Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 36

World War One - The Illusion of U.S. Neutrality

“Our firm had never for one moment been neutral; we didn’t know how to be.” —J. P. Morgan senior partner Thomas Lamont
After urging Americans to be “neutral in thought and deed,”the Wilson Administration extended the Allies unlimited credit, cured the 1913 depression on the strength of massive European war orders, and initiated a huge anti-German military “preparedness” campaign dedicated to the proposition that compromise equaled surrender. When Germany responded with unrestricted submarine warfare to bring Britain to its knees before the U.S. could enter the war directly, Washington reacted with the exaggerated outrage of false innocence aggrieved.  Quick to denounce Berlin for inevitable American losses incurred shipping supplies through a war zone, the U.S. failed to demonstrate a similar indignation at British-imposed losses. When the British cabinet chose to disregard the 1909 Declaration of London, which would have permitted U.S. ships to dock both at German ports and neutral ports like Rotterdam and Genoa, Washington failed to protest. When the British Navy shut off American trade with the Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary) by imposing a continental blockade—a violation of international law—Washington again said nothing. Then when U.S. trade with the Allies quite naturally soared, entering the war loomed as the only way to protect American investments threatened by German victory. In fact, the month Wilson declared war (April 1917), major U.S. bankers, in addition to half a million individual investors, had a stake of $2.3 billion in notes and bonds which stood to become worthless if the Allies collapsed. Several weeks earlier Ambassador Walter Hines Page had cabled the State Department from London, warning of impending economic disaster if the U.S. continued to stay out of the war: “The inquiries which I have made here...disclose an international situation which is most alarming to the financial and industrial outlook of the United States.” A danger existed, he said, that “Franco-American and Anglo-American exchange will be greatly disturbed; the inevitable consequence will be that orders by all the Allied Governments will be reduced to the lowest possible amount and that trans-Atlantic trade will practically come to an end.” Page foresaw “a panic in the United States” and found it “not improbable” that “maintaining our present preeminent trade position” would require “declaring war on Germany.” In the fiscal year 1914 American exports had exceeded imports by $436 million. Three years later war orders had raised the differential to $3.6 billion, an eight-fold increase. But most dramatic was the staggering $22.6 billion the U.S. federal government spent between its declaration of war in April 1917 and the Armistice in November 1918, an expenditure three times larger than what Washington had spent in the entire first century of its national existence combined. Never before had the U.S. economy experienced such an expansion of industry, trade, and agriculture. This extraordinary demand more than compensated for the loss of trade with the Central Powers, even taking into account losses inflicted by German submarines. With American industrial facilities growing exponentially the U.S. rapidly became a major world power and the unchallenged leader of the American hemisphere. Billions of dollars of liquidated foreign holdings helped transform the U.S. from a debtor to a creditor nation and New York became co-equal with London as the financial center of the world. Accompanying these sweeping economic and political developments were conflicts on the high seas that steadily drew the U.S. towards war. To prevent delivery of items useful to the German war effort, the British insisted on searching neutral vessels for contraband in Allied ports. This reduced American trade with the Central Powers from $169 million in 1914 to $1 million in 1916. Though the State Department made formal protests to London about the interference, it issued no ultimatum when nothing came of them. Colonel House told German Ambassador Count Johann von Bernstorff that reprisals were impossible because “American commerce was so completely tied up with the interests of the Entente.” What Congressman H. C. Peterson aptly termed the “blood soaked boom” was not to be derailed. Germany countered the British blockade with a U-boat campaign, a new weapon that delivered sudden death from the invisible ocean depths. President Wilson warned he would hold Berlin to “strict accountability” if U.S. passengers were harmed, without specifying the consequences he had in mind. The Germans took the position that they would call off the submarines only if Britain ended its blockade. Wilson and the British held that the surface blockades were legal and proper because they only affected property, whereas submarine attacks were illegal and barbarous because they cost lives. This overlooked the fact that much of the property involved in U.S.-Allied trade was munitions.In view of the British domination of the seas that brought this situation about, Washington basically had three options once war broke out. It could embargo all trade with Europe, suffering a reduction in American profits. It could convoy ships through the British blockade with men-of-war, thus maintaining its economic independence but forcing a showdown with the British that might have brought the U.S. into the war right at the start. Finally, it could foster one-sided trade with the Allies, earning fat profits but risking war with the Central Powers. This was the course chosen.For all its indignation over German “barbarism,” U.S. losses from submarine attacks were actually slight. From 1915 until Washington entered the war two years later, only one American ship, the Gulflight, suffered any deaths as a result of a German attack, while some 200 Americans died traveling on Allied ships. One-hundred-and-twenty-eight Americans perished in the Lusitania sinking in May 1915, which was a British liner carrying 4200 cases of U.S. rifle cartridges, clearly contraband of war. After Wilson demanded the Germans pledge never to attack another passenger liner, Berlin apologized and agreed to pay an indemnity.War was temporarily averted, but after the Germans caused several American deaths by torpedoing the French Sussex the following April, Wilson threatened to break off relations with Berlin unless Germany suspended unrestricted submarine warfare. Berlin reluctantly agreed, but in achieving this small triumph Wilson had effectively surrendered the initiative. As soon as Germany decided technical American neutrality was less important than the advantages of all-out submarine war, the U.S. would be forced to honor its threat. In February 1917, calculating that a full-scale U-boat campaign would bring Britain to its knees before U.S. participation in the war could prove decisive, Germany announced a resumption of submarine war against belligerent and neutral vessels alike. Feeling its national honor at stake, Washington declared war two months later.The Allied Blockade of the Central PowersThe deaths from starvation and disease resulting from the Allied blockade of the Central Powers vastly exceeded the lives lost due to German submarine attacks. By 1916 the physical effects of malnutrition stemming from the Allied naval blockade were painfully apparent. Germany was reeling from devastating illness, including tuberculosis, rickets, influenza, dysentery, scurvy, keratomalacia (ulceration of the eye), and hunger edema. An incident related by Associated Press correspondent George Schreiner makes this dramatically plain. Traveling in late 1916 on a Berlin streetcar, Schreiner encountered a woman of Central Europe’s old nobility who complained of the unaccustomed hardships of being forced to use the streetcars. Schreiner replied sympathetically that street-car travel was indeed a trial because the cars were always overcrowded. “It is not that,” responded the woman, “it is the smell.” Schreiner inquired, “Of the unwashed multitude?” She answered, “Yes! And -.” “And, madame?” “Something else,” said the woman, with some embarassment. “I take it that you refer to the odor that comes from underfed bodies,”Schreiner remarked. “Precisely,” assented the noblewoman, who proceeded to say that she first observed the odor only recently and that, “The smell was new to me.” “Remind you perhaps,” asked Schreiner, “of the faint odor of a cadaver far off?” The light of total understanding came into the woman’s eyes. “Exactly, that is it...How do you account for it?” Schreiner explained, “Malnutrition! The waste of tissue due to that is a process not wholly dissimilar to the dissolution which sets in at death.” Hunger proved especially cruel to German children, whose skeletal systems were ravaged by rickets. Their bones failed to ossify, their teeth fell out, their jawbones broke, their joints became so sore that they could only walk with great difficulty. Allied officials visiting postwar Germany found, along with rickets, rampant anemia, listlessness, poor muscular tone, sunken eyes, and emaciation. As many as 20% of children enrolling in school in the spring of 1919 were sent home as unfit. Thus, while Americans were being terrified by wartime propaganda alleging Germany was bent on world domination, the German reality was of stunted children with skinny and rickety limbs, sunken and listless eyes, and bloated stomachs—crying out to malnourished parents for nonexistent food. By war’s end the German Health Office calculated that the blockade had caused 763,000 deaths, not including 150,000 who died from Spanish influenza, but might not have had they been spared four years of increasingly severe malnutrition. One can only wonder how many survivors of this terrifying ordeal grew up to embrace Adolf Hitler’s fascist state.The Propaganda WarTo have any hope of victory Britain had to get the U.S. into the war. Convinced that intellectuals were the most gullible members of the American population, British propagandists targeted the liberal intelligentsia, establishing a War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House that produced books and pamphlets to mold its thought. They steadfastly cultivated the perception that Berlin was a congenitally evil aggressor guilty of staggering atrocities under the leadership of the wicked Kaiser, who was described as the “Beast of Berlin.” While British and French occupations of a host of neutral countries were severely downplayed, the German invasion of Belgium was depicted as an unprecedented criminal act. Some 260,000 influential citizens, in addition to newspapers, YMCA’s, libraries, universities, and clubs, were deluged with maps, pictures, diagrams, posters, cartoons, and other war propaganda designed to wed the Americans to the Allied cause. Scores of British luminaries toured the U.S. giving lectures on the war, including Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. The propaganda blitz paid off. Working with the Committee on Public Information (The Creel Commission), liberals like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays took up the British cause, while the New Republic and other liberal journals argued that the U.S. was an enlightened state fighting history’s first war over principles and values rather than spoils and tribute. When the U.S. joined the war in 1917, its participation in the most awesome slaughter in human history was passed off as a selfless “war to end all wars.”To whet the appetite for German blood, promoters of Liberty loan drives flooded the country with stories of mutilated Belgian children and babies with severed hands. The fact that babies with their hands cut off would not have lived more than a few minutes without a large supply of doctors to tie off the arteries, apply dressings, and deal with shock, did not occur to the hysterics who took such reports seriously. At one point Clarence Darrow, who supported the war but became suspicious of atrocity propaganda, offered a $100 reward to anyone who could bring him one of the “mutilated Belgian children” said to be living in Chicago. He never had to pay off. An immense success, the Wilson Administration’s war crusade took the largely pacifist American people and transformed them virtually overnight into mobs of raving jingoist fanatics. Among those impressed by the new propaganda triumph was an Austrian corporal who promised that the Germans would use the new technique of public relations to mount a better propaganda showing in the next war. It was one of the few times he ever kept his word.VersaillesOnly after the war did President Wilson admit that high ideals were not behind it: “The real reason that the war we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and the reasons why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the commercial advantage of them. The seed of the jealousy, the seed of the deep-seated hatred was hot, successful commercial and industrial rivalry.” When the U.S. entered the war Wilson knew that the secret diplomacy he claimed to abhor had arranged for a redivision of Empires as a reward for the victorious powers. The originally secret treaties were syndicated in nine newspapers in addition to the Evening Post and were reprinted in pamphlet form in many cities by 1917. Two copies of the treaties were mailed to every Senator and Congressman and two to the White House. And in the summer of that year Lord Balfour complied with Colonel House’s request that copies of the treaties be sent to Washington so the U.S. would know what it was fighting for. So while Wilson piously declaimed his undying support for self-determination for all, the treaties and the territorial spoils they called for became the basis of the Versailles Treaty. In other words, with millions dead and Europe ruined, the Big Powers resumed arranging patent pools, cartels, trusts, and power networks, the very structures that had just drenched the continent in blood. The staggering loss of life and the legions of mutilated and maimed were forgotten in strains of dance music, a clatter of tea cups, “points” and “principles” of Eternal Peace mediated by rival empires forever at each other’s throats. Wilson had promised a “peace between equals.” But at Versailles he and the Allies imposed a harshly unjust peace, forcing the defeated Germans to humiliate themselves by admitting to sole responsibility for the war. Rational territorial settlement, disarmament, the League of Nations, and the working out of permanent peace took a back seat to age-old vengeance. The Germans, who had agreed to an armistice based on the idealism of President Wilson’s 14 Points, were quickly disabused of their illusions. While champagne flowed freely in Paris, the Allied blockade imposed starvation on millions of Central Europeans well beyond the armistice. Hunger was the weapon of choice to force the Germans to sign any peace treaty the Allies dictated. The treaty might have been even harsher than it was had it not been for the shadow of Lenin and the Bolsheviks hanging heavily over the negotiations. But with hunger, chaos, and misery reigning throughout Central Europe, Allied diplomats worried that Bolshevism might well sweep to the Rhine. In fact, Communist governments did briefly take power in Hungary and Bavaria, which seceded from the Reich for three weeks in April 1919. In a letter home liberal journalist Oswald Garrison Villard wrote that the architects of Versailles were making a mockery of democratic ideals: “It is enough to make an anarchist out of anybody to see the world in such hands. The calm way they go on carving up Europe without consulting the Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, etc., is beyond words. No one knows where it will end. The Poles and Czechoslovaks, Italians, and others have about as much idea of making this a better world and ending war as the cows in New Jersey.”Aggravating his distress were the hospitals of Dresden and Berlin, where he found “many children with the swollen limbs and bellies of famine sufferers. Children six and seven years of age were the size of normal children four or five.” The Big Four (UK, US, France, and Italy) acted on the premise that they and they alone had the right to establish the terms of peace, kill millions of Germans, rob them of their territory, steal half their coal supply and three-fourths of their iron ore, annex their colonies and seize their great steamships, meanwhile making free use of German railways and exercising unlimited and perpetual rights to dispose of German industrial production. They had the right to do all this, they felt, without suffering any threat of retaliation for their acts. Meanwhile, Germany was prepared to agree to a Peace Treaty calling for a League of Nations, cession of Alsace-Lorraine and all German colonies, surrender of the German fleet, reduction of the army to a domestic police force, demilitarization of the Rhine, and indemnities for war damages to France and Belgium. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing said that such a treaty could have been drafted in 24 hours. After that, the blockades could have been terminated and normal life reestablished. But such was not to be.In May, 1919, nine attaches of the American Peace Commission resigned en masse to protest the punitive Peace Conference that emerged instead. Among them was William C. Bullitt, who stated in his resignation letter to President Wilson: “I am one of the millions who trusted implicitly in your leadership and believed you would take nothing less than ‘a permanent peace based on unselfish, unbiased justice.’ But the government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections, and dismemberments—a new century of war...Unjust decisions regarding Shantung, Tyrol, Thrace, Hungary, East Prussia, Danzig, and the Saar Valley and abandonment of the principle of freedom of the seas make new international conflicts certain.”Wilson could not invoke the excuse that he was working within constraints, for he had the whip hand. In France, he had the freshest, best-equipped, and the only expanding army. He had all the money left in the world and control over a majority of the world’s food supply. Without his approval the Allies were helpless. Had he threatened to negotiate a separate treaty with Germany and withdraw the U.S. Army without loaning Europe a penny more, there is little the Allied leaders could have done but concede to any peace terms Wilson felt were appropriate.
For a compilation of the disaster, see below.




1914: Washington “Neutrality”A Serbian hit man guns down the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, plunging "civilized" Europe into total war.The day the disaster headlines leap off American breakfast tables the British Navy hauls up the German cables and cuts them. The next day the U.S. press lacks even a single Berlin or Vienna date-line. The American people are to learn nothing of the Central Powers’ views of the war for over a year, and will not be told that President Wilson has a similar outlook until after the bloody cataclysm is all over. British censors, aspiring to control the thought of the entire world, prudently identify intellectuals as the most gullible sector of the population and target propaganda at the American intelligentsia. At the same time, U.S. correspondents are denied access to the Allied front, forcing leading U.S. papers to rely on the British press. The starvation imposed on the Central Powers by the British Naval blockade is deemed unfit for American ears.The U.S. Legation at Brussels hears little more than fevered tales of German savagery running amok, of nuns raped, and women, children, and old men coldly shot. These stories are swallowed whole and dutifully transmitted to the American public.President Wilson urges Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action,” but stigmatizes German-American immigrants as “hyphenated-Americans,” a thinly veiled euphemism for Kaiser loyalists. Immigrants favoring the Allies he praises as “patriotic.”In discussions with an officer of the National City Bank, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lansing learns of Wall Street’s need to extend short-term credits to European governments so they can buy U.S. supplies. Lansing wins Wilson’s agreement to “look the other way” at credit accommodations facilitating the Anglo-French war effort. Thus is the president’s policy calling for a “true spirit of neutrality”replaced by the more expedient “strict legality.” While Germany is shut out of the U.S. arms market, American munition stocks boom on the strength of Allied war orders. The blood of German youth lifts the U.S. out of recession.
1914: Washington Germans 100% Evil, Allies 100% InnocentThe fact that European states emerged from centuries of slaughter is quickly dismissed as a relevant context for interpreting the present war. Prussian militarism and the undemocratic intrigues of the autocracies of Central Europe are assigned all the blame. The U.S. press frames the issue as a wanton Austrian attack on “little Serbia,” and when Germany does not restrain Serbia the air is rife with accusations that the Kaiser has forced war on peace-loving nations. The New York Times boldly calls for “the crushing out of the imperial idea, the end, once for all time, in those three empires [Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Germany] of the absolute rule and the substitution for all powerful sovereigns and their titled advisers of an executive with power to carry out only the will of the people.” The Times’ editors say nothing of the Allies’ blood-soaked imperial idea, represented by the Czar and the Anglo-French alliance.The American labor movement remains skeptical of this call from on high for Europe’s working-classes to exterminate each other with weapons produced by modern industry.
1914: Paris Hun Atrocities Fictitious, U.S. Reporters Say“In spirit fairness we unite in declaring German atrocities groundless as far as we were able to observe. After spending two weeks with German army accompanying troops upward hundred miles we unable report single instance unprovoked reprisal. Also unable confirm rumors mistreatment prisoners or non-combatants.... Numerous investigated rumors proved groundless... Discipline German soldiers excellent as observed. No drunkenness. To truth these statements we pledge professional personal word.”—U.S. correspondents permitted by the Germans to tour the Belgian front, cable to Associated Press, September 1914



1915: New York City The New York Times Hails Peaceful War Trade “The promise of the new year is that we shall accomplish a peaceful penetration of the world’s markets to an extent we have never dreamed of. What others have shed blood to obtain through politics and force we shall attain while bestowing our benevolence...It is a new translation of the old beatitude, revised: ‘Blessed are the keepers of the peace for prosperity shall be within their homes and palaces.’”

"I Can't Believe Trump Has ANY Support!" ------- collective sentiment of breathless liberals

As long as the Democratic Party remains committed to the multiplication of victim minorities at the expense of the white working class, Trump has a built-in base of substantial support, which he can reach directly through Twitter ... AND he doesn't need anything like a majority vote to win in the electoral college ... If the strategy is to force the electorate to eat a political shit-sandwich, don't be surprised if voters vomit up something worse ... .

“How in heck did Armistice Day become Veterans Day?

          Skip Oliver, Ch 39  

“How in heck did Armistice Day become Veterans Day? Established by Congress in 1926 to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations…” 

Bring Back Armistice Day and Honor the Real Heroes

By Arnold Oliver

How in heck did Armistice Day become Veterans Day? Established by Congress in 1926 to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations, (and later) a day dedicated to the cause of world peace,” Armistice Day was widely recognized for almost 30 years. As part of that, many churches rang their bells on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – the hour in 1918 that the guns fell silent on the Western Front by which time 16 million had died in the horror of World War I.

To be blunt about it, in 1954 Armistice Day was hijacked by a militaristic US congress and re-named Veterans Day. Today few Americans understand the original purpose of Armistice Day, or even remember it. The message of peace seeking has been all but erased. Worst of all, Veterans Day has devolved into a hyper-nationalistic quasi-religious celebration of war and the putatively valiant warriors who wage it. We no longer have a national day to recognize or reflect upon international peace.

And the identification of warriors as heroes is pretty shaky too. If you are a veteran, and honest about it, you will admit that most of what goes on during wartime is decidedly unheroic, and actual heroes in war are very few and far between.

I have to tell you that when I was in Vietnam, I was no hero, and I did not witness a single act of heroism during the year I spent there, first as a U.S. Army private and then as a sergeant. Yes, there was heroism in the Vietnam War. On both sides of the conflict there were notable acts of self-sacrifice and bravery. Troops in my unit wondered how the North Vietnamese troops could persevere for years in the face of daunting U.S. firepower. U.S. medical corpsmen performed incredible acts of valor rescuing the wounded under fire.

But I also witnessed a considerable amount of bad behavior, some of it my own. Among US troops racism against any and all Vietnamese was endemic. There were countless incidents of disrespect and abuse of Vietnamese civilians, and a large number of truly awful war crimes. Most unheroic of all were the U.S. military and civilian leaders who planned, orchestrated, and profited greatly from that utterly avoidable war. I should have taken action to resist the war while still on active duty, but I did not.

The cold truth is that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam had nothing to do with protecting American peace and freedom. On the contrary, the Vietnam War was fought to forestall Vietnamese independence, not defend it; it bitterly divided the American people.

Unfortunately, Vietnam wasn’t an isolated example of an unjust conflict. Many American wars — including the 1846 Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Iraq War (this list is by no means exhaustive) — were waged under false pretexts against countries that didn’t threaten the United States. It’s hard to see how, if a war is unjust, it can be heroic to wage it.

But if the vast majority of wars are not fought for noble reasons, and few soldiers are heroic, have there been any actual heroes out there defending peace and freedom? And if so, who are they? Well, there are many, from Jesus down to the present. I’d put Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the list along with many Quakers and Mennonites. And don’t forget General Smedley Butler, who wrote that “War is a Racket”.

In Vietnam, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson stopped the My Lai massacre from being even worse.

Another candidate is former U.S. Army specialist Josh Stieber who sent this message to the people of Iraq: “Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.” We were honored to be able to host Josh in our home as he walked across the US on a mission of peace while giving away the money he had earned in the military as partial atonement for his role in a thoroughly unjust war.

And how about Chelsea Manning who spent seven years behind bars for exposing ugly truths about the Iraq war, and the Plowshares Seven now in the news? The real heroes are those who resist war and militarism, often at great personal cost.

Because militarism has been around for such a long time, at least since Gilgamesh came up with his protection racket in Sumeria going on 5,000 years ago, people argue that it will always be with us.

But many also thought that slavery and the subjugation of women would last forever, and they’re being proven wrong. We understand that while militarism will not disappear overnight, disappear it must if we are to avoid economic as well as moral bankruptcy – not to mention the extinction of our species.

As Civil War General W.T. Sherman said at West Point, “I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of war.” We’re with you, bro.

This year on November 11th, Veterans For Peace will bring back the original Armistice Day traditions. Join them and let those bells ring out.
~~~~~~~~~

Arnold “Skip” Oliver is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. A Vietnam veteran, he belongs to Veterans For Peace, and lives in Sandusky.  He can be reached at soliver@heidelberg.edu.

The Ruling Class, Its “Deep State” Servants, And Us

The Ruling Class, Its “Deep State” Servants, And Us


The present mind management program obsessingly distracting us with impeachment bulletins by the micro second is part of the consciousness controlling dictatorship which has kept the majority of Americans focused on our feet while our heads are filled with propaganda, what some ruling class servants called “tittytainment”, and anything but the most serious problems of a system decomposing faster than ever and threatening to come down on all our heads while we scrupulously study our feet.
The election of Trump was never supposed to happen and is another sign of the ruling powers slowly losing control but desperately trying to maintain it as, at present, depicting the rich and outspoken pinhead as an enemy of all America holds sacred – war, poverty, racism etc – by blaming him for all America holds sacrilegious – war, poverty, racism etc. The confusion, over issues like incredible economic inequality and the destruction of the environment given the brand name “climate change”, is greatest at a time when information sources should be most clear but are creating a fog of misinformation, propaganda, disinformation and near idiocy. A people rallied in the recent past to support the slaughter of millions of human beings all over the world in defense of alleged threats to our right to market guns, pets, fossil fuel and children have every right to be confused.
While the inequalities of a system with less and less rich people holding more and more scandalous amounts of wealth while great numbers in the former affluent world sink to middle class status, former middles descend to working class and the overwhelming majority of workers the world over sink faster and faster into poverty, debt and despair become more obvious even to those kept obsessed with celebrity trivia and mindless news reporting. The damage wreaked upon humanity and the nature on which we survive and evolve becomes more deadly and dangerous as the rich, arrogant and seemingly uncontrollable outspoken twit tweeting from Washington DC reaches more people than any other president has and in the process of sharing his dullard’s view of the world also speaks blatant truths never before uttered by anyone that high in the staff of our ruler’s highly paid servant class. And we must understand that the tiny group of people whose wealth is beyond that of all past tyrants, royals, dictators and upper class hooligans put together are still grasping to maintain their control of global capitalism by destroying adversaries whether foreign or local, and doing so by any means necessary. Trump is lucky to only face a ridiculous impeachment circus, while so much of the world including America faces bloody wars and threats to survival beyond anything previously experienced or imagined.
While 20th century Americans were conditioned by brain dead conservative reactionaries to look under the bed every night lest evil degenerate Russian communists hid there waiting to steal the family savings and send us all to slave labor camps, the present generation has advanced to being mind molested by brain dead liberal-progressives into fearing sneaky Russian degenerate capitalists hiding under our sacred voting booths and meddling in our most holy democracy in which every single president and most of congress has been bought and paid for by the minority rich, and never voted for by more than a minority of workers, both mental and manual. Never in our history has any president been elected by a majority of our electorate, and that is part of the ruling power’s control of this fake democracy which relies on a class of relative “house Negros” as in slavery, to keep order and block out reality. Class society was introduced to the slaves when the house negroes, who lived much better lives than the field negroes, were used by the masters, time and again, to quell uprisings and basically calm down the cries at injustice by performing as the upper class of workers does now. Though some in the house occasionally led rebellions against the master, most, overwhelmingly, did what most Americans do, whatever their skin tone, religion, sexual preference or taste in breakfast cereals; They went along to get along and maintained slavery like republicrats and demublicans now maintain capitalism, often supporting lesser evils in sincere hopes of making life better for all but without threatening their own membership in the more comfortable upper-servant class in the process.
Our rulers employ what has come to be called a “deep state” apparatus, commonly labeled an intelligence community though that involves a rape of our language. They were once seen, by the people warned about Russian commies under the bed, as being evil practitioners of all that was un-American, but in the transition from right wing brain death to what passes for left wing malignant tumors between the ears, this community is treated heroically as it performs its duty in turning against a president and creating a case for a kangaroo court to find him guilty of something, anything, to get him out of the CEO position before he bankrupts the company. The problem for America is the company, not the CEO, but our mind managers and un-intelligence community are working overtime to misguide, mislead, confuse and scapegoat one or another individual villain, while also dividing and conquering us by placing us into minority identity groups that guarantee no majority democracy possible. Despite great odds against us, we are slowly learning and showing signs of rejecting not only the lies of individual class servants to the rich rulers, but the system that places them into anti-democratic power itself.
Good people are manipulated into believing a small mob of bikers with swastika tattoos, most of them more alienated than hordes able to afford therapy, are somehow a greater menace than a tiny mob in limousines and private jets moving around the world from Wall street to Berlin to London, buying and selling nations, governments and in the process destroying people, cultures and humanity. But many among the people are learning that the alienation experienced by increasing numbers of suffering people is not due to one or another identity group reducible to a skin tone, religion or ethnicity but rather to the confiscation of wealth created by humanity into the banks and financial institutions somehow owned by special inheritors and not the working masses who created that wealth. We may not all come to our senses at the same moment, but that time is drawing near when we must. A good beginning is to look through and past this idiotic vendetta against a rich fool who represents much that is rotten about America, but also quite a bit that is good. That’s why they want him out. It has nothing to do with any constitution, especially the corrupt debased document that they want to use to further a deranged system that makes it legal and constitutional to reduce more than half a million Americans to living in the street, more than 13 million American children to living in poverty, while it recklessly squanders our wealth on war, misery and depravity. Our system and the constitution that rationalizes its social degeneracy are what must be changed, not simply one or another hack sitting in the CEO chair. And if we don’t elect a social democrat like Bernie in 2020 there may be little chance of ending the power of our ruling class, its deep state hirelings and their house servants, and less chance for all of us. At a time when our leadership is making religious fanatics, 911 truthers and area 51 believers seem like cutting edge intellectuals, we need to look beyond what they tell us and trust our own senses before having corporate media completely cloud our capabilities to think, let alone act. The problem is not the capitalist Trump. The problem is capitalism.

Deficits Aren't Bad, Capitalism Is

Earlier this week CNN announced that the federal budget deficit was nearly a trillion dollars a year, an all-time record. Puzzlement was expressed at the relative lack of public concern about this alarming matter.

There is no need for puzzlement. Deficits are fine if they are incurred to improve our economic position over time. Virtually everyone goes into debt, for example, to purchase a house rather than pay rent in an apartment forever, and this is only sensible. But going into debt to rich bankers who make profits by selling worthless paper is a prescription for disaster. And we should take notice that the corporate media only considers the federal deficit a problem when there's a chance government spending may benefit ordinary people. God forbid! But when we're going into massive debt to benefit the already obscenely wealthy, like right now, our media lapdogs are as silent as the proverbial lamb.

We give the rich our working lives, and they give us their gargantuan debts. That's teamwork under capitalism.

Bulletin From Capital Central

Fed to resume asset purchases to prevent a cash crunch ( Financial Times)


Cash? Don't they mean Credit? ( Legalienate )

How to Re-Elect Trump and/or Start a Civil War

How to Re-Elect Trump and/or Start a Civil War
 


The moment this rich, arrogant, egotistical fool – meaning he’s over qualified for the job – moved into the white house, the ruling class began plans to get rid of him. Much too blatantly indicative of what America really is to possibly be allowed to serve as chief executive, they supported impeachment rather than assassination, since even in their nearly comatose mental condition the rulers saw the possibilities of murders of Americans by Americans taking on far more massive than usual numbers if Trump were offed that way. And their employees in the democratic wing of the party of capital have not only served their owner-master but tried to go beyond, in the best house Negro fashion of past slaves with “We’ll get him for you, boss man, just watch us!” servitude. And after the incredible fiasco of trying to get him on a spy rap for colluding with Putin, we now have an alleged relationship of traitorous meaning with a Ukrainian leader, with all manner of alleged-liberal pseudo-progressive excitable bed wetting threatening DC and its suburbs with flooding dangers not attributable to climate change.
Trump is supposed to have urged the Ukraines to investigate Joe Biden, his son, his wife, or some other members of his family in this fantasy that threatens to make 911 truthers look like masters of logic. Somehow, Trump anticipated long before any votes were cast that Biden would be his opponent in 2020 – wow, what a great democracy the party nurtures with the presidential pinhead already knowing the outcome of the fierce, passionate, dedicated and sacred democratic process by which all candidates are nominated! – and so urged the Ukrainians to destroy his candidacy, as only they can. I mean hey, aren’t Americans aware of the power of that nation right on Russia’s borders and many of whose people speak Russian and stuff like that? Anyone not aware of the overwhelming power over our great democracy enjoyed by Russian speaking truck drivers and housewives in the Ukraine has probably never studied political science in an American college and then become an advisor to Wall street, Madison avenue, and the Cartoon Channel.
So the party faithful previously playing it cool when urged to move for impeachment by applying some small bit of logic, like; you want the other schmuck to be president? , have now come out from under their political beds and joined the chorus calling for an investigation of the lack of evidence for the charge of alleging traitorous treasonous really bad behavior, again, just like with Russians before and now with Ukrainians, and the rest of the world collapses in laughter at the crumbling of what passes for leadership in America while also cringing in fear of what our empire in deterioration might spell for the future of the planet, let alone Americans. Our citizens chained to their jobs, traffic and TV sets with little time or energy to notice the first vanishing to part time if at all, the second getting worse by the minute with more gig workers speeding about to more part time gigs offering lower pay and no benefits, and the TV sets gifting them with momentary escape into the dumbest reality shows and sitcoms to promote shopping for more useless commodities only affordable to a population dining on steak and salmon on a rice and beans budget with plastic payments nearing 900 billion and panhandlers begging for visa, amex, discover and master cards rather than money. Money? What the hell is that? Just charge it and move on, like the government does to support the military industrial complex, the Israeli lobby’s desires, and our minority billionaire owners, their millionaire servants, and global capital. Is this a great democracy or what?
Meanwhile, humanity’s most Important Identity Group, that ruling class more recently dubbed a Deep State by newer critics, has arranged a market approach to the climate crisis that urges newer and cleaner profiteering to save the planet from older and dirtier profiteering. And in future all wars will be fought by a gender, ethnic and philosophically diverse military wearing white gloves while committing mass murder. Yay. But wait. More attention is being paid the Climate Change Crisis while global capital, its cause, still remains mostly unquestioned as humanity is falsely held responsible for creation of the problem while the RC/DS works to suppresses its solution – democracy - wherever and whenever it rears its dangerous head.
As in every other case of a problem needing solution, including this deemed the most serious ever, there must be private profits available to truly solve it with even children entrusted to lead as a market force to upbraid their elders and innocently promote greater investment – private, of course - in the necessary transformation that will replace some fossil fuel with more renewable energy but use that energy to create more mostly useless products for consumption in the private profit creating market which is the bottom line factor in creation of the problem. This while Trump leads the forces of fundamentalist capital against the social democratic capital favoring the sanitized version of poverty and war. But there is now a small but growing group of actual socialists who need to move quickly and end the façade of cosmetic change that works to return to a dead past instead of creating a future of democracy that not only extends to politics but the economics at their foundation.
While we are manipulated to support laws that impeach individuals and leave a system intact, or more commonly charge individuals with something called hate crimes, we are kept oblivious to a global economy that is one horrendous hate crime, a malevolent social disease that threatens the future of all humanity. The borrowing of more artificially inflated money that is then used to purchase goods and services of materially deflated value can only continue us on the path towards a fate much worse than financial failure. 

Americans reduced to identity-by-hyphenation need to focus on what follows the hyphen with far more intensity than what precedes it. Divide and conquer politics distract us from understanding the minority group at the commanding heights of the political economy, the one which is being bailed out by all the minorities which compose an unrepresented majority. The now at least partly multicultural minority at the top, thanks to affirmative action, should demand all our attention. They amount to a gang of political servants to capital who wear sombreros while eating lasagna at a gay synagogue in Harlem. And rest assured, they will join in this impeachment fiasco which could lead to an even worse crisis than the dangerous one we already experience.
We need to become a democratic majority to insure our survival, not as cultural minorities, hyphenated ethnicities or racist subdivisions, but as members of the only scientifically verifiable identity group in which we all hold membership: The human race.

Penis Story Collapses In Flaccid Hearsay

Ann Coulter
September 18, 2019
 
If I can produce someone who saw John Roberts’ penis in college, can we get the Obamacare opinion overturned?

As all MSNBC viewers are well aware, last Sunday’s edition of The New York Times ran an excerpt of the book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, which revives Debbie Ramirez's accusations against the Supreme Court nominee.

Quick reminder: This is NOT the Kavanaugh accuser with two front doors. It is NOT the Kavanaugh accuser whose own father warned that she had psychological problems.

This is the one who didn’t remember what Kavanaugh did to her for more than 30 years, until a few lefty friends helpfully reminded her that they’d heard something about it from a guy, who heard it from a guy, whereupon she spent six days “assessing her memories” during the nomination hearings -- and darned if it didn’t all come back to her!

What the guy who heard it from a guy heard was that, at a drunken party in a freshman dorm, Kavanaugh unzipped his pants and stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face.

Contrary to Pogrebin and Kelly’s claim that “at least” seven people “heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge," this vast array of witnesses includes only one person whose secondhand, rumor-mill story includes both Kavanaugh and Ramirez: Kenneth Appold.

(All we know about Appold is that he is a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, meaning that he is less likely to believe in God than any person not a professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary.)

The guy Appold claims he heard it from doesn’t remember it.

Are you following how absurd this is?

This is not merely hearsay; it’s double hearsay offered by only one person, and he wasn’t there, but he heard about it from another person, who denies knowledge of it. And the corpus delecti is something that happened with a group of drunk teenagers 35 years ago.


The main point made by the excerpt is to remind us that truth means nothing to liberals.

Here’s the book’s big new scoop:

“We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms.Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

This story was on the Times’ website for more than 24 hours when -- at close to midnight on Sunday -- the paper issued an “Editors’ Note” admitting that the victim does not remember it.

I’m not even going to mention that Stier was a lawyer for Bill Clinton, defending him for whipping it out in front of Paula Jones, as governor of Arkansas. Obviously, that’s not as serious as doing it as a college freshman.

But could some good reporter -- which excludes anyone in the mainstream media -- look into Stier’s undergraduate years? Any embarrassing incidents when he was a freshman? Any rumors or third-hand accounts? While we’re at it, can we get Stier’s tax returns for the last 30 years? Where’s Chuck Johnson when we need him?

Let’s consider just the physics of Stier’s story.

How can anyone, let alone two or more people, "push" a man's penis into another person's hand? Just how big is Brett Kavanaugh's penis, anyway? Wouldn't a man's penis, if it were able to be "pushed" by one's friends into third parties, need to be erect and at least 3 feet long? Don't push my penis, bro!

The best part of the Times excerpt is the Women’s Temperance League tone of the piece.

“(Ramirez’s Yale classmates) also had experience with drinking and sexual behavior that Ms. Ramirez -- who had not intended to be intimate with a man until her wedding night -- lacked. ... ‘I had gone through high school, I’m the good girl, and now, in one evening, it was all ripped away,' she said in an interview. ...”

If someone from Bob Jones University said that her dreams of marital purity were “ripped away” because she saw a man’s penis in college, liberals would never stop laughing.

“(Kavanaugh) was ... known to attend an annual teenage bacchanal called ‘Beach Week,’ where the hookups and drinking were more important than the sand and swimming.”

It wasn’t much of a “beach party” -- if you want to call it that. Instead of wholesome fun, the young people consumed alcoholic beverages and engaged in inappropriate flirting. Everyone said it was inappropriate -- not just us.

Most shocking, from a “Little House on the Prairie” perspective, was this:

“People ... would start to say ‘Debbie does ...’ playing on the 1978 porn movie ‘Debbie Does Dallas.’ But Ms. Ramirez didn’t understand the reference.”

Remind me: Aren't these the same people demanding that we teach kindergartners about “fisting”?

But the “Debbie Does Defamation” authors weren’t finished.

“(Kavanaugh) came of age during the era of ‘Porky’s’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’”

Ha! What do you say, NOW, Trumpsters?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg “came of age during the era of” the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. Can we impeach her?

I’m beginning to suspect that, instead of writing the book, Pogrebin and Kelly screwed around for six months, then pulled an all-nighter the day before it was due. Also, “American Pie” was big!

But half the Democratic candidates for president are demanding Kavanaugh’s impeachment on the basis of this sublime idiocy. Trump touched their SCOTUS!

COPYRIGHT 2019 ANN COULTER

The Suffocation of Justice By Charity

"When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates Rockefeller, or Ford Foundation's handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse - and then, very subtly, without appearing to - they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you're sacked if you disobey . . .. sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there's always the game of pitting the 'funded' against the 'unfunded,' in which the funder takes center stage. So I mean, I'm not against people being funded - because we're running out of options - but we have to understand - are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you?  . .. . Everywhere - not just in America . . . . repress, beat up, shoot, jail those you can, and throw money at those whom you can't - and gradually sandpaper the edge off them. They're in the business of what we in India call Paaltu Sher, which means Tamed Tigers. Like a pretend resistance . . . so you can let off steam without damaging anything. . . . So many activists [have] turned into travel agents, just having to organize tickets and money, flying people up and down. The [World Social] forum suddenly declared 'Only nonviolence, no armed struggles' ...  They . . . turned Gandhian.

"Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let's say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days' walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it - what brand of nonviolence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend?  . . . Nonviolence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence . . . 

"It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change . . . .The bigger game is keeping the world safe for the Free Market. Structural Adjustment. Privatization, Free Market fundamentalism - all masquerading as Democracy and the Rule of Law. Many corporate-foundation-funded NGOs - not all, but many - become the missionaries of the 'new economy.' They tinker with your imagination, with language. The idea of 'human rights,' for example - sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum - all we are supposed to expect - but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

"But this discourse of human rights, it's a very good format for TV - the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry (laughs). Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimate violence - so who gets criminalized and delegitimized? . . . usually the resistance.

"I sound as though I'm trashing human rights. . . . I'm not.  All I'm saying is that the idea of justice - even just dreaming of justice - is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust - and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course the catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

". . . talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalizing their resources, protecting their markets . . . Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First it was topple them, now it's install them . . .. And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility - it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. . . .

"They moved in to the spaces that were left when 'structural adjustment' forced states to pull back on public spending - on health, education, infrastructure, water supply - turning what ought to be people's rights, to education, to health care, and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed and we don't even know it. . . . The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against 'corruption' and for 'transparency.' They want the Rule of Law - as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardize a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely - unimpeded - around the world today is money . . . capital. . . . 

"Stable markets, unstable world."

-----Arundhati Roy, Things That Can And Cannot Be Said

Fox T.V. Host Says Revolution Is Coming In The U.S.

"Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn't responsible for the many disasters America's leaders created. Trump didn't invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn't lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn't really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn't do any of that". . . . . 

"Trump's election wasn't about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America's ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don't elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do."

"Trump won the Republican primaries, and Republican leaders immediately began plotting to take his nomination at the convention. Trump won the general election, and elites schemed to have the results nullified by electors. Trump assumed office in Washington, and the permanent class in Washington worked to sabotage his administration."

"In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America's ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. Beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie:

Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters."

"Trump won because Russian agents 'hacked' the election."

"Trump won because mouth-breathers in the province were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links."

"Trump won because he's a racist, and that's what voters secretly wanted all along. . . . "

"What message do voters take from all of this? All your fears are real. You may have suspected our democracy was actually an oligarchy. Now you know for sure. You can vote all you want, but voting is a charade. Your leaders don't care what you think. Shut up and obey."

-----Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools - How A Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America To The Brink Of Revolution