Americans cannot vote their way out of this mess. Their only real opportunity this year is to vote AGAINST the two-party plutocracy by voting for any of the four third-party presidential candidates. We need the world to see tens of millions of votes protesting the failures of both major parties. This electoral rebellion would keep faith with Thomas Jefferson’s correct view that America would need a revolution every generation or so. To keep voting for Democrats and Republicans just makes gullible and delusional citizens co-conspirators in the vast criminal conspiracy that is our political system.

Militaristic, corrupt America increasingly resembles a Third World state. By Ximena Ortiz

December 08, 2009 "American Conservative" -- Despite a change of presidents, America remains mired in economic, institutional, and cultural purgatory, with Obama’s exalted oratory circling the stratosphere like a taunt.

Angry nationalism shouts down prudence. Disproportionate military spending threatens economic wellbeing. Industry has its hand so deep in the government’s purse that private enterprise is becoming public property. The currency falters, the infrastructure crumbles. And a supine media, once a watchdog of the powerful, happily licks the strongman’s hand.

If the picture looks familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it many times before, from Argentina to Chile to Russia. The U.S. is third worlding.

That statement may smack of hyperbole. It may also understate the phenomenon, for many of the countries that the United States increasingly resembles are not only Third World—they are authoritarian, even rogue.

This is not to say the U.S. will be indistinguishable from a Third World country any time soon. We’re clearly nowhere near Sudanese levels of violence or Bangladeshi depths of poverty. But in terms of institutional structure, financial stability, and even national spirit, the U.S. looks little like the country it was a generation ago and more like nations it has long condemned.

The turning point came on 9/11. Terrorism is now a weary concern: other issues dominate the headlines—stimulus, healthcare, climate change. Yet the attacks were a pretext for a host of foreign and domestic policies that promised to secure America against its hell-bent enemies but have instead dragged the country down, eroding the qualities that distinguished it from the rest of the world.

Honor Killing

As George W. Bush was fond of doing, Barack Obama looks penetratingly into the camera, addressing all the South Asian terrorists watching CNN from their burrows. He vows to defeat them—using other people’s lives. With demagogic mastery, he, too, has tapped America’s proud warrior culture, a latent force before the age of terror.

This emphasis on offended honor—particularly male honor—is an integral part of life in the Third World. Where the rule of law is weak, men learn to fend for their own charges, and humiliation must be quickly avenged to uphold street cred. This cultural strain exists even among educated elites, who dress and sound much like their American counterparts, but harbor ingrained machismo.

A repressive leader quickly realizes that the best way to unite his countrymen is to rally them against an outside threat—actual or invented. When Evo Morales became president of Bolivia, he stoked hostility with Chile, blocking the construction of a pipeline to export Bolivian natural gas, at significant cost to his own nation, because it would pass through Chile. In North Korea, a tradition of defiance and nationalistic self-reliance, known as juche, is a cultural imperative. If the regime abandoned its bellicose posturing, its power mystique would shatter. Across the Muslim world, the pursuit of honor is a crucial driver in jihadi recruitment. As Akbar Ahmed puts it in Islam Under Siege, a sense of grievance motivates extremism, but even “those societies that economists call ‘developed’ fall back to notions of honor and revenge in times of crisis.” Sept. 11 proved his point.

The fact that 19 misfits with boxcutters scarcely constituted an invading army was of little consequence—that anyone could touch us so shocked the American system that we lashed out with disproportionate fury. When wounded ego drives policy, force becomes the default. Far from being a passing spasm, this honor impulse has become a way of life. It rules our international conduct and makes our wars nearly impossible to quit. Andrew Bacevich, a former U.S. Army colonel and author of The New American Militarism, writes, “There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. stoops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared.”

As the martial spirit rises, soldiers are necessarily heroes, even though they are treated as expendable. Patriotism is defined in militaristic terms. And it’s not unusual for an American president to wear a jacket with “Commander in Chief” emblazoned across the chest—an only slightly subtler version of Chavez and Castro couture.

From the Shadows

In countries with a history of authoritarianism, it is not uncommon for the practiced agitators who presided over a crisis to hold sway long after they appear to exit power. In Russia, former president Vladimir Putin rules extra-officially. In Chile, for years after the transition to democracy, the military was guaranteed seats in the legislature. In Argentina after the Dirty War, the army staged rebellions to compel the executive to limit the scope of prosecutions. Even after a crisis subsides, much of the population remains in panic mode and supports the bare-knuckled approach of the previous government.

America is similarly afflicted. Dick Cheney wields such clout that even after his term ended he gave the order and previously classified information on “enhanced interrogation” was made public. His contention that the disclosure proves the value of those interrogations remains inconclusive, but he demonstrated his reach.

Barack Obama, for all his pledges of transparency, has upheld government secrecy to shield the previous administration and the former vice president in particular. He blocked the release of the FBI’s interview of Cheney in the Valerie Plame case, though a federal judge recently rejected arguments for keeping the file sealed. The Obama administration has promoted, through its actions and its rhetoric, the fiction that post-9/11 abuses were committed by “bad apple” agents rather than condoned by high-ranking officials. The Obama and Bush administrations have both sought to block the release of detainee abuse information. Obama has also declined to release new pictures of prisoner mistreatment, breaking his earlier pledge. His Justice Department’s investigation of CIA excesses will be circumscribed to lower-ranking, “rogue” agents. And Cheney has already de facto immunized those who transgressed the Bush administration’s abusive guidelines. In August, Chris Wallace asked him, “So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re OK with it?” Cheney, unhindered by such quaint constraints as the rule of law, responded with a succinct “I am.”

Here the Third World shames us. There, when prosecution has been problematic, post-crisis justice has included truth commissions, which rigorously document abuses (as in Chile after the transition to democracy) or complement prosecutions targeting those on the very top (as in Argentina after the Dirty War). Interestingly, Cheney appears to have cribbed from the Argentine junta’s self-aggrandizing farewell statements. He claims abusive interrogators risked their lives and “deserve our gratitude”—as he surely does, too.

Our current president may make pious pronouncements about America’s founding principles, but his actions belie his luminous words. In a May speech, Obama professed, “I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” He then pledged that he would continue imprisoning detainees who “cannot be prosecuted” for lack of evidence. And the administration is mounting a legal challenge to transfer, in effect, Guantanamo to Bagram, making the latter prison America’s primary human warehouse for detainees that the government holds without charges. In 30 of the 38 Guantanamo-related habeas corpus cases lower courts have heard since the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision in 2008, judges have found that the government lacked credible evidence—the lowest evidentiary burden—to continue incarceration of detainees.

Do indefinite imprisonments, immunity for favored agents, and rule by executive diktat sound like best democratic practice? Crisis-rocked Third World countries eventually move on, setting up truth commissions and holding trials. But the United States remains very much in the grip of a 9/11 emergency mentality.

The War on TV

Writing about the Argentine media during the Falklands War, Rodolfo Braceli recalled, “The majority of the media and many notable journalists, more than being submissive and saving their skin, had a good time. They were not victims. Nor were they innocents. To say they were not innocents is the gentlest of ways of saying that they were, also, particularly culpable. … And there is more to reexamine: submission out of fear is one thing, and quite another is the genuflection, sugar-coated and gleeful, of complicity. Of the latter there was too much.”

We are not much better today. Reporter Ashley Banfield described coverage of the Iraq War by embedded reporters: “It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor.”

The U.S. media has long enjoyed an independence that even its European counterparts, with their strict defamation laws, don’t have. In terms of objectivity and freedom, Third World media has always been the weaker cousin of America’s Fourth Estate. Journalists do not come from the moneyed class and are routinely bullied by high-ranking officials who have accrued generations of privilege.

That independence eroded dramatically after Sept. 11. Americans tuning in to the evening news saw flags undulating in the background of war reports, often coupled with a subtle, flapping sound-effect tying war to patriotism. State TV it was not—not yet anyway. But just when the media’s role became most critical, it turned uncharacteristically compliant.

Recall May 1, 2003, the “Mission Accomplished” moment, when coverage sounded more like unmodified PR than impartial reporting. An equal participant in the pageantry, CNN informed viewers that Bush had made a “picture-perfect landing,” was greeted by the roar of the seamen’s approval, and had underwater survival training to prepare for his flight. All that was missing was a reverential bow to “Dear Leader.”

Long before the Pentagon discovered embedding, the Argentine junta selected the journalists allowed into the Falklands to cover the conflict and checked all news content. As Stars and Stripes reported in a recent series, the Defense Department has been following a similar strategy, hiring the Rendon Group to prepare graded reports on journalists seeking embed positions, assessing how favorable their coverage has been. (That the Pentagon continued to use Rendon at all is highly suspect given the group’s disreputable history. Prior to the Iraq War, Rendon promoted million-dollar contracts to Ahmad Chalabi, who, in turn, forwarded fraudulent intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons to the Pentagon.)

In September, after the Associated Press distributed a photo of a dying Marine, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attempted to block publication, claiming it would mark an “unconscionable departure from the restraint most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since Sept. 11.” He was uncharacteristically correct: AP did break from common practice by showing the reality of the war. Gates’s public rebuke highlights the degree to which the U.S. government is willing to interfere with journalistic prerogatives—and how little space remains between us and the Third World nations we condemn for restricting freedom of press.

After eight years of lost life, money, and credibility in Afghanistan, the new administration now promotes the war in a more subdued way. President Obama and General McCrystal acknowledge steep challenges, but argue there is a “newness” to the campaign in Afghanistan. It cannot be put into historical context of any kind. The media and commentariat nod obediently.

The Good War

The armed forces of states such as Russia and Pakistan enjoy considerable clout and resources, but that often benefits only the upper tiers, which deploy foot soldiers with little planning or consideration of risk. In 1996, during Russia’s war with Chechnya, national security adviser Alexander Lebed admitted that Russian soldiers were “hungry, lice-infested and underclothed.”

Despite the lip service paid to U.S. troops, they face similar, often life-threatening shortfalls. Recall the haphazard, bring-your-own-armor approach to the early phase of the Iraq War. Gen. Anthony Zinni echoed some of Lebed’s concerns when he said of the preparations for the Iraq War, “I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.”

In September, a former Air Force staff sergeant working for a private contractor was found dead in a shower in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Adam Vernon Hermanson had served three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Uzbekistan. A military medical examiner concluded that he was killed by low-voltage electrocution. Earlier this year, an electrical expert for the Army Corps of Engineers, Jim Childs, testified that roughly 90 percent of contractor KBR’s new construction in Iraq was not properly wired. Yet KBR was paid more than $80 million in bonuses for its electrical work. To this day, it has not been held accountable for the injuries and deaths of troops who guarded a toxin-polluted facility that provided treated water. According to whistleblowers and memos, KBR knew the facility was contaminated with sodium dichromate, which is linked to cancer, long before the company informed U.S. officials. Nearly 1,200 troops were exposed to the substance, and the Army is refusing to provide most of the injured veterans with health benefits. But again, KBR received bonuses.

How smoothly our leaders speak of supporting the troops—only to command them carelessly and forbid them from leaving when their tours end. To fill its quotas, top brass persists in the institutional sleight of hand known as “stop loss,” forcing troops to serve prolonged and serial deployments. Many who return home scarred will struggle to get care: 37 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer mental-health issues. The Marine Corps Times reports that 915,000 unprocessed claims are waiting at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Once we followed the Third World into the strategic cul de sac of relying on force to solve problems, we needed a deep supply of cannon fodder. And when the democratic will waned, mercenaries were brought in to make up the difference. In Afghanistan, they outnumber U.S. troops, with 68,197 contractors in the theater, 67 percent of the total force. In Iraq, there is one KBR worker for every three U.S. soldiers.

In tone, President Obama departs from the Third World approach to problem solving. He outlines a decorous AfPak policy, calling for development funding, declaring America’s “great respect for the Pakistani people,” and stating that “a campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone”—all while ratcheting up violent confrontation and employing the bluntest instruments of warfare. He has escalated drone attacks, which have caused significant civilian deaths, and has requested an increase in funding for unmanned aircraft.

During his campaign, Obama promised to raise military spending—as did every other major candidate. He has kept his word, even though the United States spends more than all other countries combined on defense. In the CIA’s ranking of military spending as a percentage of GDP, Third World countries dominate the first 50-plus slots, with the United States in the middle of the heap at number 28, flanked by Chad and Libya—hardly flattering company. This disproportionate devotion to military spending has had profound costs, hastening the country’s economic meltdown.

Bailout of Necessity

In the Third World, crises often beget ill-considered policies that result in economic blowback—which in turn breeds further crises. Leaders try to rush their initiatives before legislatures (where they exist) and the media (where it is allowed to operate) have a chance to air drawbacks or propose more moderate alternatives.

This became America’s modus operandi after the banking crisis morphed into a global economic catastrophe. The U.S. government found itself in an unenviable position: the treasury had been depleted by two wars, and the American people had already been called upon to show their patriotic conviction by shopping. So it resorted to calling for emergency measures with a huge price tag and, in Third World-style, courted considerable moral hazard.

Like America today, Argentina in the 1980s had not recovered economically from its war and the profligacy of the junta when crisis struck. President Carlos Menem responded by invoking 472 Decrees of Urgency and Necessity from 1989 to 1998, refining the Third-World art of crony capitalism and state-power centralization. He used privatization as a form of political patronage, doling out the country’s assets at below-market prices, with no bidding, or vetting.

Now the U.S. government has passed its own bipartisan policies of urgency and necessity. In a letter to congressional leaders shortly before Obama’s inauguration, Larry Summers made the appeal for the second round of TARP funds, claiming that the need for billions of dollars was “imminent and urgent.” Obama promised to improve TARP’s transparency: “Many of us have been disappointed with the absence of clarity, the failure to track how the money’s been spent.” But his Treasury Department has done the opposite. Moreover, TARP has overwhelmingly aided the big banks; homeowners have seen scant relief. The rhetoric is populist, the practice elitist.

It is not only the opacity with which TARP spoils have been divided that suggests crony capitalism; the banking sector itself is becoming an oligopoly, less removed from the Third World’s skewed, non-competitive structures than U.S. citizens would like to admit. TARP, after all, amounts to small change when compared to the arcane government programs benefiting the big banks—TLGP, TALF, PPIP: a stew of acronyms incomprehensible to the citizens who write checks. Banks with more than $100 billion in assets are borrowing at interest rates 0.34 percentage points lower than the rest of the industry. In 2007, that difference was only 0.08 percentage points.

In his book Latin America at the End of Politics, Forrest Colburn argues that economic turmoil shocked Third World citizens into accepting a strain of so-called liberalization that is heavily weighted toward monopolies and maintains chasmic inequalities in exchange for relative stability. America’s bank rescues have taken on similar dimensions.

As in Menem’s Argentina, the Obama administration has chosen winners and losers. And as the market-distorting impact of his programs becomes evident and public anger grows, our president has taken to the bully pulpit to showcase his talent for economic demagoguery, another well-worn tactic of Third World leaders. Obama singles out unpopular market actors for scorn, much like former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who at the end of the ’90s blamed George Soros and other “speculators” for the collapse of his country’s currency. A decade later, the American president would fault “a small group of speculators” who endangered “Chrysler’s future.”

Hector E. Schamis wrote of Menem’s maneuvers, in a passage that now seems prophetic of what would happen in the U.S., “by colluding with the largest segments of Argentina’s business groups, Menem cemented a minimum winning coalition that benefited from the economic reform program and provided key political support. By distributing selective incentives among potential opponents, he divided and disarticulated rivals.”

As in so many collapsed countries, an increasingly large portion of American wealth goes toward debt. Infrastructure sags. Only industries favored by the government thrive. The middle class shrinks as it is squeezed to fund programs that keep the wealthy comfortable and the poor from rioting. The only difference is that the U.S. has an ability to continue borrowing—for now.

Decline and Fall?

The Third Worlding of America is less cinematic but more serious than empire-in-decline analogies suggest. After all, Britain no longer wields global supremacy, but it is still firmly in the First World, its political class scrutinized by an independent, assertive media. And even after its post-World War II penury, it did not backpedal on political reforms at home. This is not to excuse the colonizer’s brutality abroad but rather to distinguish Britain’s imperial decline from America’s homeland decay.

The United States has transgressed her traditions in the fog of war before, only to redeem herself later. But we are now engaged in a war without borders against a self-multiplying enemy. There is no army to trounce, so no clear end to the bloodletting or bankrupting.

The patchouli-scented youth, who protest in the streets of D.C. with their towering papier-mâché effigies, may have been correct after all in highlighting the breadth of America’s all-encompassing problems—if not their remedies. Crisis has pushed the U.S. toward Third World policies with alarming swiftness. But the risk is not that Americans will bring out the pitchforks and join the protestors. Rather, citizens seem as disaffected and resigned as their Third World brethren, only occasionally roused from reality TV by their favorite pundit peddling the outrage du jour.

The far Right wallows in paranoia with its dreams of overturning an election by discovering a Kenyan birth certificate. Most on the Left seem too mesmerized by the president to hold him accountable. The media ranges from insipid to hysterical. This country may never see the reasons for—and the parallels to—its disintegration.

 

 

The Economic Crisis And What Must Be Done

By Richard C. Cook

November 27, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19th century progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

In 1929 the bankers plunged the nation into the Great Depression by constricting the money supply. With Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the nation struggled through the decade of the 1930s but did not pull out of the Depression until the industrial explosion during World War II.

After the war came the Golden Age of the U.S. economy, when the working man, protected by strong labor unions, became a true partner in the prosperity of the industrial age. That era lasted a full generation. The bankers were largely spectators as Americans led the world in exports, standard of living, science and space exploration, and every measure of health, longevity, and culture.

Roosevelt had kept the bankers subservient to the interests of the economy at large. The Federal Reserve was part of the New Deal team, and interest rates were held at historic lows despite a large federal deficit. One main impact was the huge increase in home ownership. After World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed home ownership to grow further and millions of veterans to attend college. The influx of educated graduates led to productivity growth and the emergence of new high-tech industries.

But the bankers were laying their plans. In the early 1950s they got the government to agree to allow the Federal Reserve to escape its subservience to the U.S. Treasury Department and set interest rates on its own. Rates rose throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the interest rate hikes of 1968, the economy was slowing down. Both federal budget and trade deficits were beginning to replace the post-war surpluses. High interest rates were the likely cause.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon removed the dollar’s gold peg, allowing the huge inflation resulting from oil price increases that the international bankers engineered through control of U.S. foreign policy when Henry Kissinger was national security adviser and secretary of state. Nixon’s opening to China resulted in early agreements, also overseen by banking interests, to begin to transfer U.S. industry to overseas producers like China which had cheap labor costs.

By the mid-1970s, the U.S. had been taken over by a behind the scenes coup-d’etat that included events in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy that could only have been instigated by the highest levels of world financial control. In the election of 1976, David Rockefeller succeeded in placing fellow Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter in the White House, but Carter upset the banking community, thoroughly Zionist in orientation, by working toward peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I was working in the Carter White House in 1979-80. Unbeknownst to the president, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, another Rockefeller protégé, suddenly raised interest rates to fight the inflation the bankers had caused by the OPEC oil price deals, and plunged the nation into recession. Carter was made to look weak and uninformed and was defeated in the election of 1980 by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. It was through the “Reagan Revolution” that the regulatory controls over the banking industry were lifted, mainly in allowing the banks to use their fractional reserve privileges in making mortgage loans.

Volcker’s recession shattered American manufacturing and hastened the flight of jobs abroad. Under the “Reagan Doctrine,” the U.S. military embarked on an unprecedented mission of world conquest by attacking one small nation at a time, starting with Nicaragua. Global capitalism was also on the march, with the U.S. armed forces its own private police force. With the invasion of Iraq under George H.W. Bush in 1991, mainland Asia was revealed as the principle target.

The economy was floated by productivity gains through computer automation and a huge sell-off of assets through the merger-acquisition bubble of the late 1980s which ended in a recession. This resulted in the defeat of Bush by Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. Clinton was able to create another bubble through a strong dollar policy that attracted foreign capital.

The dot-com bubble that resulted lasted all the way through to the crash of December 2000. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force led the way in the destruction of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, whereby the international bankers took over the resource wealth of the entire Balkan region, and the U.S. military gained forward bases for further incursions into Asia.

Do we need to say that none of this was ever voted on by the American electorate? But they bought into it nevertheless, both with their silence and through participation in a generally favorable job market in the emerging service occupations, particularly finance.

By the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, the U.S. was facing a disaster. $4 trillion in wealth had vanished when the dot.com bubble collapsed. NAFTA caused even more American manufacturing jobs to disappear abroad. The Neocons who were moving into key jobs in the Pentagon knew they would soon have new wars to fight in the Middle East, with invasion plans for Afghanistan and Iraq ready to be pulled off the shelf.

But the U.S. had no economic engine available to generate the tax revenues Bush would need for the planned wars. At this moment Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve stepped in. Over a two year period from 2001-2003 the Fed lowered interest rates by over 500 basis points. Meanwhile, the federal government removed all regulatory controls on mortgage lending, and the housing bubble was on. $4 trillion in new home loans were pumped into the economy, much of it through subprime loans borrowers could not afford.

The Fed began to put on the brakes in 2003, but the mighty work of re-floating a moribund economy had been accomplished. By late 2006 another recession loomed, but it would take two more years before the crisis of October 2008 brought the entire system down.

The impact on the job market was immediate and profound. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, the U.S. was mired in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the worst recession since the Great Depression was picking up speed. In order to prevent total disaster, the Bush administration ended its eight years of catastrophic misrule with a flourish, by allocating over $700 billion in financial system bailouts to cover the bad loans the banks had been making since Greenspan gave the housing bubble the green light.

It is now November 2009. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, unemployment has soared from 7.9 percent to 10.2 percent. A few hundred billion dollars were allocated for “stimulus” purposes, but most of that went to pay unemployment benefits and to keep state and local governments from laying off more employees.

A fraction has been distributed for highway improvements, but largely through the bank bailouts the federal deficit has been running at an annual rate of $1.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, with the national debt now topping $12 trillion. Ironically, those Americans who still have productive jobs continue to grow in efficiency, with productivity up over five percent in the last year.

So much federal money has been spent that the Obama administration has been struggling to make its health care proposals budget-neutral through a raft of new taxes, fees, and penalties, and by announcing in recent days that the government’ first priority must now shift to deficit reduction. The word “austerity” has been mentioned for the first time since the Carter administration. Yet Congress voted $655 billion in military expenditures to continue fighting in the Middle East. A U.S. military attack on Iran, possibly in conjunction with Israel, would surprise no one.

So where do we now stand?

At present, the Federal Reserve is trying to prevent a total economic collapse. Interest rates are near-zero, to the chagrin of foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, and close to half of new Treasury debt instruments have been bought by the Federal Reserve itself as a way of providing free money for federal government expenditures.

But the U.S. economy shows no signs of coming back, with no economic driver emerging that could bring it back. For all the talk about alternative energy, there has been no significant growth of any home-grown industry that could possibly make up so much lost ground in either the short or the long-term.

The industries in the U.S. that are holding up are the military, including arms exports, universities that are attracting large numbers of students from abroad, especially China, and health care, especially for the aging baby boomer population. But the war industry produces nothing with a long-term economic benefit, and health care exists mainly to treat sick people, not produce anything new.

None of this provides a foundation that can bring about a restoration of prosperity to 300 million people when the jobs of making articles of consumption are increasingly scarce. On top of everything else, since government inevitably looks to its own requirements first, the total tax burden continues to increase to the point where the average employee now pays close to 50 percent of his or her income on taxes of all types, including federal and state income taxes, real estate taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, government fees, etc. Plus the cost of utilities continues to rise steadily and threatens to skyrocket if cap-and-trade legislation is passed.

The Obama administration has no plans to deal with any of this. They have projected a budget for 15 years hence that shows the budget deficit decreasing and tax revenues going way up, but it is all lies. They have no roadmap for getting us there and no plans for following the roadmap if it portrayed a realistic goal. And yet the U.S. military is still trying to conquer Asia. It is madness.

And it is madness because the big decisions are not made by the U.S., by Congress, or by the Obama administration. The U.S. has, for half-a-century, been marching to the tune played by the international financial elite, and this fact did not change with the election of 2008. The financiers have put the people of this nation $57 trillion in debt, according to the latest reports, counting debt at the federal, state, business, and household levels. Interest alone on this debt is over $3 trillion of a GDP of $14 trillion. Failure of our political leadership to deal with this tragedy over the past three decades is nothing less than treason.

But then again, at some point the decision was made that the U.S. and its population would be discarded by history, the economic status of the nation reduced to a shadow of what it once was, but that its military machine would be used for the financial elite’s takeover of the world until it is replaced by that of some other nation. All indications are that the next country up to bat as military enforcer for the financiers is China.

There you have it. That, in my opinion, is the past, present, and future of this nation in a nutshell. Great evils have been done in the world in the last century, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Except…. and that’s what each person caught up in these travesties must decide. What are you going to do about it?

In mulling over this question, it would be wise to recognize that the dominance of the financial elite has largely been exercised through their control of the international monetary system based on bank lending and government debt. Therefore it’s through the monetary system that change can and must be made.

The progressives are wrong to think the government should go deeper in debt to create more jobs. This will just create an even deeper hole of debt future generations will have to crawl out of.

Rather the key is monetary reform, whether at the local or national levels. People have lost control of their ability to earn a living. But change could be accomplished through sovereign control by people and nations of the monetary means of exchange.

This control has been stolen. It is time to take it back. One way would be for the federal government to make a relief payment to each adult of $1,000 a month until the crisis lifted. This money could be earmarked for goods and services produced within the U.S. and used to capitalize a new series of community development banks. I have called this the “Cook Plan.”

The plan could be funded through direct payment from a Treasury relief account without new taxes or government borrowing. The payments would be balanced on the credit side by GDP growth or be used by individuals to pay off debt. It would be direct government spending as was done with Greenbacks before and after the Civil War without significant inflation.

Another method increasingly being used within the U.S. today is local and regional credit clearing exchanges and the use of local currencies or “scrip.” Use of such currencies could be enhanced by legislation at the state and federal levels allowing these currencies to be used for payment of taxes and government fees as well as payment of mortgages and other forms of bank debt. The credit clearing exchanges could be organized as private non-profit regional currency co-operatives similar to credit unions.

These would be immediate emergency measures. In the longer run, sovereign control of money and credit must be returned to the public commons and treated as public utilities. This does not mean exclusive government control to replace bank control. As stated previously, it would be done in partnership between government and private trade exchanges. Nor does it mean government takeover of business, industry, or the banking system, though all should be regulated for the common good and fairly taxed.

This program would lead to a new monetary paradigm where money and credit would be available by, as, when, and where needed, to facilitate trade between and among legitimate producers of goods and services. In this way trade and commerce will come to serve human freedom, not diminish it as is done with today’s dysfunctional partnership between big government trillions of dollars in debt and big finance with the entire world in hock.

Such a change would be a true populist revolution.