HOUSE OF PAINE blog

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Leaders of the puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serioU.S. doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg. Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the defeated candidate preferred by the U.S. Government.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.

Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”

What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet states?

Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.

However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”*

The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:

“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.

“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

“The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over MoU.S.avi.

“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Moussavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”

There have been numerous news reports that the U.S. government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran. The U.S. media treats these reports in a braggadocio manner as illustrations of the American Superpower’s ability to bring dissenting countries to heel, while some foreign media see these reports as evidence of the U.S. government’s inherent immorality.

Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the U.S. interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”

The success of the U.S. government in financing color revolutions in former Soviet Georgia and Ukraine and in other parts of the former Soviet empire have been widely reported and discussed, with the U.S. media treating it as an indication of U.S. omnipotence and natural right and some foreign media as a sign of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Mir Hossein Moussavi is a bought and paid for operative of the U.S. government.
We know for a fact that the U.S. government has psychological warfare operations that target both Americans and foreigners through the U.S. and foreign media. Many articles have been published on this subject.

Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?

Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in thrall to Western devotion to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These people are easily organized with American money to give their government and Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.

The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared: “Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving only a military solution.

As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for military attack.

With the help of Moussavi, the U.S. government is creating another “oppressed people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American lives and money to liberate. Has Moussavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet ruler of Iran?

The great macho superpower is eager to restore its hegemony over the Iranian people, thus settling the score with the ayatollahs who overthrew American rule of Iran in 1978.

That is the script. You are watching it every minute on U.S. television.

There is no end of “experts” to support the script. For one example among hundreds, we have Gary Sick, who formerly served on the National Security Council and currently teaches at Columbia University:

“If they’d been a little more modest and said Ahmadinejad had won by 51 percent,” Sick said, Iranians might have been dubious but more accepting. But the government’s assertion that Ahmadinejad won with 62.6 percent of the vote, “is not credible.”

“I think,” continued Sick, “it does mark a real transition point in the Iranian Revolution, from a position of claiming to have its legitimacy based on the support of the population, to a position that has increasingly relied on repression. The voice of the people is ignored.”

The only hard information available is the poll referenced above. The poll found that Ahmadinejad was the favored candidate by a margin of two to one.

But as in everything else having to do with American hegemony over other peoples, facts and truth play no part. Lies and propaganda rule.

Consumed by its passion for hegemony, America is driven to prevail over others, morality and justice be damned. This world-threatening script will play until America bankrupts itself and has so alienated the rest of the world that it is isolated and universally despised.

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What impresses me in the current financial crisis is the near-total failure of so-called progressives to appreciate the magnitude of what is going on or the level of intelligence behind it. How many will say, for instance, that the crash was deliberately engineered by the creation, then destruction, of the investment bubbles of the last decade?

When the financial system creates bubbles it drives up the cost of assets far beyond their true value in producing or storing wealth. When the bubbles burst the value of the assets plummets. Those with ready cash then buy them up on the cheap. When the dust settles more wealth has been concentrated in fewer hands. The rich get richer, and ordinary people are left in a deeper condition of indebtedness, poverty, and pressure to perform to the liking of the financial masters.

Progressives think the system needs to be “reformed.” Maybe the banking system needs to be re-regulated or even nationalized. Maybe it should be possible for families facing loss of their homes to get a lower monthly payment from a bankruptcy court. Maybe the government instead of the private sector should administer student loans.

What we fail to acknowledge is that the system itself is totalitarian. This means that it is designed to exert total control over the lives of individuals. We are accustomed to use this label when thinking of anachronisms of history like communism or fascism. We do not understand that globalist finance capitalism and the government which protects, enables, or even regulates it are also totalitarian.

What has happened in the last year as the financial system has seemingly gone belly-up, and is coming back only through massive government bailouts, is part of a pattern that has been around for decades if not centuries. How the controllers work was laid out in 1967 when Dial Press published a leaked copy of The Report from Iron Mountain. This was a study put together by a team of academics and analysts who met at the underground facility in New York that was home to the Hudson Institute.

The report began by identifying war as the central organizing principle of society. It stated, “War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today.”

The report said that, “The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers.” It said that any failure of will by the ruling class could lead to “actual disestablishment of military institutions.” The effect on the system would be, the report said, “catastrophic.”

The appearance of the report caused a sensation when it came out at the onset of the Vietnam War. Officials within the government had no comment, and the report faded into history. But certain of its sections fit the situation in 2009 precisely.

This is because the report outlined the ways the civilian population of a developed nation could be controlled even in the absence of a large-scale war that disrupted their daily lives. One of these ways was defined as follows: “A…possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political process, of slavery….The development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control….” (Cited in Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs, 2000.)

We see the development of such a “sophisticated form of slavery” today. What else can a system be called that subjects the population to skyrocketing personal and household debt, a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, constant warfare justified as necessary to fight “terrorism,” erosion of personal freedoms, constantly expanding power allocated to the military and police, pervasive electronic eavesdropping, complete lack of accountability by politicians for their dishonesty and crimes, a mass media devoted solely to establishment propaganda, etc.

None of this seems to be diminishing under the Barack Obama administration. Even the economic recovery Obama is attempting to engineer through massive Keynesian deficit spending is expected by economists to be another “jobless” one like that of 2002-2005. Of course the unemployed or those who fear unemployment are easy to control. And the permanent series of Asian land wars George W. Bush instigated for control of resources and geopolitical leverage against Russia and China continue unabated.

None of this is accidental. As The Report from Iron Mountain made clear four decades ago, it’s what has been planned all along.

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In settler societies such as the United States, Australia and Canada, the crude racism which drove invasion and colonization mostly belongs to the past, when there was an active concept of race, allied with the categories of civilization, barbarism and savagery. The North American Indian was regarded by the white settlers as a savage, perhaps noble, mean or cunning, but a savage ‘redskin’ nevertheless. In Australia the indigenous people were scarcely counted as human beings. It was not until the 1960s that they were even given the vote. The same relegation of ‘Negroes’ to a contingent category of humanity (at best) justified slavery and segregation in the southern states of the United States. The dehumanization of all of these groups was essential to the colonizing process (including the colonization of Algeria after the French invasion of 1830) and the enrichment of white settlers.

All modern ‘western’ colonial settler states share the same characteristics, i.e. the obliteration of indigenous cultures and the displacement of people from their land. This was true of the North American settlers, the Australian colonists and the Boers who eliminated the Herero people of southwest Africa in the early 20th century. Treaties in which the indigenous people were compelled to consent to the invasion and settlement of their land were signed in North America and New Zealand but not in Australia, where the colonists regarded the indigenous people as less than human and could therefore assert that the land was ‘empty’. There are numerous parallels here with Zionism not only on the basis of an ‘empty’ land being settled or of civilization being brought to a ‘primitive’ people but in the double nature of the colonialism. In North America and Palestine, settlement was fostered by a distant government against which the settlers eventually rebelled before declaring their ‘independence’.

Gradually, mostly only in the last half century, laws and attitudes changed. This rolling process met with resistance at every stage from those who justified discrimination on the basis of the Bible or racist genetic theories. Not until the 1960s and 1970s were racially discriminatory laws eliminated from the statute books in modern settler states such as the US and Australia, which does not mean that structural racism has been eliminated. It has not. It can be measured in education, health and welfare statistics, while episodes of racism involving police and the public at large show that attitudes are harder to change than laws.

The difference between Israel and these other settler states is partly one of timing. Israel was founded not at the beginning or the middle of the historical cycle of the settler state phenomenon but right at the end. Israel is a paradox – a settler state arising at the beginning of the post-colonial era. Across Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, national liberation movements challenged powers unwilling to voluntarily relinquish the territories they had seized in the 19th century. The right of native people to self-determination was expressed in the UN Charter. It was at this precise moment that Israel was established. At a time when universal values were being emphasized Israel headed in the opposite direction.

The Holocaust generated enormous emotional support across the western world for the establishment of Israel. It might not have been the ‘pretext’ for its creation of Israel, but it was certainly exploited by the Zionists to make sure that Israel came into existence. Refugees from Europe might have gone elsewhere, but for ideological reasons the only place the Zionist movement wanted them to go was Palestine. The media joined the chorus calling for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as a solution to the refugee problem and an antidote to anti-semitism. In fact removing the victims from the scene of the crime was no answer to the historical problem of European anti-semitism. Their ‘solution’ allowed European governments to evade responsibility for the consequences of actions in which all of them were in some way complicit. A people who were in no way responsible for the massive crimes which had been committed against Jews were being made to pay for them. Their rights and interests were treated with as much indifference or disdain as anti-semites had traditionally treated the rights and interests of Jews. The export of the ‘Jewish problem’ to Palestine was in its own way anti-semitic.

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Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood in the streets!

Poem by Pablo Neruda

About a month before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on PBS’s Charlie Rose Show and was asked whether he thought Obama would be a good choice for president. Brzezinski paused for a minute, peered at Rose out of the corner of his eye, and answered, “Just think of the symbolism.” As soon as he said that, Brzezinski and Rose broke out into laughter as though they were sharing a private joke.

Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume’ small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism; the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Even better, Obama was a charismatic populist who could fill stadiums with adoring fans and put a benign face on America’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What more could Brzezinski hope for? After 8 years of dragging “Brand America” through the mud, the country would finally get the emergency facelift it needed and begin to restore its battered image as the world’s indispensable nation.

For leftists, Obama has been a total bust. He’s escalated the war in Afghanistan, increased the cross-border bombings of Pakistan, hemmed and hawed about prosecuting war crimes, refused to actively lobby House members to make it easier for workers to organize (EFCA), and surrounded himself with bank industry reps who’ve committed $12.8 trillion to sinking financial institutions with no assurance that the money would be repaid. Apart from a trifling bill on stem cells, Obama has done absolutely zero to confirm his bone fides as a liberal. The truth is, Obama is neither liberal nor conservative; he’s simply an inspiring orator and a skillful politician who has no strong convictions about anything. If he achieves greatness, it will be because he was thrust into a crisis he couldn’t avoid and reluctantly acted in the best interests of the American people. That possibility still exists, although it seems more unlikely by the day.

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As President Barack Obama approaches his first 100 days in office, the corporate media prepares a new round of fawning idolatry about the Obama administration’s “achievements,” yet a summary glance at what Obama has actually done in that short time with regard to expanding the Bush police state and the Neo-Con empire is worse than even we predicted.

Upon Obama’s election we made a cynical but unfortunately accurate prediction of how the much vaunted promise of “change” would actually manifest itself. The fact is that the “change” began and ended on the day Obama won the election.

- Illegal warrantless surveillance and wiretapping of American citizens will continue under Obama.

- Top Bush administration officials who ordered torture and those that carried it out will be protected from prosecution under Obama.

- Top Bush administration officials who deceived America into a war will be protected from prosecution under Obama.

- The expansion of the military empire through continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and further military incursions into Pakistan will continue and expand under Obama.

- Banker bailouts, reckless spending, inflation of currency through overprinting and global regulations stifling the free market, all of which were initiated under Bush, will continue under Obama.

- The militarization of the United States and the architecture of the police state that was set up under Bush will be preserved and expanded under Obama.

- The attack on the second amendment right to bear arms will continue under Obama.

“The egregious spending will continue, government will balloon in size, American soldiers will be used as cannon fodder for more interventionist wars of the military-industrial complex, U.S. citizens will continue to have their phone calls tapped and their rights curtailed,” we forecast last year, “and the Federal Reserve will continue to rule the financial system with an iron fist while the middle class is squeezed out of existence.”

Who can deny that all those things have only intensified under the Obama administration?

The honeymoon is over – Barack Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than we predicted all along – another stooge for the global banking syndicate that has controlled every U.S. president since JFK, and nothing more than a black face on the new world order – sworn to continue and intensify the same agenda that the Bush-Clinton-Bush dynasty advanced before him.

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Consider these events:

• A president who started two aggressive wars, who bears responsibility for the loss of thousands of American lives along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives, leaves office as a free man without a felony record or any negative repercussions.
• Meanwhile, the same populace that has intimate experience with lying politicians appears utterly smitten with a smooth-talking new president promising change and demanding sacrifice.
• The Congress, which had an approval rate of 14% and which just passed a $700 billion bailout over the objections of a majority of Americans, had a re-election rate exceeding 95%.
• Untold millions of Americans voice support of military troops as these very people are needlessly killed, injured, and separated from their families and productive work at home.
• A general populace believed that buying unproductive assets, like housing, could make them wealthy, forever, without any coherent explanation why.
• Researchers who pursue alternative explanations for AIDS and cancer get their funding cut and have the results of their research squelched, while others who try to improve life by providing healthful foods find themselves under attack.

Overt criminality by leaders and passive, unclear thinking by the proles have become the norm. The two go together, creating a symbiotic ecosystem of tyranny. Fraud, theft, and murder have become widespread, just as the scale of lies told and believed have reached new heights. Irresponsibility has become socialized while people in the honest pursuit of good get thwarted.

Those of us who want little more than peace and freedom don’t run the world. Pursuing freedom contradicts controlling others, so we can reason that people who pursue power have some motivations separate from our own.

I have not fully comprehended the implications of this until recently. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I had assumed that the people who wield power feel similarly about moral issues as I do—I just couldn’t see why they commit and justify unethical behavior. I already knew that states operate according to a code that the rest of us don’t follow in our own lives. Nevertheless, I assumed that a man who acts without regard to moral laws must feel guilty about it. Then, one day, I stumbled onto this idea: Suppose he doesn’t.

With only small ambitions, he probably behaves like a common criminal, a predator. He lies to gain advantage, uses force to get his way, and steals without conscience. Not feeling guilty about unethical behavior motivates him to instigate further criminal acts.

Small crime operations have one big problem, namely, the risk of getting caught. The prospect of prison appears unappealing, yet even with the high likelihood of arrest and capture during a career, common criminals approach their field with little sophistication and often pay the price. Other like-minded people see ways to avoid these problems. Just as normal people develop interests growing up and figure out how to pursue them at higher levels, a criminal mind can do the same. With greater intelligence and patience, he can pursue an ambitious career of criminality. With this objective in sight, one can easily see the state as the most expedient means to accomplish it.

Once a criminal joins forces with the state by becoming an employee, he can lie to his advantage, use force to get his way, and steal without conscience, just as the small-time operator does. The opportunities for mischief have no limits through thoughtful job selection. For example, if a man took pleasure in making innocent people squirm, he could become a police officer and plant evidence. For another, if he wanted to murder people, he could become a military officer and “accidentally” call in the coordinates of a house he’d like to see bombed. Whatever they do, the state shields them from the natural consequences of their actions. In all likelihood, if smart, they never get caught, never get punished, and probably get commended.

Too often, I have assumed that the people working for the state take the jobs only because of the easy hours and good pay, benefits, and retirement. For the predator, though, it offers all these things with the appetizing fringe benefit of satisfying their criminal urges without the risk of retribution.

It turns out this personality type has a scientific name: psychopathic. Lest you think I merely kid you, I quote from Scientific American:

Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses.

This seems like a nearly perfect description of those who seek political power. That same article goes on to say that fields over-represented by psychopaths may include “politics, business and entertainment. Yet the scientific evidence for this intriguing conjecture is preliminary.” It turns out that much stronger evidence for this exists than the article lets on.

In the book Political Ponerology, Andrew Lobaczewski claims that about 6% of the people within a population have psychopathic characters. The implications of this, which he recognized soon after World War II, stagger the mind. Moreover, he suggests that another 12% of the population has high susceptibility to psychopathic thought. In a world dominated by hierarchical structures, these people sieze control of the key positions and create a so-called “pathocracy.” Lobaczewski continues, writing in ways that clearly anticipate the current reality:

Within this [pathocratic] system, the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually starts to dominate, overshadowing the others.

Normal people have not considered the possibility that some people who seem ordinary could have no moral inhibitions. They default to believing that their leaders have good intentions. Employees of psychopaths thus carry out plans of their bosses blinded to the reality. No matter the scope of the “failure,” the leadership can always point back to their stated good intentions and shield themselves from the gallows. In fact, the more harm they create, the stronger the call becomes to vest more power in their failed agency so they can “prevent” anything of the sort from ever happening again.

Their MO focuses on figuring out how much they can get away with, and we see no signs they have begun to approach the limits the public will accept. Irrespective of the ordeals they create, the vast majority of people give them the benefit of the doubt time and time again and continue in their support of the system. This belief among good people led to the democide of the 20th Century that continues unabated today.

After considering the possibility that psychopaths have taken control of society, we find volumes of evidence to support the hypothesis. Did Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot sympathize with their victims or have any sense of guilt? More recently, among Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, or Clinton , can we point to one who even exhibits a facade resembling normality? Obviously not—these lists name one person after another who has zero accountability to a rational morality. If people like this could make their way to the highest levels of power, what does that say about lower offices?

It suggests people like this have control over the levers of power everywhere. We live at a time when the population at large cannot achieve its wants, yet few seem to know why. As one example, polls consistently indicate that educational matters concern the public, yet decade after decade, schooling gets quantitatively worse. What a mystery! Evidently, if we believe our well-meaning masters, 2,000 years of Western civilization has not yet determined effective ways to transmit key knowledge to younger generations. However, what happens if we suspend our belief in their benevolence for a moment and consider other possibilities? If schools fail to achieve their stated goals over several decades, might some groups see this as a success?

Inhibiting critical thinking in the masses obviously benefits the state and psychopaths. When overtly self-serving, irresponsible, illegal, immoral, irrational behavior gets treated as normal, we can conclude that the educational system works quite well for our masters. I have given but one example, yet the multitude of state functions exists to provide every variety of psychopathic interest with a job. Moreover, we should consider that the state not only acts like a recruitment center for psychopaths, but that psychopaths probably invented the state to take advantage of the rest of us. I can give you no better explanation for the existence of an organization that fails in every ethical dimension and invokes psychopathic thinking at every turn than this.

Our battle for liberty appears not just as a conflict between those who want freedom versus those who want control, but instead as the battle between normal people and the psychopaths. I have found incredible explanatory power of our world within the psychopathic hypothesis: The world feels wrong because psychopaths run it. In a country trained to discount and ridicule all ideas more than a standard deviation from the average, coherent explanations of observable social phenomena don’t get much press. Without understanding physical laws, we would never have gained the massive improvements in our quality of life from technological developments. Similarly, without understanding our social systems, we will never escape from the tyranny unleashed on us by psychopaths.

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“Beyond here lies nothing—Nothing done and nothing said.”

Bob Dylan

The political class has failed America. At every level, they have failed the American people. Republican and Democrat, they have failed. Liberal, conservative and centrist, they have failed. They have lived on lies, and lived by lies, for so long that they no longer know how to comprehend the truth, much less communicate it or – God forbid – act on it. And so they plow on deeper into the darkness, in zombified pursuit of pointless goals, heedless of the signposts warning of danger, like some demented wagon train dragging a load of dead mules toward the edge of a cliff.

Political failure is nothing new, of course. Deliberate deceit – and egregious self-delusion – are nothing new. Misrule and evil on the part of elites are nothing new. But the great churning engines of the American Empire – especially its war machine – are infinitely more vast and powerful than anything seen on earth before. Its inextricably entwined economic and military forces permeate the globe. Nowhere on earth can you completely escape the tourbillions of these forces; yet because of this same pervasive reach, there is now no place on earth that cannot send its shock waves back up the line, roiling the imperial heartland itself. The very magnitude of the American power structure makes the consequences of its crimes and failures more destructive and widespread: the difference between your house being hit by a cannonball or by a cruise missile.

I am, I suppose, what most people would call a cynic. I don’t see how anyone who has followed American politics for as long as I have – some 40 years now – could be anything else. To quote Uncle Bob once more, when it comes to politics, “I ain’t lookin’ for nothin’ in anyone’s eyes.” I expect to be lied to. I expect to hear horseshit and fairytales wrapped up in threadbare pieties and Orwellian doublespeak. I expect power and money and militarism to carry the day. Even so, I must admit my guts lurched with queasy dread last week when Barack Obama announced, with a flourish of falsehoods and fearmongering, his grand plans to escalate the “Af-Pak” War.

Not that I was surprised by any of it: both the truth-abusing rhetoric and the war-expanding intentions have been hallmarks of Team Obama’s Afghanistan policies since the early days of his presidential campaign. And Obama, eager to establish his tough-guy cojones, was killing civilians in Pakistan and ordering up an Afghan surge just as soon as he climbed into the Imperial cockpit. His much-vaunted “strategic review” was simply a bureaucratic exercise to determine how best to tweak and refine the policies already adopted by the Bush Administration and its military managers — all of whom were of course retained by Obama. Again, this was to be expected. After all, “continuity” has been his watchword — or rather, it became his watchword right after he was swept into office as the self-proclaimed embodiment of the public’s desperate longing for change.

Even so, to see the expansion of the Af-Pak War finally, formally promulgated, and to realize what this really means, not in terms of the ludicrous political theater of Washington and the media, not in the war-game fantasies of think-tankers and armchair warriors, but in the actual costs — the death and suffering of thousands of innocent people, the ruinous chaos and the violent hatred engendered, the massive financial corruption and gargantuan debt added to our already corrupt and bankrupt system, the further coarsening and brutalization and militarization of our society, and again, because it bears repeating, the physical and emotional destruction of countless human beings whose only crime was to be born in a region targeted by the Great Gamesters of the world, the warlords in turbans and those in Brooks Brothers suits, the gangsters in the alleys and in the corridors of power — this is a bitter and sickening thing. And no amount of foreknowledge or cynicism makes it any easier to bear.

The wagon train with its rotting cargo keeps lurching on. A change of drivers has not meant a change in direction. As Tom Englehardt points out, in both foreign policy and on the economic front, the Obama Administration is trying frantically to preserve an imperial system that is cracking under the weight of its own immoral excesses, its own arrogance and willful ignorance. But owing to the latter, their only solution is to do more of the same things that have plunged the system into severe crisis.

In fact, the domestic side of their efforts is even more radical, more shocking than Obama’s dull-witted “continuity” in Terror War. The new administration is openly transferring trillions of dollars to a small core of financial elites, in effect placing the rest of the country into a state of economic peonage to these remote and unaccountable overlords — who have, astonishingly, used the fear and suffering created by their own actions as an opportunity to take their domination of society to even greater heights. What Obama and his economic team are abetting is, as Simon Johnson and others have noted, nothing less than an oligarchic coup d’etat.

I acknowledge the aptness of the metaphor used by many of Obama’s defenders: the image of a sea captain, beset by virulent opponents on the bridge, struggling to turn a vast ocean liner in the opposite direction, in the midst of a raging storm. That would indeed take a long time, and tremendous effort, and require stoic patience from the passengers.

But that is not what is happening. The long, hard, thankless effort that it would take to roll back the bloated global empire of bases and curtail the power of the oligarchy (for you can’t do one without the other) has not even begun. Obama is not trying to wrest the ship of state toward a new direction; he is deliberately and willingly continuing on the same disastrous, destructive course as before.

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When Homer Simpson got banned from Moe’s bar, Lisa tried to console him. “Look on the bright side, Dad,” she said. “Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity?’”

“Yes!” Homer exclaimed. “Cris-atunity!” Inspired, he sprinted off in search of a new bar.

Lisa, usually so smart, was wrong. The Chinese word for crisis does not mean opportunity. That is an urban myth — repeated by John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Condoleeza Rice and Al Gore. The Chinese word weiji is a combination of wei, meaning danger, and ji, meaning crucial point (when something begins or changes).

Actually, the etymology of the word crisis goes back to the Greek krisis, meaning “decision.” Homer Simpson faced a turning point that required a decision.

But we are not in Homer’s shoes. Despite rising unemployment, massive layoffs and a stock market that has lost half of its value from its peak, we are not in a crisis. There is no banking crisis, no financial crisis, no economic crisis.

Why not? Because we have no decision to make.

A bad situation is only a crisis if making the wrong decision can be fatal, and there is a chance of making the right one. Surely, a recession is a bad situation, but where is the debate about possible decisions? There can be no crisis without even a possibility of massively shrinking government.

Who is proposing less government involvement? Who is pointing out that the problems were caused by too much government, too many regulations, too burdensome taxes, too powerful federal agencies?

We are seeing more of the same. A hundred years ago, a bank run came about as a consequence of the CEO of the United Copper Company and his brother trying to corner the market on their own stock. The short squeeze didn’t work, and the banks who had lent money to the scheme saw their depositors rush to withdraw.

That Panic of 1907 provided much of the impetus for the eventual formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. That was quite possibly the last time our country faced a crisis. We could have decided to continue as free people, but we went the other way. That same year, the Sixteenth Amendment violated our Constitution, establishing a permanent federal income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment made senators popularly elected, like House representatives, rather than appointed by state governments. Senators went from being the last protectors of states’ rights to some of the loudest proponents for more centralized government.

The cancer of big government grew slowly. At first the Fed did little and income taxes were miniscule. But then the stock market fell in 1929, perhaps as a result of Fed policies that encouraged — as they always do — debt upon debt upon debt.The Great Depression, the New Deal, the Great Society, and Compassionate Conservatism are all different labels for the same phenomenon: the growth of the cancer.

Now we are at the point where we confuse our cancerous tumor for a vital limb. Many of us can’t imagine living without the government hunch on our back. Who would build bridges and roads?

And in a time when the big government policies have clearly been shown to fail, when the borrow, borrow, borrow and tax, tax, tax policies of Democrats and Republicans over the past century have left us twisted and deformed, when the only medical alternative left is aggressively attacking the malignant growth, we instead feed and caress it. We honor it with words like “sacrifice” and “the common good.”

For the cancer of big government, nothing is going to change in this “crisis.” It will only continue to grow. Just as there are plenty of ways to treat even advanced cancer (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, hormonal therapy), there are plenty of possible ways to reduce the government (abolish the Fed, repeal income taxes with an amendment, get out of Iraq, cancel all bailouts, close federal agencies), but our elected doctors refuse to even consider any of these treatments, let alone act on them.

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A prominent L.A. Times editorial confuses the political movement of Zionism with semites as a race in an attempt to argue that anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism and should be treated as a hate crime.

The op-ed, written by Judea Pearl, the father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, asks in its headline, Is anti-Zionism Hate? The question is answered by the sub headline, “Yes. It is more dangerous than anti-Semitism, threatening lives and peace in the Middle East.”

Pearl is a professor at UCLA and the president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which includes amongst its honorary members Bill Clinton, the Queen of Jordan and writer Eliezer Wiesel, who has attracted controversy for his support of Jewish terrorist group Irgun and his indifference to historical massacres of Palestinians.

Noam Chomsky criticized Wiesel for once stating, “I support Israel—period. I identify with Israel—period. I never attack, never criticize Israel when I am not in Israel.”

The L.A. Times article essentially tries to argue that everyone, particularly academia, should adhere to Wiesel’s mantra and refrain from criticizing the government of Israel and its policies. It does so by deliberately and underhandedly conflating Jews, Israel and ZIonism into one single entity.

Pearl states that criticism of Zionism is “discriminatory,” “immoral,” and “dangerous,” because it “rejects the very notion that Jews are a nation — a collective bonded by a common history — and, accordingly, denies Jews the right to self-determination in their historical birthplace.”

Jews are a nation? That’s news to us – last time we checked, Judaism was not a race or a nation, it was a religion.

Very early in the article, Jews, Zionism and Israel have lost all definition and are conflated as one and the same.

“Anti-Semitism rejects Jews as equal members of the human race; anti-Zionism rejects Israel as an equal member in the family of nations,” writes Pearl, further conflating Zionism with some kind of biblical legacy by claiming that, “Jews are a nation first and religion second….the unshaken conviction in their eventual repatriation to the birthplace of their history has been the engine behind Jewish endurance and hopes throughout their turbulent journey that started with the Roman expulsion in AD 70.”

Again, Pearl’s agenda is to veil Zionism with the camouflage of Judaism and the country of Israel. Zionism is not a country and it does not have a biblical history to ally it with Judaism as Pearl attempts to argue. According to the dictionary definition, Zionism is a “movement of world Jewry that arose late in the 19th century with the aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.” It has no connection whatsoever with “the birthplace of their history” or “the Roman expulsion in AD 70″ as Pearl claims.

Additionally, labeling Jews as a race is completely asinine. One can make the case that semites are a race, but even in this case such a definition would include “any of various ancient and modern people originating in southwestern Asia,” according to Wikipedia.

In attempting to make the case that Zionism wholly represents Jews as a race of people and Israel as a country, Pearl tries to scoff at and downplay the massive number of Jews who oppose the Zionist political doctrine.

Groups such as Jews Not Zionists, True Torah Jews Against Zionism, and Neturei Karta – Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism, represent a significant number of Jews who make the case that “The ideology of Zionism is in total opposition to the teachings of traditional Judaism”.

“There are in fact many Jewish movements, groups and organizations whose ideology regarding Zionism and the so-called “State of Israel” is that of the unadulterated Torah position that any form of Zionism is heresy and that the existence of the so-called “State of Israel” is illegitimate,” according to the JewsNotZionists organization.

As we have vehemently argued, Zionists are attempting to equate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism as a means of silencing opposition to their brutal political agenda. This has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people against racism and everything to do with shutting down criticism of the Israeli government and its warmongering policies which, with the support of the U.S. elite, have made life a living hell for both Jews and Muslims in the Middle East for centuries.

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In the single deadliest air raid of World War II, 330 American B-29s rain incendiary bombs on Tokyo, touching off a firestorm that kills upwards of 100,000 people, burns a quarter of the city to the ground, and leaves a million homeless.

The raid also represented a tactical shift, as the Americans switched from high-altitude precision bombing to low-altitude incendiary raids.

Tokyo was the first of five incendiary raids launched in quick succession against the largest Japanese cities. Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe were also targeted – with Nagoya getting hit twice within a week. By the end of the war, more than 60 Japanese cities had been laid waste by firebombing.

The Tokyo raid, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, began an aerial onslaught so effective that the American air command concluded by July 1945 that no viable targets remained on the Japanese mainland. But if the American objective was to shorten the war by demoralizing the Japanese population and breaking its will to resist, it didn’t work. What had proven true in Germany proved equally true here: morale was shaken by bombing, but once the shock passed, the war work went on.

The Americans began looking to incendiaries as their stockpiles of those weapons increased, and because the typically cloudy weather conditions that prevailed over Japan made precision bombing difficult at best.

Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, commander of the 21st Bomber Command, also argued that incendiary bombing would be particularly effective, because Japanese cities contained a lot of tightly packed, wooden structures that would burn easily when set alight.

He was right.

The B-29 bombers for the Tokyo raid were stripped of their defensive weapons and packed with various incendiary explosives, including white phosphorus and napalm, a new gasoline-based, fuel-gel mixture developed at Harvard University.

As opposed to the high-altitude precision bombing, which the Allies practiced with only mixed success over both Germany and Japan, incendiary raids were carried out at low altitudes of between 5,000 and 9,000 feet. The attackers were helped by the fact that Japanese air defenses were almost nonexistent by that point in the war. In fact, only 14 B-29s were lost in the March 9-10 Tokyo raid.

As was done in Europe, pathfinder planes flying ahead of the bombers marked the target with a flaming X, guiding the attackers in. Tokyo was hit over a three-hour period by three bomber streams that dropped roughly 2,000 tons of incendiaries near the docklands and in the industrial heart of the Japanese capital.

Tokyo immediately burst into flames. The combination of incendiaries, the way they were dropped, windy weather conditions and lack of coordinated firefighting on the ground resulted in a firestorm similar to what occurred two years previously in Hamburg, and only a month before in Dresden. Temperatures on the ground in Tokyo reached 1,800 degrees in some places.

The human carnage was appalling; bomber crews coming in near the tail end of the raid reported smelling the stench of charred human flesh as they passed over the burning capital.

Sixty-three percent of Tokyo’s commercial area, and 18 percent of its industry, was destroyed. An estimated 267,000 buildings burned to the ground.

The firebombing campaign, coupled with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are believed to have killed more than 1 million Japanese civilians between March and August of 1945.

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