Obama's 100 Days
The Mad Men Did Well
By John PilgerApril 29, 2009 "
The BBC's American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold. It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush. No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared. Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion...” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know... identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who... can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama. All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office. In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years”. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in. Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design”, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The Madmen did well.
www.johnpilger.com
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Swine flu?
A panic stoked in order to posture and spend
Despite the hysteria, the risk to Britons' health is tiny - but that news won't sell papers or drugs, or justify the WHO's budget
Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Wednesday 29 April 2009
We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. "This could really explode," intones a reporter for BBC News. "London warned: it's here," cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading "like a Mexican wave". It "could affect" three-quarters of a million Britons. It "could cost" three trillion dollars. The "danger", according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be "worried" (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.
Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst. Had Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.
What is swine flu? It is flu, a mutation of the H1N1 virus of the sort that often occurs. It is not a pandemic, despite the media prefix, not yet. The BBC calls it a "potentially terrible virus", but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition. It is best to avoid close contact with other people, as applies to a common cold.
In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain. People die all the time after catching flu, especially if not medicated.
Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in America and almost all after returning from Mexico. A couple from Airdrie who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are getting better. That tends to happen to people who get flu, however much it may disappoint editors.
We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.
Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.
The World Health Organisation, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being "ready" for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is "ready" for another atomic explosion or another 9/11.
Professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling. Risk aversion has trounced risk judgment. An obligation on public officials not to scare people or lead them to needless expense is overridden by the yearning for a higher budget or more profit. Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
On Monday the EU health commissioner, Androulla Vassiliou, advised travellers not to go to north or central America "unless it's very urgent". The British Foreign Office warned against "all but essential" travel to Mexico because of the danger of catching flu. This was outrageous. It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the American crime rate. Yet such health-and-safety hysteria wiped millions from travel company shares.
During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists' hysteria, that BSE "has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons", led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5bn spent on farmers' compensation. A year later, the scientists tried to maintain that BSE "might" spread to sheep because, according to one government scientist, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The meat industry was wrecked and an absurd ongoing cost was imposed on stock farmers with the closure and concentration of abattoirs.
This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions". The press duly headlined a plague "worse than Aids". Not one Briton died.
The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that "it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century". The WHO issued a statement that "one in four Britons could die".
Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?
Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.
MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.
A panic stoked in order to posture and spend
Despite the hysteria, the risk to Britons' health is tiny - but that news won't sell papers or drugs, or justify the WHO's budget
Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Wednesday 29 April 2009
We have gone demented. Two Britons are or were (not very) ill from flu. "This could really explode," intones a reporter for BBC News. "London warned: it's here," cries the Evening Standard. Fear is said to be spreading "like a Mexican wave". It "could affect" three-quarters of a million Britons. It "could cost" three trillion dollars. The "danger", according to the radio, is that workers who are not ill will be "worried" (perhaps by the reporter) and fail to turn up at power stations and hospitals.
Appropriately panicked, on Monday ministers plunged into their Cobra bunker beneath Whitehall to prepare for the worst. Had Tony Blair been about they would have worn germ warfare suits. British government is barking mad.
What is swine flu? It is flu, a mutation of the H1N1 virus of the sort that often occurs. It is not a pandemic, despite the media prefix, not yet. The BBC calls it a "potentially terrible virus", but any viral infection is potentially terrible. Flu makes you feel ill. You should take medicine and rest. You will then get well again, unless you are very unlucky or have some complicating condition. It is best to avoid close contact with other people, as applies to a common cold.
In Mexico, 2,000 people have been diagnosed as suffering swine flu. Some 150 of them have died, though there is said to be no pathological indication of all these deaths being linked to the new flu strain. People die all the time after catching flu, especially if not medicated.
Nobody anywhere else in the world has died from this infection and only a handful have the new strain confirmed, most in America and almost all after returning from Mexico. A couple from Airdrie who caught the flu on holiday in Cancun are getting better. That tends to happen to people who get flu, however much it may disappoint editors.
We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of "news" or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.
Health scares are like terrorist ones. Someone somewhere has an interest in it. We depend on others with specialist knowledge to advise and warn us and assume they offer advice on a dispassionate basis, using their expertise to assess danger and communicating it in measured English. Words such as possibly, potentially, could or might should be avoided. They are unspecific qualifiers and open to exaggeration.
The World Health Organisation, always eager to push itself into the spotlight, loves to talk of the world being "ready" for a flu pandemic, apparently on the grounds that none has occurred for some time. There is no obvious justification for this scaremongering. I suppose the world is "ready" for another atomic explosion or another 9/11.
Professional expertise is now overwhelmed by professional log-rolling. Risk aversion has trounced risk judgment. An obligation on public officials not to scare people or lead them to needless expense is overridden by the yearning for a higher budget or more profit. Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
On Monday the EU health commissioner, Androulla Vassiliou, advised travellers not to go to north or central America "unless it's very urgent". The British Foreign Office warned against "all but essential" travel to Mexico because of the danger of catching flu. This was outrageous. It would make more sense to proffer such a warning against the American crime rate. Yet such health-and-safety hysteria wiped millions from travel company shares.
During the BSE scare of 1995-7, grown men with medical degrees predicted doom, terrifying ministers into mad politician disease. The scientists' hysteria, that BSE "has the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons", led to tens of thousands of cattle being fed into power stations and £5bn spent on farmers' compensation. A year later, the scientists tried to maintain that BSE "might" spread to sheep because, according to one government scientist, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The meat industry was wrecked and an absurd ongoing cost was imposed on stock farmers with the closure and concentration of abattoirs.
This science-based insanity was repeated during the Sars outbreak of 2003, asserted by Dr Patrick Dixon, formerly of the London Business School, to have "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions". The press duly headlined a plague "worse than Aids". Not one Briton died.
The same lunacy occurred in 2006 with avian flu, erupting after a scientist named John Oxford declared that "it will be the first pandemic of the 21st century". The WHO issued a statement that "one in four Britons could die".
Epidemiologists love the word "could" because it can always assure them of a headline. During the avian flu mania, Canada geese were treated like Goering's bombers. RSPB workers were issued with protective headgear.The media went berserk, with interviewers asking why the government did not close all schools "to prevent up to 50,000 deaths". The Today programme's John Humphrys became frantic when a dead goose flopped down on an isolated Scottish beach and a hapless local official refused to confirm the BBC's hysteria. The bird might pose no threat to Scotland, but how dare he deny London journalists a good panic?
Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals - the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.
MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.
DHS Sets Guidelines For Possible Swine Flu Quarantines
By Declan McCullagh
April 30, 2009 "CBS News" -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has sent a memo to some health care providers noting procedures to be followed if the swine flu outbreak eventually makes quarantines necessary. DHS Assistant Secretary Bridger McGaw circulated the swine flu memo, which was obtained by CBSNews.com, on Monday night. It says: "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines." McGaw appears to have been referring to the section of federal law that allows the Surgeon General to detain and quarantine Americans "reasonably believed to be infected" with a communicable disease. A Centers for Disease Control official said on Tuesday that swine flu deaths in the U.S. are likely. Federal quarantine authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush added "novel" forms of influenza with the potential to create pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term. A Homeland Security spokesman on Tuesday did not have an immediate response to followup questions about the memo, which said "DHS is consulting closely with the CDC to determine appropriate public health measures." The memo from McGaw, who is DHS' acting assistant secretary for the private sector, also said: "U.S. Customs and Coast Guard Officers assist in the enforcement of quarantine orders. Other DOJ law enforcement agencies including the U.S. Marshals, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives may also enforce quarantines. Military personnel are not authorized to engage in enforcement." Quarantines are hardly new: their history stretches at least as far back as the Bible, which describes a seven-day period of isolation that priests must impose when an infection is apparent. The word literally means a period of 40 days, which cities along the Mediterranean shipping routes imposed during the plague of the 15th century, a legal authority reflected in English law and echoed in U.S. law.
Click here to read more.
By Declan McCullagh
April 30, 2009 "CBS News" -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has sent a memo to some health care providers noting procedures to be followed if the swine flu outbreak eventually makes quarantines necessary. DHS Assistant Secretary Bridger McGaw circulated the swine flu memo, which was obtained by CBSNews.com, on Monday night. It says: "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines." McGaw appears to have been referring to the section of federal law that allows the Surgeon General to detain and quarantine Americans "reasonably believed to be infected" with a communicable disease. A Centers for Disease Control official said on Tuesday that swine flu deaths in the U.S. are likely. Federal quarantine authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush added "novel" forms of influenza with the potential to create pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term. A Homeland Security spokesman on Tuesday did not have an immediate response to followup questions about the memo, which said "DHS is consulting closely with the CDC to determine appropriate public health measures." The memo from McGaw, who is DHS' acting assistant secretary for the private sector, also said: "U.S. Customs and Coast Guard Officers assist in the enforcement of quarantine orders. Other DOJ law enforcement agencies including the U.S. Marshals, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives may also enforce quarantines. Military personnel are not authorized to engage in enforcement." Quarantines are hardly new: their history stretches at least as far back as the Bible, which describes a seven-day period of isolation that priests must impose when an infection is apparent. The word literally means a period of 40 days, which cities along the Mediterranean shipping routes imposed during the plague of the 15th century, a legal authority reflected in English law and echoed in U.S. law.
Click here to read more.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Barack Obama's CIA 'amnesty' condemned by human rights groups
Barack Obama's decision to grant an amnesty to CIA operatives who used controversial interrogation techniques on terror suspects has been criticised by human rights groups as a failure to uphold US laws.
Human rights groups and former detainees in US custody welcomed Mr Obama's decision to publish memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques used under the Bush administration.
But they condemned the decision not to prosecute CIA agents who use interrogation practices described by many as torture.
Mr Obama said he wanted to turn a page on what he called "a dark and painful chapter", condemning the aggressive techniques - including waterboarding, shackling and stripping - used on terror suspects. But he promised not to legally pursue the perpetrators, a move designed to allow the US to put the episodes in the past.
The decision left some bitter in the Muslim world, where there was widespread anger over abuse of detained terror suspects. It threatens to tarnish somewhat Mr Obama's growing popularity among Arabs and Muslims, who have cheered his promises to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and withdraw US troops from Iraq.
"All of us in Guantanamo never had hope or faith in the American government," said Jomaa al-Dosari, a Saudi who spent six years in the detention centre before being released last year. "We only ask God for our rights and to demand justice for the wrongs we experience in this life. There will be a time in history when every person who committed a wrong will be punished."
The editor of the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News daily, Khaled Almaeena, said the decision not to prosecute "sends the wrong message".
"They destroyed people's lives ... Unfortunately, they're allowed to go scot free," he said of agents who carried out the techniques.
The Obama administration on Thursday released secret CIA memos detailing interrogation tactics sanctioned under the Bush administration.
The memos authorised keeping detainees naked, in painful standing positions and in cold cells for long periods of time. Other techniques included depriving them of solid food and slapping them. Sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling and threats to a detainee's family also were used.
Two former top Bush officials on Friday criticised Mr Obama's decision to release the justice department memos, saying it would create "timidity and fear" among US spies.
"The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy," General Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, and Michael Mukasey, the former attorney general, wrote in an editorial published in The Wall Street Journal.
Mr Obama's attorney general offered CIA operatives legal help if anyone else takes them to court, although the administration's offer of help did not extend to those outside the CIA who approved the so-called enhanced interrogation methods or any CIA officers who may have gone beyond what was allowed.
Bush Memos Parallel Claim 9/11 "Mastermind’s" Children Were Tortured With Insects
By John Byrne
By John Byrne
April 17, 2009 "Rawstory" -- Bush Administration memos released by the White House on Thursday provide new insight into claims that American agents used insects to torture the young children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
In the memos, released Thursday, the Bush Administration White House Office of Legal Counsel offered its endorsement of CIA torture methods that involved placing an insect in a cramped, confined box with detainees. Jay S. Bybee, then-director of the OLC, wrote that insects could be used to capitalize on detainees’ fears.
The memo was dated Aug. 1, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children were captured and held in Pakistan the following month, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
While an additional memo released Thursday claims that the torture with insects technique was never utilized by the CIA, the allegations regarding the children would have transpired when the method was authorized by the Bush Administration.
At a military tribunal in 2007, the father of a Guantanamo detainee alleged that Pakistani guards had confessed that American interrogators used ants to coerce the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into revealing their father’s whereabouts.
The statement was made by Ali Khan, the father of detainee Majid Khan, who gave a detailed account of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American guards in Pakistan. In his statement, Khan asserted that one of his sons was held at the same place as the young children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Click Here to read more.
The Tower of Basel: Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency Do we really want the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issuing our global currency by Ellen Brown | |||||
Global Research, April 18, 2009 | |||||
In an April 7 article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote: “A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order. “‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century. “In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.” Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated: “[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1 And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2 In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3
“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.” Quigley wrote of this international banking network: “[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.” The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791: “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.” Click here: Global Research to read more. | |||||
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Thursday, April 16, 2009
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