Operation Sarkozy
Thierry Meyssan – Axis of Logic July 14, 2008 Translated by Robert Thompson


How the CIA planted one of its agents as President of the French Republic.

Nicolas Sarkozy should be judged on his actions and not on his personality.

But when his actions surprise even his own electors, it is legitimate to examine in detail his biography and to ask about the alliances which brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan decided to write the truth about the origins of the President of the French Republic. All the information contained in this article is verifiable, with the exception of two imputations, pointed out by the author who assumes sole responsibility for them.

The French people, weary of the over-long presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, elected Nicolas Sarkozy and counted on his energy to revitalise their country. They hoped for a break with the years of immobilism and superannuated ideologies. They have had a break with the principles which form the foundation of the French nation. They have been stupefied by this "hyper president", every day grabbing hold of another new file, drawing the right and the left to him, thus disposing of all the land-marks to the point of creating complete confusion.

Like children who have just done something very stupid, the French are too busy finding excuses to admit the extent of the damage and of their naïvety. This makes them refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy is, which they ought to have realised long ago.

The man is clever. Like an illusionist, he has diverted their attention by offering them his private life as a spectacle and in posing in celebrity magazines, to the point of making them overlook his political history.

Let the sense of this article be fully understood: it is not to reproach Mr Sarkozy with his links of family, friends and professional contacts, but to reproach him with having hidden his links from the French people who believed that they were electing a free man.

To understand how a man in whom all agree they see an agent of the United States and Israel has been able to become the head of the Gaullist party, then the President of the French Republic, one must go back in time. Far back. We must follow a long digression during which we shall introduce the protagonists who are today taking their revenge.


FAMILY SECRETS

At the end of the Second World War, the USA secret services counted on the Italo-US godfather Lucky Luciano to control the security of American ports and to prepare the allied landings in Sicily.

Luciano's contacts with the US services passed above all through Frank Wisner Sr. then, when the 'godfather' was freed and went into exile in Italy, through his Corsican 'ambassador', Étienne Léandri.

In 1958, the United States, worried about a possible victory of the FLN in Algeria which would have opened North Africa to Soviet influence, decided to give rise to a military coup d'état in France. The operation was organised jointly by the Planning Direction of the CIA - in theory run by Frank Wisner Sr.- and by NATO. But Wisner had already sunk into dementia so that it was his successor, Allan Dulles, who supervised the action. From Algiers, the French Generals formed a Committee of Public Safety which exerted pressure on the civil government in Paris and forced it to give full powers to General De Gaulle without any need to use force.

However, Charles De Gaulle was not the pawn whom the Anglo-Saxons believed they could manipulate. To start with, he tried to find a way out of the colonial contradiction by giving wide autonomy to the overseas territories within a French Union. But it was already too late to save the French Empire since the colonised peoples did not believe in the promises from the metropolis and insisted on their independence. After having successfully led fierce campaigns of repression against the independentists, De Gaulle realised what had to be done. Showing rare political wisdom, he decided to give each colony its independence.

This U-turn was seen as a betrayal by most of those who brought him to power. The CIA and NATO then backed all sorts of plots to get rid of him, including a failed putsch and some forty attempts to assassinate him. However, some of his partisans approved of his political evolution. Around Charles Pasqua, they formed the SAC, a militia to protect him.

Pasqua is both a Corsican crook and a former member of the resistance. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made a fortune during prohibition. He ran the Ricard company which, after having dealt in absinthe, a forbidden drink, made itself respectable by selling anisette. However, the company continued to serve as a cover for all sorts of deals in relation with the Italo-New Yorker Genovese family, that of Lucky Luciano. It was therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Luciano's "ambassador") to recruit strong arm men and build up a Gaullist militia. A third man played an important role in the formation of the SAC, De Gaulle's former body-guard, Achille Peretti -another Corsican.

Thus protected, De Gaulle drew up with panache a policy of national independence. While confirming that he belonged to the Atlantic camp, he questioned the Anglo-Saxon leadership. He objected to the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Common Market (1961 and 1967); he refused the deployment of UNO blue helmets in the Congo (1961); he encouraged Latin American states to break free of US imperialism (speech in Mexico, 1964); he expelled NATO from France and withdrew form the Integrated Command Structure of the Atlantic Alliance (1966); he denounced the Viet-Nam War (speech in Phnon Penh, 1966); he condemned Israeli expansionism during the Six Day War (1967); he supported the independence of Quebec (speech in Montreal 1967) ; etc...

At the same time, De Gaulle consolidated France's power by giving it a military-industrial complex including a nuclear dissuasion force, and by guaranteeing its supply of energy. He usefully separated the troublesome Corsicans from his entourage by giving them overseas missions. Thus Étienne Léandri became the dealer for the Elf group (now Total), while Charles Pasqua became the confidant of the heads of state in French-speaking Africa.

Aware that he could now defy the Anglo-Saxons everywhere at the same time, De Gaulle allied himself with the Rothschild family. He chose as Prime Minister the Director of the Bank, Georges Pompidou. The two men formed an efficient tandem. The political audacity of the first never lost sight of the economic realism of the second.

When De Gaulle resigned, in 1969, Georges Pompidou briefly succeeded him as President before being carried off by cancer. The historical Gaullists did not accept his leadership and were worried by his excessively anglophile attitude. They cried treason when Pompidou, seconded by the Secretary General of the Elyse Eduard Balladur, allowed "perfidious Albion" into the European Common Market.


THE MAKING OF NICOLAS SARKOZY

Having thus described the background, let us come back to our principal personage, Nicolas Sarkozy. Born in 1955, he was the son of a Hungarian nobleman, Pal Sarkösy de Nagy-Bocsa, who fled to France after fleeing the Red Army, and Andrée Mallah, a Jewish lady from Sallonica. After having had three children (Guillaume, Nicolas and François), the couple divorced. Pal Sarkösy de Nagy-Bocsa remarried with an aristocrat, Christine de Ganay, by whom he had two children (Pierre-Olivier and Caroline). Nicolas was not brought up by his parents alone, but passed to and fro in this recomposed family.

His mother became the Secretary of Achille Peretti. After having co-founded the SAC, De Gaulle's body-guard had pursued a brilliant political career. He was elected Député and Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the richest suburb of the capital, then President of the National Assembly.

Unhappily, in 1972, Achille Peretti was subject to serious accusations. In the United States, the magazine Time revealed the existence of a secret Corsican criminal organisation the 'Union corse ' which was said to control a large share of the traffic in drugs between Europe and America, the famous "French connection" which Hollywood brought to the screen. Based on parliamentary hearings and its own investigations, Time quoted the name of a Mafia boss, Jean Venturi, arrested some years earlier in Canada, who was no other than the commercial representative of Charles Pasqua for the drinks company Ricard. The names of several families were mentioned who were said to run the "Union corse", including the Perettis. Achille denied this, but had to resign from the presidency of the National Assembly and even escaped from a "suicide".

In 1977, Pal Sarközy separated from his second wife, Christine de Ganay, who then linked herself with the number two of the central administration of the Department of State in the United States. She married him and set up home with him in America. The world being small, as is well known, her husband was no other than Frank Wisner Jr., the son of the previous one. The functions of Junior at the CIA are not known, but it was clear that he had an important role there. Nicolas, who remained close to his step-mother, his half-brother and his half-sister, began to turn towards the United States where he "benefitted" from training programmes in the Department of State.

At the same time, Nicolas Sarkozy joined the Gaullist Party. He there met and had contacts with Charles Pasqua more speedily as he was not only a national leader, but also in charge of the local section in the Hauts-de-Seine.

In 1982, Nicolas Sarkozy, having completed his legal training and having been called to the Bar, married Achilles Pretty's niece. His best man was Charles Pasqual. As an Avocet, Maître Sarkozy looked after the interests of the Corsican friends of his mentors. He bought a property in Corsica, at Vice, and thought of making his name more Corsican by replacing the 'y' with an 'I': Sarkozy.

The following year, he was elected Mayor of Neuilly-sure-Seine in the place of his uncle-in-law, Achilles Pretty, stricken by a heart attack.

However, Nicolas did not take long to betray his wife and, from 1984 onward, he had a hidden liaison with Cecilia, the wife of the most famous French television personality at the time, Jacques Martin, whom he had met when celebrating their marriage as Mayor of Neuilly. This double life lasted for five years, before the lovers left their respective spouses to set up a new household.

Nicolas was a witness at the marriage, in 1992, of Jacques Chirac's daughter, Claude, to an editorialist at Le Figaro. he could not stop himself from seducing Claude and to have a brief affair with her, while living officially with Cecilia. The betrayed husband committed suicide by taking drugs. The break between the Chirac's and Nicolas Sarkozy was brutal and permanent.

In 1993, the left lost the parliamentary elections. President François Mitterrand refused to resign and entered into a cohabitation with a Prime Minister from the right, Jacques Chirac. His ambition was to become President and thought of then forming a tandem with Eduard Balladur comparable with that of De Gaulle and Pompidou, and he refused to be Prime Minister again and left the place to his "friend for over thirty years", Eduard Balladur. Despite his dubious past, Charles Pasqual became Minister of the Interior. Even if he kept a firm grip Moroccan marijuana, he took advantage of his position to legalise his other activities by taking control of the casinos, gaming and racing in French-speaking Africa. He also established links in Saudi Arabia and in Israel an became an honorary officer in the Mossad. As for Nicolas Sarkozy, he was Minister of the Budget and government spokesman.

In Washington, Frank Wisner Jr. took over from Paul Wolfowitz as being responsible for political planning in the Defence Department. Nobody commented on the links which he had with the French government's spokesman.
This was when the tension within the Gaullist Party came back as thirty years earlier between the historic Gaullists and the financial right, in the person of Balladur. The novelty was that Charles Pasqua and with him the young Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed Jacques Chirac to come closer to the Rothschild tendency. Everything went wrong. The conflict reached its peak in 1995 when Édouard Balladur put himself forward against his ex-friend Jacques Chirac for the presidential election, and was beaten. Above all, following the instructions received from London and Washington, the Balladur government opened negotiations for adhesion to the European Union and to NATO of the States in Central and Eastern Europe, freed from Soviet control.

Everything went wrong in the Gaullist Party where the friends of yester-year were ready to kill one another. To finance his electoral campaign, Édouard Balladur tried to get hold of the Gaullist Party's black funds, hidden within the double accounting system of the oil company Elf. Hardly had the old Étienne Léandri died, when Judges looked into the company and its bosses were incarcerated. But Balladur, Pasqua and Sarkozy never managed to recuperate the booty.


CROSSING THE DESERT

Throughout his first term, Jacques Chirac kept Nicolas Sarkozy at a distance. The man became discreet during this long period of crossing the desert. Discreetly, he continued to make links in financial circles.

In 1996, Nicolas Sarkozy having finally managed to end an endless divorce procedure married Cécilia. As witnesses they had the two billionaires Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnaud (the richest man in the country).


LAST ACT

Well before the Iraq crisis, Frank Wisner Jr. and his colleagues at the CIA were planning the destruction of the Gaullist line and the rise in power of Nicolas Sarkozy. They acted in three stages: firstly the elimination of the leaders of the Gaullist Party and taking over this body, then the elimination of the principal rival on the right and the investiture by the Gaullist Party for the presidential election, and finally the elimination of any serious challenger from the left in order to be sure of carrying off the presidential election.

For years, the media were kept excited by posthumous revelations by a real property speculator. Before dying of a serious illness, he had registered for reasons never made clear a video confession. For even more obscure reasons, the "cassette" fell into the hands of a highly placed member of the Socialist Party, Dominique Strauss-Khan, who passed it on indirectly to the press.

Even if the confessions of the speculator did not lead to any judicial sanction, they opened a Pandora's box. The principal victim of the successive affairs was to be the Prime Minister Alain Juppé. To protect Chirac, he alone took on all the criminal offences. Putting Juppé out of the way left the way clear for Nicolas Sarkozy to take over the running of the Gaullist Party.

Sarkozy then made use of his position to force Jacques Chirac to take him back into the government, despite their mutual hatred. He was definitively to be the Minister of the Interior. What a mistake! In this post, he controlled the Préfets and the interior intelligence network which he used to put his appointees into the major branches of the administration.

He also dealt with Corsican matters. The Préfet Claude Érignac had been assassinated. Although no-one had claimed it, the murder was immediately interpreted as a challenge made by the independentists to the Republic. After a long hunt, the police managed to arrest a fleeing suspect, Yvan Colonna, the son of a Socialist Député. Without regard for the presumption of innocence, Nicolas Sarkozy announced this arrest accusing the suspect of being the assassin. This news was too good two days before a referendum being organised by the Minister of the Interior in Corsica to modify the status of the Island. However that may be, the voters rejected the Sarkozy project which, according to some, favoured Mafia interests.

Although Yvan Colonna was later found guilty, he has always claimed his innocence and no material evidence has been found against him. Strangely, the man refused to talk, preferring to be found guilty than to reveal what he knows. We here reveal that the Préfet Érignac was not killed by nationalists, but shot by the hit-man, Igor Pecatte, immediately sent off to Angola where he has been taken on by the Elf group. The motive for the crime was closely linked to the previous functions of Érignac, in charge of the African networks of Charles Pasqua at the Ministry of Cooperation. As for Yvan Colonna, he has been a personal friend of Nicolas Sarkozy for many years and their children are in friendly contact with one another.

A new affair came to light: false listings were circulating which untruthfully accused certain personalities of hiding bank accounts in Luxembourg, with Clearstream. Among the personalities defamed: Nicolas Sarkozy. He took the case to court and let it seem that his right-wing rival for the presidential election, the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, had organised this machination. He did not hide his intention to have him sent to prison. In reality, the false listings were put in circulation by members of the Franco-American Foundation, of which John Negroponte was the President and Frank Wisner Jr. the Director. What the Judges did not know and we reveal here was that the listings were made in London by a joint office of the CIA and the MI6, Hakluyt & Co, of which Frank Wisner Jr. is also Director. Villepin fights back against the accusations, but he is charged, forbidden to leave his home and, de facto, temporarily removed from political life. The way is open for on the right for Nicolas Sarkozy.

It remained necessary to neutralise opposition candidates. The membership dues to the Socialist Party have gone down to a symbolic level to attract new members. Suddenly thousands of young people applied for membership cards. Among them are at least ten thousand new members who are in reality members of the Trotskyite "Lambertist" Party (so called from the name of their founder Pierre Lambert). This small extreme left formation has a history of working for the CIA against the Stalinist communists during the Cold War (it was the equivalent of the SD/USA of Max Shatchman, which formed the neoconservatives in the USA). This was not the first time that the "Lambertists" had infiltrated the Socialist Party.

In particular they planted two famous CIA agents: Lionel Jospin (who became Prime Minister) and Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the principal adviser to Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Primaries were organised in the Socialist Party to appoint its candidate for the presidential election. Two personalities were competing: Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal. Only the first represented a danger for Sarkozy. Dominique Strauss-Kahn became a candidate with the task of eliminating Fabius at the last moment. This he was able to do thanks to the votes of the infiltrated "Lambertist" militants who voted not for him but for Royal. The operation was possible because Strauss-Kahn, of Moroccan Jewish origin, had been on the US payroll for many years. The French were not aware that he lectured at Stanford, where he had been taken on by the Provost of the University, Condoleezza Rice. As soon as he took office, Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleezza Rice thanked Strauss-Kahn by having him appointed to head the International Monetary Fund.


FIRST DAYS AT THE ÉLYSÉE PALACE

On the evening of the second round of the presidential election, when the opinion polls announced his probable victory, Nicolas Sarkozy made a short speech to the nation from his campaign HQ. Then, contrary to custom, he did not go to celebrate with the militants of his party, but went to Fouquet's. The famous restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, which had once been the meeting place for the "Union Corse" now belongs to the casino operator Dominique Desseigne. It was placed at the disposition of the elected President to receive his friends and principal donors to his campaign. A hundred or so guests crowded in, the richest men in France were there with the casino bosses.

Then the elected President allowed himself a few days of earned rest. Taken there in a private Falcon-900 to Malta, he rested there on the Paloma, the 65 metre yacht of his friend Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire formed at the Banque Rothschild.

Finally, Nicolas Sarkozy was invested as President of the French Republic. The first decree which he signed was not to proclaim an amnesty, but to allow casinos to be operated by his friends Desseigne et Partouche and increase the number of gambling machines.

He formed his working team and his government. With no surprise, one finds there a very worrying casino owner (Minister of Youth and Sport) and lobbyist for the casinos of his friend Desseigne (who became spokesman for the "Gaullist" Party).

Nicolas Sarkozy relied above all on four men: Claude Guéant, Secretary General of the Élysée Palace. He was the former right arm of Charles Pasqua. François Pérol, Assistant Secretary General of the Élysée. He was a managing partner of the Banque Rothschild. Jean-David Lévitte, diplomatic adviser. Son of the former Director of the Jewish Agency. French Ambassador to UNO, he was removed from his post by Chirac who considered him too close to George Bush. Alain Bauer, the man in the shadow. His name does not appear in any directory. He is in charge of the intelligence services. Grandson of the Grand Rabbi of Lyon, former Grand-Master of the Grand Orient of France (the principal Masonic obedience in France) and former number 2 of the USA National Security Agency in Europe.

Frank Wisner Jr., who had in the meantime been appointed special envoy by President Bush for the independence of Kosovo, insisted that Bernard Kouchner be appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs with a dual priority mission: The independence of Kosovo and the ending of France's Arab policy.

Kouchner, of Baltic Jewish origin, started his career by taking part in creating a humanitarian NGO. Thanks to money from the National Endowment for Democracy, he took part in operations for Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan, alongside Osama Ben Laden and the Karzaï brothers against the Soviets. He could be found in the 90s alongside Alija Izetbegoviç in Bosnia-Herzegovina. From 1999 to 2001, he was the High Representative of UNO in Kosovo.

Under the control of the younger brother of President Hamid Karzaï, Afghanistan became the largest producer in the world of opium poppies. The juice is transformed on the spot into heroin and transported by the US Air Force to Camp Bondsteed (Kosovo). There the drug is taken over by the men of Haçim Thaçi who distribute it principally in Europe and also in the United States. The profits are used to finance the illegal operations of the CIA. Karzaï and Thaçi are long-time personal friends of Bernard Kouchner, who obviously knows nothing of their criminal activities despite the international reports which have been made on the subject.

To complete his government, Nicolas Sarkozy appoints Christine Lagarde, Minister of Economy and Finance. She had made all her career in the United States where she ran the prestigious law firm of Baker & McKenzie. Within Dick Cheney's the Center for International & Strategic Studies, she co-chaired with Zbigniew Brzezinski a working group which supervised the privatisations in Poland. She had organised intense lobbying for Lockheed Martin against the French aircraft manufacturer Dassault.

A new escapade during the summer. Nicolas, Cécilia, their joint mistress and their children were offered holidays in the USA at Wolfenboro, not far from President Bush's property. The bill this time was paid by Robert F. Agostinelli, an Italo-New York merchant banker, a Zionist and a leading neo-conservative who gives his views in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee.

The success of Nicolas spreads to his half-brother Pierre-Olivier. Under the Americanised name of "Oliver", he was appointed by Frank Carlucci (who was the number 2 of the CIA after having been recruited by Frank Wisner Sr.) Director of a new investment fund of the Carlyle Group (the joint management company of the portfolios of the Bushes and the Ben Ladens). Having become the 5th deal-maker in the world, he manages the principal assets of the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore.

The popularity of the President is in free-fall in the opinion polls. One of his advisers in communication, Jacques Séguéla, planned to distract the attention of the public with new "celebrity stories". The announcement of the divorce from Cécilia was published by Libération, the newspaper of his friend Édouard de Rothschild, to cover up the demonstrators' slogans during a day of general strikes. Going further still, the communicator organised a meeting with the singer and former model, Carla Bruni. Several days later, her affair with the President became official and the media din again covered up the political criticisms. A few weeks later still and it was Nicolas' third marriage. This time the witnesses whom he chose were Mathilde Agostinelli (the wife of Robert) and Nicolas Bazire, former private secretary of Édouard Balladur who had become a managing partner at the Banque Rothschild.

When will the French open their eyes to see what they should do?
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_27642.shtml

Visualize the Dow at 6,000
By Mike Whitney
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jul 25, 2008, 00:22



At an improvised press conference last week, George Bush gave what might have been the most comical performance of his eight-year presidency. Looking like the skipper on the flight-deck of the Hindenburg, Bush tried his best to reassure the public that “all’s well” with the economy and that everyone’s deposits were perfectly safe in the rapidly disintegrating US banking system.

Leaning lazily on the presidential podium, Bush shrugged his shoulders and said, “My hope is that people take a deep breath and realize that their deposits are protected by our government. We’re not seeing the growth we’d like to see, but the financial system is basically sound.”

Right. “Breath deep” and chill out; no need to panic. One shouldn’t let the long lines of anxious depositors who are presently trying to extract what’s left of their life savings from the now-defunct IndyMac Bank upset one’s basic equanimity. The banking system is perfectly safe, you heard it from President Trickledown himself.

At the same time Bush was offering his soothing words on all the major TV news networks, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke was on the other side of Washington giving a decidedly grimmer assessment of the economy: “The contraction in housing activity that began in 2006 and the associated deterioration in mortgage markets that became evident last year have led to sizable losses at financial institutions and a sharp tightening in overall credit conditions. The effects of the housing contraction and of the financial headwinds on spending and economic activity have been compounded by rapid increases in the prices of energy and other commodities, which have sapped household purchasing power even as they have boosted inflation. Against this backdrop, economic activity has advanced at a sluggish pace during the first half of this year, while inflation has remained elevated.”

Keep in mind, that these two events were perfectly coordinated to take place at exactly the same time, 10:20 a.m. July 15. Quite a coincidence, eh? Just another masterful public relations coup engineered by the Bush PR team, the last functioning agency in the entire bureaucracy. To no one’s surprise, the collusive media managed to divert attention from the impending financial firestorm long enough to lull the American people into believing that nothing is really wrong; the economy is just hunky-dory.

Fed-chief Bernanke again: “The economy continues to face numerous difficulties, including ongoing strains in financial markets, declining house prices, a softening labor market, and rising prices of oil, food, and some other commodities. . . . The deteriorating performance of subprime mortgages in the United States triggered turbulence in domestic and international financial markets as investors became markedly less willing to bear credit risks of any type. . . . Many financial markets and institutions remain under considerable stress, in part because the outlook for the economy, and thus for credit quality, remains uncertain.”

As Bernanke delivered one hammer-blow after another, our engaging Commander in Chief was busy swapping funny stories and rough-housing with his pals in the Washington press corps. The media confab turned out to be a typical Bush frat-party with plenty of back-slapping and hee-haws to go around.

“You had a question, Stretch?” (Ha, ha)

And that was that. Bernanke’s candid and (frankly) scary assessment of the economy was dwarfed by Bush’s diversionary palavering and bravado -- another stunning victory for the White House spinmeisters. Even so, the Fed chairman’s testimony should be dug up and examined by anyone who is interested in knowing how bad things really are so they can prepare themselves for the hard times ahead. (Find it here: Bernanke’s Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to Congress)

Bernanke again: “In the housing sector, activity continues to weaken . . . Home prices are falling, particularly in regions that experienced the largest price increases earlier this decade. The declines in home prices have contributed to the rising tide of foreclosures; by adding to the stock of vacant homes for sale, these foreclosures have, in turn, intensified the downward pressure on home prices in some areas. . . . The declines in home prices have contributed to the rising tide of foreclosures; by adding to the stock of vacant homes for sale, these foreclosures have, in turn, intensified the downward pressure on home prices in some areas. . . . . . Surveys of capital spending plans indicate that firms remain concerned about the economic and financial environment, including sharply rising costs of inputs and indications of tightening credit, and they are likely to be cautious with spending in the second half of the year.”

The economic sky is quickly darkening and Bernanke made no effort to hide his concern. His testimony was as close to the truth as one gets in Washington where honesty is usually eradicated like a malignant tumor. In any event, it is worth wading through Bernanke’s speech word by word even if it only reinforces one’s belief that the economy is about to take a sleigh-ride through a deflationary blast-furnace which will ultimately result in the demise of Breton Woods, the disorderly replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and an end to the United States short-lived dominance as the world’s lone superpower. The American Century has about run out of steam just eight years into the new millennium. Bernanke’s presentation confirms what the econo-bloggers have been saying for the past three years: the end is nigh, get your house in order.

Personal consumption is down, the labor market is softening, and food and fuel prices are soaring. Housing values are plummeting, wages have stagnated, and American households are more overextended, underpaid and stressed out than any time in history. It’s all bad. No wonder consumer confidence is at its nadir.

“The summer of 1931”?

The next shoe to drop is the stock market. It’s not that complicated either. When wholesale prices on supplies and raw materials go up, but businesses can’t pass along those costs because consumers are already maxed-out, then corporate profits plummet and the stock market crashes down with the force of an avalanche.

Journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard summed it up like this: “It feels like the summer of 1931. The world’s two biggest financial institutions have had a heart attack. The global currency system is breaking down. The policy doctrines that got us into this mess are bankrupt. No world leader seems able to discern the problem, let alone forge a solution. The International Monetary Fund has abdicated into schizophrenia. . . . My view is that a dollar crash will be averted as it becomes clearer that contagion has spread worldwide. But we are now at the point of maximum danger.” (Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, “The Global Economy is at the point of maximum danger,” UK Telegraph)

“Maximum danger,” indeed. Stock market mayhem is just around the corner. Visualize the Dow at 6,000 and then hang on for dear life. The indexes will tumble and Wall Street will be reduced to Dresden-type rubble, nothing left but toxic fumes and twisted iron. By the end of 2009, the last few bulls will be driven out of the exchanges and onto the streets where they’ll be slaughtered one by one. It won’t be pretty.

According to Bloomberg News, “Investors worldwide are betting more than $1 trillion on a collapse in stock prices.”

But no matter how bad it gets, the media will still bang-out its “Sunny Jim” market forecasts while reiterating every mangled phrase and muddled thought from our alcohol-addled Dear Leader. The lines from the shelters, pawn shops and soup kitchens may stretch from the Golden Gate to the Statue of Liberty, but the perennially upbeat predictions of a “bottom in housing” or an “economic turnaround” will continue to blast from every media bullhorn in the nation. America’s financial media is a never-ending source of baseless optimism and hogwash.

It’s funny, while Bush was hosting his faux-press conference, live-footage was appearing on other media of fully armed LA policemen being dispatched to the various IndyMac locations. Their task was to remind the gathering of elderly “blue-hair” women and middle-aged white guys in Tommy Bahama T-shirts that any public display of outrage would be swiftly met with Rodney King-style justice. Hmmm. So now withdrawing one’s savings from the bank is not only riskier, it’s tantamount to committing a felony. My, how America has changed.

Just imagine the frustration of spending $5 a gallon for gas to drive to the local IndyMac branch to get whatever is left of your savings only to get roughed up by the local constabulary. Nice touch, eh?

Going to the bank? Don’t forget the protective headgear!

The truth is the banking system is built on a foundation of pure quicksand and it’s only a matter of time before the Bush’s truncheon-wielding Robocops start Tasering old ladies and gassing portly white guys for massing in front of the boarded up doors of their local bank. Move along, now.

Market Ticker’s Denniger made this insightful observation about the present condition of the banking system. He said, “Why does Paulson keep telling us that the banking system is sound every time he gets within 200’ of a microphone? Maybe it is because the banking system is on the verge of all-out collapse, and he knows you could blow it over with a feather!” (The Market-Ticker)

It is worth noting that the demise of IndyMac is expected to cost the FDIC around $8 billion of its meager $53 billion of reserves. four or five bank failures of equal size and the FDIC will be underwater, which is a serious problem since even conservative estimates expect bank failures to run into the hundreds. The Fed will be forced to monetize the debt, further weakening the dollar.

But IndyMac is small potatoes compared to the liabilities of the two mortgage behemoths, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Years of sketchy accounting, risky investments, abusive lending, and political cronyism have eroded the two government sponsored enterprises’ (GSEs) balance sheets and pushed them to the brink of insolvency. If they fail, it will be disastrous for the US taxpayer who will be expected to guarantee $5.2 trillion of US residential mortgages, hundreds of billions of which was lent to borrowers who will likely default on their loans in the next few years. As the housing bubble continues to fizzle; Fannie and Freddie will face losses of $500 billion or more, forcing disgruntled foreign investors to ditch their bonds and make for the exits. When that happens, long-term interest rates will skyrocket and the ailing dollar will collapse in a heap. The Bush administration can’t allow that to happen, which means that Henry Paulson will push for emergency funding from the congress (which he is doing now), so he can rebuild investor confidence and stop the hemorrhaging of foreign capital. Whether Fannie and Freddie are saved or not, it is bound to be a drain on the dollar which can only get weaker as deficits soar and confidence wanes. There’s really very little chance the dollar will survive as the “international currency.”

Economist Nouriel Roubini summed it up like this: “The existence of GSEs . . . is a major part of the overall U.S. subsidization of housing capital that will eventually lead to the bankruptcy of the U.S. economy. For the last 70 years investment in housing -- the most unproductive form of accumulation of capital -- has been heavily subsidized in 100 different ways in the U.S.: tax benefits, tax-deductibility of interest on mortgages, use of the FHA, massive role of Fannie and Freddie, role of the Federal Home Loan Bank system, and a host of other legislative and regulatory measures.

“The reality is that the U.S. has invested too much -- especially in the last eight years -- in building its stock of wasteful housing capital (whose effect on the productivity of labor is zero) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor and increases long run economic growth. This financial crisis is a crisis of accumulation of too much debt -- by the household sector, the government and the country -- to finance the accumulation of the most useless and unproductive form of capital, housing, that provides only housing services to consumers and has zippo effect on the productivity of labor.” (Seeking Alpha, “Just How Terrible is Housing as an Asset Class? Roubini Weighs In”)

Fannie and Freddie made a big mistake by shifting into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the 1990s. From 1997 to 2007, Fannie’s portfolio of dodgy MBS jumped from $18.5 billion to $127.8 billion by the end of 2007. The numbers at Freddie were even higher. Now they’re caught in the same downgrading-spiral as the investment banks, with billions of dollars of assets steadily losing value every month. It’s death by a thousand cuts. The losses have left the two GSEs cash-starved and searching frantically for new sources of capital to build their cushion. Regrettably, foreign sovereign wealth funds feel like they were burned in the Citigroup bailout and are no longer in the market for destitute US investment banks.

Here’s “The Economist” shedding a little more light of Fannie and Freddie’s creative bookkeeping: “The companies have also been unwilling to accept the pain of market prices in acknowledging delinquent loans. When borrowers fail to keep up payments on mortgages in the pool that supports asset-backed loans, Fannie and Freddie must buy back the loan. But that requires an immediate write-off at a time when the market prices of asset-backed loans are depressed. Instead, the twins sometimes pay the interest into the pool to keep the loans afloat. In Mr Rosner’s view, this merely pushes the losses into the future.” (The Economist, “The End of Illusions”)

Nice, eh? Wouldn’t it be great if guys didn’t have to explain to their wives why they pissed away their paycheck at the racetrack? Apparently, it’s okay for Fannie and Freddie; just keep paying the interest on bad loans and no one’s the wiser. What a racket. This is the type of sleazy Enron-type accounting that goes unchallenged in Washington, where everyone fudges the numbers to hide their losses from their shareholders or taxpayers, as the case may be. That’s why the namby-pamby regulators at the SEC need to be replaced with a few knuckle-dragging Abu Ghraib interrogators. There’s nothing going on at Fannie and Freddie that a set of leg irons and a few lively dunks on a waterboard wouldn’t fix.

The road to perdition: Paulson’s scatterbrain capitalism

Something has gone terribly wrong with the economy, but no one wants to say what it is. This is more than just a typical downturn in the demand-cycle or a temporary “rough patch.” In fact, it’s not a recession at all; it is a meltdown of the financial system. And it’s obvious. The “deep pocketed” Federal Reserve is currently providing hundreds of billions of dollars through its auction facilities to the most craven speculators on the planet, the investment banks. These very same banks have no ability to pay that money back. Show me their revenues; show me their assets; show me their capital cushion which is calculated mainly in terms of “Level 3 assets” and which allow the banks to assign their own value to the bad paper that’s overflowing from their vaults. Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous? One blogger called Level 3 assets “mark to fantasy.” He’s right, too. It’s all smoke and mirrors. So why are we letting crooks decide what their assets are worth?

True, a few of the investment banks just reported “better than expected” earnings, but no one on Wall Street is fooled by that baloney. The SEC changed the rules on shorting bank stocks just days before their earnings reports were due -- another gift from Uncle Sam to hide the dirty laundry. Also, some of the banks have started extending their “write downs” from 120 days to 160 days, buying themselves a little more time to deceive their shareholders about the size of their losses. It’s all one big swindle following another. The whole business stinks to high heaven and the Bush administration is right there in bed with them, snuggling up close and holding their hands.

If the public grasped the significance of the Bear Stearns fiasco, they’d understand how grave the situation really is. The technical details are irrelevant; don’t bother with them. What IS important is that the Fed acknowledged that the investment speculators had so polluted the financial system with their toxic, unregulated garbage (Credit default swaps) that if the transaction with JP Morgan flopped, the entire system would have imploded. Think about that. In other words, the legitimate “Real Economy” is now inextricably lashed to a massive $500 trillion dollar unregulated shadow banking system that operates without rules, supervision or sufficient capital. Over the counter derivatives trading is a cancer that has spread to every part of the system and is devouring it from the inside. It’s only a matter of time before the patient succumbs. That’s what the Bear bailout really means; the rest is bunkum.

The banking system is broke, busted, penniless; and yet the Fed and the G-7 allow this comedy to persist like nothing is wrong. When will the American people wake up?

And, will someone please explain how free markets can exist when speculators are subsidized by the state, or when the risk is removed from risky investing? That’s what it means when the Fed opens its auction facilities to the investment banks and brokerage houses. It makes no sense at all. Government “safety nets” are anathema to free market capitalism. “You pays yer money and you takes yer chances.” That’s finance capitalism; deal with it.

What we are seeing is a hybridized version of capitalism, “Paulson’s Scatterbrain Capitalism,” a hodge-podge of taxpayer bailouts, government intervention and free market mumbo-jumbo. It’s a toxic mix of off-balance sheets operations, over-the-counter “unregulated” derivatives, dark pool trading, opaque hedge funds, dodgy Enron-style accounting, and complex, hard-to-pronounce debt-instruments wrapped up into one, cheesy, unsustainable shell game, managed by Harvard-educated flim-flam men and backed by a 100 percent government guarantee. That’s the system we’re supporting with our tax dollars and that’s the system that is dragging us headlong to ruin.

It ain’t capitalism, my friend. It’s a crooked system run by corporate carpetbaggers and banking scalawags who’ve shot the Golden Goose in hopes of keeping the larder at the cottage on the New Jersey coast chock-full of Dom Perignon and halibut fillets. They created this nightmare and they’ve doomed us all.

As long as we prop up the existing system, the economy will continue to flounder, unemployment will continue to rise, foreclosures will continue to soar, banks will continue to be shuttered, and the wobbly old greenback will continue its inexorable march towards Pesoville. It’s time to clean house and we can start by firing Paulson.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Ecuador’s president now in neocon crosshairs
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jul 23, 2008, 00:16




(WMR) -- Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has now found himself, like his ally Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, in the neocon crosshairs for ordering Ecuador’s Deposit Guarantee Agency (AGD) to seize control of some 200 companies belonging to fugitive Ecuadorian banker brothers William and Roberto Isaias.

The neocons, especially those that inhabit the greater Miami area and hail from Cuba and New York, are accusing Correa of cracking down on press freedoms. It is the same cant heard from the neocons after Chavez closed two TV networks, RCTV and Globovision, for doing the bidding of the neocons in Washington and Miami.

In Ecuador, Correa’s actions had nothing to do with press freedom. The Isaias brothers’ Isaias Group owned Ecuador’s Filanbanco bank. Filanbanco collapsed in 1998 and the Ecuadorian government was left holding the bag. Ecuador’s government claims the Isaias brothers embezzled $661 million from the bank. However, the Ecuadorian government cannot do very much to recover the losses because the Isaias brothers fled Ecuador and now live comfortably, under the protection of the Bush regime, in Florida. They fled to the Miami area in 2000 before an arrest order was issued by Ecuador. The Correa government has asked the United States to extradite the Isaias brothers back to Ecuador and outgoing U.S. ambassador to Ecuador Linda Jewell said the request is being studied.

The Isaias brothers and their friends in Miami, including Miami Herald Latin America correspondent Andres Oppenheimer, are falsely charging that Correa is stamping out press freedom in his seizure of Isaias Group companies because they include three media companies: TC-Television, Gamavision, and Cablevision. However, among the other Isaias companies seized are a sugar mill, construction firms, and trading and insurance companies. Correa has not moved to take over other media companies that have criticized him much more vociferously than the Isaias Group TV stations.

Much like the Russian oligarchs who raided the Soviet and Russian treasuries and then absconded abroad with the funds, the Isaias brothers lorded over a business empire amid the collapse of the Ecuadorian economy in 1998. Ecuador was even forced to scrap its national currency and adopt the U.S. dollar.

Correa, a U.S.-trained economist, is now trying to revive Ecuador’s economy and political system, the latter through a referendum on a new constitution, and part of his plan is to try to recover the money embezzled by the Isaias brothers.

U.S. ambassador Jewell, who is leaving her post in Quito, may see Correa as a victim of the neocon U.S. foreign policy that is being dictated from their think tanks in Washington and condos in Miami and Coral Gables. She recently defended Correa and said there is no proof to past neocon allegations that Correa is supporting the Colombian FARC rebels. Colombia conducted a U.S.-supported military raid into Ecuador in March of this year, killing a number of FARC guerrillas, including FARC deputy commander Raul Reyes, as well as others. U.S. support for the Colombian raid was seen as retaliation for Ecuador’s ordering the U.S. to leave its military airbase at Manta on the Ecuadorian coast.

The comments by Jewell in support of Correa are sure to earn her the wrath of the neocons in Washington and Miami, which will now place a vendetta against the ambassador high on their “to do” list.

Israel’s collective psychosis: The denial syndrome
Khaled Amayreh




July 20, 2008






This week, Israel sank in an avalanche of national lethargy, hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Seeking to cope with Hezbullah’s success in getting Israel to release all Lebanese prisoners, dead and living, in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers, Israeli leaders, media and shapers of public opinion have been indulging in sanctimonious self-glorification while denouncing the other side as "hateful, uncivilized and representing an inferior culture."

This is a characteristic Israeli behavior. It perfectly characterizes a society that has been living in a state of denial ever since Zionist gangs, aided by western powers, succeeded in uprooting the bulk of native Palestinians from Palestine, their ancestral homeland, and implanting therein Israel, a state based on racism, terror, ethnic cleansing and falsification of history.

The orgy of lying, especially the shocking amenability of most Zionist Jews to take the obscene lies at face value caricatures a people that dreads knowing the truth, let alone coping with it. And when the truth eventually manages to penetrate the "iron wall" of Zionist lies, the custodians of the big lie, which is Zionism, resort to a whole set of defense mechanisms to protect the collective mental sanity of a state whose very existence constitutes a crime against humanity.

Thus, according to this depraved and psychotic mindset, Israel doesn’t murder children and innocent civilians, It is only the victims that bring death upon themselves. And Israelis don’t steal the land and property of Palestinians, since the entire world was created for the sake of the "chosen people."

And even when Jews do commit "certain mistakes" and "abominable sins," they are not really to blame for that since it is the victims that always force Jews to make these mistakes.

Hence, the proverbial Palestinian victim of Israeli savagery is always responsible for the demolition of his own home, the murder of his own children and the destruction of his own farm, grove and orchard by Israeli bulldozer!!

Eventually, the entire Palestinian Nakba is a self-inflicted calamity which the Palestinians brought upon themselves because they refused to succumb to the will of the "chosen people." More to the point, if the Palestinians don’t come to terms with the Nakba and the occupation, a greater Nakba, or holocaust, would be inflicted upon them.

Interestingly, the wave of self-righteous overindulgence in Israel has been led by the establishment people, figures that know too well that Israel doesn’t really represent the culture of peace, but rather the culture of war and aggression; they know that Israel is inculcated with a criminal and murderous mentality that differs very little from the Nazi mentality.

Yes, they do know all of this, but like all murderers, thieves and liars, they dread facing the truth. The truth would simply make them lose their raison d’etre. This is why they always try to turn the black into white, the white into black and the big lie into a "truth" glorified by millions of "beneficiaries" at home and ignorant "fans" abroad.

It may be particularly difficult to convince the "beneficiaries" of their sinfulness, namely the fact that they are living in homes that belong to other people and living on land that belongs to another people.

However, for the sake of the ignorant or naïve fans in Europe and north America as well as the rest of the world, it is imperative that they be delivered from the grip of Zionist lies.

Yes, westerners must be allowed to know the naked truth about this sick and sickening state that deceptively claims to be the sole true inheritor of Judaism while its ideology, behavior and actions are antithetical to all religious and moral values that stress universal justice and human equality.

Let us remember some of the "glorious expressions" of the Zionist culture of love and self-abnegation in recent years.

Chris Hedges is a prominent journalist and author specialized in American and Middle Eastern politics. He worked for a number of publications including the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times where he spent 15 years.

In his recent book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges tells a chilling story from his trip to the Gaza Strip in the heydays of the intifada, or the second Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation.

Hedges watched, ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children being lured to their neighborhood’s perimeter fence by taunts from a loudspeaker on the Israeli side. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come! The Israeli voice barked insults at the boys’ mothers. The boys responded by hurling their rocks at the jeep with the loudspeaker. The Israelis shot at them with M-16s fitted with silencers. Hedges found the victims in the hospital, children with their stomachs ripped out, and with gaping holes in their limbs.

Writing for "Harper’s Magazine" (see The Nation, March 11, 2002), Hedges wrote: " Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. Death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights in Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

Here is another "expression of love:" In November, 2001, an undercover unit of the Israeli army buried a landmine in the sand that flows around Abdullah Siyam Primary School in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

A few hours later, as Palestinian children headed to school, the mine exploded. Five school kids were instantly reduced to broken flesh. The youngest was six. All the victims came from the same extended family: Akram Naim Astal, 6, and his brother Mohammed, 13; Omar Idris Astal, 12, and his brother Anis, 10; and their cousin Muhamemd Sultan Astal, 12. Their young bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. The limbs of one child were found 50 meters away. Some of the kids could only be identified by their school bags, brightly colored and spattered with blood, still dangling from their butchered bodies.

Hasbara doctors in Israel might seek to extenuate the gravity or even whitewash these crimes by claiming that these were "individual acts" that didn’t reflect the overall policy of the Israeli government and army.

However, this is a big lie. In 2001, the noted Israeli award-wining journalist Amira Hass interviewed an Israeli sniper in which the soldier described the commands he received from his superiors:

"Twelve and up, you are allowed to shoot. That is what they tell us," the soldier said. "So," responded the reporter, "according to the IDF, the appropriate minimum age group at which to shoot is 12." The soldier replied: "this is according to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media."

A further "expression of love and humanity of Israeli culture" manifested itself, also in Gaza, in 2004, when an Israeli occupation army soldier, dubbed Captain-R, shot a Palestinian girl, Iman al Hums, who was on her way to school. However, the soldier was not sure whether the 13-year-girl died or not. Hence, he walked to the bleeding child, and instead of trying to save her life, he shot here 25 times, emptying his entire magazine of bullets into her tender body. He did what he did in order " to verify the kill," a standard Israeli army practice in such circumstances

Now, the reader might be prompted to think that the bloodthirsty murderer was arrested and made to stand trial for his hair-raising crime. Well, the opposite happened. The soldier not only was innocent of any wrongdoing but was also awarded tens of thousands of dollars for being "hurt and libeled by unfavorable media coverage."

In truth, it is not only Israeli army soldiers and officers who willfully indulge in such Nazi behavior. Zionist rabbis routinely issue religious edicts that would allow Israeli troops to murder non-Jewish children knowingly and deliberately without having to worry about any ramifications, moral or otherwise.

In May 2007, shortly before Israeli occupation soldiers murdered two Gaza children who apparently were searching for scrap metal to sell for a few cents in order help feed their impoverished families, the former Israeli Chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombing of Gaza population centers.

Elyahu argued that a ground invasion of the world’s most crowded spot would endanger Israeli soldiers. He said "If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million, whatever it takes to make them stop."

Earlier, Elyahu, a prominent Talmudic sage, called on the Israeli occupation army not to refrain from killing Palestinian children if that means saving the lives of Israeli soldiers.

The above-mentioned are only sporadic examples of the barbarian spirit inculcated in Israelis, especially soldiers dispatched to the occupied Palestinian territories to guard the occupation and enforce apartheid.

It is this barbarian mindset that makes Israeli soldiers abduct Palestinian school children and take them to nearby Jewish settlements where they are used as "training objects" by Jewish youngsters. It is this barbarian mentality that makes Jewish soldiers force helpless Palestinian laborers do certain depraved acts such as drinking soldiers’ urine and singing, individually or in unison, "wahad Hommas, wahad fool, Allah Iyhay-yee Mishmar Gvul" (one 'dish’ hummus, one broad beans, may Allah greet the Border Police)!!!

There are of course thousands, even tens of thousands, of examples which one could easily and readily cite to underscore Israeli barbarianism.

To be sure, this disgraceful reality is known to many Israelis. In 2001, Shulamit Aloni, a former minister of education, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv that "we have become a barbarian people."

So, what makes a leftist, liberal woman see in Israel what the vast bulk of Israelis, including the country’s intelligentsia, wouldn’t see, or more correctly, wouldn’t want to see.

Well, it is Israel’s collective psychosis, the denial syndrome?








:: Article nr. 45832 sent on 20-jul-2008 08:36 ECT


www.uruknet.info?p=45832

The Toddler King’s Insufferable Reign is Doomed
July 9th, 2008 · No Comments


By Jason Miller

6/30/08

Both George Bush and Dick Cheney have emphatically proclaimed the American Way of Life as “non-negotiable.” As hard as it may be for the feeble-minded, deluded, conscienceless, or hopelessly addicted to grasp, Mother Nature and billions of human beings are going to force us to the bargaining table. We can kick, scream, stomp our feet, and hold our breath all we want, but our abhorrent mode of existence is going down.

Aside from the fact that they are utterly unsustainable, why is it such a certainty that American Capitalism, consumerism, militarism, and the myriad associated ills that exist to maintain our obscene lifestyle are a house of cards on the verge of collapse?


Quite simple really. With our overwhelming wealth, power, and military firepower, the United States exercises virtual hegemony over the globe. Granted our influence is waning, but we still call most of the shots. As lord and master of the planet, we are doing a miserable job. Emotionally infantile, we have a sense of entitlement that dwarfs Mt. Everest, we are absolutely certain that we are center of the universe, and we throw incredibly destructive tantrums when we don’t get our way, the American Way that is. We are massive toddlers inflicting our version of the “terrible twos” on the world. Were we not wielding such a massive cudgel, our childishness would be laughable.

Under our “good stewardship,” as our current unitary executive loves to call it, the world is careening down the highway at breakneck speed with an infant at the wheel. And if he crashes before an adult can wrest control from him, we’re looking at a major accident with multiple fatalities. We’ve already pushed the world to the verge of economic collapse, the brink of starvation, the initiation of perpetual war, and impending environmental disaster.

Collectively, we act without conscience or concern for the consequences of our actions. The American Way of Life is “all about me and to hell with everyone else.” We revere narcissism, hyper-individualism, greed, wealth, and status as virtues. Becoming a rich, acquisitive careerist by clawing one’s way to the top of the hierarchy through deceit, betrayal, sycophancy, and whoring oneself out in any way imaginable is enshrined as the penultimate achievement in our sewer of a society.

Contrary to the common misconception, the psychological umbilical cord between our mothers and us is severed at a very young age. Nearly the instant we are able to intellectualize we drop mom like a hot potato and become psychically parasitic, our hosts being those ubiquitous devices known as televisions.

When we were in the womb, our mothers’ rich and nurturing blood flowed through our veins, quite literally providing the essence of our physical being. Fast forward a few years. Our psychic umbilical cord detaches from mom and is immediately seduced to fuse itself to that seemingly innocent yet deeply nefarious pusher of mind crack. In stark contrast to our mother’s wholesome blood that nourished us in a way that ensured healthy physical growth, the rancid filth we derive from television cripples and malforms our psyches in profound and perverse ways.

Planned or not, television has become the power elite’s primary weapon in the daily propaganda war they wage to maintain the American Way of Life, furiously beating down any and all challengers. Calling the content of television “programming” is quite fitting. Through our addiction to pixilated images, the lords and masters of American Capitalism manipulate us into participating in the banality of evil without giving it a first thought, let alone a second one.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, Tant Mieux, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to JMiller@bestcyrano.org

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Much like the Leatherman, TV is an incredibly multi-faceted tool that enables the ruling elites in the US to hone the masses into the infantilized little sociopaths they need to man the bulwarks of American Capitalism, spreading our “corporatocracy and freedom from the pangs of conscience and critical thought” the world over.

If you don’t know the stats, you’ve been somnambulating, but here are a few:

1. We are 5% of the population and siphon off more than 30% of the world’s goodies, while 35,000 people starve to death each day.
2. We, the land of the free, exercise a higher degree of social control than even those “tyrants” in China and Russia. We have the world’s largest prison population, many of whom are non-violent drug offenders. And then there’s our clever way of imposing our agenda in Latin America via the “War on Drugs…..”
3. We lost about 500,000 people in WWII while Russia lost over 22 million yet we arrogantly boast that WE “defeated fascism.” And that’s not to mention the fact that many of our beloved capitalists, including members of the Bush dynasty, supported Hitler until they faced potential criminal prosecution.
4. We have staged coups and incursions the world over (our interventions are far too numerous to document in this dispatch, but visit this site to familiarize yourself with the reach of our malevolent imperialist tentacles: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/US_ForeignPolicy.html)
5. Ironically, we justify our trillion dollar a year military budget by waging wars against nations with phantom weapons of mass destruction–while we are the only nation to have utilized such weapons. Ask Japan about the devastating impact.
6. We pour billions of dollars into the support of those miserable Zionist squatters in Palestine because a very small percentage of our population (which has very deep pockets, a strangle-hold on mass media, and a juggernaut lobbying organization-the AIPAC) has many of us brain-washed into believing “poor little Israel” is fighting for its very existence—when the reality is that it has a more formidable military than all of its alleged threats combined and has ruthlessly brutalized the Palestinians like the terrorist state that it is.
7. We slaughtered over two million Vietnamese in an attempt to keep the world safe for capitalism and are poised to consider putting one of the perpetrators in the White House.
8. We have murdered millions of Iraqis since the Gulf War via invasion, brutal economic sanctions, fomenting civil war and chaos, illegal occupation, and destruction of infrastructure, not to mention art and archeological treasures that are in fact the patrimony of all humanity. And neither of the performers in the theater of the absurd we call a “presidential election” has promised to bring an immediate end to this moral and legal abomination. If we enforced the Nuremberg Laws that WE crafted, all responsible would be hanged, including whoever replaces Bush and perpetuates this genocide.

And that is just a brief and very incomplete summary of the evil that we openly or tacitly support simply by being Americans, even if our role is very banal or pedestrian. As cogs in a murderous machine built on stolen land and primarily with the blood, sweat and tears of slaves and poor immigrants, we all bear a degree of responsibility for the atrocities we commit. Even those who choose to remain and fight the system from within are still buttressing the American Way to some extent.

How do we sleep at night? Some of us don’t and some of us have pharmaceutical help. But by and large our television programming has given us the “gifts” of a pathologically muted conscience, heavy doses of blissful ignorance, and the attention span of anencephalic sheep.

Desensitized to violence, mentally malnourished by a steady diet of brain candy, conditioned to putting our brains in neutral and letting the “idiot box” do our thinking for us, psychologically beaten down by constant reminders that the subjects of our idolatry are “better than us,” and manipulated into believing that the spiritually vacuous American Dream is more than just a mirage that keeps the working class trudging through the desert of perpetual corporatism, many of us remain true believers, prefer wage slavery to sleeping under a bridge, or recognize that (despite the shop-worn and inane rhetoric about freedom and democracy) the system has harsh consequences for those who don’t at least ostensibly toe the line.

Regardless of our individual level of consciousness or level of participation in this criminal enterprise known in some circles as the American Empire, we Americans as a collective are an intriguingly repulsive synthesis of excessively spoiled brats and sociopaths. We want what we want when we want it, consequences be damned. We have the means to get what we desire, virtually no capacity to delay gratification, and the ability to punish those who stand in our way. To top it off, we don’t let trivialities like conscience restrain us. We are a nation of sociobrats.

Individually, we can change. Many have transformed and many more will. But there are some pretty long odds against enough of us shedding our grotesquely malformed psyches and evolving beyond our state of infantilization before the American Way of Life collapses under the weight of its own excrement or is eradicated by its hordes of victims.

Jason Miller is the associate editor of Cyrano’s Journal Online. He is the editorial director of Cyrano’s largest blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner.

The Russian-Israeli Mafia: Off-limits to FBI, US intelligence
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jul 11, 2008, 00:19




(WMR) -- The same cancer that bankrupted the Soviet Union and the early Russian Federation, namely the Russian-Israeli Mafia -- the global organized crime syndicate that uses Israeli government protection and passports to cover their illegal worldwide activities -- has so thoroughly permeated the American political and business system that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are virtually powerless to bring the major perpetrators to justice.

Across the United States, FBI agents have been hamstrung by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments, led by two individuals, Michael Mukasey and Michael Chertoff, whose close links to the Russian-Israeli Mafia in New York and New Jersey have seen case after case involving Russian-Israeli mobsters going un-investigated and virtually ignored.

In fact, the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, and the military intelligence services have seen their ranks of Russian linguists slashed by the Bush administration. In most cases, Russian-Israeli mobsters use their native Russian language in their telephone conversations and email communications. Only recently, perhaps owing to a shift within the Defense Department led by Robert Gates, has the NSA began re-hiring Russian linguists, although at a very slow pace.

Neo-con outlets such as The Daily Telegraph in Great Britain, which has also witnessed an infiltration of its government, law enforcement, and intelligence services by individuals linked to the Russian-Israeli mob, are now complaining that there are so many Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) agents in Britain that MI-6, MI-5, and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are finding it difficult to battle “Islamist terrorists.” However, the FSB is primarily a law enforcement agency that has been waging battle against the Russian-Israeli Mafia, particularly its major backers like exiled Russian-Israeli oligarch Boris Berezovsky who have been granted protection by the British government while they plan subversive activities against Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

In fact, as seen in the poisoning of Russian ex-FSB and KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, there are solid links between Berezovsky, the Russian-Israeli Mafia, and Islamist guerrillas in Chechnya and abroad. However, British intelligence, which recently suffered a major blow with the strange illness that struck the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Alex Allan, who was found in a coma and covered with blood in his Hammersmith apartment in the London suburbs, has been unable to crack down on the Russian-Israeli Mafia infiltration of Britain since the billions of pounds in dirty money has made its way into the coffers of top Labor and Conservative politicians.

Allan reportedly had plans to return to Freemantle, Australia, where he lived with his Australian-born wife before she died of cancer. Allan had been the British High Commissioner in Canberra before moving back to London to serve as JIC Chairman. As JIC Chairman, Allan coordinated the activities of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. The last high-ranking British spy to take up residence in Australia was the late Peter Wright, whose book “Spycatcher,” detailed past secret activities of MI6 and MI5. Attempts by the Margaret Thatcher government to have the book’s publication banned in Australia were unsuccessful.

The United States is only second to Britain in infiltration by the Russian-Israeli gangsters in the highest echelons of government. The Bush administration has ignored INTERPOL arrest warrants and requests for information issued on behalf of Russia for wanted Russian-Israeli billionaires like Leonid Nevzlin, Boris Berezovsky, aka Platon Elenin (suspected by Russian authorities of links to the assassinations of Litvinenko and Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya), Arkady Gaydamak, Semyon “Sam” Kislin, Michael Chernoy, and others.

The Russian-Israeli interference in the law enforcement activities of the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have hobbled major investigations to the detriment of the national security of the United States. The FBI investigation of the assassination of retired CIA Houston station chief Roland “Tony” Carnaby, who was investigating Israeli Mossad and Russian-Israeli mob activities in the Houston area, has been relegated to a low-level and non-descript national security investigation by FBI higher ups. The DEA and FBI investigations of the activities of Israeli “art students” and “movers” in the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks were similarly stymied by the direct orders of then-FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to a major wire service journalist who covered the Justice Department. The Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), funded by wealthy Jewish American private contributors and the Israeli government, “threatened” media outlets, including the Associated Press, who continued to report on the activities of the Israeli art students and movers.

The FBI has also ignored the massive thefts of personal data of American citizens. WMR has previously reported that most of the major thefts are part of a covert operation by the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security to pick up where Iran-contra felon Admiral John Poindexter left off with his aborted Total Information Awareness (TIA) system, designed to collect the most personal details of American citizens in a massive database. A February 27, 2008, truck theft of backup data tapes from Bank of New York Mellon Corporation’s Jersey City Shareholder Services unit has the hallmarks of an organized crime heist. Shareholders of the Walt Disney Company, John Hancock Financial Services (a division of Manulife Financial Corporation), People’s United Bank of Connecticut, and the Bank of New York were informed that their stock sale transactions may have been compromised. WMR has learned that Disney stock holders were not officially informed of the theft of their data until June 13, 2008, four months later. Perhaps not coincidentally, a number of Israeli-owned computer services companies are now offering protection against data theft to potential customers. In addition, Kislin was linked to a money laundering scandal involving the Bank of New York, now Bank of New York Mellon. WMR previously reported on the Bank of New York (BONY) scandal and the Russian-Israeli mob:

“Forest Hills has been identified by the FBI as a major center for both the Russian-Israeli Mafia and Mossad and it is a place where the two interests often cooperate. In 2002, OPERATION SPIDERWEB, a joint FBI-EUROPOL operation, resulted in the arrest of 20 Russian-Israeli dual citizens on charges of money laundering. The laundering primarily involved the Bank of New York (BONY), the Russian bank Menatep, and an ‘Internet bank’ called the European Union Bank. More importantly, the money laundering network also included Benex, a firm connected to Bill Clinton-pardoned Mossad figure Marc Rich, who still resides primarily in Switzerland. . . . Benex’s office was located on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills in the same building where Grigori Loutchansky headquartered two of his companies. Loutchansky is a Latvian-born Israeli who laundered billions through his Vienna-based NORDEX firm. National Security Agency (NSA) signals intercepts have reportedly yielded intelligence on Loutchansky’s role in the smuggling of nuclear materials. Loutchansky also was closely linked to Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign through New York real estate magnate and Democratic donor Sam Dombs. . . . Forest Hills was also the hometown of international diamond dealer Yehuda Abraham, convicted in a plot to smuggle surface-to-air missile launchers from Russia into the United States, mere four months after 9/11, and launder the proceeds from the deal through Malaysia. The network was discovered to have links with the Viktor Bout weapons smuggling network and money laundering facilities linked to ‘Al Qaeda’ Southeast Asia affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah. Abraham, an Afghan Jew, was linked not only to Mossad but to the Saudi Royal Family.”

It is now being reported that John McCain has a severe gambling addiction, evidenced by his long bouts with the craps tables in Las Vegas. There are reports that convicted GOP lobbyist and Russian-Israeli mob money launderer Jack Abramoff traded favors with McCain and Alabama Governor Bob Riley, who, through election malfeasance, cost Democratic Governor Don Siegelman his governorship in 2002 and then proceeded to engage in a criminal conspiracy to indict and convict Siegelman on trumped up charges.

A set of emails sent between Abramoff and Tom DeLay’s Communications Director in December 2002, emails that were never produced by McCain’s Indian Affairs Committee, show that Abramoff was conspiring with Riley, a casino gambling opponent, to keep gambling from the Poarch Creek Indian Reservation to benefit gambling on the Coushatta Indian Reservations in Mississippi. The email also describes efforts between Mississippi Republican Governor Haley Barbour and Maryland Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich to bring casino gambling to Indian reservations in their states. Ehrlich and his staff were targets of a federal investigation linking them to a prostitution ring involving Pamela Martin & Associates escorts and Shirlington Limousine, which ferried escorts on behalf of individuals and lobbyists linked to Abramoff in the Washington, DC and Baltimore areas. That investigation was shut down after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.

McCain has also been linked to Russian aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, another member of the Russian Mafia who has been denied an entry visa to the United States. Deripaska, unlike his Russian Jewish comrades, has maintained good links to Putin. Deripaska has also figured prominently as a supplier of aluminum to the European Airbus aircraft frames to be used in the production of the US Air Force tanker plane, a contract pushed hard by McCain and his top campaign advisers, some of whom were lobbyists for Airbus.

The Russian-Israeli mob infiltration of the McCain campaign is only the continuation of a cancerous infiltration of the American body politic that began with the takeover of the Senate office of Washington’s Henry “Scoop” Jackson by anti-Soviet Jewish “neo-conservatives” in the early 1970s and blossomed into the full scale coup witnessed in the presidential election of 2000.

"Non-Lethal" Weapons: Where Science and Technology Service Repression


by Tom Burghardt


Global Research, July 10, 2008
Antifascist Calling...







Acoustic microwave armaments? Laser induced plasma channels? Vortex ring guns? Are these high-tech MacGuffins spiffing-up the latest Hollywood near-future thriller? Regrettably, no. Welcome to the twisted world of "non-lethal" weapons research brought to you by the "fun" folks at the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD).

Like a newborn's proud parents, the JNLWD is heralding the successful phase two testing of Raytheon's Active Denial System (ADS), a directed energy weapon used for "crowd control." Known for its "goodbye effect," it functions as a primitive, though highly-effective "pain ray" by heating the skin to around 130 degrees F.

According to a blurb on the JNLWD website, the ADS is "helping to fill the gap between the 'shout' and 'shoot' alternatives faced by our troops." ADS "represented the first integration of the key technology elements such as the millimeter wave source, cooling system, and antenna, among other things." With a range of some 550 yards, the ADS can penetrate clothing. Its effects have been described by test subjects as "excruciating."

A domestic version of the system known as the Silent Guardian is being hawked to law enforcement by Raytheon for its alleged ability to provide "a zone of protection that saves lives, protects assets and minimizes collateral damage." According to some reports, ADS has "been present" at some public events in the United States. How comforting.

But as disturbing as Raytheon's ADS may be, there are systems about to come "on-line" that are far, far worse. New Scientist recently described how one enterprising outfit of capitalist grifters, the Sierra Nevada Corporation, is "ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads," David Hambling reports.

Touted as the "next big thing," MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) will eventually be deployed for "crowd-control" applications in U.S. military "operations other than war." According to Hambling, MEDUSA

exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognisable sounds. ("Microwave Ray Gun Controls Crowds with Noise," New Scientist, July 3, 2008)




Sierra Nevada Corporation's Lev Sadovnik is working on the latest in a series of "active denial systems" under contract with the U.S. Navy which said in a preliminary report that the device "was shown to be effective."

According to its manufacturer, MEDUSA involves an "auditory effect" loud enough to "cause discomfort or even incapacitation."

While the technology is ballyhooed by weapons designers as an "advance," its effects are wholly insidious since "normal audio safety limits do not apply since the sound does not enter through the eardrums." Sadovnik told New Scientist, "The repel effect is a combination of loudness and the irritation factor. You can't block it out."

Another technological "breakthrough" that greatly impressed Sierra Nevada's Pentagon "customer" is "a new reconfigurable antenna developed by colleague Vladimir Manasson. It steers the beam electronically, making it possible to flip from a broad to a narrow beam, or aim at multiple targets simultaneously."

In other words, a "target" could be one person, say a union leader speaking outside a plant gate to "disruptive" strikers challenging the corporatist paradigm, or a range of "targets" engaged in "anti-social behavior" such as nonviolent civil disobedience by concerned citizens blocking the entrance to a major polluter's factory--or weapons manufacturer, for that matter.

With one eye on his corporate masters' bottom line while the other is focused on potential adverse publicity that might accrue from fabricating a product that creates a shockwave inside someone's skull, Sadovnik resorts to the old "dual-use" public relations ploy to cover his ass-ets, so to speak. Without skipping a beat, Sadovnik claims the technology could have "non-military" applications such as scaring away pesky flocks of birds or even as a means to "help" people with impaired auditory functions!

While the system may be feasible, James Lin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago told Hambling that a high-power system such as MEDUSA "would mean much more powerful--and potentially hazardous--shockwaves."

"I would worry about what other health effects it is having," says Lin. "You might see neural damage."

Damaging or not, the next phase in acoustic weapons development will almost certainly entail human testing. According to Wired, a military-funded lab "is pushing to get approval to conduct human testing at 130Db to see if, in that range, sound could have a 'deterrent effect'."

At a "non-lethal" weapons conference back in December, Nicholas C. Nicholas, the Chief Scientist at Penn State's Applied Research Laboratory, told his audience that "Behavior modification is next logical step [in testing]." Sharon Weinberger reported,

You would think for all the talk of acoustic weapons, there's tons of data. Not true, says Nicholas. There isn't really any reliable data on the effects on human as you move up the decibel range. The big problem is safety standards. "Current standards are far too conservative," argues Nicholas, whose lab works on a number of projects for the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate. OSHA standards, Nicholas says, are for occupational hazards that cover up to 30 years of exposure, and shouldn't be used for testing weapons. ("Lab Pushes for Sonic Blaster," Wired, December 12, 2007)

Despite the potential of acoustic weapons inflicting permanent injuries, Nicholas was not concerned in the least: "Some injury has to be tolerated or you cannot develop nonlethal weapons." Nevertheless, their implicit dangers are already well-known.

When the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) was forced to release a study under the Freedom on Information Act, it did just that, documenting a multitude of hazardous side-effects. Under the heading, "Incapacitating Effect: Microwave Hearing," we discover the following:

Microwave hearing is a phenomenon, described by human observers as the sensations of buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking sounds that originate within or immediately behind the head. There is no sound propagating through the air like normal sound. This technology in its crudest form could be used to distract individuals: if refined, it could also be used to communicate with hostages or hostage taken directly by Morse code or other message systems, possibly even by voice communications.

The mechanism described by INSCOM analysts refer to the so-called "Frey effect," named after Allan H. Frey, a Cold War neuroscientist who first published his 1962 findings in the Journal of Applied Physiology. While some of the technologies are still in the conceptual stage, how does INSCOM view their possible deployment as a "crowd control" weapon? The following passage sets the tone (if you'll pardon the pun) of the sinister nature of these systems and those who design them. Under the heading, "Microwave Hearing: Possible Influence on Subject(s)," INSCOM analysts hypothesize:

Application of the microwave hearing technology could facilitate a private message transmission. It may be useful to provide a disruptive condition to a person not aware of the technology. Not only might it be disruptive to the sense of hearing, it could be psychologically devastating if one suddenly heard "voices within one's head." ("Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons," U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), 17 February 1998)

Although "non-lethal" microwave acoustic weapons have yet to be deployed, they have been field tested. According to New Scientist,

It is claimed that the so-called "Frey Effect"--using close-range microwaves to produce audible sounds in a person's ears--has been used to project the spoken numbers 1 to 10 across a lab to volunteers'. ... In 2004 the US Navy funded research into using the Frey effect to project sound that caused "discomfort" into the ears of crowds. (David Hambling, "U.S. Army Toyed with Telepathic Ray Gun," New Scientist, March 21, 2008)

While Hambling may believe such systems are "outlandish," given time--and virtually unlimited resources courtesy of their intended "targets"--U.S. citizens, I'm far less sanguine.

Despite all the hoopla, it should be clear by now that descriptors such as "non-lethal" or "less-than-lethal" are, strictly speaking, Orwellian constructs that mask their application as repressive tools for domination. Their primary purpose is not to "save lives" but to be used as instruments of social control.

What other horrors are Pentagon contractors literally cooking-up? According to Wired, the Wattre Corporation has created an "active denial system" called Hyperspike. Sharon Weinberger reports,

Imagine being hit by a nonlethal blast that seems to explode in front of you--a deafening and blinding combination of light and sound. As the battle for "sonic blasters" heats up, a number of companies are looking at innovative ways to combine light and sound into new, nonlethal devices. ("Sonic Blaster + Laser = New Weapon," Wired, March 31, 2008)

According to Wattre's president Curt Graber, Hyperspike combines a "collimated beam of sound" with corporate grifter Stellar Photonics "dynamic pulse detonation" laser to create a combined effect that Graber describes as a "psycho-acoustical event."

The new weapon creates a "mid-air plasma ball" that that "basically ignites the air in front of the person," Graber says. "It creates fireworks right in front of you."

What will they think of next! A fireworks show just before the cops bash your head in. How's that for American innovation and know-how!

With a multitude of uses in the coming period as the American economy tanks and "restless natives" in the "homeland" take to the streets in protest against endless imperial wars and assaults on our economic and social rights, Hyperspike seems just the thing to "keep the rabble in line." As touted by Wattre Corporation, the Plasma Accoustic Shield System (PASS) "will eventually combine a dynamic pulse detonation laser with a high power speaker for hailing or warning, and a dazzler light source."

But Keith Braun of the U.S. Army's Advanced Energy Armaments Systems Division, based at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, told New Scientist last year that the PASS is not quite ready for prime time. According to David Hambling,

Braun puts the maximum range of the system at around a hundred metres. But he says the PASS laser is unlikely to be used as a weapon, in its current format, since it lacks sufficient power. Unlike other high-power lasers which burn a target, the DPD relies on a shockwave. Braun says it would take several minutes to burn through a piece of paper using the laser.

"It is fair to say that any stunning or disabling of a target individual would require additional force on target," says Braun. "The current state-of-the-art in portable, rugged laser systems is not at the point of sufficient power." ("Plasma Shield May Stun and Disorient Enemies," New Scientist, April 26, 2007)

Indeed, PASS and other combinations such as Wattre's Hyperspike "may be the first step towards a man-portable, tuneable laser weapon that could be used in both non-lethal and lethal modes."

Stellar Photonics, which has a $2.7 million contract to build PASS for the Defense Department, is pitching a portable laser rifle "which would be lethal," according to Army researchers. Hambling reports,

It would weigh about fifteen kilograms, would have a range of more than a mile, and could have numerous advantages over existing rifles--better accuracy and the ability to hit a moving target at the speed of light.

It could also be used in non-lethal mode, "offering the individual soldier a first response non-lethal alternative, with the capability to go lethal should the situation call for that level of response", says Braun. But extensive testing of its effects on humans would need to be carried out before it could be legitimately used as a non-lethal weapon.

One shudders to think what "extensive testing of its effects on humans" would entail and what "metrics" would determine its "effectiveness."

Fear not, the Defense Department is busily exploring this for us. According to its website, Picatinny Arsenal, "the Home of American Firepower," has a brief to "establish strong partnerships with many agencies...and academia that are exploring advanced technologies." Some of the "advanced technologies" under development by Picatinny include:

Advanced Energy Weapons Systems employ advanced technologies that may completely change the way military missions are organized and executed in the future. These systems include, but are not limited to, charged particle beams, neutral particle beams, antiparticle beams, low and high energy lasers, high-power microwaves (HPM), acoustics, plasma, and substantial potential with nanotechnology. ("Products and Services," Picatinny Arsenal, no date)

As we have seen in this brief descriptive overview, American militarism is extending the boundaries of "pacification" directly into the human body and mind, viewed by military planners and their corporatist paymasters as necessary accoutrements for dominating the "battlespace." And in this brave new world, science and academia are playing pivotal roles in the development of "non-lethal" weapons systems for the American Empire's "up-armored" war fighters and mercenaries.

According to researcher Nick Turse, since World War II academia has come to rely on Pentagon funding for research and development, a devilish relationship that has "the money and muscle to alter the landscape of higher education, to manipulate research agendas, to change the course of curricula, and to force schools to play by the rules."

As Turse documents in his valuable book, The Complex, one institution, MIT and its spun-off "not-for-profit" research powerhouse The MITRE Corporation, brought in a cool $883,832,277 in research and development dollars from the Pentagon. "Heavy-lifting" such as this "would move MIT out of the military-academic ranks and within striking distance of the military-corporate megagiant General Dynamics."

Researcher and activist Frank Morales described the sinister convergence of science, corporate power and the military's development of "non-lethal" weapons technology as one where "the Pentagon and Justice Department, along with their private and academic appendages are spearheading new ways to control, hurt, torture and kill people, here and abroad." Indeed, Morales writes,

Within this context, a well-funded sadistic science, searching literally for the "magic bullet," weaponizes anything that can "disable." This new fascism attacks the body utilizing bio-determinist ideology and advanced technical means, necessarily widening its potential targets with each new technological advance and/or political requirement. ... No longer content to withstand the annoying pressures of democracy, the corporate game plan calls for a more direct action approach, more repression and less concession. This is the context for so-called non-lethal weapons. ("Non-Lethal Warfare," in Police State America, edited by Tom Burghardt, Toronto/Montreal: Arm The Spirit/Solidarity, 2002, p. 120)

There is nothing "gee-whiz" about such appalling technologies. Serving as instruments for waging the American Empire's new class war, the well-paid "little Eichmanns" busily designing an uninhabitable world of corporatist nightmare and horror should be denounced--and their "research" shut down.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.