Beyond Bush:
regime rotation, not regime change

Obama was a choice of different approach to the endless wars, not a choice against war

related pages:

The 2008 "election" was a choice between the Rockefeller Republicans and the neo-cons, between the Council on Foreign Relations (Obama / Biden) and the American Enterprise Institute (McCain), between the old guard of foreign policy and the crazies. We need better choices than that if we are going to be able to use some of the rest of the oil for relocalization, renewable energy and "power down" strategies to mitigate the end of the age of oil. Unfortunately, we are getting the choice of "smarter empire" versus "Fourth Reich," not a choice of "empire" versus "no empire." Worse, it is obvious that the "voters" are not going to determine the outcome via the ballot boxes, touch screen voting machines and ballot scanners - Presidential elections are rigged in advance by elites who are divided about tactics but not about the goal of US global dominance.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

The powers that be, above the political parties, got buyer's remorse with Bush/Cheney and have been trying to reel them in. They let them "win" in 2000 to get the oil wars going, since Peak was happening faster than they'd hoped, but now it's time for the illusion of change. But the empire isn't ready to attack Iran - and by extension, all of the countries that depend on Iran's oil exports. When does the US attack countries that can fight back (as Iran surely could do)?

The elite are split on how to manage the situation (collapse?) but the "old guard" are clearly tilted toward putting in Obama as the front man this time.

It's hard to say how much the "grassroots" ferment impacts this grand chessboard, but most of the grassroots prefers to avoid root causes and deep understanding of what goes on. This is a reason why most chose to avoid the American Reichstag Fire and do not factor in Peak Oil to their analyses. The so-called Culture Wars are a great distraction and keep most opponents arguing with fundamentalist whackos who have little power but are useful, scary targets of oppositional energy. And most of the "leaders" of the opponents urge their followers to focus on the secondary and tertiary issues, with predictable results.

 

 

Elites: The Puppeteers Who Run the Global Show

www.projectcensored.org/downloads/Global_Dominance_Group.pdf

The Global Dominance Group: 9/11 Pre-Warnings & Election Irregularities in Context
By Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton and Celeste Vogler

The leadership class in the US is now dominated by a neo-conservative group of people with the shared goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This global dominance group, in cooperation with major military contractors, has become a powerful force in world military unilateralism and US political processes. This research study is an attempt to identify the general parameters of those who are the key actors supporting a global dominance agenda and how collectively this group has benefited from the events of September 11, 2001 and irregularities in the 2004 presidential election. This study examines how interlocking public private partnerships, including the corporate media, public relations firms, military contractors, policy elites, and government officials, jointly support a US military global domination agenda. We ask the traditional sociological questions regarding who wins, who decides, and who facilitates action inside the most powerful military-industrial complex in the world.
A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the United States, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. The American ruling class is complex and inter-competitive, maintaining itself through interacting families of high social standing who have similar life styles, corporate affiliations and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools.

 

 

www.namebase.org/sources/ES.html

Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. New York: MacMillan Company, 1966. 1348 pages.

Tragedy and Hope is a diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural history of the world, dealing mainly with the years from about 1900 to 1950. Quigley was professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, where he was best known for his rigorous undergraduate teaching. His credentials as a historian were excellent, and he was well-connected with the Washington elite. But Quigley is something of an embarrassment to those elites, because he called it the way he saw it. Since they cannot match his breadth and depth, nor duplicate his archival research, Quigley is usually criticized for not using footnotes. It won't wash -- the quality of his scholarship is evident on every one of these 1300 pages.
The embarrassment has to do with the fact that Quigley believed in the relevance of secret history -- the machinations of powerful personalities, the role of international finance and banking (following the money), the importance of covert action and diplomacy, and the collusion of Anglo- American elites. Although his prose is too subdued and well-crafted to label him a conspiracy theorist, Quigley has admirers on both the Right and Left who study him for this very reason. His appeal is universal: a rare combination of range, competence, and integrity in a tricky profession.
ISBN 0-945001-10-X

Mike Ruppert accurately predicted the "old guard" would dump Bush (but got the timing wrong)

"We have a plan for globalization which would call for the forming of the corporation of Planet Earth. The CEO of that corporation, and the main stockholder is to be the United States, the Chairman of the Board ... with other regions or interests holding separate shares, let's say Britain holding 12%, China holding 17%, etc. A particular CEO management firm called the neo-cons was selected by the board of directors to implement the plan and that particularly CEO is the United States and Israel advocating Zionists ... they have to massage, manipulate public opinion, they also have to deliver the corporate, financial and economic interests of the world into the portfolio of the global corporation. The neo-con CEO group has failed to deliver Europe into that board of directors ....
"the neo-cons and neo-libs are feuding in the board of directors about how to implement the plan, but don't get confused about what the plan is - they can fire the CEO and bring in another one, regroup their losses and move ahead, don't get distracted."
-- from the panel discussion after the opening night for the film Aftermath, April 21, 2003, San Francisco, California

"...there are increasing signs that the U.S. political and economic elites are laying the groundwork to make the Bush administration, specifically Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Perle and Wolfowitz, sacrificial scapegoats for a failed policy in time to consolidate post 9-11 gains, regroup and move forward."
THE PERFECT STORM - Part II (Michael Ruppert, FTW. 24 Mar 2003) www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/032503_perfect_storm_2.html

www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070103_beyond_bush_1.html
BEYOND BUSH

July 1, 2003 1600 PDT (FTW) -- Let's just suppose for a moment that George W. Bush was removed from the White House. Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz and Rove too. What would that leave us with? It would leave us stuck in hugely expensive, Vietnam-like guerrilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would leave us with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and Total Information Awareness snooping into every detail of our lives. It would leave us with a government in violation of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to the Constitution. It would leave us with a massive cover-up of US complicity in the attacks of 9/11 that, if fully admitted, would show not intelligence "failures" but intelligence crimes, approved and ordered by the most powerful people in the country. It would leave us with a government that now has the power to compel mass vaccinations on pain of imprisonment or fine, and with no legal ability to sue the vaccine makers who killed our friends or our children. It would leave us with two and half million unemployed; the largest budget deficits in history; more than $3.3 trillion missing from the Department of Defense; and state and local governments broke to the point of having to cut back essential services like sewers, police, and fire. It would leave us with a federal government that had hit the debt ceiling and was unable to borrow any more money. And we would still be facing a looming natural gas crisis of unimagined proportions, and living on a planet that is slowly realizing that it is running out of oil with no "Plan B". Our airports however, would be very safe, and shares of Halliburton, Lockheed and DynCorp would be paying excellent dividends.
This is not good management.
Leaving all of these issues unaddressed is not good management either.
And this is why, as I will demonstrate in this article, the decision has already been made by corporate and financial powers to remove George W. Bush, whether he wants to leave or not, and whether he steals the next election or not. Before you start cheering, ask yourself three questions: "If there is someone or something that can decide that Bush will not return, nor remain for long, what is it? And if that thing is powerful enough to remove Bush, was it not also powerful enough to have put him there in the first place? And if that is the case, then isn't that what's really responsible for the state of things? George W. Bush is just a hired CEO who is about to be removed by the "Board of Directors". Who are they? Are they going to choose his replacement? Are you going to help them?
What can change this Board of Directors and the way the "Corporation" protects its interests? These are the only issues that matter.
So now the honest question about the 2004 Presidential campaign is, "What do you really want out of it?" Do you want the illusion that everything is a little better while it really gets worse? Or are you ready yet to roll up your sleeves and make some very unpleasant but necessary fixes?
 The greatest test of the 2004 presidential election campaign is not with the candidates. It is with the people. There are strong signs that presidential election issues on the Democratic side are already being manipulated by corporate and financial interests. And some naïve and well-intentioned (and some not-so-naïve and not-so-well intentioned) activists are already playing right into the Board's hands. There are many disturbing signs that the only choice offered to the American people will be no choice at all. Under the psychological rationale, "This is the way it has to be done", campaign debates will likely address only half-truths and fail to come to grips with - or even acknowledge - the most important issues that I just described. In fact, only the least important issues will likely be addressed in campaign 2004 at the usual expense of future generations who are rapidly realizing that they are about to become the victims of the biggest Holocaust in mankind's history. The final platforms for Election 2004 will likely be manifestos of madness unless we dictate differently.
Some on the Democratic side are already positioning themselves to co-opt and control what happened on 9/11 into a softer, less disturbing "Better this than nothing" strategy. This attitude, that the only thing that matters is finding an electable Democrat, is nothing more than a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Has everyone suddenly forgotten that the 2000 election was stolen: first by using software and political machinery to disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible voters, then by open interference at polling places, and finally by an absolutely illegal Supreme Court decision? Do these people believe that such a crime, absolutely successful the first time, will never be attempted again?
And has everyone also forgotten that in the 2002 midterm elections the proprietary voting software, in many cases owned by those affiliated with the Republican Party or - as in the case of Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska - the candidates themselves, has been ruled by the Supreme Court to be immune from public inspection. (Hagel won by a lopsided 83% majority). Throughout the United States in 2002 there was abundant evidence that the so-called "solution" to hanging chads did nothing more than enshrine the ability to steal elections with immunity and also much less fuss afterwards? Who in their right mind would trust such a system? Why have none of the candidates mentioned it?
And, if all else fails, we can have more Wellstone plane crashes. It has worked with three Democratic Senate candidates in key races over the last thirty years. Maybe that's why no one in Congress is talking about the election process. Plane crashes are part of that process too.
Unless people find the will to address scandals, lies, and betrayals of trust that, by their very existence, reveal that the system itself is corrupt and that the people controlling it - both in government, and in America's corporations and financial institutions -- are criminals, there is no chance to make anything better, only an absolute certainty that things will get worse. ....

Unless people find the will to address scandals, lies, and betrayals of trust that, by their very existence, reveal that the system itself is corrupt and that the people controlling it - both in government, and in America's corporations and financial institutions -- are criminals, there is no chance to make anything better, only an absolute certainty that things will get worse. ....
There is only one difference between the evidence showing the Bush administration's criminal culpability in and foreknowledge of the attacks of 9/11, and the evidence showing that the administration deceived the American public about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Both sets of evidence are thoroughly documented. They are irrefutable and based upon government records and official statements and actions shown to be false, misleading or dishonest. And both sets of evidence are unimpeachable. The difference is that the evidence showing the Iraqi deception is being seriously and widely investigated by the mainstream press, and actively by an ever-increasing number of elected representatives. That's it.

Beyond Bush II, by Michael Ruppert www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102003_beyond_bush_2.html

 

sent by a reader - August, 2008

Having read Wurmser, Perle and the rest of the crazies I knew that their plan was always to partition the country [Iraq].

Most people get tripped up in the layers of lies that are propagated about Iraq. The biggest lie out there is incompetency. That is the answer to everything---- makes liberals feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Because they are smarter than Cheney, Bush, Schultz, Rumsfeld. They are all a bunch of idiots---right? Sorry but no. Not everything goes according to plan for these people. If they had stabilized Iraq under a nice American puppet dictator and gotten the oil law passed that would have been the ideal for them. But, making tons of cash off chaos is a nice fall back.

I was reading The Future of Iraq Plan that Powell put together and was declassified in 2006. www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB198/index.htm

I am sure that Obama will dust it off if he takes office. It falls under the category of Smart Empire or Long term over Short term profits. The plan talks about building up the infrastructure first and then privatizing. It talks about building up employment in Iraq. I would be willing to bet that if Powell had gotten 500 thousand troops in, kept the Baath bureaucracy, co-opted Saddam's military industrial complex, then at least Iraq could have avoided the genocide that is now taking place. You really should read the plan---- it's a lot better than what took place. They would have put in some form of LDP into a permanent position of power.

Instead they went with the Bearing Point Plan--- Privatize everything and shock the shit out them. Steal all their money and put the army, government and factory workers out of work. Obama is all about bringing Baker, Scowcroft, Powell and the GHWB crowd back into control. It's going to be Smart Empire. Frankly, I am looking forward to it. All this talk of having out and out evil in office instead of wolves in sheep clothing is a lot of Hokum. McCain will bring us to the brink of WWIII---- no question about it. He will appoint all the PNAC crowd and take us to war against Iran and most likely Russia. I think that the potential for extinction of all life on this planet is very high if McCain is elected.

Zbigniew and his crowd are about stability. I really don't think they will risk the closing of the Straight of Hormuz by attacking Iran. Baker wanted to use diplomacy with Syria and Iran. We need some new Mafia dons---- Bring back Vito Scowcroft---- We have had enough of the coke sniffing Scarfaces in office now. If Obama is elected I will dance in the street like all the other Democrats and I will feel good about it because I know what I am getting. I have read all the backgrounds of his team of realists and I know the alternative----- Cheney, Schultz, Woolsey, Perle, Ledeen----- these people are fucking lunatics. They want to use strategic nuclear weapons. I would be willing to bet that Abizaid, Shineski, Baker, Brezenski, Powell, Hamilton, Haas, Mearsheimer, Walt and the rest of the smart empire people would never blithely use nuclear weapons.

Biden is really the best we can hope for at this point. I will be overjoyed if he is elected. There really is a split in the elite. They both want American Empire but strategy is important. Personalities do matter. Grandpa Psycho is just another incarnation of Cheney, only maybe worse. Isn't there something very Cheney about him?--- there is a rot in his soul. He is on the verge of death like Cheney and he is angry and mean spirited and has the same sick sense of humor. There is something positively death-like about McCain and Cheney. They fall into the dubious category of being in the elite class of psychos in history with Curtis LeMay, Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Ledeen has that same look about him--- like he is already dead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwMspCM-SY4 There is no humanity in his eyes. This may be naive of me but I put a lot of stock in this assessment. You look at Cheney, Putin, Rumsfeld, Ledeen, McCain--------- they are like the walking dead. These men can not be compromised because their is no morality left to compromise.

Bush is not quite up to their level of evil----- this business of killing people is not easy for our frat boy in chief. I think that is why he started drinking again. On some level Bush suffers pangs of conscience. But Cheney is so dead inside that the possibility of war, death and dictatorship is the only thing that is keeping him alive. I think that McCain is so dead inside that he could push the button and vaporize millions. McCain is like Conrad's Lord Jim----- when it came time for him to be courageous he made propaganda speeches for the North Vietnamese. This eats away at him. He knows that he wasn't the war hero that he is being portrayed as but on some level he thinks---- I could be that guy. I just need another chance. He wants to redeem himself in a cauldron of war. There is something pathological about him. If he were in power today, he would try to send troops to Georgia.

What is interesting about the post-Iraq history that I am reading is that the realists were able to rein in Cheney. GHWB still had some control over his son--- the military was in a position to veto Iran, but if Grandpa gets a mandate we'll be at war with Iran within weeks.

 

www.cryptome.org/cryptome-secret.htm

3 October 2008

A writes:

In all the research you've accumulated, have you been able to piece it all together, like the pieces of a puzzle, so as to form a working/coherent worldview, which makes sense of all that is going on in the world, that on the surface, seems unrelated? Is there a push for a "New World Order /ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT, among the wealthiest top 2% of the world's total population? Also, what can we/should we, as individuals, do, in order to take back our country, and preserve our liberty, as Americans?

Cryptome:

Certainly there is highly organized cooperation among the world's wealthy, individuals, institutions and corporations. To the extent this group is able to influence governments, it does aim to influence political, economic and social policy to serve its interests.

There continues to be competition among governments as well as among the members of this wealthy group and that leads to disagreement and dispute about who is supreme -- the group does not like equality and therefore continually struggles to gain control of its members openly and covertly.

Covert manipulation of the group and the populace of nations is carried out by the world's vast intelligence operations, private and governmental, which is itself a global force which may be more powerful than that based on wealth or national identity.

The principal tool for covert manipulation is secrecy, again private and governmental. Secrecy fosters deception and cloaks criminal activity, and most importantly, it is opposed to democratic openness and prevents full governmental transparency and accountability.

Secrecy is increasing, and to the exact extent it increases it favors those who keep secrets and enforce laws that protect secrecy, most often invoked on the basis of "national security" but also heavily used to hide commercial malfeasance.

My view is that secrecy is the greatest threat to freedom throughout the world, by far the greatest threat to democracy and freedom, and has been in history and will continue to be. Without secrecy none of the private and governmental means to control and exploit the uninformed populace would work.

Abuse of secrecy underlies all efforts to frighten the populace into submission and obedience. The current financial crisis an example, not different from that used to go to war in Iraq and wars galore in the past and yet to come unless people rise up to abolish secrecy -- which they do from time to time, thank goodness, but the vile addictive practice requires constant medication, or best, surgical removal.

If George Bush [Jr] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can't get away with that sort of thing in this democracy.
 -- Lawrence Eagleburger, US Secretary of State under George Bush Sr
www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0414-01.htm

John Judge, "Bush on 60 Minutes - 9/11 events," 26 September 2002
www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/BushOutOfLoop.html

Whenever factions fight like this, we get a peek behind the curtain. To have Madeline Albright today speaking about an "irrational exuberance for war" on the part of "some members of the Administration" is almost surreal, but it tells us something. Some want an openly aggressive empire, full of the arrogance of its power, and immune to any international or domestic limitations on its excesses. Others still want to retain a semblance of international cooperation (even if silently coerced), and an illusion of democracy in the decisions made, while still getting the same results.
 If the world is our oyster, some want to put on a bib and say "Let's eat" and others would rather not mention the fact at the dinner table while they sup. Kissinger and others in his circle prefer quiet "diplomacy" and behind the scenes manipulation. He writes that "History to be successful must be negotiated in absolute secrecy." The neo-cons want to declare Pax Americana instead. Bush, now clearly little more than a figurehead and PR front man, is out of the loop and expendable it seems. They let him know that clearly on 9/11.

www.alternet.org/rights/42458/
The illusion of democracy...
Posted by: SteveB on Oct 9, 2006 1:30 PM

is just too useful to the American ruling class to ever do away with.
Why not continue the pretense? Why not continue with two parties that both follow the corporate line, a "free press" that publishes corporate propaganda, all while maintaining the illusion that we all live in a democracy?
This system is much more stable (and profitable) than any military dictatorship. If you think the corporate elites who hold the real power in this country are going to throw it all away just to keep Bush in office, you're wrong.
My prediction: now that the Republicans are no longer proving useful to their purposes, our ruling class will throw their weight behind the Democrats, who will mostly pursue the same policies pursued by the Republicans. The illusion of democracy will be maintained, and those detention camps will remain a figment of some people's paranoid imaginations.

in November 2006, the plutocrats wanted a Democratic victory to stop the neo-cons

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20061119&articleId=3921

Cheney's Revenge
by Mike Whitney

.... the adults are stepping in and taking back their government. The establishment "old school" Republicans and country club plutocrats put-together a plan to sabotage the Cheney administration and put an end to the Iraq debacle. The scheme first became apparent when Bob Woodward, the establishment's number one scribe, released his book "State of Denial". That was followed by the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Lancet's Iraqi casualty report, the Mark Foley page fiasco, and a steady barrage of ethics and corruption scandals.
The Democrats had nothing to do with the ferocious media-blitzkrieg which pummeled the Bush team day-in and day-out. It was all the handiwork of big-money Republicans who lost their place at the policy-table when Cheney and Rummy decided they would run the whole shebang by themselves.
The only way they could be certain of undermining the Sec-Def and the Veep's powers was by attacking their political base and destroying the "rubber stamp" congress. And, that is precisely what they did. It's a classic case of the parent killing its own offspring or, as Dostoyevsky said, "One reptile devouring the other."
The election simply proves that one should not expect to take the country away from the people who really own it.
It's theirs, and the political parties are merely the temporary security guards who are paid to watch over their prized possession.

www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=285

The Coup d'Etat against Bush

Date 2008/1/19 15:10:00

Paris, January 17, 2008 – The conspicuous irrelevance of George W. Bush’s tour of the Middle East to any of the real forces and interests of the region, as well as the spooky irrelevance of nearly everything he said there about the alleged menace of Iran, Israel-Palestine peace, his fancied notions of Iraq’s democratic development, and even about oil prices and the American economy, embarrassed his Arab hosts as well as the American officials and press accompanying him.

The tour – his farewell to the Middle East? -- lent weight to the judgement many abroad have already reached, that he no longer governs the United States, and indeed does not even understand its present foreign relationships. It is widely felt that what amounts to a coup d’etat has taken place in the United States, removing George Bush, without his even recognizing this (or at least admitting that it has occurred) from control over the principal issues of war and peace.

This coup has taken the form of what amounts to a mutiny of the professional foreign policy services of the U.S. government, acquiesced in by the new Secretary of Defense, the service chiefs, and Director of Central Intelligence Bush has himself appointed.

It was specifically carried out by the 16 recognized intelligence services in the American government, not as an act of law defiance, but by faithful execution of their duty as required by law, which is to form a common judgement, free from partisan pressure or interest, on matters vital to the nation.

The National Intelligence Estimate made known December 3, after an elaborate civilian and military interagency consultation, carefully walled off from interference by the politically partisan figures in the Bush administration, was presented as a fait accompli to the White House, the press and the nation as a whole. Its finding was that the claims made by the White House and others that Iran was actively developing nuclear weapons were untrue, contradicted by the consensus judgement of all the American government’s intelligence agencies.

Implicit in this was a threat. This threat was that the main military service chiefs and their Department of Defense superiors would not act on a presidential order to attack Iran. This decision would not take the form of direct and insubordinate refusal of orders. It would be a refusal by the military and their chiefs to act on such an order until Congress had been informed and consulted, and had performed its constitutional duty to give formal legislative consent to acts of war.

The pathetic and pusillanimous refusal of recent American Congresses – and we are not simply speaking about the Congress now in office, but of practically every Congress since the beginning of the cold war – to fulfill their constitutiuonal responsibilities with respect to the declaration and financing of wars, has now generated its own rebuke from within the executive branch of government.

Leaders in the executive branch are unwilling to act on presidential orders that do not carry with them the constitutionally mandated authority of the representative branch of government.

This is a response by the executive branch to the insistent efforts of the Bush White House, acting on a novel and controversial theory of supreme executive authority in matters of national security, to permanently alter the practive and disarm the legal precedents of American government.

This effort has thus far met little effective opposition in the Congress, and has in general been abetted by a judiciary intimidated by the powers of the Bush Justice Department, and by administration federal and supreme court appointments that imply that this novel theory will become permanntly installed as the law of the land.

Judicial resistance has been rare to the administration’s defiance of what until now have been all but universally accepted as fundamental norms of American government and justice: of respect for humanitarian precedent and treaty obligation under international law concerning wartime conduct towards civilians, the seizure and treatment of prisoners or ‘detainees,’ and deference to what the American Declaration of Independence describes as a ‘decent respect to the opinions of mankind.’

The matter might also be described as a mutiny by what it is now customary to call the civil society, that minority of responsible leaders of important institutions in society itself -- the professions, the university, the clergy – who are willing to demand accountability of American government and defend American society’s traditional norms of justice and decency.

It seems resasonable to say that as the irresponsibility of the Bush-Cheney government has become increasingly apparent, and in the past year its seeming determination to initiate another war of aggressive intervention in the Middle East became evident, with manifest risk of provoking regional confict embroiling the United States for years to come, a consensus has emerged in American elite opinion that has lent authority to mutiny inside the government.

I am perhaps taking a romantic and unjustified view of what has happened. I hope not. I believe that only grave malfeasance in government and unconstitutional conduct justify an executive ‘coup d’etat’ – however ‘postmodern’ the form that it assumes, and however elevated its motives.

However I would suggest that the present election campaign demonstrates that powerful forces in the Washington political and foreign policy communities, reinforced by financial and industrial interests, are committed to suppressing all challenge to policies that already have altered the political character of the United States. The American form of government itself needs to be defended.

© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.

note: "Global Research" promotes the idea that Peak Oil is not real and highlights some of the false claims about 9/11, but this article is excellent

 

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7693

The Post-Bush Regime: A Prognosis
By Richard K. Moore
Global Research, December 27, 2007

In order to understand anything about American political affairs, it is necessary to have some understanding of who it is that really makes the decisions behind the scenes, and what their interests are. In this way we have some hope of identifying the hidden agendas being served by government actions and programs, and some hope of identifying the longer-term strategies that are in play.

It turns out--and informed people should already know this--that the U.S. is essentially owned and managed by a small clique of wealthy families--the ones who own and control the Federal Reserve. The Rockefellers are the obvious and well-known members of this clique, but there are others less well-known, not all American, and some whose identity remains to this day a carefully guarded secret. We don’t even know exactly who it is that’s running the show.

Such has been the nature of our ‘democracy’ since 1913, when the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through Congress during Christmas recess, by the same folks who funded Woodrow Wilson’s campaign and who became the private owners of the new all-powerful central bank. The first major initiative of these folks, the ancestors of our current ruling clique, was to finance both sides in Europe during World War I, and then to connive the entrance of the US into the war just in time to tilt the balance to the side favored by the clique--the same pattern that later characterized World War II.

From that point forward American policy-making has been firmly in the hands of the original Federal Reserve clique and its descendents. The mainstream media is also under the thumb of the same clique, so that public opinion is never allowed to interfere with fundamental clique objectives. The media can be used to support sitting Presidents, or to undermine them, depending on which best enhances those objectives. No President who has turned on these people has survived long in office, as we saw most recently in the case of JFK. The tentacles of the clique reach also into the top echelons of all the Intelligence services and the Pentagon, and into those influential globalist forums, such as the WTO, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderbergers.

Bush and the neocons have been mere tools-of-the-day for this clique. The neocons happened to be promoting a package that appealed to the clique, that promised to advance some of its objectives. In selecting the neocons to be the drivers behind a new administration, the clique was by no means adopting the neocon philosophy, nor were they buying into the whole PNAC package. They were simply employing a convenient tool that was aligned tactically with clique interests for the time being. Any such tool can be discarded whenever its behavior becomes counter-productive, or when a better tool comes along. There is always a Plan B in the wings for any tool that might go rogue or go sour.

Bush, who has probably never even read the PNAC agenda, was selected for entirely different reasons. Knowing that the agenda would be highly unpopular, the clique decided that defending it logically would be very difficult, even with complete control over the media. An articulate and intelligent President would look like a fool if he tried to defend the insane policies. So, our clique slyly figured, why not put someone up there who is obviously a fool, right through his whole little soul, so that the public will believe they are struggling against the foolishness of one man, and have no understanding of what’s really going on. Of course Bush, being clueless on all matters apart from golf, looting, cocaine, and womanizing, would need to be kept far away from any role in running the White House. Hence the need for Cheney, the shadow real president, who leaves all the photo ops to Bush, who stays out of the public eye himself, and who carries the Black Armageddon Box with him everywhere he goes, something only official Presidents have done in the past.

This was the project that went operational in the form of Bush’s initial Presidential campaign. The ducks were all lined up for launching a major imperialist venture, the preparations for 9/11 were well underway, and no power on Earth was going to stop the Bush Show. Of course Bush The Clueless was going to win, no matter how much vote fixing and media lying was required, or how many Supreme Court Justices were needed to accomplish the task. As a last resort they wouldn’t have hesitated to off Gore, one of their own boys, if it was the only way to open the path for their current man, a tactic they used earlier with Bobby Kennedy. Of course now that we have Diebold machines, all of this can be accomplished by a single computer command message, specifying which candidates are to get which percentage of votes in each precinct. Exit polls have been abandoned since they provide hard statistical evidence of the systematic fix.

The neocons have accomplished much for their elite puppeteers, and have been given in return free reign to loot at will, funneling all those billions for the Iraq War into their own corporate coffers and investment portfolios. They for their part have established the foundations of a fascist state in the US and Canada, secured Iraq’s oil reserves, built permanent forward mega-bases in Iraq, successfullly destabilized Iraq and prepared it for balkanization, secured pipeline routes in Afghanistan, restored the profitable opium trade, and made progress toward achieving the first-strike capability that will be needed when the time comes to take on Russia and China. Quite a bundle of major achievements in a very short time indeed. But to our clique, the question always is, “What have you done for me lately, Sunshine?”

The neocon intention to bomb Iran was the point where the tool went sour, and threatened to go rogue. Anyone who thought seriously about what bombing would lead to knew that an attack would quickly spiral out of anyone’s control--given the advanced arms that Russia has supplied to hot-headed Iran, and given the fact that the powder keg would involve a trigger-happy, nuclear potent, clinically-deranged Israel. Russia and China would of course be on ultra-high scrambled alert, poised to intervene with due force if the spiral crossed certain unspecified lines in the sand. The neocons knew this and the clique knew this. Any attack on Iran, no matter how well planned, limited, and executed, would be playing Russian roulette with World War III.

The neocons were ready to take this step, to play this game, and they were in a very advanced stage in their preparations, of both the military and the psy-op variety. Quite obviously they were not deterred by the possibility of all-out global nuclear war. This has nothing to do with Bush’s pretended belief in Revelations and the ascension of the elect, but rather with the neocons’ evident belief that they were ‘ready for the big one’, copying a page directly out of Dr. Strangelove, with the neocons in the role of Jack D. Ripper. Unlike the demented SAC base commander, however, the neocons were forced to telegraph their moves, and the clique was not pleased with the scenario. They knew the first-strike capability was not nearly ready--and Russian roulette is not a game they ever play. They play only when they hold all the top cards and own a controlling interest in the casino.

So the time had come to pull the plug on the neocon tool. It was surprisingly easy to do. The first step, taken who knows how long ago, was to put the word discreetly to the Joint Chiefs that the Iran project is off, regardless of what orders might come from the White House or the Black Box. This news, of course, was to be kept in the room, as it surely was. Once the castle was thereby made secretly safe, it was a trivial matter to plant the seeds that would unravel the whole gone-sour, rogue-threatening, neocon bandwagon. A simple but devastating Intelligence announcement, a few whispers to key Bilderberger players that it was open season on the American contingent at the next meeting, and various other subtle and quite easy moves. It takes little, after all, to bring down a house of cards, particularly one propped up by a weak joker. The clique as usual remains invisible.

Certain elements in the White House know what’s happening by now, while others seem to still think the neocon agenda is the order of the day. It seems pretty obvious that Cheney was briefed in advance, and has some kind of golden parachute in his Xmas stocking. I haven’t heard a peep from him since we first learned of the clique reversal, when the Intelligence announcement became public knowledge. Bush is by now imagining Cheney as a reincarnated Judas, and practicing how he’ll say “Et tu, Brute?” if the opportunity arises. And yet Bush evidently still hasn’t caught on that his chip has been turned off, him and that fellow Gates, both of whom still act as if the tractor is still in gear. I guess they’ll go down like the fellow in the Monty Python film...“Go ahead, cut off my other arm. I’ll still beat you.”

What happens next will be ratcheting in gains and preparing a fresh new story line. That is to say, none of the very impressive (ie, horrific) achievements of the neocons will be undone, and yet the American people will be led to believe that the evils are in the past--the same standard tactic that we saw work so well when Nixon resigned. The media will be filled with fresh new story lines, along with bright intelligent confident reassuring empathetic Earth-loving new faces, plus other new fantasies--and the Bush experience will fade from public memory, along with last season’s football scores. Such an advantage it is for our rulers, that we Americans have such tiny memory spans and such limited powers of independent observation, compared to the rest of the world’s population. I guess the purpose of the melting pot was to melt away our basic intuitive judgment.

It’s not quite time for the surprise attack on the Wicked Witches of the East. Space-based warfare is still in Beta Test. Nor is it necessary to proceed at the moment with the full unleashing of the Gestapo, the SS Storm Troopers, concentration camps, forced labor, and the whole nine yards. The neocons have diligently built the foundations for all this, both in concrete and in legal precedent, but the project is for the moment on hold and the neocons off mission. When the time comes to resume project, that will be perceived as a new response to an unexpected emergent scenario, and no deferred continuity with the Bush era will be noticed.

I suggest that we can see the focus of the next US administration by paying attention to Al Gore. He’s going around preaching the gospel of climate change, and that is rapidly becoming the new cause celebre for the ‘international community’. It’s more than a campaign by Gore, we’re seeing a campaign being supported by the mass media, by the powers that be. We are clearly being prepared for a ‘new show’, after the ‘Bush show’, and the ‘new show’ is going to be about carbon taxes and credits, new energy sources, more efficient cars, biofuels, and all those other things that are allegedly related to climate change and peak oil.

In order to clear the way for the new show, it seems pretty clear that the new administration will begin with some easy political wins, by rapidly cleaning up some of the obvious messes left by the neocons. Closing down Guantanamo, and declaring that rendition flights have been abandoned, would gain a lot of points at no real cost (secret flights and prisons would undoubtedly continue). Iraq has already been destabilized and prepared for balkanization, and permanent US bases have already been built. Another easy win will be for US troops to withdraw to their bases and the oil fields, for the war to be declared over, and for Iraq to be split up into ethnic provinces, leaving them to squabble among themselves. It can all be portrayed in the media as a ‘victory for peace and democracy’.

What then, can we expect from this new show? What consequences are likely to follow from implementing the kind of policies that Al Gore and the media have been talking about, around climate change, energy independence, etc.? What is our ruling clique really trying to accomplish?

At a general level, it is clear that those kinds of policies do not involve fundamental changes in how our societies operate. We’ll still have cars, only they might be a bit more efficient, and we’ll be paying more for fuel and taxes to operate them. We’ll still be shipping products from China that we could produce locally, and we’ll still be depending on long-distance trucking. We’ll still be using agricultural methods that are highly petroleum-dependent, for tractors, fertilizers, and pesticides. Research and development of new energy sources will lead to lots of government subsidies, and it may get us a bit more energy, but not nearly enough to replace petroleum. As long as our transport and other infrastructures remain basically unchanged, we remain unsustainable, dependent on petroleum, and none of the Gore-like initiatives change the overall energy picture, carbon picture, or climate picture in any significant way.

In order to begin figuring out what the real agenda is, behind Gore-like policies, let’s look first at one example: biofuels. Producing biofuels does give us another energy source, but it also removes land from food production. As a consequence of the already-existing biofuels market, market prices for grain and other potential biofuels are now being driven by energy prices. Global food prices are therefore rising rapidly, while at the same time food-production acreage is being reduced. These two things will directly and drastically increase world hunger and starvation, particularly in the poorest regions. A Gore-inspired administration will be promoting an expansion of biofuel programs on a global scale, and it will be patting itself on the back for its noble oil-saving deeds.

All of this will be occurring in a context where we are facing a global food crisis generally. We haven’t seen many headlines on this topic, but the world is sitting on the brink of a major food crisis. Emergency stockpiles are at low ebb, production levels are down, crop failures are up, etc. It’s a very nasty picture even without biofuels.

In this context, the net consequence of a major biofuel agenda comes down to intentional genocide. In order to provide marginally more fuel to the over-consuming industrialized nations, untold millions will starve in the third world, in addition to those untold millions that are already starving. The marginal energy gain is so small by comparison, that we must accept that the biofuels agenda is primarily about genocide. However when we begin reading about new famines breaking out, perhaps in Brazil where biofuels are now going into massive production, the headlines will blame it on droughts, or crop failures, or some other excuse, as they always do. We will meanwhile feel a ‘green glow’ every time we fill up our Prius with biofuels, unaware of what damage we are doing. And perhaps we’ll donate to Oxfam, or adopt some third world child and send them letters.

A Gore agenda is simply genocidal imperialism hiding under a new mask, a new show. Instead of killing off the Indians by killing their buffalo, it kills off populations by removing their access to food in other ways. Once again, ‘they’ must be sacrificed so that ‘our’ way of life can continue and expand. We might note here that more Iraqis died under Bill Clinton’s sanctions that have been killed in the current Iraq war. In Bill Clinton’s time the pattern was invisible genocide, rather than the more violent Bush variety. Apparently in Hillary Clinton’s time we are to return to that earlier invisible pattern.

Clearly the consequences of a Gore agenda are genocidal, but one might question whether that is a primary intended outcome. I’ve been suggesting that it is, and I think more elaboration is in order on that point. I haven’t made the case very well yet. I’ve merely presented some of the evidence and suggested a pattern. In order to get a proper perspective on this issue, we need to step back a bit, and consider the bigger picture of the industrialized world vis a vis the third world, in the face of a broad range of mounting resource shortages--the strategic perspective of our ruling clique.

It seems very clear that the industrialized nations have no intention of changing the basic path they are on, or of abandoning capitalism. We can expect only more industrial growth, more energy consumption, continued use of energy-intensive agricultural methods, etc. The energy band-aids of a Gore agenda make no significant difference in this picture whatever, they simply affirm the intention to proceed with business as usual.

The only way the industrialized North can continue on this path is by taking over more and more of the third world’s land, water, and resources for its own use. As the industrial appetite for resources continues to grow at a rapid rate, and as our global resources are increasingly stressed, we are going to see a very rapid expansion of third world hunger and starvation -- the globalization of African-scale famines. This is inevitable while the North stays on this basic path, whether we have Gore-like policies or some other set of policies is of little consequence.

This ‘inevitability’ of mass die-offs in the third world is well known to those who run the industrial nations. From the perspective of the heights of power, the question becomes, “How can we manage these die-offs so that they cause the least disruption in the global economy, and so that they don’t arouse too much public outcry?” Of course once you begin managing die-offs, you are then engaging in genocide, ie, arranging for particular populations to die in preference to others.

The pattern for the management strategy has been made very clear in Sub-Saharan Africa, where all those civil wars, genocidal atrocities, droughts, and famines have been occurring. Not many people realize that these disasters have been systematically imposed on Africa, by means of IMF requirements, covert destabilization programs, denial of medical care, the widespread distribution of automatic weapons, the manipulations of international banks, the dedication of agricultural land and water to Northern consumption, and the list goes on. Not only is Africa being starved to death by market forces, but the process is being accelerated by covert genocidal interventions.

In Africa we see a full-scale Holocaust, a massive genocide program in process, or should I say we see it not. For in the media it’s nothing like that. We read that ‘tribal conflicts have flared up’, but we don’t hear about the two CIA bombings that were each blamed on the ‘other side’, and which ignited the fracas, a fracas that could become a civil war. We read about a famine due to ‘drought’, and we aren’t told that there would be plenty of water if it weren’t for all the coffee-export plantations using up the local water. We don’t see genocide, we see Africans befallen with unfortunate miseries, all due to the vagaries of Mother Nature.

Thus the pattern of managing die-offs becomes clear. It has been tested satisfactorily in Africa, and we can expect the proven pattern to be employed in future. They pick a population that they consider ‘redundant’, they undertake a program of acquiring that population’s resources, and then to speed up the process of removal they engage in various covert acts of genocide. In this way the world’s population can be whittled down piecemeal, and manageably, as the North gradually requires the utilization of ALL the world’s resources for its own exclusive use. Unfortunately for the North, even that won’t be enough to enable industrial growth to continue. The South is being killed off only that the unsustainable North can continue on its path a wee bit longer.

Meanwhile, the media in the North paints a picture in which only nature causes famines, and the role of the North is always to provide aid, to the extent it can. Concerned viewers are given convenient numbers to call, so they can dispel their concern with a simple donation that will ‘save a child’, or ‘give a family a goat’. No genocide around here; we’re the good guys. See no evil, feel just fine. By the way, too bad about those famines over there.

The Gore-style policies are not just genocidal, they are formidably genocidal. When they start taking massive amounts of land out of food production, and bring about a substantial increase in global food prices, in the face of an already stressed world food situation, they could bring about in a very short time--one bad harvest season--famine on a scale we have never seen before. How serious the outcome will be depends entirely on how aggressively the new administration pursues the Gore-style agenda. They’ve got genocide down to a science, with tunable parameters.

Apparently, having field-tested Holocaust tactics in Sub-Saharan Africa, a decision has been made to go global with the program. For this purpose, the Gore-style policies have the potential to be the appropriate Weapon of Mass Destruction, the equivalent in the starvation game to nukes in the kill-by-fire game. This decision to go global was evidently made some time ago, no doubt just before Gore was asked to make An Inconvenient Truth. The film was the first signal of which way the winds were going to blow, the first preview of the ‘new show’.

The primary mission of the Hillary administration, under the banners of ‘doing something about climate change and peak oil’, will evidently be to undertake a massive resource grab in the global South, leading to the selective and massive elimination of certain populations through starvation. In other words, the mission is to expand the starving-Africa model globally, a process that will presumably be helped along by the usual shadowy suspects in their usual destabilizing roles.

My big fear with the Bush regime was the likely attack on Iran...or was it the unleashing of the Gestapo? It was a close race in those dark days. Now we are on the verge of a regime bent on genocide on a scale that would put the Nazis to shame. I suggest that we have escaped the kettle only to fall into the frying pan.

I hope no one out there has any romantic notions about the new Administration, and I hope everyone realizes that the political process can never be used to solve our problems; that system is in fact the heart of our problem. I also hope it is clear to everyone that global genocide is an inevitable consequence of the continuation of this insane capitalist system, whether you agree with most of my analysis or not. And in the end, capitalism can’t last anyway.

Only when you have reached that deep level of hopelessness, where you see no avenue of escape, can you clear your mind enough to begin to see where the real problem lies. The real problem lies, my friends, in the fact that you and I have nothing to say about how our societies are run. Any one of us has more sense than the people who are running things, and we certainly have our fellow beings more at heart. Our problem lies in our own powerlessness, leaving power in the hands of those who always abuse it, in one way or another, in one age after another.

Our challenge as a sentient species, and our response if we seek to do anything about the growth-thru-genocide agenda, is to begin to empower ourselves, us ordinary people, without reference to the useless political process. How to pursue our empowerment must be the aim of our investigations, and pursuing that empowerment must be the point of our activism.

© Copyright Richard K. Moore, Global Research, 2007

The Guardian (London) December 5, 2007

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/
spencer_ackerman/2007/12/iran_meltdown.html

Iran meltdown

The US intelligence community reasserted its independence by releasing a critical report that destroys George Bush's case for war

By Spencer Ackerman

More than any particular line of intelligence, a recent statement from Michael McConnell might explain why the US intelligence community he heads unexpectedly released a report that devastated the Bush administration's years-long presentation of an Iranian nuclear threat.

McConnell, appointed in January to become President Bush's director of national intelligence, had a reputation as a dispassionate intelligence professional before joining the administration. But the former director of the Defence Intelligence Agency had come under fire from congressional Democrats for misleading statements about a summer surveillance bill, and, for the first time, was having his independence questioned. That made it all the more surprising for McConnell to pledge his resignation last month if the administration manipulated intelligence to serve its agenda. "If it were cherry-picked in an inappropriate way, then for me, that's a professional obligation to object, and I would submit my resignation," McConnell told reporters.

McConnell hasn't quit. But his release yesterday of the key judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran [ www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf ] was just as resounding a rebuke to Bush. It represents the kind of pushback the intelligence community now wishes it had provided ahead of the Iraq war: both a check on administration misrepresentations, and an internal correction of what it got wrong itself.

The need for both is evident. In 2005, even as a presidential commission chided the community for its lack of knowledge on Iran, a National Intelligence Estimate found Iran possessed an active nuclear programme that would yield a weapon in 10 years. The assessment was more cautious than some administration statements, but for years the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the ground in Iran, has stated that it does not see evidence of a weapons programme. Since 2005, a number of developments affected the intelligence picture, including communications intercepts from Iranian military officers lamenting the weapons programme's demise.

Just as powerful has been the damage to the intelligence community's self-regard as both independent and competent in the acrimony over the Iraq war. In that spirit, McConnell informed Bush as early as August or September, according to the Washington Post, that new evidence - still being evaluated - cast doubt on the assessment of an active nuclear-weapons programme. It was precisely what a professional intelligence community ought to do.

In response, President Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney doubled down on misleading assertions. "Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons," Cheney told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on October 21. He was careful not to actually use the words "nuclear weapons programme", which would have been contradicted by what the intelligence community knew, but instead ominously termed Iran's "nuclear programme" an "inescapable reality" that merited "serious consequences". The same sort of hair splitting was on display during President Bush's October 17 press conference. "I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said, shifting the goal posts from a weapons programme to the mere knowledge necessary to enrich uranium, which supports a civilian energy programme as well as a weapons programme. In the hands of the Iranians, that "knowledge", Bush said, could lead to "World War III".

It strains credulity to believe that Bush and Cheney's statements were not calibrated so that intelligence leaks on Iran wouldn't directly contradict them. No wonder, then, the intelligence community violated a recent policy to keep NIEs secret. McConnell's deputy, Don Kerr, explained: "Since our understanding of Iran's capabilities has changed, we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."

This, again, is how an intelligence apparatus is supposed to behave. Yet some of President Bush's supporters prefer to accuse the intelligence community of subterfuge rather than adjust their perception of an Iranian threat. Former Iran-Contra conspirator Michael Ledeen called the NIE redolent with "blatant unprofessionalism". A National Review writer quoted an anonymous ex-CIA official as saying the document "was strongly influenced by two hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials who oversaw it." Norman Podhoretz, a long-time advocate of attacking Iran and an adviser to Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign, added: "The intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W Bush, is doing it again."

Nor did the intelligence community's correction change the mind of the person it most needs to convince. "I'm saying that I believed before the NIE that Iran was dangerous, and I believe after the NIE that Iran is dangerous," Bush said at a press conference this morning. "I have said Iran is dangerous, and the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world. Quite the contrary." In other words, no matter how much of a corrective the intelligence community seeks to provide, Bush has decided that truth and falsity about Iran carry equal persuasive freight. McConnell would be better off resigning.