipping line--let Hitler increase his private armies of “brown shirts.”

Prescott Bush was himself the son of an industrialist who had partnered with a Rockefeller scion. As head of small arms and ammunition on the War Industries Board under President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, Samuel Prescott Bush had helped Percy Rockefeller, son of William Rockefeller (William the brother of Standard Oil’s founder John D.), take over Remington Arms and

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thereby corner small-arms manufacturing in the U. S.
Samuel P. Bush owned the Buckeye Steel Castings Company,

which supplied parts to Railroads owned by E. H. Harriman, the father of Averill W. Harriman and another beneficiary of financing by the Rockefeller family.

“Press” Bush, a 1919 graduate of Yale and an initiate of the Skull & Bones secret-society there, married Bert Walker’s daughter, further binding families and alliances.

Now let’s pause to focus on a hidden piece of history.

The aid of Bush, Harriman and Walker to Nazis’ rise during the 1920s. ‘30s and ‘40s--their well-paid aid along with the well-paid aid of intimately related U. S. capitalists--is one of the great, little-known stories of the past century.

I can’t begin to detail it here. I can, however, recommend Webster G. Tarpley’s and Anton Chaitkin’s George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography and summarize some of the financiers' broad strokes over two decades (1922 to 1942).

As mentioned earlier in relation to Wall Street’s Dillon, Read investment-banking firm, W. Averill Harriman, George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush partnered with German magnates Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick to assist the Nazi Party during the 1920s and early 1930s. They helped the Nazis with guns and propaganda (delivered via Remington Arms and via their co-owned Hamburg- Amerika Shipping). Thyssen and Flick, partners with the three U. S. principals in the German Steel Trust that Clarence Dillon had organized in 1926, also lent funds to Hitler.

At the same time Harriman, Walker and Bush profited from deals with the Soviet Union as it came under Joseph Stalin’s control.

1932 and 1933 were crucial years for Germany.

Tarpley and Chaitkin write about Germany in 1932: ‘The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces.’

In the ensuing street-fighting the Nazis’ Brown Shirts and Black Shirts killed hundreds with Thompson submachine-guns that had been smuggled aboard Hamburg Amerika (HAPAG) ships.

Hitler became German Chancellor on January 30, 1933, anointed by industrialists, landholders and military.

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Still, the Communist and Social Democrats held a plurality in Germany’s legislature, the Reichstag, and the U.S. public’s concerns about Nazis’ methods had to be allayed.

Control of Germany remained uncertain.

On the night of February 27, 1933, Germany’s legislative building, the Reichstag, burned to the ground. Communists were blamed for the arson. More of them were murdered and Nazis’ power mounted.

Nazis' ascension immediately benefited Bush, Harriman and Walker. The partners made Jewish financier Max Warburg (the chief of Germany's intelligence-agency during World War I) their representative on the Board of the Hamburg Amerika Line. On March 27 Max Warburg reassured Averill Harriman about the nascent fascism: ‘The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever.’

The Warburgs themselves threw worldwide weight.

On March 31, 1933, according to Tarpley and Chaitkin, ‘the American-Jewish Committee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers (New York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counseling “that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, '' and advising “that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed. ''

The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the “Anti-Defamation League '') continued with this hardline, no- attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.’

Bush, Harriman and Walker benfited from a monopoly of trade with Nazi Germany. ‘In May 1933,’ Tarpley and Chaitkin wrote, ‘an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler’s Germany to the United States.’

This pact was ‘negotiated between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.’

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Tarpley and Chaitkin added: ‘John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of “covert action government, '' that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.’

The Hamburg Amerika Line merged with the North German Lloyd Line in September 1933, becoming HAPAG/LLOYD. The new Line continued to carry Nazi agents, finances and propagranda between Germany and other nations.

By 1940, however, a majority of the U.S. ruling elite sided with England and agreed that war against Germany was again in its
‘ “pre-eminent” ’ interest.

In October of 1940 the U.S. State Department and the nominally non-Governmental Council on Foreign Relations, a body of executives and academics founded and funded by the Rockefeller family above all, met as partner bodies. Their sit-down decided that this nation must prepare for war with Germany and at the same time devise ‘an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States’ after the war.

A memorandum from the Council on Foreign Relations to the State Department in 1941 may remind you of Zbignew Brzezinski’s memorable phrasing of perspective in his 1997
The Grand Chessboard: ‘Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.’

The 1941 CFR memo advised: ‘If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the world.... The interests of other peoples should be stressed ... This would have a better propaganda effect.’

Then, as in 2001, we may infer that ‘a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.... a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat’ might be thought useful to ‘imperial mobilization.’

The 1941 CFR memo closely preceded the mass murder of more than 2000 people at Pearl Harbor.

Let's look more closely at " 'Pearl Harbor.' " On December 7, 1941 Japanese forces attacked U.S. ships, planes and personnel at this base and port in Hawaii. Documents in best-selling author John Toland’s

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Infamy and in Robert B. Stinnett’s Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor show that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his closest advisors knew for days, if not weeks, that the Japanese fleet, the Kido Butai, was advancing on Hawaii. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, did not inform Pearl Harbor’s commanding officers, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, about the advancing fleet.

In the Fall of 1941 Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior and an advocate for Jews against Nazis’ carnage, wrote in his diary: ‘For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.’

John Toland explains reasons further in Infamy: ‘The first bomb dropped on Oahu would have finally solved the problem of getting an America--half of whose people wanted peace--into the crusade against Hitler.’

So this Roosevelt, too, got the war he wanted, one that his peers advised was necessary. The Roosevelt Administration's withholding of warning to commanders at Pearl Harbor was another of history's conspiracies by a few to dupe masses into war.

Earlier in 1941 Prescott Bush and Averill Harriman took advantage of the Nazis’ war in Europe. They used their Union Banking Corporation to buy out their partner Fritz Thyseen’s interest in the Silesian American Corporation.

The Silesian American Corporation in Poland was then mining nearby a new concentration-camp called Auschwitz. Into the following year, 1942, Bush’s and Harriman’s UBC subsidiary employed inmates at Auschwitz as slave-labor in their mining.

Now, your stomach may have sunk while reading the few paragraphs above. At the same time, a slow burn of disbelief and outrage may be rising in you.

I relate the immediate history above so that we may better know the character of the U. S. elitists whom we still face.

Ruthless conspiracies are their way of life.

By August of 1942 the U. S. was fully entered into World War II, its troops fighting on both the European and Asian fronts. Invoking the new Trading with the Enemy Act, our Government in that month ordered seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd shipping lines.

Two months later it seized assets of the Union Banking Corporation. The UBC’s Managing Director then was Prescott Bush.

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“Press” Bush, however, escaped fines or incarceration, as his son George Herbert Walker Bush would escape punishment from scrutiny of the Iran/Contra and Iraqgate scandals.

Instead, Prescott Bush (who resigned from the Union Banking Corporation in 1943) became Chairman of the United States’ National War Fund!

And World War II went on killing with its killing of about 60 million civilians and soldiers.

According to the Internet’s ‘World War II Pages’ by Phil Stokes, these are the numbers of that War's dead: 8,668,000 military and 16,900,000 civilians of the Soviet Union, 1,324,000 military and 10,000,000 civilians of China, 3.250,000 military and 3,810,000 civilians of Germany, 850,000 military and 6,000,000 civilians of Poland, 1,506,000 military and 300,000 civilians of Japan, 300,000 military and 1,400,000 civilians of Yugoslavia, 520,000 military and 465,000 civilians of Roumania, 340,000 military and 470,000 civilians of France, ... , 326,000 military and 62,000 civilians of Great Britain, ..., and 295,000 military of the United States.

Also, we can never forget the estimated 6 million dead due to the Holocaust that coincided with overt fascism's rise and that lasted throughout World War II in Europe.

World War II, however, did rescue capitalists in the West from economic Depression. And those who supplied both the Axis and the Allies with arms, oil and financing--these few profited all-around-- just as they had in World War I.

‘After bombs’ rain/ the War was done/ With the Bomb’s reign/ the War was done/ Treaties were complete/ Plains greened with wheat/ Steel pressed into fins/ Northern empires still king ‘--”Let The Children Come”. 1990

Following World War II, capitalists in the United States did in fact achieve apparent ‘supremacy’ among colonial powers .

Britain and France were too depleted to keep their outright hold on territories in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. U.S.-based power moved in. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 coincided with the transformation of the United States’ wartime Office of Secret Services into the Central Intelligence Agency.

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This new Agency, the CIA, continued with the absorption of hundreds of Nazi agents into anti-Communist operations.

On February 24, 1948 the academic, diplomat and “ ‘liberal’ “ George F. Kennan--then chief of Policy Planning for the State Department--later adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson--stated what should be the new superpower’s attitude.

Princeton graduate Kennan wrote: ‘We have about 60% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of it’s population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.’

Between 1948 and 1961--using embargoes, narcotics, coups, proxy armies and death-squads--maintaining ‘vassals’ and ‘tributaries’--and unhampered by any ‘disparity’ or idealism--the U.S. ruling-class subverted anti-imperialist movements or governments in Colombia, the Congo, Greece, Guatamala, Iran and Vietnam through its “old-boy” arm of the CIA.

In 1952 Prescott Bush became a Senator from Connecticut two generations after Orville Platt. “Press” then was a regular golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower, we know, while John Foster and Allen Dulles orchestrated U.S. “ ‘foreign policy.’ ”

Still, by end of the 1950s, the Soviet Union, the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions, and armed struggles for national liberation in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America blocked or worried Western imperialists.

Leading “ ‘the arms race,’ ”, the Lords of the U.S. still were far short of uncontested ‘supremacy’ on Earth.

Struggle and reaction heightened during the 1960s. Within the U.S., Blacks led the fights for genuine rights and equality. Their eventual militance arrived at ‘Black Power.’

Worldwide, Vietnam represented many conflicts. Despite the United States’ intrusion of more than a half-a-million troops at one time and a bombardment that exceeded all of World War II’s,

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communists and nationalists in Vietnam won another protracted guerrilla war.

At the same time the “French connection” of opium/heroin from “the Golden Triangle” of Burma, Thailand and Laos to Europe and the United States--a CIA-directed flow that was strong-armed on the ground by the Taiwanese Kuomintang and Sicilian and Corsican mafias--and a flow that had funded anti-Communist movements and paramiltiaries in France, Italy and Greece shortly after World War II--addicted at least 30,000 U.S. service-men in Vietnam by 1970, according to an Insititue for Policy Studies history that was read into the Congressional Record by John Conyers of Michigan on May 7, 1998.

In May of 1970 the Christian Science Monitor reported on CIA ties to ‘the extensive movement of opium out of Laos.' One charter pilot told the Christian Science Monitor then that `opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country.'

In the middle of the 1960s and in the middle of the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. was among the most eloquent, far-seeing, compassionate voices for justice.

On April 4, 1967 MLK Jr. talked about the empire around him in his 'A Time to Break the Silence' speech at Riverside Church in New York City. MLK Jr. said then: "We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells us why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment."

In other words, the United States’ military and other material power was directed at maintaining a great ‘disparity’ over the world’s poor to serve ‘those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come with the immense profits over overseas investment.’

MLK Jr. was among those assassinated or otherwise killed between 1963 and 1976. Other lights of revolutionary internationalism--such as Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, George Jackson and untold other Blacks in the U.S: Che Guevara, Carlos Fonseca, Father Camilo Torres in Latin America: and Anna Mae Aquash of the American Indian Movement (AIM) on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South

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Dakota--were suspiciously or brutally killed during this span. So too were those of the ruling elite--John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy and perhaps Phillip Graham of the Washington Post--who appeared to threaten the 'privileges' of those who profited hugely from 'overseas investments'.

Still: ‘Many stood and fought for lands they lived on.’

During the 1970s liberation-movements with socialist plaforms persevered in armed struggle and won state-power in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe. U.S. troops and other personnel left Vietnam. Oil-producing nations combined to set prices that rocked Western economies and consumers in 1973 and 1978.

In 1973 the Trilateral Commission was formed, we know, David Rockefeller its central founder and Zbignew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger among its leading members.

Democrat Jimmy Carter was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations before he became U. S. President in 1977. The inauguration of Republican Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in 1981 was then needed to push the Trilateralist agenda of revived U. S. ‘supremacy’ forward.

In the 1980s Northern imperialists of the West devised complex, amazing and often criminal solutions to areas of difficulty for them around the planet.

The Soviet Union they entrapped in Afghanistan and sapped through an arms-race that cost trillions of dollars.

At the same time, Afghanistan’s rising share of the world’s opium- production, corresponding with the CIA’s supply of billions of dollars of weapons to Muhjadeen warlords, increased to 800 tons per year. This rise made it, according to a statement by the U.S. State Department in 1986, ‘probably the world's largest producer of opium for export' and ‘the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.'

Elsewhere in Central Asia/the Middle East, Iran was entangled in a war with Iraq that killed more than one million people between 1980 and 1988. This war depleted and distracted both oil-rich nations at a time when either might have resisted Western Corporations’ extractions from the Middle East. This war also brought billions of dollars to arms-sellers in the West.

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At the same time, Northern imperialists mired Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique in post-revoltionary wars through their funding of proxy armies.

Nicaragua was especially the United States’ target. During the middle 1980s President Ronald Reagan warned that Sandinista- Cuban-Russian soldiers might invade Texas any day or night, now, unless Congress gave the anti-revolutionary contras a blank check.

Congress’ subsequent reluctance or refusal to fund the contras prompted a strange, secret triangle--or a set of complementary channels--that was partially exposed as the Iran/Contra scandal in 1986-87.

Here’s how this triangle--yet another conspiracy-- worked.

Reagan Administration officials (Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, CIA Director and the Rockefellers’ Manhattan Institute founder William Casey among them) used the sale of weapons to Iran--the United States’ nominal enemy--to fund contras based along the Honduran/Nicaraguan border.

At the same time, completing a third side of the triangle, U.S. agents or assets used money from said arms-sales to buy Colombian cocaine and transport it to Flordia, Calfornia, Texas, Louisiana and Mena, Arkansas. They thus augmented profits that then were partly passed on to contra commanders.

The imported cocaine, we know, was then made into the Crack that wracked Black and Brown inner-city neighborhoods in the middle 1980s. In 1986 Newsweek and other Corporate media presented lurid coverage of this “ ‘epidemic’ ”. Congress then passed the laws for mandatory sentencing for possession of Crack that would imprison hundreds of thousands of poor people in the next decade.

Soon afterward, we know, a Deputy Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Catherine Austin Fitts, identified a similar “ ‘epidemic’ ” of HUD-ordered foreclosures in Crack-wracked neighorhoods.

Vice-President and former CIA Director George H. W. Bush was evidently at the center of the Iran/Contra conspiracy. GHWB’s aide Donald Gregg talked daily with Oliver North’s contra-supply manager, Felix Rodriquez, the Cuban exile who saw fit to steal the executed Che Guevara’s Rolex watch off his wrist in 1967.

Nevertheless, George Herbert Walker Bush, like his father before him, escaped anything near incarceration. Instead, we know, in 1988 GHWB succeeded Ronald Reagan as President of the United States.

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The first Bush Administration was rich in warfare and bloodshed

In December of 1989 George H. W. Bush invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, his former partner as a CIA asset, after Noriega refused to let the U.S. stage contra attacks on Nicaragua from Panama.

In February of 1991 George H. W. Bush launched “ ‘the Gulf War’ ” against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, his favored Head-of-State and partner during the Iran/Iraq war. The previous July U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie had told Hussein that the U.S. had ‘ “no opinion on the Arab/Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait.” ’ Thus Hussein was led to invade Kuwait, giving Great Britain and the U. S. their ‘pretext’ for war. The tricking of Hussein was again a conspiracy, hidden from the U.S.
public, and the invasion of Kuwait killed thousands of people. The war against Iraq killed hundreds of thousands.

The 1990-91 slaughters in both Kuwait and Iraq had several economic and ‘geopolitical’ results. The bloodshed there let the U.S. build a permanent military Base in Saudi Arabia; let the price of a barrel of oil rise by $7; let U.S. and Saudi contractors (including companies owned by the Bechtel and bin Laden families) make tens of millions of dollars; and postponed a severe economic downturn in the U.S. for one year.

Under Democrat Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the 1990s continued to inflate speculative bubbles in Stock Markets at the same time as the U.S. military bombed and invaded whenever and wherever its directors chose.

After the Gulf War, the U.S. and Great Britain imposed no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. They kept Iraqi oil out of the world’s open market. They thereby made tens of billions of dollars for Western oil-companies.

They also insisted on U. N. sanctions that have kept food and medicines from Iraq. These sanctions have killed at least 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1999 Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright called these half-a-million dead children an ‘ “acceptable” ’ price to pay for destablizing the regime of Saddam Hussein. Reports on the ground say that the sanctions have in fact strengthened the Iraqi people’s loyalty to Hussein.

The U.S. bombed Iraq intensively in in 1993, 1994, and 1998-99. In the first 8 months of 1999 Anglo/American forces flew 10,000 sorties against Iraq.

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On August 30, 1999 U.S. Brigadier General William Looney was especially triumphant and frank in the Washington Post.

Brigadier General Looney minced no words about the United States’ dominance and ends in Iraq: ‘ "If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace.... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need." ‘

In 1993 the U.S invaded Somalia to protect interests of the Conoco Oil-Corporation there and to establish another miltiary Base beside the Red Sea and Middle East.

From 1993 onward the U.S. was also busy in Yugoslavia. It led the break-up or “ ‘Balkanization’ ” of Yugoslavia into small, ethnically divided nation-states (Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, ...). These lesser states abandoned nationalized industries and socialist protections for their people in return for International Monetary Fund and World Bank financing--that is, for the loan-sharking, imposed exports and ultimate deprivations that we’ve previously seen in Argentina, Brasil and elsewhere.

The break-up of Yugoslavia was promoted in Western media through horror-stories of Serbian massacares that later proved to be fraudulent. This break-up cost tens of thousands of people their homes or lives.

Oh, those boom-time ‘90s!
At the same time as the world’s “ ‘lone superpower’ “ was firing its

missiles and planting its feet wherever its leading Corporations chose--and opium and heroin were flowing through Pakistan and Kosovo--and cocaine and heroin were flowing through Colombia and Mexico--the speculative bubbles of industrialized economies and their Stock Markets grew more and more gigantic.

Up and up these bubbles blew, unbounded by facts and reason.

Biggest of them was the cybernetic “ ‘New Economy’ “ that was supposed to rocket along the Internet’s “Superbahn” (Vice-President Al Gore, Democrat, circa mid-1990s).

Never before, Bill Clinton crowed in 1996 to the G-7 nations (the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan--a group of Northern imperialists whose membership mirrors the Trilateral

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Commission’s supermajority) had capitalism and its prime nation- state, the U.S., been so prosperous.

Affluence was booming in an abstract bubble of greed, seeing solidity in sand, deluded by wishes and speed.

By 1999 companies trading on NASDAQ, the Stock Market that most serves the Internet economy and the telecommunications industry, were valued at an average ratio that exceeded 50 to 1 of price versus earnings.

The New York Stock Exchange’s average ratio was less inflated in that year--35 to 1--but still wildly above the 20-to-1 ratio of “pop” that’s considerd the upper limit of rationality.

Now, by middle of the year 2002, scandals and/or bankruptcies and/or colossal losses are rocking giant Corporations of the oil-and- gas (Enron, Reliant, Pacific Gas & Electric), telecommunications (WorldCom), accounting (Arthur Anderson), and Internet (AOL/ Time Warner) realms.

Here’s a quick survey of desperate principals and the ravaged, blasted landscape.

Reliant Resources now admits to overstating its 1999-2001 earnings by $7.8 billion, more than double the amount previosly admitted by WorldCom.

The commercial drug-company Merck tops Reliant with $14 billion in probably false earnings.

General Electric has joined General Motors among blue-chip Corporations that are widely supposed to have cooked their accounting books.

Fox News, that bastion of Corporate ideology, estimated on July 6, 2002, that $600 billion would be the total loss to the U.S economy this year due to accounting scandals.

Foreign capital is in full flight. ‘ “The international financial system is coming apart at the seams,” ’ says billionaire U.S. speculator George Soros. ‘ “Everybody’s going home. The Swiss banks are going home....” ’

The infusions of Federal capital into oil-based and Defense- contractor Corporations that followed “ ‘9/11’ ”--and the rapacious theft of tens of billions from programs such as Social Security under the G. W. Bush Administration--are short-term fixes, helpng only a rich few of Executives while they ultimately weaken an already tottering system.

According to the Washington Post and USA TODAY, $34 billion was drawn from Social Security in 2001, while the House

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Budget estimates that $160 billion will be drawn from Social Security in 2002.

As a whole, the total loss of taxpapers’ moneys from takes to Federal Departments and programs over the last three years will be $4.2 trillion dollars, Michael Ruppert estimates in a July 6, 2002 article on his From the Wilderness Website.

Please bear in mind again what I must remind myself: One trillion is one thousand times one billion.

No wonder that New York City’ employees’ pension-fund has lately lost $9 billion.

New York City employees’include those of the Fire and Police Departments.

The hugest pillars of the world’s financial Establishment-- names that this book’s scans of conspiracy and plunder have cited often--now are most overloaded with high-risk debts.

The Chase Bank acquired JP Morgan Company on the last day of the year 2000. We know the Chase Bank’s and JP Morgan’s connections to Rockefellers, Nazis, and to World War I and/or World War II.

JP Morgan Chase is now at risk for an amount 571 times greater than its assets. That is, JP Morgan Chase is at risk for $23.5 trillion--there’s that trillion again--in the “derivatives” it holds.

What are “derivatives” in the banking world? Simply stated, “derivatives” is the term for the means by which one institution derives or assumes responsibility for the debts of another entity in return for a substantial fee.

JP Morgan Chase has far outraced its peers in grabbing “derivatives.” and the fees attendant to "derivatives"--JP Morgan Chase has 51% of this game among U. S. banks.

How can we relate such an unfathomable amount as $23.5 trillion to the everyday, working world? Adam Hamilton’s Zeal Intelligence newsletter writes that ‘every man, woman, and child in America all working together can “only” manage to produce $10.4 trillion worth of goods and services every year. JPM’s derivatives book is almost two and a half times as large as the entire US economy!’

Other U. S.-based giants have put themselves in similar peril.

The largest U. S. bank, Citigroup, taken over by Traveler’s Insurance in 1998, shows $1 trillion in assets, against JP Morgan

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Chase’s $799 billion, but Citigroup holds $9 trillion at risk in derivatives.

Bank of America ranks third in assets, with $620 million, against its many-times-greater risk of $10 trillion in derivatives.

So: Even a modest, 10%-of-total “run” of demands for payment on the derivatives contracts that JP Morgan Chase, the Bank of America, and Citigroup now hold would wipe out all three. Their fall would take down other pillars of global capitalism in a Crash much more severe than that which precipitated the Great Depression.

H’mm! H’mm and double-H’mm!

How have working-class and middle-class people been so deprived and endangered?

Early in 2002 Waldon Bello, a Filipino sociologist, wrote on ‘Capitalist Crisis and Corporate Crime’ in the first issue of Global Outlook. (You can also find this piece on the globalresearch.ca site.)

Waldon Bello wrote about capitalist overproduction. He wrote that by 1997: ‘The world auto industry was selling just 74 per cent of the 70.1 million cars it built each year. So much investment took place in global telecommunications infrastructure that traffic carried over fiber-optic networks was reported to be only 2.5 per cent of capacity.... There was, as economist Gary Shilling put it, an "oversupply of nearly everything." ‘

Because businesses were actually losing money, Corporations and the Banks that served them had to engage in practices and devices that were ever more removed from real earnings and losses.

That is, some appear to have engaged in conspiracies.

Bello wrote: ‘With profit margins slim or nonexistent, survival increasingly meant greater and greater dependence on Wall Street financing, which increasingly came under the sway of hybrid investment-commercial bankers like JP Morgan Chase, Salomon Smith Barney, and Merrill Lynch, ... With little to show in terms of an attractive bottom line, some firms took the route of trading future promise for hard cash in the present, ... It was this seemingly innovative technique of trading on illusion that resulted in the stratospheric rise of share values in the high technology sector, ... ’

The dot.com crash of 2000-2001, the resounding bust of that “ ‘Boom’ ”, wiped out $4.6 trillion--trillion!--of mostly innocent investors’ wealth on Wall Street.

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Amid such ruin, surviving busineses further extended their illusions in order to seem viable.

Still, Bello wrote: ‘In the end, there was no getting around the fact that your balance sheet had to show an excess of revenue over costs to continue to attract investors. This was the simple but harsh reality that led to the proliferation of fancy accounting techniques such as that of Enron finance officer Andrew Fastow's "partnerships," which were mechanisms to keep major costs and liabilities off the balance sheet, as well as cruder methods like Worldcom's masking of current costs as capital expenditures.’

JP Morgan Chase was a consulting partner to both Enron and Worldcom.

On a single, recent day of trading, July 23, 2002, JP Morgan Chase lost 18.1% of its value.

Working-people both inside and outside the U.S. have suffered most under the systems of supranational Corporate Government over the past 30 years.

Imperial Capital!

Where and when capitalists have the powers of dictators or kings, they must naturally treat the masses under them as peasants to be worked, duped and robbed.

Since 1973 real wages as a whole for U. S. manufacturing workers have declined by increasing percentages. Their drop fell more in the 1990s with the stepped-up relocation of manufacturing by U.S.- based Corporations to “off-shore” plants. At least 800,000 such U.S. jobs were lost to this or that Free Trade Agreement in the past decade.

Workers elsewhere have been even more misled and abused.

Millions have joined assembly-lines in off-shore factories, earning as little as $2 per 12-hour shift, their ages as young as 8, but they’ve gained nothing in economic standing at the same time as they’ve lost a great deal of environmental well-being and indigenous cohesion within their societies.

On every continent and in every nation, workers’ earnings against their cost-of-living has stagnated or receded.

Economic growth has especially fallen in nations of the Southern Hemisphere, making them even more needful of cash from the IMF and World Bank and private institutions of the North. Thus they’re more vulnerable to austerity-measures and demands-for-exports. Such ‘disparity’ of exchange means less bread, health-care,

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education, and even water for most of the world’s people. Such are the fruits of the methods of ‘transcendant’ exploitation and speculation, theft and degradation, that we reviewed earlier.

And yet: Capitalism is not working even for its most essential and pillarlike institutions.

Capitalists based in the U.S. now enjoy unprecedented dominance. They have the ‘military and economic supremacy’ that was sought just before the start of World War II. David Rockefeller has his ‘free market forces able to transcend national boundaries’ as never before. The United States has the ‘control’ that the faithful Zbignew Brzezinski desired in his The Grand Chessboard.

And yet: Their present and the present of the whole of humanity is an unprecedented, perilous mess.

On July 7, 2002 the Observer newspaper in London, England wrote that a World Wildlife Fund study ‘warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life.’

Mark Townsend and Jason Burke wrote about the WWF report: ‘Earth's population will be forced to colonize two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, ... ’

The Observer continued: ‘The report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades.’

Between 1970 and 2002 the Earth's forest cover has shrunk by about 12 per cent, biodiversity in the world’s Oceans by 1/3, and freshwater ecosystems by more than 55 per cent.

The United States leads in consumption and damage. ‘The WWF report shames the US for placing the greatest pressure on the environment. It found the average US resident consumes almost double the resources as that of a UK citizen and more than 24 times that of some Africans.’

The realization penned by one of the comic-strip artists with whom I laughed most as a boy in the 1950s, Walt Kelly in his Eisenhower- era ‘Pogo’, is widely quoted now: ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’

And yet: We can choose our fates even under Snopesian criminals (' "Idjits" ', William Faulkner called these characters of his) such as some Rockefellers and Bushes.

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