On Sep 2, 10:36 am, Keith In Tampa <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> With regard to your views of Romney's wealth......You're probably right!
> Of course, Moochie and Barack Hussein Obama come from such poor, humble
> beginnings, and this of course will be the reason you support Barack
> Hussein in the next election?
Keith how many times do I have to tell you; I don't vote for either of
the 2 major political parties... never have, never will.
You see, this is your problem, you don't listen, have selective
memory, and routinely ignore all the bad things the party you vote for
does.
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Monday, September 3, 2012
Re: [LDA] An Impressive List Of Accomplishments
good post
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On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 6:10 AM, Bruce Majors <majors.bruce@gmail.com> wrote:
----------
An impressive list of accomplishments:
President Barrack Obama is the first President to:
- apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
- have a social security number from a state where he has never lived.
- go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.
- preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.
- have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
- keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
- quote the Holy Quran and tells us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
- violate the War Powers Act. .
- be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
- defy a Federal Judge's court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.
- require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
- spend a trillion dollars on 'shovel-ready' jobs when there was no such thing as 'shovel-ready' jobs.
- abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
- bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
- order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
- demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
- terminate America 's ability to put a man in space.
- have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
- arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
- threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.
- to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
- file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
- withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
- First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
- appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
- play golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 90 to date.
- hide his medical, educational and travel records.
- win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
- go on multiple global 'apology tours'.
- take a 17 day vacation.
Forwarding this is an option I hope you will take.
THERE'S AN ELECTION COMING UP... PLEASE REMEMBER THIS LIST WHEN YOU VOTE!
If you looking for HOPE and CHANGE, this is your opportunity to finally get it.__._,_.___
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Medicare Is Doomed
Medicare Is Doomed
by Sheldon Richman, September 3, 2012
When Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to "end Medicare as we know it," they are right. But Democrats do too. "Medicare as we know it" is no longer an option.
Leaving aside Medicare's fatal moral defect -- that it's coercively funded -- the program is doomed. It has tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities. It threatens working generations with a crushing tax burden. Because of the relative size of the Baby Boom generation, soon there will be only two workers to pay each retiree's medical bills. Younger people might have other plans for their money.
So something's got to give, no matter which party is in power. If the government promises to pay for older people's medical care essentially without limit, one would expect the bill to grow fast. It's the law of demand: as price falls, demand rises. Given that law, and assuming that taxes can't be jacked up, there's only one thing to do, short of abolishing the program: limit what the beneficiaries can buy.
But older people, who vote in great numbers, won't like that. So politicians need to deceive.
President Obama's health care plan would cut over $700 billion from Medicare. (He needs the money for Obamacare.) But he insists this will not reduce benefits. How can that be? The money will be taken from providers (and insurers under the popular alternative, Medicare Advantage), not beneficiaries, he says. But if reimbursements to providers are reduced, how could that not reduce benefits?
Obama replies, "eliminate waste." It sounds nice, but it means that government will second-guess the decisions of doctors and patients.
Obamacare sets up an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), consisting of 15 presidential appointees (confirmed by the Senate), whose job is to limit spending. Now we run into the law of supply: as the price of a service falls, supply tends to fall also. We can anticipate that fewer doctors will accept Medicare patients and some on-the-edge hospitals will close. Patients will wait longer for services.
Despite assurances that only "unnecessary" services will be eliminated, it is hard to have confidence that something as individualized as medical care can be managed by 15 distant "experts." Medical care "by number" will become the standard in America.
So the choice appears to be between Medicare bankruptcy and increasing government control over retirees' health-care spending.
The Republicans disagree. What do they propose? Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would change Medicare from a "guaranteed-benefit" plan to a "guaranteed-contribution" plan. Instead of paying whatever bills retirees incur, the government would provide "premium support" to enable them to buy private coverage. Retirees would also have the option of staying in traditional Medicare, but since the Republicans predict that their plan will bring costs down through competition, they forecast that Medicare costs will be controlled without limiting people's choices.
Suspicion is warranted. "There's very little difference between the two [Obama and Ryan] plans," write John Goodman and Thomas Saving of the National Center for Policy Analysis. "There is no important difference in Medicare spending."
Ryan's misidentified voucher plan is not likely to deliver on cost control. The proposal would set up an insurance exchange in which companies offer government-designed policies. We know that providers will lobby the federal government to have their services included under the allowable plans. Moreover, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation writes, "Insurance companies selling coverage to seniors will have a bigger incentive to lobby harder, since the money will go to them." AARP will have a strong incentive to lobby too.
As a result, there will be more pressure to raise government spending -- and we know where that leads.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Money always has strings, and he who pays the piper eventually calls the tune. Opponents of Medicare warned of all this but were ignored. The welfare state is a snare and a delusion. It creates dependence at the point of a gun, and then, once dependency is achieved, it imposes restrictions that create hardship. All the while, the taxpaying generations bear an ever-greater burden.
It's time for the separation of medicine and state. Mutual-aid associations and other private for-profit and nonprofit organizations can provide for our medical needs -- without bureaucratic intrusion and coercion.
http://www.fff.org/comment/com1209a.asp
Re: How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
The CFR may be 'nothing less that a think tank' ... but like ALL 'pieces to the puzzle' ... some are emphasized MORE.
As North observes:
- I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through the screening.
I REALLY liked the quote pulled and placed at the top. It is QUITE indicative to what I have long observed.
Regard$,
--MJ
"If Romney wins, the 2016 Democrat nominee will be repeating Romney's 2012 line: "I'll fix the economy, balance the budget, & create jobs."" -- Jacob Hornberger, 31 Aug 12
At 09:05 AM 9/3/2012, you wrote:
As much as I respect Gary North, he's placing way, way, way too much emphasis on the CFR, as many conspiratorialist crackpots do......The CFR is nothing more, and nothing less than a think tank.
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:19 AM, MJ <michaelj@america.net> wrote:
- "This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this."
- How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
- by Gary North
- Tea Party Economist
- I sent a stripped-down version of my movie review of 2016 to my Tea Party Economist list. I knew it would outrage some of them.
- Why did I do it? To make sure D'Souza sees it. The list is large. Someone will send it to him. I want him to know that the Old Right isn't buying his thesis that Obama's agenda is somehow uniquely wrong because it is anti-colonialist. Obama is a defender of the American Empire as Bush was. His agenda is that of one of the factions of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is not in bed with the neocons, meaning big on Israel, but the dominant foreign policy objectives of the CFR were pro-oil and therefore pro-Arab long before 1948, let alone the late 1960s, when the neocons showed up.
- In domestic policy, his rhetoric is Democrat. But this is nothing new. The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire, what President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address (1961) called the military-industrial complex. He should have called it the military-industrial-oil-banking-AIPAC complex. This is why Clinton had the Homeland Security legislation in reserve, and why Bush presented it to Congress when the nation was in hysteria over 9-11.
- I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through the screening.
- The only exception to the vetting process over the last 80 years was Barry Goldwater. When he got the nomination, the eastern wing of the Republican Party walked out of the convention, and it would not provide the money to let him win. The media turned against him overwhelmingly. The Council on Foreign Relations members understood exactly what he meant in terms of a threat to them, and they torpedoed his campaign. They cared not at all that Lyndon Johnson would win. That was irrelevant to them. It is equally irrelevant to them today whether Obama wins or loses. He is expendable. So is Romney.
- REAGAN
- Ronald Reagan also seems to be an exception. Here was one case in which the elite really did have trouble suppressing his candidacy. He was too good with the media, and he had already proven twice that he could win in California. There were no real leaders in the Republican Party in early 1980 – before Volcker's recession – who were capable of beating Carter.
- Reagan trounced George Bush in the primaries. He told his supporters in the "Reagan Right" that he would not select Bush as his running mate. Yet he reversed himself at the Republican National Convention. Not only did he put Bush on the ticket, he turned the White House over to James Baker III, Bush's senior advisor, then as now. Baker became Reagan's Chief of Staff. Bush became the Presidential nominee in 1988. He needed the VP position. No one since Herbert Hoover had been elected President without having been a governor, a U.S. Senator, VP, or a victorious general. As soon as Bush was inaugurated in 1989, he appointed Baker as his Secretary of State. Bush had been a Skull & Bones member at Yale. He was married into the family of Brown Brothers Harriman, the international private banking firm. He was a CFR member.
- Reagan's initial cabinet contained only one person who could be regarded as a philosophical conservative, James Watt, the Interior Secretary. He was fired two years later. His replacement, William Clark, was conservative. He was pushed out by Michael Deaver. He lasted two years.
- I have discussed the CFR's vetting process here.
- The story of the CFR is well known to those of us who have been in the conservative wing of the party for over 50 years. It has been over half a century since Dan Smoot wrote The Invisible Government (1960). In late 1964, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society shifted his entire life's work from anti-Communism to anti-conspiracy, and forced the restructuring of the Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion. The story of the CFR/Federal Reserve alliance has been known to the hard-core Right for a generation. But it is still not known the standard conservative, who came into the movement in 1980 or later.
- NAIVE CONSERVATIVES
- This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this.
- D'Souza made a movie about Obama as anti-colonialist. This is utterly irrelevant in American foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-colonialist. He was an anti-British colonialist. He used World War II to replace British colonialism. Harry Truman completed the process. The Council on Foreign Relations supported this replacement. It still does. Truman's recognition of the state of Israel had serious opponents in the Council on Foreign Relations, most notably his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. Obama is extending a pre-Israel (1948), non-neoconservative (post-1965) American agenda in foreign policy. D'Souza ignores all this in his movie. So what if Obama is anti-British colonialism? It has been gone for 50 years. The main theme of his movie is utterly irrelevant. It is simply a neocon propaganda film well within the orbit CFR opinion against the big-oil wing.
- The standard Republican conservative, being ignorant of the history of American foreign policy since 1947, is blissfully unaware of this.
- Here is an example that I received from one subscriber.
- I am deeply offended by your liberal Mafia remarks. Your opinions are far from fact and in fact are B.S. right out of the liberal handbook. Sickening, misleading, untruthful and disgusting. America is not stupid as you seem to think. Look in the mirror!
- I have been told this for over 40 years. In high school, I was taught by a very conservative civics teacher, who was legendary in Southern California. He was the most conservative public school high school teacher in the region. About a decade after I graduated from his class, I was a teaching assistant at the University of California, Riverside. One of his recent graduates had been in one of my sections. I knew nothing about this. Later, the teacher told me that this student had informed him that I was a communist. This was at about the time that I was writing my book on Marx, Marx's Religion of Revolution.
- The student could not comprehend the meaning of communism. He could not comprehend the difference between the Old Right and conservatism. At that point, neoconservatism was only about three or four years old, so he probably was not familiar with that strand of political theory.
- The conservative movement has always been filled with naïve people. People are attracted to a fringe movement, rarely because of their understanding of the mainstream, but only because they don't like the mainstream, and they are determined to take a stand against it. The subtleties of the political philosophy or economic theories of the group they joined are lost on them. They got excited. They committed. And they now send their money to the Republican Party, because it seems to be fighting all those terrible liberals. The thought that the two parties have been completely vetted at the top by the same group of elite deal-doers, who in fact are very famous people, does not occur to them. The fact that, at the top of American politics, the limits of discussion have been set by the same group of a few thousand people, is lost on them.
- THE SUPERCLASS
- When you realize that the process is international, as described in the book by David Rothkopf, Superclass, it seems beyond belief. How is it that approximately 6,000 people control virtually all of the agenda for the Western nations? Your typical conservative probably would believe this with respect to the internationalist connections of the elite. They would blame the impotent UN. But they seem to feel that this elite did not begin the screening process of the present leaders of both political parties three decades or four decades earlier. These people say that they do not trust the Ivy League, yet it never occurs to them that virtually everybody they are asked to vote for as President is a graduate of one of two or possibly three Ivy League universities. It never occurs to them that there is cause and effect in education. It never occurs to them the Ivy League universities are really, truly as good as the critics think they are with respect to their ability to set the terms of discussion, meaning the exclusion of the fringes on both the right and left, among those people who graduated from the system.
- So, the political charade goes on. It will continue to go on until the day that the federal government does not have the ability to write the checks any longer. At that point, all over the world, the superclass will find that they have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and they have lost the ability to control what happens at the local level.
- The key to this is a combination of money and intellectual screening at the university and graduate school level. The elite defines the extreme limits of acceptable discussion. The elite leaders do not attempt to tell people what they ought to believe inside these limits. They do define what constitutes extremism and therefore what constitutes an unacceptable list of assumptions and policies within the network of the good old boys. Communism is out. It has always been out. Libertarianism is obviously out. Conservatism was out until Reagan was elected. There were a few early conservatives who got inside the gates, the most famous being William F. Buckley. Buckley got inside the gates early. He got into Yale, and he was tapped to join Skull and Bones. Then he went into the CIA. So, he was vetted very early.
- To get into the inner sanctum, you have to abandon extremism. Whether you are from the Right or the Left, the extreme positions are not acceptable. People who have spent their lives trying to get into the inner ring understand the limits, and they accept them. This is how the limits of acceptable discourse are imposed on the people who formulate policy, advise presidents, and write for the establishment media outlets. None of this is understood by the average conservative in the Republican Party. I think it is much more understood by the far left members of the Democratic Party. People on the far left believe in politics, and they learn how the game is played early in their lives. Conservatives do not.
- So, it is easier for the CFR to control the terms of discourse on the Right than on the Left, or so it seems most of the time. The far Left did get sucked in by Obama's rhetoric in 2008. It is highly unlikely that they will be sucked in again. They will probably vote for him. I doubt that they will vote for Romney. They will not vote the same enthusiasm this time. Voting to keep Guantanamo Bay filled with prisoners for another four years is probably not high on their list of political mobilization.
- Conservatives think Guantanamo is great. So, anybody who thinks Guantanamo should be shut down, as I do, is perceived automatically as somebody on the Left. This is because there has been a long tradition within the conservative movement to suppress civil rights. People who got into the movement, and have spent time in the movement, assume that the suppression of civil rights is okay. This is why Bush was able to get the Patriot Act passed, when Clinton did not have the courage to introduce it to Congress. It is easier to get conservatives to vote for something like this than it is to get Democrats to vote for it. Of course, in a time of crisis, most politicians will vote for anything that suppresses civil liberties.
- CONCLUSION
- If the followers of Ron Paul will ever make any difference, they are going to have to spread out and burrow in. They are going to have to go back to their hometowns, get active in local politics, and spend the next 25 years or even 50 years figuring out how the local system runs, and then taking it over. This has to be a bottom-up transformation. There is no possibility of capturing power at the top of either party. To capture control of either party will require fringe people to go to the local county level and to spend at least a generation, and maybe two generations, building a political network that will enable them to control the terms of discourse at the top. They have to do an end run around Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This will not be easy.
- www.garynorth.com
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Re: How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
As much as I respect Gary North, he's placing way, way, way too much emphasis on the CFR, as many conspiratorialist crackpots do......The CFR is nothing more, and nothing less than a think tank.
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:19 AM, MJ <michaelj@america.net> wrote:
"This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this."--
How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
by Gary North
Tea Party Economist
I sent a stripped-down version of my movie review of 2016 to my Tea Party Economist list. I knew it would outrage some of them.
Why did I do it? To make sure D'Souza sees it. The list is large. Someone will send it to him. I want him to know that the Old Right isn't buying his thesis that Obama's agenda is somehow uniquely wrong because it is anti-colonialist. Obama is a defender of the American Empire as Bush was. His agenda is that of one of the factions of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is not in bed with the neocons, meaning big on Israel, but the dominant foreign policy objectives of the CFR were pro-oil and therefore pro-Arab long before 1948, let alone the late 1960s, when the neocons showed up.
In domestic policy, his rhetoric is Democrat. But this is nothing new. The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire, what President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address (1961) called the military-industrial complex. He should have called it the military-industrial-oil-banking-AIPAC complex. This is why Clinton had the Homeland Security legislation in reserve, and why Bush presented it to Congress when the nation was in hysteria over 9-11.
I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through the screening.
The only exception to the vetting process over the last 80 years was Barry Goldwater. When he got the nomination, the eastern wing of the Republican Party walked out of the convention, and it would not provide the money to let him win. The media turned against him overwhelmingly. The Council on Foreign Relations members understood exactly what he meant in terms of a threat to them, and they torpedoed his campaign. They cared not at all that Lyndon Johnson would win. That was irrelevant to them. It is equally irrelevant to them today whether Obama wins or loses. He is expendable. So is Romney.
REAGAN
Ronald Reagan also seems to be an exception. Here was one case in which the elite really did have trouble suppressing his candidacy. He was too good with the media, and he had already proven twice that he could win in California. There were no real leaders in the Republican Party in early 1980 – before Volcker's recession – who were capable of beating Carter.
Reagan trounced George Bush in the primaries. He told his supporters in the "Reagan Right" that he would not select Bush as his running mate. Yet he reversed himself at the Republican National Convention. Not only did he put Bush on the ticket, he turned the White House over to James Baker III, Bush's senior advisor, then as now. Baker became Reagan's Chief of Staff. Bush became the Presidential nominee in 1988. He needed the VP position. No one since Herbert Hoover had been elected President without having been a governor, a U.S. Senator, VP, or a victorious general. As soon as Bush was inaugurated in 1989, he appointed Baker as his Secretary of State. Bush had been a Skull & Bones member at Yale. He was married into the family of Brown Brothers Harriman, the international private banking firm. He was a CFR member.
Reagan's initial cabinet contained only one person who could be regarded as a philosophical conservative, James Watt, the Interior Secretary. He was fired two years later. His replacement, William Clark, was conservative. He was pushed out by Michael Deaver. He lasted two years.
I have discussed the CFR's vetting process here.
The story of the CFR is well known to those of us who have been in the conservative wing of the party for over 50 years. It has been over half a century since Dan Smoot wrote The Invisible Government (1960). In late 1964, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society shifted his entire life's work from anti-Communism to anti-conspiracy, and forced the restructuring of the Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion. The story of the CFR/Federal Reserve alliance has been known to the hard-core Right for a generation. But it is still not known the standard conservative, who came into the movement in 1980 or later.
NAIVE CONSERVATIVES
This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this.
D'Souza made a movie about Obama as anti-colonialist. This is utterly irrelevant in American foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-colonialist. He was an anti-British colonialist. He used World War II to replace British colonialism. Harry Truman completed the process. The Council on Foreign Relations supported this replacement. It still does. Truman's recognition of the state of Israel had serious opponents in the Council on Foreign Relations, most notably his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. Obama is extending a pre-Israel (1948), non-neoconservative (post-1965) American agenda in foreign policy. D'Souza ignores all this in his movie. So what if Obama is anti-British colonialism? It has been gone for 50 years. The main theme of his movie is utterly irrelevant. It is simply a neocon propaganda film well within the orbit CFR opinion against the big-oil wing.
The standard Republican conservative, being ignorant of the history of American foreign policy since 1947, is blissfully unaware of this.
Here is an example that I received from one subscriber.
I have been told this for over 40 years. In high school, I was taught by a very conservative civics teacher, who was legendary in Southern California. He was the most conservative public school high school teacher in the region. About a decade after I graduated from his class, I was a teaching assistant at the University of California, Riverside. One of his recent graduates had been in one of my sections. I knew nothing about this. Later, the teacher told me that this student had informed him that I was a communist. This was at about the time that I was writing my book on Marx, Marx's Religion of Revolution.
- I am deeply offended by your liberal Mafia remarks. Your opinions are far from fact and in fact are B.S. right out of the liberal handbook. Sickening, misleading, untruthful and disgusting. America is not stupid as you seem to think. Look in the mirror!
The student could not comprehend the meaning of communism. He could not comprehend the difference between the Old Right and conservatism. At that point, neoconservatism was only about three or four years old, so he probably was not familiar with that strand of political theory.
The conservative movement has always been filled with naïve people. People are attracted to a fringe movement, rarely because of their understanding of the mainstream, but only because they don't like the mainstream, and they are determined to take a stand against it. The subtleties of the political philosophy or economic theories of the group they joined are lost on them. They got excited. They committed. And they now send their money to the Republican Party, because it seems to be fighting all those terrible liberals. The thought that the two parties have been completely vetted at the top by the same group of elite deal-doers, who in fact are very famous people, does not occur to them. The fact that, at the top of American politics, the limits of discussion have been set by the same group of a few thousand people, is lost on them.
THE SUPERCLASS
When you realize that the process is international, as described in the book by David Rothkopf, Superclass, it seems beyond belief. How is it that approximately 6,000 people control virtually all of the agenda for the Western nations? Your typical conservative probably would believe this with respect to the internationalist connections of the elite. They would blame the impotent UN. But they seem to feel that this elite did not begin the screening process of the present leaders of both political parties three decades or four decades earlier. These people say that they do not trust the Ivy League, yet it never occurs to them that virtually everybody they are asked to vote for as President is a graduate of one of two or possibly three Ivy League universities. It never occurs to them that there is cause and effect in education. It never occurs to them the Ivy League universities are really, truly as good as the critics think they are with respect to their ability to set the terms of discussion, meaning the exclusion of the fringes on both the right and left, among those people who graduated from the system.
So, the political charade goes on. It will continue to go on until the day that the federal government does not have the ability to write the checks any longer. At that point, all over the world, the superclass will find that they have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and they have lost the ability to control what happens at the local level.
The key to this is a combination of money and intellectual screening at the university and graduate school level. The elite defines the extreme limits of acceptable discussion. The elite leaders do not attempt to tell people what they ought to believe inside these limits. They do define what constitutes extremism and therefore what constitutes an unacceptable list of assumptions and policies within the network of the good old boys. Communism is out. It has always been out. Libertarianism is obviously out. Conservatism was out until Reagan was elected. There were a few early conservatives who got inside the gates, the most famous being William F. Buckley. Buckley got inside the gates early. He got into Yale, and he was tapped to join Skull and Bones. Then he went into the CIA. So, he was vetted very early.
To get into the inner sanctum, you have to abandon extremism. Whether you are from the Right or the Left, the extreme positions are not acceptable. People who have spent their lives trying to get into the inner ring understand the limits, and they accept them. This is how the limits of acceptable discourse are imposed on the people who formulate policy, advise presidents, and write for the establishment media outlets. None of this is understood by the average conservative in the Republican Party. I think it is much more understood by the far left members of the Democratic Party. People on the far left believe in politics, and they learn how the game is played early in their lives. Conservatives do not.
So, it is easier for the CFR to control the terms of discourse on the Right than on the Left, or so it seems most of the time. The far Left did get sucked in by Obama's rhetoric in 2008. It is highly unlikely that they will be sucked in again. They will probably vote for him. I doubt that they will vote for Romney. They will not vote the same enthusiasm this time. Voting to keep Guantanamo Bay filled with prisoners for another four years is probably not high on their list of political mobilization.
Conservatives think Guantanamo is great. So, anybody who thinks Guantanamo should be shut down, as I do, is perceived automatically as somebody on the Left. This is because there has been a long tradition within the conservative movement to suppress civil rights. People who got into the movement, and have spent time in the movement, assume that the suppression of civil rights is okay. This is why Bush was able to get the Patriot Act passed, when Clinton did not have the courage to introduce it to Congress. It is easier to get conservatives to vote for something like this than it is to get Democrats to vote for it. Of course, in a time of crisis, most politicians will vote for anything that suppresses civil liberties.
CONCLUSION
If the followers of Ron Paul will ever make any difference, they are going to have to spread out and burrow in. They are going to have to go back to their hometowns, get active in local politics, and spend the next 25 years or even 50 years figuring out how the local system runs, and then taking it over. This has to be a bottom-up transformation. There is no possibility of capturing power at the top of either party. To capture control of either party will require fringe people to go to the local county level and to spend at least a generation, and maybe two generations, building a political network that will enable them to control the terms of discourse at the top. They have to do an end run around Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This will not be easy.
www.garynorth.com
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* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
The Two Faces of the Power Party
"Obama is still running against George W. Bush, as we knew he would. But Obama is also running as George Bush."
The Two Faces of the Power Party
by Christopher Manion
Gary North's insightful piece last week invites serious reflection. He refers briefly to Barack Obama's twenty year discipleship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose theological roots lie in the shallows of the faux religion called "Liberation Theology." That term signifies the variant of Marxism that presents Jesus not as Savior, but as a materialist warlord and political liberator. In other words, Liberation Theology hides Marx's impersonal and inexorable process of the Class Struggle behind a Christian, human face to make it more palatable to the masses and more intimidating to its clueless opponents – all without changing its methods or its goals.
This is what ideology is all about – the deceptive assertion of falsehood as the ground of truth and reality. It represents a perversion of metaphysics and philosophical anthropology – that is, it denies what's true about reality and about us. But the Devil knows Latin, as the saying goes, and the ideologues feel free to pick and choose from among treasured, traditional language and symbols that once meant something real, but have long been emptied of their content and stuffed with tyrannical hemlock. Thus "patriotism" now means love of government. "Freedom" means bombing ornery foreigners into submission. And the "Two-Party System" means the one-power charade.
And "Change" means the same old same-old.
Consider the neocons. We've long known that they are the proud intellectual disciples of Trotsky. Well, they dread pitchforks as well as pickaxes. They rise and fall on the dialectic -- they never "lie," you see it's just that the "correlation of forces" keeps on shifting. For a neocon, there's nothing that's true for long except the timeless fact that they're always superior (after all, Marx called the party "The Vanguard of the Proletariat"), that they are always right (especially when they're wrong), and that we must all love Big Brother.
But here is the theoretical breakthrough: as Dr. North suggests, a glance at Obama's own campaign reveals that he too is relying on the dialectic, and in a most original and innovative way:
Obama is still running against George W. Bush, as we knew he would. But Obama is also running as George Bush.
"The Obama Administration is the operational successor of the Bush Administration. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, [and] on Wall Street," North writes. All this, and so much more. But should we be surprised? Consider: long ago the neocon altar boy at the pagan power-shrine welcomed Obama into the ranks of the Inner Party as a "born-again neocon."
We might not ever find Obama's birth certificate, but here's Bill Kristol issuing his baptismal certificate.
"But Obama is such a liar," we are plaintively told. True enough. Now, please examine George W. Bush's 2000 campaign promises. Were any of them true? Smaller government? A humble foreign policy? Less federal spending? Blah Blah blah? Which is to say: Of course Obama lies. Was Bush any different?
The elephant in the room has morphed into a donkey. No one will acknowledge it, although everybody sees it. That, too, is a required ingredient of the dialectic.
Admittedly, the GOP has an internal dialectic of its own. It claims it wants to win, yet it has repeatedly acted as though it is possessed by a death wish. Just last week several of my neighbors here in the Shenandoah Valley witnessed firsthand the slow-motion suicide of the GOP when they were held in involuntary servitude in Tampa. Victims of an endearing prank engineered by the party Hot-Tubbers, they were trapped for hours aboard a "lost" bus supposedly sent to bring them to the convention hall. This cute little ploy occasioned their convenient absence from the convention floor, allowing the party elites to vote holy war on the grass roots, whom they nonetheless expect to vote for them by the millions in November because of course everybody knows that "Obama must be defeated." occasioned
In ancient Rome, near today's Forum of Nerva, there stood the Temple of Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, of war and peace, and (perhaps a stretch) of outright duplicity. Our own imperial age should trot out this good fellow, who symbolizes so much of the spirit of our own time. The two parties are actually two faces of one power-cult. Our politicians are not actually lying, they are only ignoring Confucius ("restore the proper meaning of words"), preferring instead the scornful reprise of Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
We live in an age of DoubleThink – where "minds [are] trained to hold contradictory positions simultaneously and unquestioningly." On examination, the campaign promises of both parties thrill to the dialectic: Freedom is Slavery. War Is Peace. And, especially in even-numbered years, Ignorance is Strength. We've heard before of politicians who say that "I was for it before I was against it." Now Obama has magically raised the dialectic to a new high (Hegel called it die Aufhebung): he is governing as George Bush while he is running against George Bush. It is indeed a stunning specter to behold.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/manion/manion102.html
The Two Faces of the Power Party
by Christopher Manion
Gary North's insightful piece last week invites serious reflection. He refers briefly to Barack Obama's twenty year discipleship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose theological roots lie in the shallows of the faux religion called "Liberation Theology." That term signifies the variant of Marxism that presents Jesus not as Savior, but as a materialist warlord and political liberator. In other words, Liberation Theology hides Marx's impersonal and inexorable process of the Class Struggle behind a Christian, human face to make it more palatable to the masses and more intimidating to its clueless opponents – all without changing its methods or its goals.
This is what ideology is all about – the deceptive assertion of falsehood as the ground of truth and reality. It represents a perversion of metaphysics and philosophical anthropology – that is, it denies what's true about reality and about us. But the Devil knows Latin, as the saying goes, and the ideologues feel free to pick and choose from among treasured, traditional language and symbols that once meant something real, but have long been emptied of their content and stuffed with tyrannical hemlock. Thus "patriotism" now means love of government. "Freedom" means bombing ornery foreigners into submission. And the "Two-Party System" means the one-power charade.
And "Change" means the same old same-old.
Consider the neocons. We've long known that they are the proud intellectual disciples of Trotsky. Well, they dread pitchforks as well as pickaxes. They rise and fall on the dialectic -- they never "lie," you see it's just that the "correlation of forces" keeps on shifting. For a neocon, there's nothing that's true for long except the timeless fact that they're always superior (after all, Marx called the party "The Vanguard of the Proletariat"), that they are always right (especially when they're wrong), and that we must all love Big Brother.
But here is the theoretical breakthrough: as Dr. North suggests, a glance at Obama's own campaign reveals that he too is relying on the dialectic, and in a most original and innovative way:
Obama is still running against George W. Bush, as we knew he would. But Obama is also running as George Bush.
"The Obama Administration is the operational successor of the Bush Administration. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, [and] on Wall Street," North writes. All this, and so much more. But should we be surprised? Consider: long ago the neocon altar boy at the pagan power-shrine welcomed Obama into the ranks of the Inner Party as a "born-again neocon."
We might not ever find Obama's birth certificate, but here's Bill Kristol issuing his baptismal certificate.
"But Obama is such a liar," we are plaintively told. True enough. Now, please examine George W. Bush's 2000 campaign promises. Were any of them true? Smaller government? A humble foreign policy? Less federal spending? Blah Blah blah? Which is to say: Of course Obama lies. Was Bush any different?
The elephant in the room has morphed into a donkey. No one will acknowledge it, although everybody sees it. That, too, is a required ingredient of the dialectic.
Admittedly, the GOP has an internal dialectic of its own. It claims it wants to win, yet it has repeatedly acted as though it is possessed by a death wish. Just last week several of my neighbors here in the Shenandoah Valley witnessed firsthand the slow-motion suicide of the GOP when they were held in involuntary servitude in Tampa. Victims of an endearing prank engineered by the party Hot-Tubbers, they were trapped for hours aboard a "lost" bus supposedly sent to bring them to the convention hall. This cute little ploy occasioned their convenient absence from the convention floor, allowing the party elites to vote holy war on the grass roots, whom they nonetheless expect to vote for them by the millions in November because of course everybody knows that "Obama must be defeated." occasioned
In ancient Rome, near today's Forum of Nerva, there stood the Temple of Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, of war and peace, and (perhaps a stretch) of outright duplicity. Our own imperial age should trot out this good fellow, who symbolizes so much of the spirit of our own time. The two parties are actually two faces of one power-cult. Our politicians are not actually lying, they are only ignoring Confucius ("restore the proper meaning of words"), preferring instead the scornful reprise of Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
We live in an age of DoubleThink – where "minds [are] trained to hold contradictory positions simultaneously and unquestioningly." On examination, the campaign promises of both parties thrill to the dialectic: Freedom is Slavery. War Is Peace. And, especially in even-numbered years, Ignorance is Strength. We've heard before of politicians who say that "I was for it before I was against it." Now Obama has magically raised the dialectic to a new high (Hegel called it die Aufhebung): he is governing as George Bush while he is running against George Bush. It is indeed a stunning specter to behold.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/manion/manion102.html
How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
"This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this."
How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
by Gary North
Tea Party Economist
I sent a stripped-down version of my movie review of 2016 to my Tea Party Economist list. I knew it would outrage some of them.
Why did I do it? To make sure D'Souza sees it. The list is large. Someone will send it to him. I want him to know that the Old Right isn't buying his thesis that Obama's agenda is somehow uniquely wrong because it is anti-colonialist. Obama is a defender of the American Empire as Bush was. His agenda is that of one of the factions of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is not in bed with the neocons, meaning big on Israel, but the dominant foreign policy objectives of the CFR were pro-oil and therefore pro-Arab long before 1948, let alone the late 1960s, when the neocons showed up.
In domestic policy, his rhetoric is Democrat. But this is nothing new. The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire, what President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address (1961) called the military-industrial complex. He should have called it the military-industrial-oil-banking-AIPAC complex. This is why Clinton had the Homeland Security legislation in reserve, and why Bush presented it to Congress when the nation was in hysteria over 9-11.
I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through the screening.
The only exception to the vetting process over the last 80 years was Barry Goldwater. When he got the nomination, the eastern wing of the Republican Party walked out of the convention, and it would not provide the money to let him win. The media turned against him overwhelmingly. The Council on Foreign Relations members understood exactly what he meant in terms of a threat to them, and they torpedoed his campaign. They cared not at all that Lyndon Johnson would win. That was irrelevant to them. It is equally irrelevant to them today whether Obama wins or loses. He is expendable. So is Romney.
REAGAN
Ronald Reagan also seems to be an exception. Here was one case in which the elite really did have trouble suppressing his candidacy. He was too good with the media, and he had already proven twice that he could win in California. There were no real leaders in the Republican Party in early 1980 – before Volcker's recession – who were capable of beating Carter.
Reagan trounced George Bush in the primaries. He told his supporters in the "Reagan Right" that he would not select Bush as his running mate. Yet he reversed himself at the Republican National Convention. Not only did he put Bush on the ticket, he turned the White House over to James Baker III, Bush's senior advisor, then as now. Baker became Reagan's Chief of Staff. Bush became the Presidential nominee in 1988. He needed the VP position. No one since Herbert Hoover had been elected President without having been a governor, a U.S. Senator, VP, or a victorious general. As soon as Bush was inaugurated in 1989, he appointed Baker as his Secretary of State. Bush had been a Skull & Bones member at Yale. He was married into the family of Brown Brothers Harriman, the international private banking firm. He was a CFR member.
Reagan's initial cabinet contained only one person who could be regarded as a philosophical conservative, James Watt, the Interior Secretary. He was fired two years later. His replacement, William Clark, was conservative. He was pushed out by Michael Deaver. He lasted two years.
I have discussed the CFR's vetting process here.
The story of the CFR is well known to those of us who have been in the conservative wing of the party for over 50 years. It has been over half a century since Dan Smoot wrote The Invisible Government (1960). In late 1964, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society shifted his entire life's work from anti-Communism to anti-conspiracy, and forced the restructuring of the Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion. The story of the CFR/Federal Reserve alliance has been known to the hard-core Right for a generation. But it is still not known the standard conservative, who came into the movement in 1980 or later.
NAIVE CONSERVATIVES
This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this.
D'Souza made a movie about Obama as anti-colonialist. This is utterly irrelevant in American foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-colonialist. He was an anti-British colonialist. He used World War II to replace British colonialism. Harry Truman completed the process. The Council on Foreign Relations supported this replacement. It still does. Truman's recognition of the state of Israel had serious opponents in the Council on Foreign Relations, most notably his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. Obama is extending a pre-Israel (1948), non-neoconservative (post-1965) American agenda in foreign policy. D'Souza ignores all this in his movie. So what if Obama is anti-British colonialism? It has been gone for 50 years. The main theme of his movie is utterly irrelevant. It is simply a neocon propaganda film well within the orbit CFR opinion against the big-oil wing.
The standard Republican conservative, being ignorant of the history of American foreign policy since 1947, is blissfully unaware of this.
Here is an example that I received from one subscriber.
The student could not comprehend the meaning of communism. He could not comprehend the difference between the Old Right and conservatism. At that point, neoconservatism was only about three or four years old, so he probably was not familiar with that strand of political theory.
The conservative movement has always been filled with naïve people. People are attracted to a fringe movement, rarely because of their understanding of the mainstream, but only because they don't like the mainstream, and they are determined to take a stand against it. The subtleties of the political philosophy or economic theories of the group they joined are lost on them. They got excited. They committed. And they now send their money to the Republican Party, because it seems to be fighting all those terrible liberals. The thought that the two parties have been completely vetted at the top by the same group of elite deal-doers, who in fact are very famous people, does not occur to them. The fact that, at the top of American politics, the limits of discussion have been set by the same group of a few thousand people, is lost on them.
THE SUPERCLASS
When you realize that the process is international, as described in the book by David Rothkopf, Superclass, it seems beyond belief. How is it that approximately 6,000 people control virtually all of the agenda for the Western nations? Your typical conservative probably would believe this with respect to the internationalist connections of the elite. They would blame the impotent UN. But they seem to feel that this elite did not begin the screening process of the present leaders of both political parties three decades or four decades earlier. These people say that they do not trust the Ivy League, yet it never occurs to them that virtually everybody they are asked to vote for as President is a graduate of one of two or possibly three Ivy League universities. It never occurs to them that there is cause and effect in education. It never occurs to them the Ivy League universities are really, truly as good as the critics think they are with respect to their ability to set the terms of discussion, meaning the exclusion of the fringes on both the right and left, among those people who graduated from the system.
So, the political charade goes on. It will continue to go on until the day that the federal government does not have the ability to write the checks any longer. At that point, all over the world, the superclass will find that they have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and they have lost the ability to control what happens at the local level.
The key to this is a combination of money and intellectual screening at the university and graduate school level. The elite defines the extreme limits of acceptable discussion. The elite leaders do not attempt to tell people what they ought to believe inside these limits. They do define what constitutes extremism and therefore what constitutes an unacceptable list of assumptions and policies within the network of the good old boys. Communism is out. It has always been out. Libertarianism is obviously out. Conservatism was out until Reagan was elected. There were a few early conservatives who got inside the gates, the most famous being William F. Buckley. Buckley got inside the gates early. He got into Yale, and he was tapped to join Skull and Bones. Then he went into the CIA. So, he was vetted very early.
To get into the inner sanctum, you have to abandon extremism. Whether you are from the Right or the Left, the extreme positions are not acceptable. People who have spent their lives trying to get into the inner ring understand the limits, and they accept them. This is how the limits of acceptable discourse are imposed on the people who formulate policy, advise presidents, and write for the establishment media outlets. None of this is understood by the average conservative in the Republican Party. I think it is much more understood by the far left members of the Democratic Party. People on the far left believe in politics, and they learn how the game is played early in their lives. Conservatives do not.
So, it is easier for the CFR to control the terms of discourse on the Right than on the Left, or so it seems most of the time. The far Left did get sucked in by Obama's rhetoric in 2008. It is highly unlikely that they will be sucked in again. They will probably vote for him. I doubt that they will vote for Romney. They will not vote the same enthusiasm this time. Voting to keep Guantanamo Bay filled with prisoners for another four years is probably not high on their list of political mobilization.
Conservatives think Guantanamo is great. So, anybody who thinks Guantanamo should be shut down, as I do, is perceived automatically as somebody on the Left. This is because there has been a long tradition within the conservative movement to suppress civil rights. People who got into the movement, and have spent time in the movement, assume that the suppression of civil rights is okay. This is why Bush was able to get the Patriot Act passed, when Clinton did not have the courage to introduce it to Congress. It is easier to get conservatives to vote for something like this than it is to get Democrats to vote for it. Of course, in a time of crisis, most politicians will vote for anything that suppresses civil liberties.
CONCLUSION
If the followers of Ron Paul will ever make any difference, they are going to have to spread out and burrow in. They are going to have to go back to their hometowns, get active in local politics, and spend the next 25 years or even 50 years figuring out how the local system runs, and then taking it over. This has to be a bottom-up transformation. There is no possibility of capturing power at the top of either party. To capture control of either party will require fringe people to go to the local county level and to spend at least a generation, and maybe two generations, building a political network that will enable them to control the terms of discourse at the top. They have to do an end run around Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This will not be easy.
www.garynorth.com
How the Council on Foreign Relations Controls Conservative Republicans
by Gary North
Tea Party Economist
I sent a stripped-down version of my movie review of 2016 to my Tea Party Economist list. I knew it would outrage some of them.
Why did I do it? To make sure D'Souza sees it. The list is large. Someone will send it to him. I want him to know that the Old Right isn't buying his thesis that Obama's agenda is somehow uniquely wrong because it is anti-colonialist. Obama is a defender of the American Empire as Bush was. His agenda is that of one of the factions of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is not in bed with the neocons, meaning big on Israel, but the dominant foreign policy objectives of the CFR were pro-oil and therefore pro-Arab long before 1948, let alone the late 1960s, when the neocons showed up.
In domestic policy, his rhetoric is Democrat. But this is nothing new. The domestic policies of both CFR wings are the same: the maintenance of the American Empire, what President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address (1961) called the military-industrial complex. He should have called it the military-industrial-oil-banking-AIPAC complex. This is why Clinton had the Homeland Security legislation in reserve, and why Bush presented it to Congress when the nation was in hysteria over 9-11.
I have discussed Council on Foreign Relations Team A vs. Team B for 35 years. I have seen two anti-CFR people get through the screening.
The only exception to the vetting process over the last 80 years was Barry Goldwater. When he got the nomination, the eastern wing of the Republican Party walked out of the convention, and it would not provide the money to let him win. The media turned against him overwhelmingly. The Council on Foreign Relations members understood exactly what he meant in terms of a threat to them, and they torpedoed his campaign. They cared not at all that Lyndon Johnson would win. That was irrelevant to them. It is equally irrelevant to them today whether Obama wins or loses. He is expendable. So is Romney.
REAGAN
Ronald Reagan also seems to be an exception. Here was one case in which the elite really did have trouble suppressing his candidacy. He was too good with the media, and he had already proven twice that he could win in California. There were no real leaders in the Republican Party in early 1980 – before Volcker's recession – who were capable of beating Carter.
Reagan trounced George Bush in the primaries. He told his supporters in the "Reagan Right" that he would not select Bush as his running mate. Yet he reversed himself at the Republican National Convention. Not only did he put Bush on the ticket, he turned the White House over to James Baker III, Bush's senior advisor, then as now. Baker became Reagan's Chief of Staff. Bush became the Presidential nominee in 1988. He needed the VP position. No one since Herbert Hoover had been elected President without having been a governor, a U.S. Senator, VP, or a victorious general. As soon as Bush was inaugurated in 1989, he appointed Baker as his Secretary of State. Bush had been a Skull & Bones member at Yale. He was married into the family of Brown Brothers Harriman, the international private banking firm. He was a CFR member.
Reagan's initial cabinet contained only one person who could be regarded as a philosophical conservative, James Watt, the Interior Secretary. He was fired two years later. His replacement, William Clark, was conservative. He was pushed out by Michael Deaver. He lasted two years.
I have discussed the CFR's vetting process here.
The story of the CFR is well known to those of us who have been in the conservative wing of the party for over 50 years. It has been over half a century since Dan Smoot wrote The Invisible Government (1960). In late 1964, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society shifted his entire life's work from anti-Communism to anti-conspiracy, and forced the restructuring of the Birch Society's magazine, American Opinion. The story of the CFR/Federal Reserve alliance has been known to the hard-core Right for a generation. But it is still not known the standard conservative, who came into the movement in 1980 or later.
NAIVE CONSERVATIVES
This is why any attempt to warn conservatives about the latest Republican Party presidential campaign is always regarded by them as an attack from the Left. They think of themselves as being on the far Right, and they cannot abide by any criticism based on the history of Republican politics, basic economics, CFR influence, or anything else. They just assume that the criticism has to come from somebody on the Left, because they have been trained to think that the national conservatives within the Republican Party's leadership do not share with Democrat liberals the same background, ideology, social networks, and screening. They are outraged by criticism. Why? Because they perceive that such criticism has an unstated implication: they have been taken in. No one wants to hear this.
D'Souza made a movie about Obama as anti-colonialist. This is utterly irrelevant in American foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-colonialist. He was an anti-British colonialist. He used World War II to replace British colonialism. Harry Truman completed the process. The Council on Foreign Relations supported this replacement. It still does. Truman's recognition of the state of Israel had serious opponents in the Council on Foreign Relations, most notably his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. Obama is extending a pre-Israel (1948), non-neoconservative (post-1965) American agenda in foreign policy. D'Souza ignores all this in his movie. So what if Obama is anti-British colonialism? It has been gone for 50 years. The main theme of his movie is utterly irrelevant. It is simply a neocon propaganda film well within the orbit CFR opinion against the big-oil wing.
The standard Republican conservative, being ignorant of the history of American foreign policy since 1947, is blissfully unaware of this.
Here is an example that I received from one subscriber.
- I am deeply offended by your liberal Mafia remarks. Your opinions are far from fact and in fact are B.S. right out of the liberal handbook. Sickening, misleading, untruthful and disgusting. America is not stupid as you seem to think. Look in the mirror!
The student could not comprehend the meaning of communism. He could not comprehend the difference between the Old Right and conservatism. At that point, neoconservatism was only about three or four years old, so he probably was not familiar with that strand of political theory.
The conservative movement has always been filled with naïve people. People are attracted to a fringe movement, rarely because of their understanding of the mainstream, but only because they don't like the mainstream, and they are determined to take a stand against it. The subtleties of the political philosophy or economic theories of the group they joined are lost on them. They got excited. They committed. And they now send their money to the Republican Party, because it seems to be fighting all those terrible liberals. The thought that the two parties have been completely vetted at the top by the same group of elite deal-doers, who in fact are very famous people, does not occur to them. The fact that, at the top of American politics, the limits of discussion have been set by the same group of a few thousand people, is lost on them.
THE SUPERCLASS
When you realize that the process is international, as described in the book by David Rothkopf, Superclass, it seems beyond belief. How is it that approximately 6,000 people control virtually all of the agenda for the Western nations? Your typical conservative probably would believe this with respect to the internationalist connections of the elite. They would blame the impotent UN. But they seem to feel that this elite did not begin the screening process of the present leaders of both political parties three decades or four decades earlier. These people say that they do not trust the Ivy League, yet it never occurs to them that virtually everybody they are asked to vote for as President is a graduate of one of two or possibly three Ivy League universities. It never occurs to them that there is cause and effect in education. It never occurs to them the Ivy League universities are really, truly as good as the critics think they are with respect to their ability to set the terms of discussion, meaning the exclusion of the fringes on both the right and left, among those people who graduated from the system.
So, the political charade goes on. It will continue to go on until the day that the federal government does not have the ability to write the checks any longer. At that point, all over the world, the superclass will find that they have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and they have lost the ability to control what happens at the local level.
The key to this is a combination of money and intellectual screening at the university and graduate school level. The elite defines the extreme limits of acceptable discussion. The elite leaders do not attempt to tell people what they ought to believe inside these limits. They do define what constitutes extremism and therefore what constitutes an unacceptable list of assumptions and policies within the network of the good old boys. Communism is out. It has always been out. Libertarianism is obviously out. Conservatism was out until Reagan was elected. There were a few early conservatives who got inside the gates, the most famous being William F. Buckley. Buckley got inside the gates early. He got into Yale, and he was tapped to join Skull and Bones. Then he went into the CIA. So, he was vetted very early.
To get into the inner sanctum, you have to abandon extremism. Whether you are from the Right or the Left, the extreme positions are not acceptable. People who have spent their lives trying to get into the inner ring understand the limits, and they accept them. This is how the limits of acceptable discourse are imposed on the people who formulate policy, advise presidents, and write for the establishment media outlets. None of this is understood by the average conservative in the Republican Party. I think it is much more understood by the far left members of the Democratic Party. People on the far left believe in politics, and they learn how the game is played early in their lives. Conservatives do not.
So, it is easier for the CFR to control the terms of discourse on the Right than on the Left, or so it seems most of the time. The far Left did get sucked in by Obama's rhetoric in 2008. It is highly unlikely that they will be sucked in again. They will probably vote for him. I doubt that they will vote for Romney. They will not vote the same enthusiasm this time. Voting to keep Guantanamo Bay filled with prisoners for another four years is probably not high on their list of political mobilization.
Conservatives think Guantanamo is great. So, anybody who thinks Guantanamo should be shut down, as I do, is perceived automatically as somebody on the Left. This is because there has been a long tradition within the conservative movement to suppress civil rights. People who got into the movement, and have spent time in the movement, assume that the suppression of civil rights is okay. This is why Bush was able to get the Patriot Act passed, when Clinton did not have the courage to introduce it to Congress. It is easier to get conservatives to vote for something like this than it is to get Democrats to vote for it. Of course, in a time of crisis, most politicians will vote for anything that suppresses civil liberties.
CONCLUSION
If the followers of Ron Paul will ever make any difference, they are going to have to spread out and burrow in. They are going to have to go back to their hometowns, get active in local politics, and spend the next 25 years or even 50 years figuring out how the local system runs, and then taking it over. This has to be a bottom-up transformation. There is no possibility of capturing power at the top of either party. To capture control of either party will require fringe people to go to the local county level and to spend at least a generation, and maybe two generations, building a political network that will enable them to control the terms of discourse at the top. They have to do an end run around Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This will not be easy.
www.garynorth.com
‘They Hate Us for Our Freedom’
'They Hate Us for Our Freedom'
Posted by David Kramer on September 2, 2012 03:17 PM
I used to be a twice-a-week cigar smoker during the last cigar boom of 1995–2004. (I stopped because new cigar manufacturers jumped into the market, flooding it with lower quality cigars. Even the established cigar manufacturersincluding those in Cubawere rushing cigars of lower quality out into the market.)
A pleasant perk of the finer cigar stores that I patronized here in Nazi York City was the espresso/cappuccino/coffee machine that customers could use for free while they enjoyed their cigars in the store's smoking lounge.
After almost nine years, I decided to give cigars a try again. I noticed that the espresso/cappuccino/coffee machine in the first store I revisited was shut down. I was puzzled, so I asked the owner of the store why he no longer offered free coffee. The reason he no longer offered free coffee is because the Nazis of Nazi York City have decided that in order to serve any sort of food or beverage in an establishment, the store has to have a permit. The catch, of course, is that here in Nazi York City you cannot smoke in an eating or drinking (e.g., bar, nightclub) establishment. In other words, if a cigar store serves any sort of food or beverage (even though it's FREE), it can no longer allow smoking in the store!!
Pretty soon we'll be hating them for their freedom.
Re: Hating Us for Our Freedom
Posted by Butler Shaffer on September 2, 2012 05:31 PM
David: Now I understand the Republican mindset: If "they" (the "bad guys") hate us for our freedom and thus want to destroy us, taking away such freedom will deprive the "bad guys" of any reason to attack us! Being thoroughly dominated and enslaved by the corporate-state, in other words, is a form of national defense! I haven't appreciated the depths of their thinking. I just thought the GOP crowd was nothing more than a gang of unprincipled thugs prepared to use any amount of lies, contradictions, and violence to serve their ends!
Actually, It's Even More Ridiculous Than I Thought
Posted by David Kramer on September 2, 2012 10:24 PM
In a previous post, I mentioned that cigar stores in Nazi York City can no longer serve free coffee to their customers. But I just remembered something: A customer may bring in his own coffee (or any other beverage) to enjoy while smoking his cigar. It's just that the store itself cannot serve its own free coffee to a customer.
http://youtu.be/VFCM6TZgTMI
Posted by David Kramer on September 2, 2012 03:17 PM
I used to be a twice-a-week cigar smoker during the last cigar boom of 1995–2004. (I stopped because new cigar manufacturers jumped into the market, flooding it with lower quality cigars. Even the established cigar manufacturersincluding those in Cubawere rushing cigars of lower quality out into the market.)
A pleasant perk of the finer cigar stores that I patronized here in Nazi York City was the espresso/cappuccino/coffee machine that customers could use for free while they enjoyed their cigars in the store's smoking lounge.
After almost nine years, I decided to give cigars a try again. I noticed that the espresso/cappuccino/coffee machine in the first store I revisited was shut down. I was puzzled, so I asked the owner of the store why he no longer offered free coffee. The reason he no longer offered free coffee is because the Nazis of Nazi York City have decided that in order to serve any sort of food or beverage in an establishment, the store has to have a permit. The catch, of course, is that here in Nazi York City you cannot smoke in an eating or drinking (e.g., bar, nightclub) establishment. In other words, if a cigar store serves any sort of food or beverage (even though it's FREE), it can no longer allow smoking in the store!!
Pretty soon we'll be hating them for their freedom.
Re: Hating Us for Our Freedom
Posted by Butler Shaffer on September 2, 2012 05:31 PM
David: Now I understand the Republican mindset: If "they" (the "bad guys") hate us for our freedom and thus want to destroy us, taking away such freedom will deprive the "bad guys" of any reason to attack us! Being thoroughly dominated and enslaved by the corporate-state, in other words, is a form of national defense! I haven't appreciated the depths of their thinking. I just thought the GOP crowd was nothing more than a gang of unprincipled thugs prepared to use any amount of lies, contradictions, and violence to serve their ends!
Actually, It's Even More Ridiculous Than I Thought
Posted by David Kramer on September 2, 2012 10:24 PM
In a previous post, I mentioned that cigar stores in Nazi York City can no longer serve free coffee to their customers. But I just remembered something: A customer may bring in his own coffee (or any other beverage) to enjoy while smoking his cigar. It's just that the store itself cannot serve its own free coffee to a customer.
http://youtu.be/VFCM6TZgTMI
**JP** اژدھا کے منہ میں چار سال45-53
السلام علیکم ورحمۃ اللہ وبرکاتہ
ملا عبدالسلام ضعیف کی داستان کے مزید اوراق
Fwd: [LDA] An Impressive List Of Accomplishments
----------
An impressive list of accomplishments:
President Barrack Obama is the first President to:
- apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
- have a social security number from a state where he has never lived.
- go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.
- preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.
- have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
- keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
- quote the Holy Quran and tells us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
- violate the War Powers Act. .
- be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
- defy a Federal Judge's court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.
- require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
- spend a trillion dollars on 'shovel-ready' jobs when there was no such thing as 'shovel-ready' jobs.
- abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
- bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
- order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
- demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
- terminate America 's ability to put a man in space.
- have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
- arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
- threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.
- to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
- file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
- withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
- First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
- appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
- play golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 90 to date.
- hide his medical, educational and travel records.
- win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
- go on multiple global 'apology tours'.
- take a 17 day vacation.
Forwarding this is an option I hope you will take.
THERE'S AN ELECTION COMING UP... PLEASE REMEMBER THIS LIST WHEN YOU VOTE!
If you looking for HOPE and CHANGE, this is your opportunity to finally get it.
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Have a great peaceful DAY!
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