Hail to the Thief

It’s got to that stage now where I’ve just switched off listening to news and reports of the US primaries and the coming battle for the presidency. After all, what the hell difference does the victory of one candidate over another really make to the ordinary American? The short answer must be very little.

In truth, this election, like every preceding election, is little more than a public relations exercise where those Americans ‘fortunate’ to vote (and the news is that many more will be disenfranchised this time round) are given their ‘sixty seconds of democracy’ to select an ambassador of the master class to safeguard and, if possible, to expand its class interests over the next four years.

In the quest to preserve the deception that the average American has a real stake, control of public opinion is crucial. So the media functions to peddle distortions and untruths that blur this reality, to keep public opinion placid and render ordinary working people isolated and ineffective, so leaving the interests of the ruling class unchallenged and supreme. The US media add credence to the myth that the Presidential election carries real choice by eagerly analysing every minute perceived difference between the candidates (witness, if you will, the palaver over which candidate is the most religious) bombarding the electorate with patriotic oratory and fine sounding ‘promises’ while enthusiastically expounding the lie that the candidates share a common interest with ordinary working people. Their propaganda is heavily loaded with corporate and business ideology and praise for the virtues of the ‘free-market system,’ designed to perpetuate the fallacy that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, indeed synonymous.

The outcome of US elections carry one truth: namely that any president has but one remit once in office – to carry out the wishes of the men behind the curtains, the ones who really call the shots. Just watch vice president Dick Cheney prostrating himself in front of his master in the video below. Any newly elected president, entertaining any idea other than ensuring the US maintains its global hegemonic status, that it pursues the path of full spectrum dominance that the profits keep on coming, that dissent is kept in check, would get a bullet in the head and each and every candidate knows it.

And what is incontestable is that the outcome of the election will not be of benefit to the America’s (or the world’s) wage and salary earning class over the following four years.

Yes sir Mr. Rockefeller

By the turn of the last century, the Rockefeller family and its associates had a virtual monopoly over the oil and mineral resources of the world. Not much has changed since. Over the years, the group has created and/or taken control of a dizzying array of politicians, news media, academic institutions, think tanks and foundations to further its aims.

No one gets to be a serious candidate for President of the United States without being under their control and domination and all White Houses pick Rockefeller employees for its top slots.

Nixon had Henry Kissinger (a Rockefeller agent), Reagan had Bush Sr, and Bush Jr. has Dick Cheney. And on it goes.

Two noteworthy quotes from this video:

"The (Rockefeller) family has a long history of strengthening the bonds of friendship throughout the Americas."

In fact, the Rockefellers are despised by the people of Latin America.

There's not a Latin American dictator that the family did not have friendly relations with. If a dictator didn't exist, the family provided one. Under the direction of Rockefeller employee Henry Kissinger, the US initiated and then supported a reign of terror in Chile after organizing the violent overthrow of its democratically elected president.

"We are able to go about our business here in the Americas and throughout the world with confidence and security because we know the strength of this government stands behind us."

Our business? What business exactly is that? And why should the strength of this or any government stand behind a private commercial enterprise?

To the public and the press, Cheney is a sneering, snarling mad dog. In front of Rockefeller, he's groveling and obsequious and Rockefeller rewards him accordingly with a pat on the head: "Good boy!"

Here's the real power in the US. Just look at the body language. It could not be any plainer.

Another American Cenury?

George Bush’s State of the Union address at the end of January was little short of a declaration of war on the world; an assertion that US interests are now paramount and woe betide anyone foolish enough to think otherwise.

Bush boldly announced that the ‘ war on terror’ was ‘only beginning’ and announced an enormous hike in military spending. This year’s military budget is up $36 bn to $379 bn and next year the US war machine will receive an extra $48 bn, with a further $120 bn promised over the next five years, bringing the total spent on the military by 2007 to $ 2 trillion. To get some estimate of this level of spending it is worth noting that this year’s increase alone is higher than the joint military spending of Europe, and larger than China’s existing military budget. Though just how such an awe inspiring arsenal of state of the arts weaponry is to stop September 11th type attacks on the USA is yet to be explained.

America has at last declared that the ’war on terror’ has replaced the threat of the ‘international communist conspiracy’ and found in this the pretext to set the agenda for the coming century. The Bush administration has embedded its flag in what it believes is the moral high ground. From now on it is a war of good against evil - evil being anyone standing directly in the way of the US and its aspirations of global domination, with the ‘war on terrorism’ allowing it to intervene anywhere and whenever and to deem who it likes a terrorist. Clearly this new ‘war’ will involve countless military interventions with no regard whatsoever for international sensibilities.

There are now bogeymen under every rock and the world needs protecting from them. Bush identified an ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union Address, pointing to the threat the world faced from North Korea, Iraq and Iran. Vice president Dick Cheney would later remark that the US is considering military action against 50 countries and that this ongoing conflict could last 50 years.

Bush’s advisor Richard Perle commented: “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there…if we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

All of this has naturally left political analysts wondering just who will be next. Somalia, with untapped oil deposits off its coast and with whom the US has a score to settle following the botched ‘Restore Hope’ operation of a decade ago, which left thousands of innocents dead, or Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria or Libya? All harbour bogeymen whose existence sullies the notion of western cultural supremacy. Any could be the next target for a war machine drunk with its recent victory in Afghanistan. And what a victory! – Usama bin Laden still not caught (the entire campaign was about catching him), 5 thousand civilians dead and 7 million facing starvation in refugee camps.

A key element in the US game plan for global hegemony is clearly control of the Caspian’s rich oil reserves – estimated to be able to produce 3.3 million gallons of crude oil per day and 4850 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year. Hence US military manoeuvring in the states surrounding Afghanistan and thus the attaching of the ’bogeyman’ label to any state perceived as standing in the way of these profits.

Already Kyrgistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are under US military domination and there are US military tent cities in 13 states surrounding Afghanistan, with the map of US bases mirroring the route of a projected oil pipeline favoured by the US and which takes oil through Iran to the Indian ocean. To save the cost and inconvenience of laying a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is far easier to simply topple the Tehran regime, install a US proxy government and run Caspian oil directly through Iran. And who is to stop the US? The UN may object, but who is the UN? The best place from which to launch an attack upon Iran is Iraq, so both states now feature high on the US hit list.

Iran and Iraq are both perceived as the regional powers who challenge US strategic ambitions between Europe and East Asia. And invasions of these two countries would well fit the ongoing US strategy of asserting itself into strategic areas of the world, setting up is bases and installing US geopolitical influence in these regions. US interventions in recent years in Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan have allowed the US to leave behind its bases in these regions and to better oversee the activities of its corporate elite. With US economic power now being challenged by Europe and the East Asian bloc, military bases become a useful counterweight to the threat posed its corporate elite by its competitors and US control over Iran and Iraq gives the US control over extant oil supplies between Europe and East Asia.

Iraq has long been high up on the list of US targets, a fact perhaps best portrayed recently by the pathetic and futile US attempts to link the anthrax scare in the US to Saddam Hussein. The Guardian’s February 14th front page headline “ US targets Saddam” was not reporting anything new. The story had been doing the rounds in the Russian press for some time with Russian military intelligence suggesting a full scale attack on Iraq would begin in September. But now sources close to Bush say the CIA is already in Saudi Arabia and Northern Iraq preparing for a joint operation with Kurdish forces and that the third Iraqi war may commence in May with the mobilisation of 200,000 US troops from bases in Kuwait.

Undoubtedly the pretext for the US invasion of Iraq will be Iraq’s refusal to agree to terms laid down by a US lead weapons inspectorate into the country, hence Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union Address that Iraq “continues to flaunt its hostility towards the US” and that “this is a regime that has something to hide from the civilised world.”

The above may sound like so much scare-mongering, but when it is considered the US now accounts for 40 per cent of global military spending, that it spends more on its war machine than the next 19 states, that in the past year it has discarded numerous international treaties, including those pertaining to weapons control, that the space taken up by its military hardware covers an area the size of Sweden, that it has served notice on all countries opposing the notion of US hegemony that their days are numbered, we can’t but conclude that warfare will be as much a part of life in this century as the one we have just emerged from. And what do we make of Bush’s words in that most eloquent of addresses: “Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘let’s roll’”? And what better way to distract domestic attention from the corruption of US politics – wonderfully exhibited in the Enron scandal – than to commence a war on the enemies of US freedoms?

We have every reason to be fearful for the future of humanity. War is competition for profits (either via trade routes, mineral wealth, resources or areas of influence) writ large, and to safeguard its future profits, its control of world resources the world’s greatest and largest military power is accumulating an unimaginable array of weaponry, rolling up its sleeves and marching forward to stamp underfoot all it perceives as being a threat to its interests.

So when will you join with us? When a million Iranians lie smouldering? When North Korea resembles a Stone Age society? Or when cruise missiles are heading towards Beijing? We owe it to the millions about to die in the name of profit to act now. They cannot, their fate is sealed.