All in Vain

".... Every dead soldier died in vain. Coming home in a box or bag was in vain. Every wounded soldier, physically and psychologically,  that did return home alive was damaged in vain. Every returning soldier that committed suicide or took the lives of others due to the war demons they brought home with them were lives lost in vain. Wasted lives and all for the few whose only desires are for money and power and blood lust. It's the American way....  

Read the rest of this thoughtful and poignant post HERE

JFK and the Unspeakable

"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters"

by Edward Curtin

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behavior has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it” – not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA. Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven-year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. “Let me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought I’d hear myself saying this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming.”

Let’s look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.

First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.

Though Douglass doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”

Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.

In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via the KGB, Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII, and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.” Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.

These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’état against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.” And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it.

But who killed him?

Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s actions on behalf of peace.

He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present.” This “unspeakable,” this hypnotic “collective denial of the obvious,” is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don’t, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.

Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination – that plus the thought that it no longer matters.

It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750-plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically.

There is a great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know, or at the very least, investigate.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters.

As he begins to trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?”

After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk, and taking a Russian wife – during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union – he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department.

He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where, at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.

Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations’ Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide.

Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former FBI agent, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

During this time up until the assassination Oswald was on the FBI payroll, receiving $200 per month. This startling fact was covered up by the Warren Commission even though it was stated by the Commission’s own general counsel J. Lee Rankin at a closed-door meeting on January 27, 1964. The meeting had been declared “top secret” and its content only uncovered ten years later after a lengthy legal battle by researcher Harold Weisberg. Douglass claims Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960 to 1964, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did, but for which he was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, “There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.” Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their (CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car came almost to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 – a story little known but extraordinary in its implications – is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up – clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book.

He says it best: “The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.”

Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Let’s hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end.

This article originally appeared on GlobalResearch.ca.

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Myths of Our Time

"Morality vs. Material Interests; Myths of Our Time

By Paul Craig Roberts

November 13, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end.

That fact that in those days the US still had an independent media of sorts that sometimes framed the war in moral terms is ignored. Are we sure, for example, that the film of the naked little girl running in terror down the road burning with napalm was ineffectual in arousing moral opposition to the war? Are we certain that it wasn’t an aroused moral conscience that brought about the end of the war but was college students’ fears for their lives and limbs?

If we ascribe ending the war to material interests, it makes ending the war look as unworthy as the war itself.

Yet, virtually every conservative columnist, commentator, newsperson and politician, as well as today’s antiwar protesters and apparently the Pentagon, believes that a military draft would reduce Americans’ toleration for wars because of body bags coming home to middle and upper class parents. Apparently, the lower class doesn’t mind its kids coming back in body bags.

Those in thrall to this explanation, which derives from Marx’s materialist explanation of history, do not notice that Vietnam was our longest war. It apparently took almost forever for the material interest of students and their parents to realize itself and stop the war.

Why are we afraid to say that the war stopped because American troops and the American population got tired, offended even, from killing women, children and noncombatants? Vietnam had not attacked the US. The US had interjected itself into a civil war in a far off place, as it has done in Afghanistan.

By invading Iraq the US started a civil war between Sunni and Shi’ite. In Pakistan the US has started a civil war between the religious tribal population and the secular US puppet state. In Palestine the US started a civil war between Fatah and Hamas.

One continuously reads from those Americans opposed to America’s wars of aggression that the wars are possible because they don’t affect Americans, just those few who sign up for the voluntary military. Thus, there are insufficient material interests at stake to stop the war. This is a common explanation for the weakness of the antiwar movement.

One could argue instead that it is the triumph of Karl Marx’s materialist thinking that has made moral protests impotent. What is morality? You can’t weigh it, define it, measure it. It can be dismissed as the whining of material interests. In contrast, material interests, such as lives, limbs, and bank accounts are real.

For whatever the reason, morality has shown itself to be an impotent force in 21st century America. Americans show no remorse at over one million dead Iraqis and four million displaced Iraqis due entirely to an American invasion based on lies and deception. The lies and deception are now well proven. Yet, there has been no apology for the horrors that Americans inflicted on Iraq.

Afghanistan is another example. Intentional lies conflated the Taliban with al Qaeda and “terrorists.” The diverse peoples in Afghanistan who were first ravaged by Soviet bombs are now ravaged by American bombs. Weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, people waiting for fuel or food, people asleep in their homes, people attending Mosques have all been murdered and are murdered routinely by US and its NATO puppets.

Each time civilians are murdered, the US denies it, only to be contradicted every time by the evidence.

Why is the president of the United States contemplating sending yet tens of thousands more US troops to kill people in Afghanistan?

The answer is that the United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government. Americans no longer have a moral conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side.

Humanity has endeavored for millennia to control evil with morality. In the American “superpower,” this effort has collapsed and failed.

The United States needs to be censured for its immoral behavior, not have that behavior rationalized as being in its material interests.

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Resistance is Futile

"Why Are We Unable to Resist?

October 2, 2009

by Christopher Bollyn

I often wonder why young Americans do nothing to protest the outrageous criminal regime that has taken control of the United States. Where is the resistance? Two illegal wars, a growing police state, and several trillion dollars stolen by criminal bankers from the American people in the past year alone -- why aren't they protesting, resisting - burning tires in the streets?

Having grown up during the Vietnam War, I was immersed in the protest movement and vibrant anti-war music and culture of the 1960s. "Lucky Man" by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer is a good example of the anti-war music of the time. I find it odd that there is no similar anti-war movement or music today. Faced with never-ending wars in the Middle East, today's youth seem completely apathetic and apolitical.During the years that I attended public school, the United States was engaged in an undeclared war of aggression in Southeast Asia that nobody really understood. Every week, the American people saw actual photos from the war in LIFE magazine and could easily see through the deception that we were fighting "communism". After 8 years of war in Afghanistan and 18 years in Iraq, however, there is no similar photo-journalism of comparable quality coming from the "embedded" journalists covering these wars. Likewise, there is virtually no anti-war music or protest movement against the criminal wars being fought in our name. Why?

We have to look at the media to understand the lack of a similar anti-war movement in the United States. Today, there is no mass resistance because the U.S. media is now completely owned and controlled by Zionist Jews who actually support the fraudulent "War on Terror" and the illegal wars being fought by the United States and its allies. These wars are being waged to benefit Israel and strengthen the Zionist hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia. The Zionist-controlled mass media in the United States now works full time to promote the war agenda - first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran. In the Zionist-controlled media there is no room for any real criticism of the Zionist war agenda.

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the senior U.S. officials who conspired and planned the wars of aggression against both Afghanistan and Iraq, is now pushing for war against Iran in the pages of the Financial Times (U.K.), for example. It needs to be understood that Wolfowitz is guilty of the most serious war crime, "a crime against peace" as defined by the Nuremberg Principles. That his opinion is published in a leading financial paper illustrates my point that the mass media actively promotes the Zionist war agenda. Wolfowitz has strong connections to the state of Israel. He lived in Israel as a teenager when his Polish-born father, Jacob, worked at the Technion, and his sister, Laura, married an Israeli and lives in Jerusalem.

The controlled media today censors and sanitizes the images and information about the wars and the human suffering the aggression has caused to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The public is kept in the dark about the true costs of the illegal wars, both human and financial. Most importantly, the U.S. media keeps powerful images like these from the Vietnam and Iraq wars off the pages of our newspapers.

The famous photo of Vietnamese children burned with napalm changed U.S. public opinion about the war.

The photo of a summary execution by a South Vietnamese police chief showed the lawlessness of the war.

The U.S. evacuates after the fall of Saigon

After nearly 19 years of fighting and bombing Iraqis, very few images of the human cost of the war have been published. The ones that have been seen are horrible beyond belief and reveal the criminal nature of the war of aggression.

A photo from the "Highway of Death" shows what happened to one of the thousands of retreating Iraqis who were incinerated by a U.S. gas-air MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) in 1991.

A U.S. Marine killing injured Iraqis in a mosque in Fallujah, November 13, 2004 (NBC/AP)

The Vietnam war was being fought, we were told, to keep Southeast Asia from falling to the communists. Thousands of young men, including several of my relatives, went to Vietnam to fight "communism". Many thousands of young Americans died in Viet Nam. An untold number of Vietnamese died.

Vietnam eventually did fall to the communists and the last U.S. personnel had to flee from the roof of the embassy in Saigon with desperate people being pushed off the over-crowded helicopters. Despite the fact that the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam, the world did not come to an end. As a matter of fact, nobody even seemed to notice. Most people were simply glad the 12-year old war was over.

I have often wondered why today's youth seem utterly unable to resist the blatant lies of the criminal government and controlled media, which are clearly extremely harmful to them and their nation. I can't understand why the young people in America and Europe abuse themselves with tattoos and body piercings. Don't they care about themselves? I have seen people with screws coming through their eyebrows that look like construction accidents that should be sent to the nearest emergency room.

Christopher J. Petherick, the former chief editor of the Spotlight and American Free Press, a weekly newspaper I wrote for in Washington, D.C., had an ugly metal stud sticking through his tongue that looked absolutely awful. I had never seen such a thing. He told me that he was a Satanist. I thought he was just an East Coast trendie. I sometimes told him that we were doing the Lord's work by spreading the Truth.

Christopher J. Petherick, a self-avowed Satanist, was the editor of American Free Press and the former Spotlight, publications of the Liberty Lobby of Washington, D.C. It makes no sense that a Satanist would be the chief editor of a newspaper that is purportedly written for patriotic Christian Americans, unless one understands that the Liberty Lobby is actually owned and controlled by a Zionist Jew named Mark Lane. The paper is a controlled opposition outlet that acts like flypaper to create a list of active patriots -- for the Jewish intelligence organization Lane works for.

Petherick fired me after a three-man team of heavily-armed undercover police broke my arm and TASERed me in front of my family, but only after collecting many thousands of dollars from readers for the Bollyn "legal defense fund," which were kept by the so-called employee owned newspaper. I later discovered that the newspaper and the organization behind it, the Liberty Lobby, are actually owned by the Jewish leftist lawyer, Mark Lane, and have been since the early 1990s when he bought the assets of Liberty Lobby with some of the $5 million he had been paid by Willis A. Carto in legal fees.

I learned this from L.T. Patterson, publisher of Criminal Politics of Cincinnati. Patterson's newsletter is similar to the publications of the Mark Lane's Liberty Lobby, which is what led Lane to sue Patterson in the mid-1990s for some $10 million. Lane, a Zionist Jew, wanted to have a monopoly in the patriotic newspaper business. During the legal process Patterson learned that Lane had acquired the assets of the nearly bankrupt Liberty Lobby in the early 1990s. Manfred Roeder, a German patriot who has been imprisoned often in occupied Germany, told me that such controlled opposition newspapers like National Zeitung are designed to skim the cream off of the nationalist movement. They also serve as outlets of disinformation and have even more sinister purposes.

Jane Fonda and Mark Lane worked closely together in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. Lane, who served in U.S. Army intelligence in post-war Germany, owns the assets of Liberty Lobby and American Free Press.

As the U.S. prepared for war in Kuwait and Iraq in the summer of 1990, I began organizing pro-Palestinian students at the University of California at Santa Cruz who were opposed to the war effort. I learned a great deal through my anti-war efforts. I saw how the anti-war movement was taken over by Jewish students from the Hillel organization (B'nai B'rith). The issue of occupied Palestine was pushed to the side. This is what controlled opposition means: controlling both sides of the debate to control the message.

James B. Phillips, a devout Catholic and dear friend from Chicago who served in Vietnam, recently sent me a video from the mid-1980s that explains how Americans have been demoralized and why.

James B. Phillips, (top row, 3rd from left) commanded a U.S. rifle platoon in Viet Nam.

The information comes from a former agent of the Soviet K.G.B. who defected to the United States.

The former K.G.B. agents says: "Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him."

This is exactly the problem we face in 2009. Although Americans have the information that proves that their government has not been elected and is lying to them about 9-11 and everything else, the people do nothing to resist. They have become enslaved to lies. This video explains how this was done.

As the former Soviet journalist Yuri Bezmenov says in the video clip about the KGB's demoralization of American youth through the media, "Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes.... It has nothing to do with espionage... in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American [so] that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country."

Today, nearly every network and news outlet in the U.S. mass media is owned and controlled by Zionist Jews. This is a statement of fact and should not be misconstrued to be anti-Semitic in any way. Zionist Jews control nearly all of the U.S. mass media: television and radio networks, major newspapers, book publishers and leading book stores, and the big film studios and chains of movie theatres. They have taken control of the media for one reason - to manipulate public opinion by controlling the message. It is the same with media as with pipelines: He who owns the pipeline controls the product.

Many of the Jewish media moguls are members of the secret organization of Freemasons, the International Order of B'nai B'rith. Philip Morris Klutznick, the man who made Obama president, was the international president of B'nai B'rith. The Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times was one of the founding families of Lodge No. 1 of the B'nai B'rith, which was started in New York City in 1843. It is through this secret society, which is closed to all non-Jews, that the media moguls and Jewish financiers are able to conspire against the American people while living among them.

The B'nai B'rith also started the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the early 1900s. The ADL is an organization that protects the Jewish criminal network by attacking those who expose their crimes. The ADL has infiltrated police departments across the United States. The B'nai B'rith also runs Hillel, an organization for promoting the Zionist agenda at every college campus in the United States. Through their organizations like the ADL and Hillel, the secretive Elders of Zion of the B'nai B'rith are able to push their agenda into every community and college campus in America. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is certainly not a "hoary fake", and is most likely the protocols from a meeting of the leaders of the B'nai B'rith.

Bezmenov's statement about the KGB being primarily occupied with disinformation and demoralization efforts aimed at Americans through the media is similar to the analysis by the German intelligence expert, Andreas von Bülow, who told me that 90 percent of the work done by the CIA and other intelligence agencies is disinformation and deception.

It needs to be understood that communism and Zionism are fraternal twins from the same mother -- big Jewish capital of the Rothschild sort. This relationship can be seen in Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, the most senior advisers of President Barack Hussein Obama II. Emanuel, the son of a Zionist terrorist, and Axelrod, the son of Jewish communists, were commissioned in 1992 by the daughter of Jewish financier Philip Morris Klutznick of Chicago to make Obama our "first black president." Zionism and communism are two heads of the same evil beast.

Communism and Zionism emerged together in the Russian Empire in the late 1800s. There were six communist parties, two of which were also Zionist. Although the Rothschild family who created the state of Israel is capitalist, the Russian Jews who emigrated to Palestine in the late 1800s and early 1900s were ardent communists and socialists. Most of the Ashkenazi (Khazar and Slavic) Jews who built the Zionist state and who run it to this day come from the communist and Zionist parties that created the kibbutz and moshav settlements in Palestine. The Jews who were forced to emigrate to Palestine (later Israel) and the millions of people who have lived under communism are similar. Zionists and communists are both merely the pawns of the Rothschilds; foot soldiers for international Jewish bankers.

To be continued...

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Tomorrow is Today

"“Well What If There Is No Tomorrow…

By Kurt Osterhoff

August 07, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- - …there wasn’t one today.” Sadly, it seems this memorable line from the charming comedy film classic, Groundhog Day, now carries a highly foreboding relevance to our present times. Indeed, what if there is no tomorrow?

What if the legal groundwork for our permanent police state, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 are here to stay? What if torture is now the accepted norm? What if the NSA’s expanded domestic spying program is for keeps? What if the newly operational Rex-84 network of high capacity detention camps spread across the nation is permanent? What if Posse Comitatus remains effectively dormant? What if our quietly dismantled Bill of Rights is no more? What if the growing number of civilian deaths caused by our military only continues to climb? What if our massive troop deployment to the Middle East, like our phony wars on drugs and terror, goes on without end? And what if our two party system of representative democracy is in fact little more than an interminable, illusory puppet show orchestrated from behind the scenes by powers unaccountable?

Has Orwell’s 1984 become our infinitely looping Groundhog Day? Is this our inescapable fate? Perhaps so, but recall how early on the fate of Bill Murray’s character (weatherman, Phil Connors) appeared sealed and inescapable too. Remember also that somewhere along the way he had an epiphany, after which he got smart, got busy, got the girl, and broke free of the time loop.

Do “we the people” dare dream to do the same? Could we experience an awakening, our own collective epiphany of sorts, and then set about breaking free from this national Orwellian Groundhog Day nightmare? To contemplate the alternative is to see the answer: we must break free of it.

The Making of a Revolutionary

So what goes into the making of a contemporary American revolutionary? What turns an ordinary law abiding, relatively sedate and insular, American Idol watching couch potato into an informed and committed citizen prepared to incur risk and make meaningful prolonged personal sacrifice aimed at reclaiming our country? Two things: truth and suffering.

According to a New Mexico State University affiliated news service, Frontera Norte Sur (an on-line provider of US-Mexico border news) there is reason to believe a steadily growing money stream is, for the first time ever, flowing north from Mexico into the US, sent by the relatives of un- and underemployed immigrants. If this is true, surely we needn’t wonder whether real suffering (the longstanding hardship of Mexican immigrants notwithstanding) via our engineered economic tailspin has begun; likewise, anyone with internet access and the inclination to do research can readily confirm the dissemination of important truths inexorably linked to our burgeoning national impoverishment is also underway.

Well then, if we have these essential elements of truth and suffering, why is there still no large, forceful, coherent, and well organized body of popular grassroots resistance in the US? The main reason is simply that the requisite deep suffering and penetrating hard truths are not yet sufficiently widespread. Another reason is the extensive dumbing down of our society, along with the non-stop lies and propaganda spoon fed us daily by mainstream corporate media. Also there’s the ever present fear created by our government, using both rhetoric and legislation designed to consistently reinforce the clear threat so plainly put to us in the wake of 9-11 by George W. Bush: “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”

In any case, with our Bush initiated upward spiraling national debt, exploding unemployment, and massive war related economic hemorrhaging, all continuing unabated under Obama and our wholly owned Congress, the furtherance of expanded suffering is a foregone conclusion. It will be left to the small but growing numbers of would-be resisters and truth-tellers (citizens Big Brother will vilify as home-grown terrorists) to advance the spread of truth.

Channeling Truth-tellers Past

In his famous “Letters from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King wrote:

I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

While Socrates and MLK, widely separated by time, place, and circumstance, may well have been more different than alike, commonality of purpose in their respective missions to enlighten and inform cannot be denied. If we could somehow channel the spirits of these two men, what counsel might they offer our small army of truth-tellers to assist in finding words to create this necessary “tension” in the minds of individuals? And how would this consultation from the great beyond unfold?

Would it be consistent with the teachings of Socrates to think that he would agree to sift through the many pressing truths of our time and then kindly hand down his findings along with some helpful instructions? What about Dr. King, was he known to be a pontificator given to issuing directive? Is this the way these men taught? Isn’t the “tension in the mind” Dr. King refers to really about stirring individuals to think, reason, and act on things that matter?

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

- Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam speech, April 4, 1967

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” Is this an example of one particularly powerful and ugly truth being pressed into service by Dr. King to create tension in the minds of fellow citizens? Are his words any less relevant today than they were forty years ago?

Gulf of Tonkin was an Inside Job

We now know the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which provided the pretext for President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, was a lie – the alleged attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats against US war ships did not occur and our government no longer denies this.

Suppose shortly following this incident a determined group of conscientious truth seeking citizens had done their own independent investigative research and within the course of a couple years constructed a very compelling case, based on credible circumstantial evidence, exposing Gulf of Tonkin for the staged false flag event that it was. Suppose further, while no mainstream or left gatekeeper media outlets of the time would agree to help in exposing this monumental lie, that these citizen investigators had something on the order of today’s internet at their disposal – a relatively cheap interactive means of reaching at least some of the population. And lastly, let’s suppose they’d successfully reached Dr. King with the details of this shocking revelation.

Would Dr. King have spoken this awful truth about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident publicly? Should we believe he would have dared drop such a bombshell in his Beyond Vietnam speech? Or would he have recoiled from it, believing, with the JFK assassination and all that followed still very much on people’s minds, that he would too easily be marginalized by his many powerful detractors for embracing and spreading a truth sure to be savagely maligned as conspiracy theory? Could public perception considerations ever have trumped the telling of such an important and relevant truth for a man like Martin Luther King?

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Fast forward thirty-seven years from the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. If our government is to be believed, on the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers wielding box cutters successfully commandeered four commercial passenger jetliners, not long afterwards slamming two into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, and crash diving another (allegedly after struggling with passengers that had stormed the cockpit) into the ground in a remote area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The official narrative also attributes the destruction of WTC towers I, II, and building 7, each of which collapsed neatly into their own respective footprints at near freefall speed, to structural damage, fire, and falling debris originating from the impact of the two planes said to have hit WTC I and II.

Is the government’s official version of the events of 9-11 credible? Fortunately, we are not simply left to wonder, as there is now a large and impressive body of diligent investigative research done by a loose-knit group of private citizens known as the Truth Movement. Here’s a small sample of video links highlighting some of this research: September Clues (90 min); Enlightening the Shadows (8 min); 9-11 NIST Report Debunked (20 min); Ret US Major General on the Pentagon hit (5 min); Shanksville (10 min); Architects and Engineers for Truth (16 min); Dr. David Ray Griffin interview (60 min); Sibel Edmonds: Kill the Messenger (52 min).

A Deafening Silence

After even a cursory objective examination of the accumulated evidence contradicting the official story, the utter absurdity of what we’ve been asked to believe by our own government concerning the events of 9-11 becomes painfully obvious. Further pain is felt in the realization that there is apparently no longer a free press (if there ever was one) in America. If we had one they would certainly be exposing the 9-11 cover-up. As things stand, it’s been nearly eight years and still nothing from either corporate mainstream, or left gatekeeper media – their silence is deafening.

This, of course, like the 9-11 investigative work, leaves responsibility for the dissemination of these and other important truths to fall squarely upon us, the citizenry. And we should treat it the same way Dr. King would have: as a duty.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

- Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam speech, April 4, 1967

Time is not on our side, it rarely is. Please do what you can to help spread important truths.

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Related: Armageddon Is Now

Also see: The Time Monks

U.S. History Lesson

"Elections Are A Scam

See also: Non-Voting Archive

As in every election we're now being bombarded with propaganda about how "your vote makes a difference" and associated nonsense. According to the official version ordinary citizens control the state by voting for candidates in elections. The President and other politicians are supposedly servants of "the people" and the government an instrument of the general populace. This version is a myth. It does not matter who is elected because the way the system is set up all elected representatives must do what big business and the state bureaucracy want, not what "the people" want. Elected representatives are figureheads. Politicians' rhetoric may change depending on who is elected, but they all have to implement the same policies given the same situation. Elections are a scam whose function is to create the illusion that "the people" control the government, not the elite, and to neutralize resistance movements. All voting does is strengthen the state & ruling class, it is not an effective means to change government policy.

If a party wins the elections but implements policies that go against the interests of big business then profits will go down and businesses & investors will withdraw their investments. This capital flight will cause the economy to crash. If the ruling party does not change its policies to appease big business then they'll lose the next elections due to the bad economy. In practice most parties change their policies to appease the corporate elite in order to avoid losing power.

This is not merely theoretical, it has happened repeatedly. It happened in India a few months ago. The left, lead by the Congress party, won the elections, leading to a coalition government with the Congress party and the Communist party. This caused the stock market to crash because investors feared a change in economic policy that would hurt their profits. Sonia Ghandi, who was originally going to be the next Prime Minister, chose not to take the position and the new government was forced to adopt policies virtually identical to the previous government. Their rhetoric is different, but policy is basically the same.

Usually the mere threat of capital flight is enough to keep potentially recalcitrant politicians in line (although most politicians never even consider policies that conflict with the corporate elite/state bureaucracy). For example, Bill Clinton won election on a mildly liberal reformist platform. Once in office he was forced to abandon his campaign promises because if he continued them the bond market wouldn't react well and the economy would go down the tubes. Clinton's famous statement to his advisers upon realizing this was, "You mean to tell me that the success of my program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?" He was thus forced to abandon his program before it even started, instead implementing one virtually identical to Republican proposals. He complained to his aides:

I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans. We're Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?

In theory the government might be able to combat this by nationalizing industry but neither the Democrats nor Republicans (or most prominent third parties) are willing to do this. Even if they were, the Supreme Court would strike it down. If some way were found to get around this then the CIA and/or Pentagon would overthrow the government in a coup (or through less dramatic means). The CIA has overthrown many governments for nationalizing industry, or even just implementing policies not sufficiently favorable to US corporations, including Chile, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Greece, the Congo and many others. Doing the same on their home turf would be a piece of cake.

Once elected representatives are isolated from the general public but surrounded by bureaucrats and other politicians. They therefore have a tendency to see things from the perspective of politicians and bureaucrats, rather than from the perspective of the general public from which they are isolated, and are much more susceptible to pressure from government bureaucracies.

Elected representatives' dependency on the state bureaucracy for information makes them very susceptible to manipulation by the bureaucracies they are officially in charge of. For example, in the late '50s the CIA secured approval to launch an uprising in Indonesia by feeding a series of increasingly alarmist reports to their superiors in the National Security Council, who otherwise might have shot the proposed uprising down. This shows how government agencies (especially secretive ones) can pressure politicians and influence policy in preferred directions. This is enhanced by the fact that individual politicians come and go but the bureaucrats are permanent, which makes it easier for bureaucrats to manipulate information and ensures that politicians have less experience with such manipulation. Because the state bureaucracy is permanent while politicians are transitory state bureaucracies tend to accrue more power than elected representatives.

State bureaucracies can also manipulate the political process by leaking damaging information about politicians they don't like or by harassing parties or movements they don't like (such as COINTELPRO or the recent harassment of anti-war activists by the FBI). This gives an advantage to politicians favorable to the interests of the state bureaucracy.

State bureaucracies, especially the military and intelligence services, have a considerable degree of autonomy from elected representatives and so aren't truly controlled by those representatives. When New Zealand intelligence began secretly participating in Echelon, an international electronic spying system, New Zealand's Prime Minister didn't even know about it. Most of the CIA's covert actions (including coups) were done without Congressional approval and some, like CIA participation in Ghana's 1966 coup, didn't even have Presidential approval. Entire wars have been fought in secret, including Russia 1918-1920, Laos 1965-1973 and Cambodia 1970-1975. When Congress cut off funding for the Contras (US-backed terrorists in Nicaragua) in the mid-80s the CIA (and other parts of the state bureaucracy) just kept doing it in secret, disregarding Congress's wishes.

The Pentagon can't even produce auditable books and regularly "loses" billions of dollars every year. Auditors for the Office of Management and Budget found that "unsubstantiated balance adjustments" for financial year 2000 totaled 1.1 trillion dollars. In other words, elected politicians (and especially congress) have no real control over Pentagon spending. The whole process of Congressional hearings and budgetary oversight is just an elaborate charade - they appropriate money and the Pentagon spends it however it wants to. Plus there's the "black budget" whose contents are kept secret, allowing the national security establishment to effectively do whatever they want with it.

All of this puts many state bureaucracies (especially the military and intelligence services) beyond effective control of elected representatives, let alone the general public. Their secrecy, manipulation of budgets and complexity (there are too many bureaucrats for representatives to effectively keep track of them all) gives government bureaucracies a considerable degree of autonomy. They go off and do whatever they want, either keeping things secret from elected politicians or pressuring them into going along with it.

What a politician says to win an election and what he actually does in office are two very different things; politicians regularly break their promises. This is not just a fluke but the outcome of the way the system is set up. Bush the second said he wouldn't engage in "nation-building" (taking other countries over) during the 2000 election campaign but has done it several times. He also claimed to support a balanced budget, but obviously abandoned that. Clinton advocated universal health care during the 1992 election campaign but there were more people without health insurance when he left office than when he took office. Bush the first said, "read my lips - no new taxes!" while running for office but raised taxes anyway. Reagan promised to shrink government but he drastically expanded the military-industrial complex and ran up huge deficits. Rather than shrinking government, he reoriented it to make it more favorable to the rich.

Carter promised to make human rights the "soul of our foreign policy" but funded genocide in East Timor and backed brutal dictators in Argentina, South Korea, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. During the 1964 elections leftists were encouraged by Democrats to vote for Johnson because Goldwater, his Republican opponent, was a fanatical warmonger who would escalate US involvement in Vietnam. Johnson won, and immediately proceeded to escalate US involvement in Vietnam. FDR promised to maintain a balanced budget and restrain government spending but did the exact opposite. Wilson won reelection in 1916 on the slogan "he kept us out of war" but then lied us into World War One. Hoover pledged to abolish poverty in 1928 but instead saw it skyrocket.

In the 1974 Canadian elections the Liberals criticized Tory plans to introduce wage and price controls but, shortly after winning office, implemented wage and price controls. In 1993 the Liberals promised to abolish the Goods and Service Tax but reneged on that after getting power. The British Liberal party promised to cut military spending during the 1906 elections but, after winning, went back on that promise in order to wage an arms race with Germany. In 1945 the British Labor party promised to set up a ministry of housing but abandoned it after winning the election.

According to the official version when leftists get elected to office we should always (or almost always) get leftist policies and vice versa when rightists get elected to office but this is not the case. The German Green party was originally pacifist and was founded on an anti-nuclear power position. They gained power in a coalition government in the late 1990s but abandoned their program, effectively delaying the end of nuclear power in Germany until the nuclear industry wanted to end it and supported military intervention during the Kosovo war. Lula, the current president of Brazil, originally ran on an anti-corporate and anti-IMF platform but is now cooperating with the IMF (although his rhetoric, but not his policies, are sometimes critical of it) and he's just as favorable towards corporate power as his predecessor.

The socialist/social democratic/labor parties in Europe were originally revolutionary Marxist parties aiming to establish a communist society. As they won elections and gained power they increasingly abandoned this goal and became ordinary capitalist parties. At first they continued to mouth Marxist rhetoric while pushing reformist policies, but eventually even Marxist rhetoric was abandoned. Prior to world war one they declared their opposition to any kind of inter-imperialist world war on the grounds that workers should not kill each other in order to benefit their capitalist masters. When world war one broke out all but two parties (the Bolsheviks and US Socialist party -- neither of whom had gained much power through elections) abandoned this stance and supported their own government in a wave of patriotic fervor. Today they're pushing through Reagan/Clinton-style deregulation and "free market reforms," dismantling the very welfare states they formerly advocated.

The most liberal American president in the last 30 years was Richard Nixon, a Republican whose personal beliefs and rhetoric were quite conservative. He created the environmental protection agency, established diplomatic relations with China, (eventually) withdrew from Vietnam, ended the draft, supported affirmative action, proposed a minimum income and imposed price controls. Every president since Nixon -- including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton -- has been more conservative.

In the US & UK Ronald Reagan & Margaret Thatcher implemented far right policies that attacked the social safety net and benefited big business in the name of the "free market." During the same time period in Australia and West Europe the supposedly left-wing parties (labor/social democrats/socialists) held power and implemented the same "free market" policies. Clinton & Blair from the supposedly left-wing parties (Democrat & Labor) later defeated Reagan & Thatcher's successors but once in office continued the same "free market." policies as their predecessors.

This refutes all the nonsense about how "your vote makes a difference." Politicians are required to implement the same policies (what the elite want) even if it conflicts with their campaign promises no matter who is elected. Elected representatives are figureheads. That's why there are so many examples of people getting elected and then doing the opposite of what they promised. Electing different people to power is not an effective way to change policy. In practice, politicians differ only in the lies they tell to get in power. Once in power their policies are the same given the same situation, although the rhetoric and symbolism used to justify those policies may change greatly.

Changes in policy direction are due to changes in the situation, not who is elected to office. Most major changes in policy do not coincide with new people getting in office; they coincide with changes in the situation. When the Great Depression started the US government responded with Keynesian state interventions in the economy designed to resuscitate the economy and prevent growing population movements (caused by the depression) from bringing about revolution. This actually began under Hoover, who did more in this area than any previous President, even though these policies are usually attributed to the next President, FDR.

In the mid-twentieth century welfare states expanded in most Western societies as a way of preventing the then large revolutionary socialist movements from overthrowing the government (welfare programs can make the poor less likely to rebel since they are better off and because it makes the state seem more benevolent). The welfare state was in the elites' interests because it was a way to prevent revolution and decrease unrest, which helped them gain and keep power & profit. The state bureaucracy will sometimes nationalize a limited amount of industry under these conditions, as a way of preventing revolution and also of keeping capitalism going (selling unprofitable industries to the government can be a useful way for businesses & investors to recoup loses during a depression).

In the later twentieth century these revolutionary movements declined and the welfare state was gradually dismantled. It was no longer in the interests of the elite to maintain a welfare state because the threat of unrest & revolution was no longer there to justify the costs. In the US this started not under Reagan, as liberals usually claim, but in the later part of Carter's term with deregulation and other small attacks on the welfare state. Carter also initiated other policies liberals blame Reagan for, including support for the Contras, Pol Pot, Afghan Mujahadeen and Saddam Hussein. This dismantling of the welfare state and general move to the right has continued under every subsequent President regardless of which party was in power.

In the US, during Nixon's term, there were a number of growing left-wing movements and spreading revolutionary ideology that threatened to overthrow the government. Had he not done things like end the draft, withdraw from Vietnam and implement other liberal reforms there was a real possibility that socialist revolution would erupt and even if it didn't there would have been greater unrest which would likely outweigh the cost of his reforms.

Although elections do not secure popular control over the state, they do help secure state control over the populace. Voting is a ritual that reinforces obedience to state authority. It creates the illusion that "the people" control the state, thereby masking elite rule. That illusion makes rebellion against the state less likely because it is seen as a legitimate institution and as an instrument of popular rule rather than the oligarchy it really is. This is why even totalitarian states like Russia under Stalin had elections. Embedded within all electoral campaigns is the myth that "the people" control the state through voting. This is implied & assumed by all election campaigns because it if wasn't true then the campaign for that candidate would be pointless.

This is why governments and corporations today are generally supportive of elections or at least do not question them. Government schools usually promote the importance of voting, teaching the official view that citizens control the state via elections, and some corporations (like MTV) even run commercials encouraging people to vote. It is in the interests of governments and corporations to promote voting because they serve to legitimize the system and reduce unrest.

In addition, elections can help neutralize resistance movements by getting disgruntled individuals to channel their efforts into the election, instead of more effective means of resistance. Since electoral campaigns are an ineffective means of changing policy, all the labor and resources put into election campaigns are wasted. Potential rebellion is thus diverted into a dead end where it will not hurt the system. Boycotting elections doesn't necessarily change things, but participating in elections (and especially in election campaigns) changes things for the worse by legitimizing the state and wasting resources. A vote for anyone is a vote for capitalist "democracy" and to strengthen the state.

Some Democrats try to guilt leftists into voting for their candidate(s) by arguing that oppressed peoples - the poor, people of color (POC) - vote for their candidate and so you should therefore do the same. The most obvious problem with this is that most oppressed people don't vote. You're more likely to vote the richer and whiter you are. So by their logic you shouldn't be voting because most poor/POC don't vote.

This argument is also based on a logical fallacy. Just because someone is poor/non-white doesn't mean everything they believe is correct. Most believe in god and during periods in the past Leninism was quite popular among sections of the poor/POC. It does not follow from this that either idea is true. Just because oppression is wrong does not mean that everything an oppressed person believes is true.

Some leftists argue that having Democrats in power is better because they will be more responsive to leftist pressure than Republicans. This argument was widely used in 1992 to justify voting for Bill Clinton but the conservative policies implemented by his presidency, which were basically a continuation of the first Bush's policies, disprove this argument. To continue believing it after Clinton is to stick your head in the sand and ignore reality.

Influence actually goes the other way around: having a Democrat in office makes the left more likely to believe the president's lies and go along with his policies than if a Republican were in office doing the same thing. Clinton was able to gut welfare, something Reagan wanted to do but couldn't, because he was able to co-opt other Democrats into going along with it. Had a Republican done the same many more would have opposed it. When Clinton attacked Yugoslavia & bombed Iraq the response from the left was quite small, but when Bush attacked Iraq the left formed a much larger movement against it. Many leftists (erroneously) think that a Democrat is preferable to a Republican and so are willing to give a Democrat the benefit of the doubt, and therefore are more likely to believe their lies, but will be much more skeptical of a Republican even if he does the same thing.

In addition, electing a Democrat can ruin left-wing movements if they support that candidate. Once in power that Democrat will have to do the same thing a Republican would under the same circumstances. This can cause leftists who supported the Democrats to become disillusioned and drop out -- allowing the right to advance even further.

Some claim that the year 2000 "election"/coup shows that "every vote counts" but it actually shows the opposite. The Supreme Court decided who became president, not the voters. Gore would be president today if you went by what the voters wanted (and he would be doing the same thing Bush is doing).

Actual power lies with big business and the state bureaucracy, elected representatives must do what these institutions want. If they do not obey these institutions pressure on them will mount and various disciplinary mechanisms (such as capital flight) will come into play to force them to do so. Ultimately they will be removed from office (through elections, coups, or other means) if they continue to disobey these institutions. The White House and Congress don't really make the decisions, Wall Street and the Pentagon do. Who wins the election makes no difference (with rare exceptions) because all politicians must do what the elite want. Elections are a scam whose function is to neutralize resistance movements and dupe ordinary citizens into thinking they control the state.

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