Some contemporary authors have characterized current conditions in the United States as being oligarchic in nature. Simon Johnson wrote that "the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent," a structure which he delineated as being the "most advanced" in the world. Jeffrey A. Winters argues that "oligarchy and democracy operate within a single system, and American politics is a daily display of their interplay." Bernie Sanders (I-VT) opined in a 2010 The Nation article that an "upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country."
United States political and finance industry leadership has recently been dominated by people associated with Harvard and Yale. All nine members of the current Supreme Court attended Harvard or Yale law schools. The last member appointed to the court who was not a former student at one of those two institutions was Sandra Day O'Connor, appointed by the newly elected President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan was also the last United States President who did not attend either Harvard or Yale.
A well-known fictional oligarchy is represented by the Party in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The socialists in the Jack London novel The Iron Heel fight a rebellion against the oligarchy ruling in the United States. In the Ender's Quartet, by Orson Scott Card - specifically Xenocide, Speaker for the Dead, and Children of The Mind - there is an Oligarchy of the Starways Congress which rules by controlling communication by the Ansible. The Capitol in The Hunger Games trilogy is also a form of Oligarchy, as is the nation of Tear (ruled by a group of High Lords, until the appointment of High Lord Darlin as King of Tear) in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time.
Corporatocracy is a term used as an economic and political system controlled by corporations or corporate interests. It is a generally pejorative term often used by critics of the current economic situation in a particular country, especially the United States. This is different to corporatism, which is the organisation of society into groups with common interests. Corporatocracy as a term tends to be used by liberal and left-leaning critics, but also some economic libertarian critics and other political observers across the political spectrum. Economist Jeffrey Sachs described the United States as a corporatocracy in his book The Price of Civilization. He suggested that it arose from four trends: weak national parties and strong political representation of individual districts, the large U.S. military establishment after World War II, big corporate money financing election campaigns, and globalization tilting the balance away from workers.
The term was used by author John Perkins in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, where he claimed that a "corporatocracy" exists, involving tacitly coordinated corporations, banks, and governments. This collective is known as what author C Wright Mills would call the Power Elite. The Power Elite are wealthy individuals who hold prominent positions in Corporatocracies. These individuals control the process of determining society's economic and political policies.
The concept has been used in explanations of bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs, as well as complaints such as the exploitation of national treasuries, people, and natural resources. It has been used by critics of globalization, sometimes in conjunction with criticism of the World Bank or unfair lending practices, as well as criticism of free trade agreements.
BBC reports that the US is officially an oligarchy and @nowwithalex accepts it with open arms, tries to blame Republicans, and eventually blames capitalism, rather than the illegal activities of the oligarchy itself. I don't ague with the premise one bit. We've been saying that for years but were labeled as "Conspiracy Theorists".
Looking back at @nowwithalex and her recent interview with CFR member @casssunstein you can hear this same woman denying conspiracy theories altogether. But if the BBC says so, then hey, we've got an oligarchy. There is the empirical data, which she didn't share by the way.
Alex Wagner needs to be dragged out to a public square and tied to a chair and forced to watch documentaries and read books on "conspiracy theories" until she is begging to be released into the hands of the CIA and their enhanced interrogation techniques - oh but that doesn't exist, that's conspiracy theory.
First watch this "joke" from The Onion. Then watch the following serious videos that raise more serious questions about the high tech industry and the current #policeState, funded by the CIA's #InQTel, and a complete invasion of our privacy.
"Pump and Dump: How to Rig the Entire IPO Market with just $20 Million | Wolf Street" ( http://twitthat.com/GsoAH )
Four out of Five Richest Tech Moguls Involved in US Intelligence" ( http://twitthat.com/WvK4m )
Is this part of a global warming hoax to destroy property rights and amass wealth in the hands of a few or a legitimate concern by honest citizens to deal with overpopulation, energy, and environmental issues?
Having decided counter-sanctions are useless for now, reflecting on the uselessness of Western sanctions against his nation, Vladimir Putin warned, however, that if they continue he would "have to think about who is working in the key sectors of the Russian economy" - in other words, protectionism is coming. However, it is his ominous words regarding Washington's involvement in the crisis that appear to have fallen on deaf ears among the mainstream media... though will be no surprise to ZH readers "what is happening now shows us who really was mastering the process from the beginning. But in the beginning, the United States preferred to remain in the shadow."
The US has been behind the Ukrainian crisis from the beginning, but was initially flying low, Russian President Vladimir Putin has told journalists, adding that he called on Kiev to establish an all-Ukrainian dialogue and find a compromise.
“I think what is happening now shows us who really was mastering the process from the beginning. But in the beginning, the United States preferred to remain in the shadow,” Putin said, as quoted by RIA Novosti.
Putin stated that since the US has taken a lead role in resolving the political crisis in Ukraine, it is “telling that they originally were behind this process, but now they just have emerged as leaders” of it.
The "Maidan cookies" policy paves the way to a broader crisis, Putin warned, referring to US officials showing up in central Kiev and encouraging protesters during demonstrations.
“It is necessary to understand that the situation is serious and try to find serious approaches to the solution,” he said.
Putin said that he has called on Kiev to start an all-Ukrainian dialogue, adding that other countries should not be blamed for the crisis.
“[They should] treat equally the rights of those living in other areas of Ukraine, first of all, I mean, the east and southeast, establish a dialogue, find a compromise," he told journalists while speaking about the measures necessary to put an end to the crisis. “Here's what you need to do; searching for the guilty outside Ukraine is wrong.”
More "costs" as the West tries to wriggle its way from the under the pile it has created and scapegoat an unwilling to play Russia...?
Below you will find a video explaining what the United Nations Agenda 21 plan really is. You will also find documents from Zurich Insurance presented to the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2014 on the risks that we should all fear. (For more information on Agenda 21, see this play list on YouTube.)
Note in the image below, from the Zurich report, that a failure of global governance would be a bad thing.. Note all the other nodes on the network ring that are connected to global governance.
“The
common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to
unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of
global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and
it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be
overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself." -
Club of Rome The First Global Revolution
The
environmental movement has been described as the largest and most
influential social phenomenon in modern history. From relative
obscurity just a few decades ago it has spawned thousands of
organisations and claims millions of committed activists. Reading the
newspaper today it is hard to imagine a time when global warming,
resource depletion, environmental catastrophes and 'saving the
planet' were barely mentioned. They now rank among the top priorities
on the social, political and economic global agenda.
Environmental
awareness is considered to be the mark of any good honest decent
citizen. Multi-national companies compete fiercely to promote their
environmental credentials and 'out-green' each other. The threat of
impending ecological disasters is uniting the world through a
plethora of international treaties and conventions. But where did
this phenomenon come from, how did it rise to such prominence, and
more importantly, where is it going?
While researching for
these articles, and during my academic studies, I have come across
many references to the The
Club of Rome(CoR),
and reports produced by them. Initially I assumed that they were just
another high-level environmental think-tank and dismissed the
conspiracy theories found on many websites claiming that the CoR is a
group of global elitists attempting to impose some kind of one world
government.
I am not a conspiratorial person by nature and
was faced with a dilemma when I first read their reports. But it's
all there - in black and white. The CoR claims that "we
are facing an imminent catastrophic ecological collapse"
and "our only hope is to transform
humanity into a global interdependent sustainable society, based on
respect and reverence for the Earth." In the end I
came to the conclusion that there are two possibilities –
either the CoR wrote all these reports and setup a vast network of
supporting
organisationsjust
for fun or they actually believe what they have written and
are working hard to fulfill their role as the self-appointed saviours
of Gaia.
Based on my close observation of their actions, and
watching the recommendations made by the CoR many years ago now being
adopted as official UN and government policy – well, I have
become personally convinced that they are deadly serious. On this
website I try to use quotes and excerpts as much as possible and let
the reader reach their own conclusions.
So, what exactly is
the Club of Rome and who are its members? Founded in 1968 at David
Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, the CoR describes
itself as "a group of world citizens,
sharing a common concern for the future of humanity."
It consists of current and former Heads of State, UN beaureacrats,
high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats,
scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the
globe.
The Club of Rome subsequently foundedtwo sibling organizations, theClub
of Budapestand the Club
of Madrid.
The former is focused on social and cultural aspects of their agenda,
while the latter concentrates on the political aspects. All three of
these 'Clubs' share many common members and hold joint
meetingsand
conferences.
As explained in other articles on this website it is abundantly clear
that these are three heads of the same beast. The CoR has also
established a network of 33 National
Associations.Membership
of the 'main Club' is limited to 100 individuals at any one time.
Some members, like Al Gore and Maurice Strong, are affiliated through
their respective National Associations (e.g. USACOR,
CACOR
etc).
I
would like to start this analysis of the Club of Rome by listing some
prominent members of the CoR and its two sub-groups, the Clubs of
Budapest and Madrid. Personally it isn’t what the CoR is that I
find so astonishing; it is WHO the CoR is! This isn’t
some quirky little group of green activists or obscure politicians.
They are the most senior officials in the United Nations, current and
ex-world leaders, and the founders of some of the most influential
environmental organisations. When you read their reports in the
context of who they are – its gives an entirely new, and
frightening, context to their extreme claims.
Some
current members of the Club of Rome or its two siblings:Al
Gore –
former VP of the USA, leading climate
change campaigner, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Academy Award winner,
Emmy winner. Gore lead the US delegations to the Rio Earth Summit and
Kyoto Climate Change conference. He chaired a meeting of the full
Club of Rome held in Washington DC in 1997.Javier
Solana –
Secretary General of the Council of
the European Union, High Representative for EU Foreign
Policy.Maurice
Strong
– former Head
of the UN Environment Programme, Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan,
Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit, co-author (with Gorbachev)
of the Earth Charter, co-author of the Kyoto Protocol, founder of the
Earth
Council,
devout Baha’i. Mikhail
Gorbachev –
CoR
executive
member, former President of the Soviet
Union, founder of Green Cross International and the Gorbachev
Foundation, Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder
(with Hidalgo) of the Club of Madrid, co-author (with Strong)
of the Earth Charter.Diego
Hidalgo –
CoR executive
member, co-founder (with Gorbachev) of the Club of
Madrid, founder and President of the European
Council on Foreign Relationsin
association with George Soros.Ervin
Laszlo –
founding member of the CoR, founder
and President of the Club of Budapest, founder
and Chairman of the World Wisdom Council.Anne
Ehrlich – Population
Biologist. Married
to Paul Ehrlich with
whom she has authored many books on human overpopulation. Also a
former
directorof
Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, and a member of the UN's
Global Roll of Honor. Hassan
bin Talal–
President of the
CoR, President of the Arab Thought Forum, founder of the World
Future Council,
recently named as the United Nations 'Champion
of the Earth'. Sir
Crispin Tickell
– former British Permanent
Representative to the United Nations and Permanent Representative on
the Security Council, Chairman of the ‘Gaia Society’,
Chairman of the Board of the Climate Institute, leading British
climate change campaigner.Kofi
Annan –
former Secretary General of the United
Nations. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.Javier
Perez de Cuellar
– former Secretary General of
the United Nations. Gro
Harlem Bruntland–
United Nations
Special
Envoy for Climate Change,
former President of Norway Robert
Muller–
former Assistant
Secretary General of the United Nations, founder and
Chancellor of the UN
University of Peace. The
Dalai Lama
– The 'Spiritual Leader' of
Tibet. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Father
Berry Thomas–
Catholic Priest who
is one of the leading
proponentsof
deep ecology, ecospirituality and global consciousness. David
Rockefeller
– CoR
executive
member, former Chairman of Chase
Manhattan Bank, founder of the Trilateral Commission, executive
member of the World Economic Forum, donated land on which the United
Nations stands.Stephen
Schneider –
Stanford Professor of Biology and
Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and
most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of
many IPCC reports.Bill
Clinton –
former President of
the United States, founder of the Clinton Global Iniative.Jimmy
Carter –
former President of the United States,
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.Bill
Gates –
founder
of Microsoft, philanthropist Garret
Hardin–
Professor of Human
Ecology. Originator of the 'Global
Commons'
concept. Has authored many controversial papers on human
overpopulation and eugenics. Other
current influential members:(these
can be found on the membership lists of the COR (here,
here,
and
here), Club
of Budapest,Club
of Madridand/or
CoR
National Associationmembership
pages)
Ted
Turner – media mogul, philanthropist, founder of CNN George
Soros – multibillionare, major donor to
the UN Tony Blair – former Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom Deepak Chopra – New Age
Guru Desmond Tutu – South African Bishop and
activist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Timothy
Wirth – President of the United
Nations Foundation Henry
Kissinger – former US Secretary of State George
Matthews – Chairman
of the Gorbachev Foundation Harlan
Cleveland – former Assistant US
Secretary of State and NATO Ambassador Barbara Marx
Hubbard – President of the Foundation
for Conscious Evolution Betty
Williams – Nobel Peace Prize LaureateMarianne
Williamson – New Age 'Spiritual Activist' Robert
Thurman – assistant to the Dalai Lama Jane Goodall
– Primatologist and Evolutionary Biologist Juan
Carlos I – King of Spain Prince Philippe of
Belgium Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands Dona Sophia
– Queen of Spain José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero – current Prime Minister of
Spain Karan Singh – Former Prime Minister of
India, Chairman of the Temple
of Understanding Daisaku
Ikeda – founder of the Soka
Gakkai cult Martin
Lees – CoR Secretary General, Rector of
the UN University of Peace Ernesto Zedillo –
Director of The
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization Frithjof Finkbeiner –
Coordinator of the Global
Marshall Plan Franz
Josef Radermacher–
Founder of the Global
Marshall Plan Eduard
Shevardnadze – former Soviet foreign minister and President
of Georgia Richard von Weizsacker – former President
of Germany Carl Bildt – former President of
Sweden Kim Campbell – former Prime
Minister of Canada and Senior
Fellowof the
Gorbachev Foundation Vincente
Fox – former President of Mexico Helmut
Kohl – former Chancellor of Germany Romano
Prodi – former Prime Minister of Italy
and President of the European CommissionVaclav
Havel – former President of the Czech Republic Hans
Kung – Founder of the Global
Ethic Foundation Ruud
Lubbers – United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees Mary Robinson
– United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights Jerome Binde – Director of
Foresight, UNESCO Koïchiro Matsuura – Current
Director General of UNESCO Federico Mayor –
Former Director General of UNESCO Tapio
Kanninen – Director of Policy and
Planning, United NationsKonrad Osterwalder –
Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Peter
Johnston – Director General of European Commission Jacques
Delors – Former President of the European Commission
Domingo Jimenez-Beltran – Executive Director of the
European Environment Agency Thomas Homer-Dixon –
Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Toronto Hazel
Henderson – Futurist and 'evoluntionary
economist' Emeka Anyaoku – former Commonwealth
Secretary General, current President of the World
Wildlife Fund Wangari
Maathai – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate,
founder of the Green
Belt Movement and
many more….
The concept of
'environmental sustainability' was first brought to widespread public
attention in 1972 by the Club of Rome in their book entitled The
Limits to Growth.
The official summary can be read here.
The report basically concluded that the growth of the human
population, and an increase in prosperity, would cause an ecological
collapse within the next hundred years:
“If
the present growth trends in world population, industrialization,
pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue
unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached
sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result
will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both
population and industrial capacity.”
“It is possible to alter these growth trends
and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability
that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global
equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of
each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal
opportunity to realize his individual human potential.”
“The overwhelming growth in world population caused
by the positive birth-rate loop is a recent phenomenon, a result of
mankind's very successful reduction of worldwide mortality. The
controlling negative feedback loop has been weakened, allowing
the positive loop to operate virtually without constraint. There are
only two ways to restore the resulting imbalance. Either the birth
rate must be brought down to equal the new, lower death rate, or the
death rate must rise again.”
“The
result of stopping population growth in 1975 and industrial capital
growth in 1985 with no other changes is that population and
capital reach constant values at a relatively high level of food,
industrial output and services per person. Eventually, however,
resource shortages reduce industrial output and the temporarily
stable state degenerates.”
“Man
possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful
combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever
known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally
new form of human society - one that would be built to last for
generations. The two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term
goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the
Human Will to achieve that goal.”
“Without
such a goal and a commitment to it, short-term concerns will generate
the exponential growth that drives the world system toward the limits
of the earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that
commitment, mankind would be ready now to begin a controlled,
orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.”
So
as you can see the even back in 1972 the Club considered modern
industrial society to be completely unsustainable. They state that
even if population was frozen at 1975 levels, and industrial activity
at 1985 levels, then the earth’s ecosystems would still
ultimately collapse. The CoR has not changed these views in the
slightest, in fact, in the last three decades their warnings have
become increasingly more urgent and alarmist. They call this imminent
collapse the ‘World
Problematique’ and
their proposed solution the ‘World
Resolutique.’
The
Limits to Growth is considered to
be the most successful environmental publication ever produced and
propelled the Club of Rome to its current position of an
environmental thought-leader and a major consultant to the United
Nations. It has been translated into more than forty languages and
sold more than 30 million copies. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the
concept that humanity was irreparably damaging the earth gained
popularity and facilitated the formation of mainstream and activist
environmental groups.
All meetings of the CoR are held
‘behind closed doors’ and no public records are kept.
However the Club does produce many ‘discussion
reports’that can be found on its website. The
United Nations contractsthe Club of Rome to prepare ‘Policy
Guidance Documents’ which it uses in formulating its policies
and programmes. A quick search for Club of Rome on the UNESCO
publicationssite reveals 250 such
documents. There are many other documents there authored by CoR
members acting in other capacities. As many high ranking UN officials
are actually CoR members, this is like a man asking himself for
advice, and then agreeing with that advice. Not very objective!
Various UN organisations also hold joint
conferenceswith
the CoR.
While checking the Club of Rome website this morning
the first item in their ‘current news’ section refers to
a briefing delivered by the CoR
to G8 officialsin
preparation for the upcoming G8 meeting. The second item is a summary
report from the Club of Romes ’strategy
planning retreat’ with
150 senior UNESCO officials. The joint CoR/UNESCO communique
states:
“We are at the end of
an era – a turning point in history. We are approaching the
threshold of runaway climate change. We underline the urgency of
radical action to reduce emissions, by both immediate action and
longer-term measures; to stress to political leaders the non-linear
nature of the processes at work which will generate sudden change;
and to assert that the overriding priority must be to avert the
impending risk of catastrophic climate change.” -
CoR/UNESCO communique
Twenty years after the Limits
to Growth the CoR published another major report that
became an instant best-seller. In The First
Global Revolution the Club of Rome claimed that the time
to act had run out. It was now or never. Delay in beginning
corrective measures will increase the damage to the world ecological
system and ultimately reduce the human population that will
eventually be supportable. They also stated that democratic
governments are far too short-sighted to deal with the
‘problematique’ and new forms of governance are urgently
required.
In order not too violate any copyright protection I
will not reproduce the text of the book on this site. However, it is
permissible for me to quote a brief excerpt in the context of this
wider discussion. The complete text(third ed.) can
be read and searched online at Google Books. As you read the
following quote (from page 75, first ed.),
please remember the names of the leaders listed above. This is not
some quirky little cult. This is the stated
agenda of the
leaders of the environmental movement:
“This
is the way we are setting the scene for mankind’s encounter
with the planet. The opposition between the two ideologies that
have dominated the 20th century has collapsed, forming their own
vacuum and leaving nothing but crass materialism.
It is a law
of Nature that any vacuum will be filled and therefore eliminated
unless this is physically prevented. “Nature,” as the
saying goes, “abhors a vacuum.” And people, as children
of Nature, can only feel uncomfortable, even though they may not
recognize that they are living in a vacuum. How then is the vacuum
to be eliminated?
It would seem that humans need a common
motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act
together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the
divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real
one or else one invented for the purpose.
New enemies
therefore have to be identified. New strategies imagined, new
weapons devised.
The common enemy of humanity is man.
In
searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that
pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and
the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by
human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and
behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is
humanity itself.
The old democracies have functioned
reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in
a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real
leadership and innovation
Democracy is not a panacea.
It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits.
These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may
sound, democracy is no longer well
suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical
nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected
representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”So,
long before Global Warming became a well known issue Al Gore and his
Club of Rome colleagues stated that they would use the threat of
global warming to unite humanity and "set
the scene for mankind's encounter with the planet."
In the same way that shamans and sooth-sayers in medieval times used
their advance knowledge of when eclipses would occur to control and
terrify their followers, they would use a natural phenomenon as their
'enemy' to achieve their objectives. But then they state that
although Global Warming would be presented as the initial enemy, the
real enemy of humanity would be portrayed as man himself. I am
already noticing how frequently the terms climate change and
overpopulation are being uttered in the same breath.
Having
discovered that all these influential environmental leaders were
associated with the Club of Rome I set about reading all the reports,
lectures and speeches on their website as well as the reports
commissioned by the UN. I was amazed to find that they lay out their
entire agenda for anyone who has eyes to see. Exactly the same
themes, concepts and phrases are repeated continuously throughout
their publications. They are full of references to 'imminent
collapse', 'dying planet',
'our mother Gaia', 'wrenching
transformation', 'united global
society', 'global consciousness',
'new forms of governance' etc.
They truly intend to bring about the world's First
Global Revolution.
The
Kosmos
Journalprovides
perhaps the best insight into their worldview. This Journal was
founded by the Club of Rome in partnership with with several of its
sibling organizations. As described in my article, The
Green Web,
the CoR has established a network of supporting organizations, each
focusing on a different aspect of their agenda. The Kosmos Journal
contains many articles written by CoR members. The basic premise of
their worldview is:
"Modern
industrial civilisation is fast outstripping the Earth's natural
regenerative and life-supporting capacity..."
"At
current rates of resource depletion and environmental degradation a
near complete collapse of ecological integrity will occur within the
next 100 years..."
"Gaia, our Mother, who nutured
humanity for countless millenia within her womb of evolution, is
dying..."
“A small window of opportunity now exists
to transform humanity into a sustainable global interdepedant society
based on respect and reverence for Earth..."
"A
radical change from the current trajectory is required, a complete
reordering of global society..."
"Humans only truly
unite when faced with a powerful external enemy..."
"At
this time a new enemy must be found, one either real or invented for
the purpose..."
"Democracy has failed us, a new
system of global governance, based on environmental imperatives, must
be implemented quickly..."
Now that Obama is
firmly ensconced in the White House the Club of Rome and its
affiliates are swinging into high gear. The CoR recently unveiled a
new 3-year programme entitled A
New Path for World Development.
The Club of Madrid has launched the Road
to Copenhagen,
a joint programme with the UN Environment Programme intended to
facilitate a binding global climate change treaty in 2009. Perhaps
most interesting is the State
of Global Emergency declared
by the Club of Budapest in October 2008. The declaration states that
we only have four or five yearsto
prevent a total collapse of the Earth's ecosystems. To quote from the
document:
“If
we continue on our present unsustainable path, by mid-century the
Earth may become largely uninhabitable for human and most other forms
of life. Such a total systems collapse could occur much sooner,
however, due to runaway global warming or other
ecocatastrophes, and/or by nuclear wars triggered by religious,
ethnic or geopolitical conflicts or access to diminishing natural
resources. The macro-trends driving these global threats and
challenges have been apparent for decades and are now building toward
a threshold of irreversibility. The scientific modeling of complex
systems shows that when systems reach a state of critical
instability, they either break down to their components or break
through to a higher order of integral functioning. At these “points
of no return” maintaining the status quo, or returning to a
previous mode of organization and functioning, are not a feasible
option.
The acceleration of critical trends and cross-impacts
among them indicates that the ‘window of opportunity’ for
pulling out of the present global crisis and breaking through to a
more peaceful and sustainable world is likely to be no more than
four to five years from the end of 2008. This is close in time
to the Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the current world. The
period around the end of 2012 is likely to be a turbulent one for
this and other reasons. Predictions coming from the physical sciences
foresee disturbances in the geomagnetic, electromagnetic and related
fields that embed the planet causing significant damage to
telecommunications and impacting many aspects of human activity and
health. For the esoteric traditions the end of 2012 will be the
end of the known world, although the more optimistic intepretations
speak of a new world taking the place of the old.”
This
may seem very strange – a group of prominent world leaders
talking about ancient Mayan prophecies, but as I describe in my
article, Gaia's
Gurus,
many leading global warming activists openly advocate earth-reverence
and other New Age philosophies. Gaia, Global Warming, and Global
Governance are intricately entwined, if one truly believes in
Gaia, and that she is being fatally harmed by the current system,
then a new system of global governance and control would appear to be
the only answer. Global Warming provides the ideal 'enemy' to bring
about this objective. It is easy for these global elitists to talk
about sacrifice, wrenching transformation, population reduction and
eliminating the use of fossil fuels but the implications are truely
horrendous.
Even if you think this is all nonsense I would ask
you to at least read these
quotes and excerpts, and think about the
implications of their agenda. Everyday I am amazed at how quickly
things are changing. It is coming hard and fast. It's almost like
reading a book and then watching the television adaptation, except
that this adaptation is not a movie - it's on the evening news. As Al
Gore said in the closing sentence of his statement after he won the
Nobel Peace Prize ... "This is just the beginning."
Watch this video created a couple of years ago by James Rickards. The scenario is about China running a scorched earth campaign, which may very well happen, but for now it is Russia.
Cyprus and Russia - what's the difference (aside from the fact that the former was a money laundering offshore center of the latter until last year of course)?
If you said one is a lackey to statist, selfish banker interests, and after having its economy thoroughly destroyed by the great doomed European sociopolitical (and pathological) experiment, came crawling back to its Eurozone masters, while the other couldn't care one bit about Pax Petrodollariana and the global central bank cabal, you are right. In which case it will also be clear why a few hours ago that joke of a rating agency, Standard & Poor's, which also earlier announced it was "affirming" France at an AA rating making it very clear it will no longer accept being sued for telling the truth and downgrading sovereigns or otherwise have its offices abroad raided, not only upgraded Cyprus from B- to B (please deposits your funds in Cyprus banks now: they are safe, S&P promises), but - far more importantly - delivered a political message to the Kremlin, and downgraded Russia from BBB to BBB-, one short notch away from junk status. This was the first downgrade of Russia by S&P since December 2008.
"In our view, the tense geopolitical situation between Russia and Ukraine could see additional significant outflows of both foreign and domestic capital from the Russian economy and hence further undermine already weakening growth prospects," S&P wrote in its report.
Moscow's MICEX stock index fell by 1.5% after the move. The ruble weakened 0.6% against the dollar to 35.977.
A further cut to junk status would be a big move, given Russia's relatively modest level of debt, according to Tim Ash, an economist at Standard Bank.
"But if the crisis in Ukraine deteriorates further, and we see sustained capital flight and pressure on the ruble and Russian markets further, then it is possible," he said.
Russia's response was prompt.
First, in retaliation to the downgrade, Russian economy minister Alexei Ulyukaev said S&P’s downgrade of Russia’s rating was expected by investors, won’t significantly change their behavior, adding the obvious that the decision to cut Russia’s rating was partly political, partly based on economic situation. In other words, entirely symbolic - it is not as if Russia has access to bond markets anyway, plus as we wrote earlier this week in "Why Putin Is Smiling At The Bond Market's Blockade Of Russia", it is not as if it needs them.
But far more importantly, and ahead of yet another round of western sanctions which appears imminent unless Obama is to look even more powerless than he currently is (granted, a difficult achievement), Russian presidential adviser Sergei Glazyev proposed plan of 15 measures to protect country’s economy if sanctions applied, Vedomosti newspaper reports, citing Glazyev’s letter to Finance Ministry. According to Vedomosti as Bloomberg reported, Glazyev proposed:
Russia should withdraw all assets, accounts in dollars, euros from NATO countries to neutral ones
Russia should start selling NATO member sovereign bonds before Russia’s foreign-currency accounts are frozen
Central bank should reduce dollar assets, sell sovereign bonds of countries that support sanctions
Russia should limit commercial banks’ FX assets to prevent speculation on ruble, capital outflows
Central bank should increase money supply so that state cos., banks may refinance foreign loans
Russia should use national currencies in trade with customs Union members, other non-dollar, non-euro partners
In other words, a full-blown scorched earth campaign by Russia.
Granted, Russian holdings of US Treasurys are not that substantial (and could be monetized entirely in three months of POMO by the Fed), and western financial linkages to Russia, aside from trade routes, are not life-threatening, but if Russia were to take the baton, and other BRIC countries, already furious by the recent US decision to not boost their IMF status, follow suit, then Obama's life is about to become a living nightmare. Especially, if that most important BRIC member - China - does any of the many things it can do to indicate if, in this brand new Cold War, it is with or against the US...
Here is the side of climate change that no one is talking about. This video exposes a massive geoengineering cover up that includes testimony at the United Nations by a representative of the United States Federal government that these programs do exist and are underway.
So, this means that government is acting AS IF they believed that climate change is real. But on the behalf of a foreign agenda, United Nations Agenda 21. Well, you have to do more homework to understand the connection between the various parts. The evidence is there.
References: Peace Revolution Podcast on Agenda 21; Rosa Koire book on Agenda 21; and this video!
"TwistedEconomix: NASA Expert, Climate Change, Chemtrails, The UN and Rogue Geoengineers" ( http://t.co/sFxoAkCuX6 )
— Get your #DailyDose (@TwistedPolitix) April 23, 2014
CNN continues to spew nonsense propaganda. Watch Corbett Report instead. This CFR corporate propaganda is DESIGNED to generate support for WAR! Remember Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya.
It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy -
but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply
have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is
to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of
these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by
the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in
freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us
to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we
no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the
task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from
citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers
and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the
founders put in place, even as they are being systematically
dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the
setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else
was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might
have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush
and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an
open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable -
as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it
can happen here.
And that we are further along than we realise Conason
eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am
arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other
kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events
we see unfolding in the US.
1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national
shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot
Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many
said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on
a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate"
intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of
crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as
during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second
world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned.
But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has
noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the
pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as
open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe
itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no
defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like,
secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a
communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events
(one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he
noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the
Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by
passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an
open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based,
like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world
Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a
severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language
used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such
as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it
is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security
threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially
threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this
makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2 Create a gulag
Once
you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison
system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American
detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer
space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are
sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies,
"enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to
support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do
not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders -
opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are
arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in
fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and
Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s
and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or
crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are
abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the
due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and
his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no
information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the
world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the
street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever
larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from
first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that
people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we
are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But
Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only
scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave
of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor
Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First
they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the
destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent
for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals
that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist
shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the
Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial
system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and
tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to
show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system
that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in
favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3 Develop a thug caste
When
leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an
open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to
terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside
beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout
Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a
democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs
who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have
proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush
administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the
US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of
dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and
abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of
involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on
Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq
by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these
contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq,
you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of
Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security
guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill
interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed
civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that
episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing
scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on
crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in
America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical
shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida
in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a
need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are
protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule
out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to
restore public order".
4 Set up an internal surveillance system
In
Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in
communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on
ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi
needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to
convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In
2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York
Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read
their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became
clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state
scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being
about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile
and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5 Harass citizens' groups
The
fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass
citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose
minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being
investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got
Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have
been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American
Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American
anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by
agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen
peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in
its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of
Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations
engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track
"potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen
activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as
animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist"
slowly expands to include the opposition.
6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This
scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof
and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes:
the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy
activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released
many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of
dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you
are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004,
America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a
list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if
they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two
middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator
Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's
president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor
Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the
foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic
Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and
he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this
year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the
Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I
explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in
September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the
constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war
marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential
terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people"
tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US
citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of
mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military
before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and
released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield,
a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a
possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer
seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still
on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7 Target key individuals
Threaten
civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe
the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did
not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged
academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so
does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students
and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those
seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional
loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically.
Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being
fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically
"coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a
Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush
supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on
regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have
been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush
administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke
up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official
publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by
threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere,
a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is
torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to
do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US
attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When
Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were
"coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal
laws to follow.
8 Control the press
Italy
in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s,
Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators
target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more
open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and
worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee
to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time
high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put
in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war
demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against
reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure"
when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in
Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush
administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in
other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of
leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam
Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie
Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her
career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared
with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in
Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has
documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or
threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and
camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC.
While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should
pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie.
In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's
Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff
members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the
news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their
staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted
by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens
falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about
to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged
papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it
is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal
have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What
you already have is a White House directing a stream of false
information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort
out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that
count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake,
they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9 Dissent equals treason
Cast
dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing
society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly
criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy"
and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times,
ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of
classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress
called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators
and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as
Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating
the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how
serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall
that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai
Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is
important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last
widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists
were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for
up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and
threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson.
After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's
Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National
Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November
traitors". And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do
not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly,
foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president
has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the
power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also
delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to
define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize
Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens,
even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us
of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes
at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you
or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for
months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists
know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That
is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every
satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at
Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a
trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for
Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying
increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US
citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not
even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over
into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something
bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a
spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet.
No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every
closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests -
usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything
goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV
and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real
dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before
those arrests is where we are now.
10 Suspend the rule of law
The
John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new
powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency -
which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send
Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared
in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even
as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question
of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised
about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that
laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in
the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now
use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural
disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other
condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from
using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator
Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal
martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our
system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a
monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of
concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an
oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is
not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that
followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political
prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and
judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It
is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile
of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal
on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria
in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931.
Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while
someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing:
"dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite
leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite
leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the
foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has
changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic
traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a
context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end,
on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the
president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US
citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That
means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these
still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way
under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to
think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there
is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can
declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any
party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has
passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no
less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani -
because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through
edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic
negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US
newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort
seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years
in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from
history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be
very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to
hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center
for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the
detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at
the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying
to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group
called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of
people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others
internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration
because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home
can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and
face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of
America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different
moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to
look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it
is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive,
and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny,"
wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this
road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the
banner the founders asked us to carry.
