Friday, July 19, 2019

America’s No. 1 enemy British controlled American fascist congress:



"If the evidence is correct and no logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting lawyers from serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from US Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never lawfully repealed, it is still the Law today.

I found a very interesting article that was written in 2016 by Jean-Michel Letennier called Missing 13th Amendment Found: “No Lawyers In Public Office” which explains how America’s government became unconstitutionally corrupted by the millionaire lawyers and bankers who make up our government, in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Having worked at a bank for 18 years, many of those years in corporate security and as an anti-money laundering analyst, I witnessed the overthrow of the government in 2000 by the lawyers and bankers.  I understand the 2008 financial crisis was a controlled demolition instigated by lawyers and bankers.  When George W. Bush lost the 2000 presidential election, the Bush Crime Family lawyers took the case of Bush v. Gore to 5 corrupt Republican lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court who overturned the will of the American people and installed George W. Bush as president. 

Three days later, in a lame duck session the U.S. Senate passed the Commodities and Futures Modernization Act and was signed into law by the outgoing (impeached by lawyers) President Bill Clinton.  The law was written by lawyers and bankers which deregulated the derivatives market and insurance industry and opened the door to massive corruption in the banking and insurance industries.  Today there is in excess of $700 trillion in derivatives trading per day, unregulated and untaxed.

The Federal Reserve Bank’s hundred year charter was due to expire in 2013 and after President Bill Clinton balanced the budget and paid down America’s debt to the foreign owned Federal Reserve Bank, the Fed needed a tax cuts for the rich lawyers and war to plunge America back into debt.  Al Gore, who won the 2000 election in spite of massive fraud by the lawyers in both parties, wasn’t likely to give the Fed it’s much needed war and tax cuts the central bank wanted therefore extraordinary measures were taken to ensure W. Bush was president. 

Within 9 months of the Bush presidency a massive tax cut was passed into law followed by the bankers and lawyers funded terrorist attacks of 911 which provided the impetus for endless wars.  The Patriot Act had already been written by the bankers’ lawyers prior to Bush taking office and was  passed in congress unanimously in congress with just one dissenting vote, that of Representative Barbara Lee of California. 

Everything bad thing that has happened in America, from wars for profit and financial crashes couldn’t have happened if the 13th Amendment had not been illegally removed from the Constitution and lawyers and bankers. 

And don’t forget that Barack Obama was a “constitutional lawyer” who received over $300 million dollars in “small” campaign contribution of $200 dollars or less in pre-paid credit cards.  In keeping the “individual” donations under $200 they were not required to reveal the source of the funds. 

The October 2008 collapse of the banking industry occurred one month before the Presidential election when John McCain was leading Obama in the polls, so McCain temporarily suspended his campaign effectively handing Obama the presidency.  Obama not only bailed out the corrupt banks but paid them bonuses and saddled the taxpayers with the debt.  Obama’s healthcare bill called Obamacare codified insurance industry profits into law. 

The British Empire never relinquished control over the United States after the war for independence and played a large role in the 2000 presidential election and every election since.  As a matter of fact, the Russian collusion hoax was a product of the British spy agencies the MI5 and MI6 in collusion with the CIA and FBI. 

The Brits even threatened to ban President Trump from Britain because of his support for Brexit, withdrawing the U.K. from the European Union.   So let’s take a look at this excellent article by Jean-Michel Letennier:


Excerpt:

Missing 13th Amendment Found: “No Lawyers In Public Office”

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States has been altered from its original in order to fool the American public into accepting a government that is mostly illegally in office.   The information contained in the article below contains stunning revelations that the entire U.S. congress should be deemed illegitimate, after evidence that a clandestine plot to alter the U.S. Constitution has now emerged.

Themillenniumreport.com reports:

In the winter of 1983, archival research expert David Dodge, and former Baltimore police investigator Tom Dunn, were searching for evidence of government corruption in public records stored in the Belfast Library on the coast of Maine.

By chance, they discovered the library’s oldest authentic copy of the Constitution of the United States (printed in 1825). Both men were stunned to see this document included a 13th Amendment that no longer appears on current copies of the Constitution.

Moreover, after studying the Amendment’s language and historical context, they realized the principle intent of this “missing” 13th Amendment was to prohibit lawyers from serving in government. So began a seven year, nationwide search for the truth surrounding the most bizarre Constitutional puzzle in American history — the unlawful removal of a ratified Amendment from the Constitution of the United States.

Since 1983, Dodge and Dunn have uncovered additional copies of the Constitution with the “missing” 13th Amendment printed in at least eighteen separate publications by ten different states and territories over four decades from 1822 to 1860. In June of this year (1991), Dodge uncovered the evidence that this missing 13th Amendment had indeed been lawfully ratified by the state of Virginia and was therefore an authentic Amendment to the American Constitution.

If the evidence is correct and no logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting lawyers from serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from the U.S. Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never lawfully repealed, it is still the Law today. The implications are enormous…

MEANING of the 13th Amendment

The “missing” 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:

“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them...”

At the first reading, the meaning of this 13th Amendment (also called the “title of nobility” Amendment) seems obscure; unimportant. The references to “nobility,” “honour,” “emperor,” “king,” and “prince,” lead us to dismiss this Amendment as a petty post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy…

Not so. Consider some evidence of its historical significance: First, “titles of nobility” were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution of the United States (1787);

Second, although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional “title of nobility” amendment was proposed in 1789, again in 1810, and according to Dodge, finally ratified in 1819. Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in “titles of nobility” and “honors” that anyone receiving them would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited “titles of nobility” several times over four decades, and went through the amending process (even though “titles of nobility” were already prohibited by the Constitution), it’s obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

To understand the meaning of this “missing” 13th Amendment, we must understand its historical context — the era surrounding the American Revolution. We tend to regard the notion of “Democracy” as benign, harmless, and politically unremarkable. But at the time of the American Revolution, King George III and the other monarchies of Europe saw Democracy as an unnatural, ungodly ideological threat, every bit as dangerously radical as Communism was once regarded by modern Western nations.

Just as the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia spawned other revolutions around the world, the American Revolution provided an example and incentive for people all over the world to overthrow their European monarchies.

Even though the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, the simple fact of our existence threatened the monarchies. The United States stood as a heroic role model for other nations, that inspired them to also struggle against oppressive monarchies. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Polish national uprising (1794) were in part encouraged by the American Revolution. Though we stood like a beacon of hope for most of the world, the monarchies regarded the United States as a political typhoid Mary, the principle source of radical democracy that was destroying monarchies around the world.

The monarchies must have realized that if the principle source of that infection could be destroyed, the rest of the world might avoid the contagion and the monarchies would be saved. Their survival at stake, the monarchies sought to destroy or subvert the American system of government. Knowing they couldn’t destroy us militarily, they resorted to more covert methods of political subversion, employing spies and secret agents skilled in bribery and legal deception — it was, perhaps, the first “cold war”. Since governments run on money, politicians run for money, and money is the usual enticement to commit treason, much of the monarchy’s counter- revolutionary efforts emanated from English banks.

DON’T BANK ON IT (Modern Banking System)

The essence of banking was once explained by Sir Josiah Stamp, a former president of the Bank of England: “The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again… Take this great power away from them, or if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit…”

When the first United States Bank was chartered by Congress in 1790, there were only three state banks in existence. At one time, banks were prohibited by law in most states because many of the early settlers were all too familiar with the practices of the European goldsmith banks. Goldsmith banks were safe-houses used to store client’s gold. In exchange for the deposited gold, customers were issued notes (paper money) which were redeemable in gold. The goldsmith bankers quickly succumbed to the temptation to issue “extra” notes, (unbacked by gold). Why? Because the “extra” notes enriched the bankers by allowing them to buy property with notes for gold that they did not own, gold that did not even exist.

Colonists knew that bankers occasionally printed too much paper money, found themselves over-leveraged, and caused a “run on the bank”. If the bankers lacked sufficient gold to meet the demand, the paper money became worthless and common citizens left holding the paper were ruined. Although over-leveraged bankers were sometime hung, the bankers continued printing extra money to increase their fortunes at the expense of the productive members of society. (The practice continues to this day, and offers “sweetheart” loans to bank insiders, and even provides the foundation for deficit spending and the U.S. Federal government’s unbridled growth.)

PAPER MONEY

If the colonists forgot the lessons of goldsmith bankers, the American Revolution refreshed their memories. To finance the war, Congress authorized the printing of continental bills of credit in an amount not to exceed $200,000,000. The States issued another $200,000,000 in paper notes. Ultimately, the value of the paper money fell so low that they were soon traded on speculation from 5000 to 1000 paper bills for one coin.

It’s often suggested that the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against a paper economy — “No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a tender in Payment of Debts”was a tool of the wealthy to be worked to the disadvantage of all others. But only in a “paper” economy can money reproduce itself and increase the claims of the wealthy at the expense of the productive.

“Paper money,” said Pelatiah Webster, “polluted the equity of our laws, turned them into engines of oppression, corrupted the justice of our public administration, destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had confidence in it, enervated the trade, husbandry, and manufactures of U.S. country, and went far to destroy the morality of U.S. people.”

CONSPIRACIES

A few examples of the attempts by the monarchies and banks that almost succeeded in destroying the United States:

According to the Tennessee Laws (1715-1820, vol. II, p. 774), in the 1794 Jay Treaty, the United States agreed to pay 600,000 pounds sterling to King George III, as reparations for the American revolution. The Senate ratified the treaty in secret session and ordered that it not be published. When Benjamin Franklin’s grandson published it anyway, the exposure and resulting public uproar so angered the Congress that it passed the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) so federal judges could prosecute editors and publishers for reporting the truth about the government.

Since we had won the Revolutionary War, why would U.S. Senators agree to pay reparations to the loser? And why would they agree to pay 600,000 pounds sterling, eleven years after the war ended? It doesn’t make sense, especially in light of Senate’s secrecy and later fury over being exposed, unless we assume U.S. Senators had been bribed to serve the British monarchy and betray the American people. That’s subversion.

The United States Bank had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the beginning, but the Federalists (the pro-monarchy party) won out in its establishment. The initial capitalization was $10,000,000 — 80% OF WHICH WOULD BE OWNED BY FOREIGN BANKERS. Since the bank was authorized to lend up to $20,000,000 (double its paid in capital), it was a profitable deal for both the government and the bankers since they could lend, and collect interest on, $10,000,000 that didn’t exist.

However, the European bankers outfoxed the government and by 1796, the government owed the bank $6,200,000 and was forced to sell its shares. (By 1802, the U.S. government owned no stock in the United States Bank.) The sheer power of the banks and their ability to influence representative government by economic manipulation and outright bribery was exposed in 1811, when the people discovered that European banking interests owned 80% of the bank.

Congress therefore refused to renew the bank’s charter. This led to the withdrawal of $7,000,000 in specie by European investors, which in turn, precipitated an economic recession, and the War of 1812. That’s destruction.

There are undoubtedly other examples of the monarchy’s efforts to subvert or destroy the United States; some are common knowledge, others remain to be disclosed to the public. For example, David Dodge discovered a book called “2 VA LAW” in the Library of Congress Law Library. According to Dodge, “This is an un-catalogued book in the rare book section that reveals a plan to overthrow the constitutional government by secret agreements engineered by the lawyers. That is one of the reasons why this Amendment was ratified by Virginia and the notification was lost in the mail.

There is no public record that this book exists.” That may sound surprising, but according to The Gazette (5/10/91), “the Library of Congress has 349,402 un-catalogued rare books and 13.9 million un-catalogued rare manuscripts.” There may be secrets buried in that mass of documents even more astonishing than a missing Constitutional Amendment.

TITLES OF NOBILITY

In seeking to rule the world and destroy the United States, bankers committed many crimes. Foremost among these crimes were fraud, conversion, and plain old theft. To escape prosecution for their crimes, the bankers did the same thing any career criminal does. They hired and formed alliances with the best lawyers and judges money could buy. These alliances, originally forged in Europe (particularly in Great Britain), spread to the colonies, and later into the newly formed United States of America.

Despite their criminal foundation, these alliances generated wealth, and ultimately, respectability. Like any modern member of organized crime, English bankers and lawyers wanted to be admired as “legitimate businessmen”. As their criminal fortunes grew so did their usefulness, so the British monarchy legitimized these thieves by granting them “titles of nobility”.

Historically, the British peerage system referred to knights as “Squires” and to those who bore the knight’s shields as “Esquires”. As lances, shields, and physical violence gave way to the more civilized means of theft, the pen grew mightier (and more profitable) than the sword, and the clever wielders of those pens (bankers and lawyers) came to hold titles of nobility. The most common title was “Esquire” (used, even today, by some lawyers).

INTERNATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION

In Colonial America, attorneys trained attorneys but most held no “title of nobility” or “honor”. There was no requirement that one be a lawyer to hold the position of district attorney, attorney general, or judge; a citizen’s “counsel of choice” was not restricted to a lawyer; there were no state or national bar associations. The only organization that certified lawyers was the International Bar Association (IBA), chartered by the King of England, headquartered in London, and closely associated with the international banking system.

Lawyers admitted to the IBA received the rank “Esquire” — a “title of nobility”. “Esquire” was the principle title of nobility which the 13th Amendment sought to prohibit from the United States.

Why? Because the loyalty of “Esquire” lawyers was suspect. Bankers and lawyers with an “Esquire” behind their names were agents of the monarchy, members of an organization whose principle purposes were political, not economic, and regarded with the same wariness that some people today reserve for members of the KGB or the CIA.

Article 1, Sect. 9 of the Constitution sought to prohibit the International Bar Association (or any other agency that granted titles of nobility) from operating in America. But the Constitution neglected to specify a penalty, so the prohibition was ignored, and agents of the monarchy continued to infiltrate and influence the government (as in the Jay Treaty and the US Bank charter incidents).

Therefore, a “title of nobility” amendment that specified a penalty (loss of citizenship) was proposed in 1789, and again in 1810. The meaning of the amendment is seen in its intent to prohibit persons having titles of nobility and loyalties to foreign governments and bankers from voting, holding public office, or using their skills to subvert the government.

HONOR

The missing Amendment is referred to as the “title of nobility” Amendment, but the second prohibition against “honour” (honor), may be more significant.

According to David Dodge, Tom Dunn, and Webster’s Dictionary, the archaic definition of “honor” (as used when the 13th Amendment was ratified) meant anyone “obtaining or having an advantage or privilege over another”. A contemporary example of an “honor” granted to only a few Americans is the privilege of being a judge: Lawyers can be judges and exercise the attendant privileges and powers; non-lawyers cannot.

By prohibiting “honors”, the missing Amendment prohibits any advantage or privilege that would grant some citizens an unequal opportunity to achieve or exercise political power. Therefore, the second meaning (intent) of the 13th Amendment was to ensure political equality among all American citizens, by prohibiting anyone, even government officials, from claiming or exercising a special privilege or power (an “honor”) over other citizens.

If this interpretation is correct, “honor” would be the key concept in the 13th Amendment. Why? Because, while “titles of nobility” may no longer apply in today’s political system, the concept of “honor” remains relevant. For example, anyone who had a specific “immunity” from lawsuits which were not afforded to all citizens, would be enjoying a separate privilege, an “honor”, and would therefore forfeit his right to vote or hold public office.

Think of the “immunities” from lawsuits that U.S. judges, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats currently enjoy. As another example, think of all the “special interest” legislation the U.S. government passes: “special interests” are simply euphemisms for “special privileges” (honors).

WHAT IF? (Implications if Restored)

If the missing 13th Amendment were restored, “special interests” and “immunities” might be rendered unconstitutional. The prohibition against “honors” (privileges) would compel the entire government to operate under the same laws as the citizens of this nation. Without their current personal immunities (honors), US judges and I.R.S. agents would be unable to abuse common citizens without fear of legal liability.

If this 13th Amendment were restored, the entire U.S. Government would have to conduct itself according to the same standards of decency, respect, law, and liability as the rest of the nation. If this Amendment and the term “honor” were applied today, U.S. Government’s ability to systematically coerce and abuse the public would be all but eliminated.

Imagine! A government without special privileges or immunities. How could we describe it? It would be … almost like … a government … of the people … by the people … for the people! Imagine: a government … whose members were truly accountable to the public; a government that could not systematically exploit its own people! It’s unheard of … it’s never been done before. Not ever in the entire history of the world…

SIGNIFICANCE OF REMOVAL

To create the present oligarchy (rule by lawyers) which the U.S. now endures, the lawyers first had to remove the 13th “titles of nobility” Amendment that might otherwise have kept them in check. In fact, it was not until after the Civil War and after the disappearance of this 13th Amendment, that American bar associations began to appear and exercise political power.

Since the unlawful deletion of the 13th Amendment, the newly developing bar associations began working diligently to create a system wherein lawyers took on a title of privilege and nobility as “Esquires” and received the “honor” of offices and positions (like district attorney or judge) that only they could hold.

By virtue of these titles, honors, and special privileges, lawyers have assumed political and economic advantages over the majority of U.S. citizens. Through these privileges, they have nearly established a two-tiered citizenship in this nation where a majority may vote, but only a minority (lawyers) may run for political office. This two-tiered citizenship is clearly contrary to Americans’ political interests, the nation’s economic welfare, and the Constitution’s egalitarian spirit.

The significance of this missing 13th Amendment and its deletion from the Constitution is this: Since the amendment was never lawfully nullified, it is still in full force and effect and is the Law of the land. If public support could be awakened, this missing Amendment might provide a legal basis to challenge many existing laws and court decisions previously made by lawyers who were unconstitutionally elected or appointed to their positions of power; it might even mean the removal of lawyers from the current US government system.

AT THE VERY LEAST, THIS MISSING 13TH AMENDMENT DEMONSTRATES THAT TWO CENTURIES AGO, LAWYERS WERE RECOGNIZED AS ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE AND NATION. SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE…

We await the inevitable convulsion. Only two questions remain: Will we fight to revive our rights? Or, Will we meekly submit as our last remaining rights expire, surrendered to the courts, and perhaps to a “new world order”?

Yes, “Imagine! A government without special privileges or immunities. You know, like … a government … of the people … by the people … for the people! Imagine: a government … whose members were truly accountable to the public; a government that could not systematically exploit its own people!

The American people have been systematically enslaved by the foreign owned Federal Reserve Bank and their minions in the U.S. government since the removal of the Thirteenth Amendment after the war of 1812.  It’s interesting that “The United States Bank had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the beginning, but the Federalists (the pro-monarchy party) won out.” 

The Federalists still exist today, they call themselves The Federalist Society and they have provided President Trump with a list of their approved judges.  All of the judges that Trump has installed are Federalist Society judges and the 5 Supreme Court Justices who overturned the 2000 election were Federalists.

The lawyers and bankers illegally running the American government have sold out the American people.  Thomas Jefferson warned the American people of the dangers of a central bank. 

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."


Excerpt:

The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent

 Ronald Reagan used a recession as an excuse to cut spending on social services –– like the safety net that existed since the Great Depression.  At Christmastime 1982, fed-up religious leaders called a press conference.  The Rev. Paul Moore, New York City's Episcopal bishop, was furious. Standing next to Methodist and Catholic bishops, a rabbi and a Muslim, Moore laid into the source of his ire: President Ronald Reagan.

At the time, there were 36,000 homeless people on New York's streets, a scene repeated in cities across the country, including San Francisco. But this new wave of needy was different. Instead of the single men with drinking problems who'd populated the hotels and alleys of South of Market after World War II, there were factory and office workers who had lost their jobs in the recent global recession slumped in doorways next to Vietnam War veterans. There were women, children, families.

During a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1981, his first year in office, the new president — who would use the recession as an excuse to cut taxes and slash government spending to spark growth, the infamous “Reaganomics” — presented a solution to homelessness, an issue seen at the time as a temporary problem that would soon cycle itself away, just as it had several times before.

In classic small-government fashion, Reagan's fix did not involve government. If only “every church and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families” each, the president said, the problem could be weathered until it passed. It was a truly conservative approach, reminiscent of how homelessness was addressed in the 19th century.

And it was “absolute balderdash,” said the Rev. Moore, according to a Dec. 25, 1982 United Press International wire story picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. The responsibility for dealing with homelessness wasn't the church's — it was the state's, the bishop said, just as it had been since the Great Depression.

“Housing the homeless and feeding the hungry is the responsibility of the public sector,” he said. “They should have a permanent policy whereby homeless persons would have a place to live.”  People like then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch needed to stand up to people like Reagan and demand more help. After all, cities received the bulk of the money used for social programs like housing and welfare from the federal government.

“Don't shirk your responsibility,” said Moore, addressing both the president and mayor.  Faced with a glut of poor people huddled on the streets with nowhere to live and nowhere to go — many of them war veterans, others unemployed workers struggling to adapt to a changing labor market that no longer needed their skills — city leaders in Chicago decided to take action…

To better understand why people are experiencing homelessness today and why solutions have been so hard to come by, it's worthwhile to look at what put them thereand why other periods of homelessness in America eventually ended.  Tramps, vagabonds, hobos: whatever you call them, people without stable living situations have appeared in waves several times in American history.

During the Revolutionary War, it was itinerant workers, the “wandering poor” of an agricultural society reliant on worker mobility. Before the Civil War, it was unemployed mill workers, dockworkers, and miners, displaced by business cycles or changes in society caused by the introduction of a rail line or telegraph station.

After the Civil War, when a credit-fueled railroad boom went bust, breaking banks and killing jobs — the “Panic of 1873,” capitalism's first major worldwide economic downturn, known as the “Great Depression” until the bigger Great Depression in the 1930s — it was freed slaves and veterans, whose wartime habits of foraging (or sometimes pillaging) the countryside for food and provisions introduced the words “tramp” and “bum” to the lexicon.

During the Great Depression, with unemployment at 25 percent and large swaths of agricultural land turned to literal dust by a combination of drought and over-farming, as many as 5 percent of Americans were homeless.  Almost always, it was temporary. As soon as the economy recovered, homeless people recovered, too. They went back inside and resumed normal lives. In the meantime, there was a safety net.

For colonial Americans living under English tradition, the community or local parish was responsible for poor residents. In the 19th century, religious and other charitable organizations offered almshouses where lodging and food were available in return for work. During the Great Depression, with one-quarter of cities offering no homeless services, responsibility shifted to the federal government, which provided job training, education, food, and housing.

Thirty-six years after the Rev. Moore called out President Reagan at Christmastime in 1982, there are now more than 60,000 homeless people in New York City.  That's more per capita than any other city in America except San Francisco, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

By the time Reagan took office, HUD was the main federal agency that offered housing and other programs aimed at helping poor and working-class people.  And beginning under Reagan but continuing with the next three presidents, HUD would see its funding reduced. By the time George W. Bush took office, it had been slashed almost 60 percent. 

Reagan — who famously could not recognize Samuel Pierce, his own HUD secretary, and failed to recognize and halt a scandal in which HUD money was funneled to Republican consultants rather than building and repairing low-income-housing — didn't shirk his responsibility.

He abdicated it, a wholesale abandonment that signaled the near-end of the federal government's role in managing homelessness and housing policies, a legacy carried on by every American president since. 

“Homelessness has been a persistent and enduring feature in American history,” wrote retired HUD researcher Walter Leginski in 2007. “While there have been temporary lulls, from colonial times forward there has been no period of American history free of homelessness.”  But unlike in other eras, “the contemporary wave of homelessness has not subsided during good economic times.”

In San Francisco, unemployment stands at a near-record low of 3.1 percent, yet there are officially more than 3,505 people living on the street — more than at any other time over the past 10 years, including during the height of the Great Recession.

(PRIOR TO THE SUBPRIME CRISIS, WHEN 20 PERCENT OF PROPERTIES IN FORECLOSURE WERE RENTAL PROPERTIES, MORE THAN 1 MILLION OF THE COUNTRY'S 2.5 MILLION TO 3.5 MILLION HOMELESS WERE EMPLOYED…

Nationally, in 2015, homeless counts found 222,197 homeless households with at least one child, while the Department of Education reported 1.2 million homeless children in schools. )

The divestment that began under Reagan can help explain why what was once a cyclical phenomenon, in tune with the boom-and-bust of the nation's economy, is now a permanent urban fixture — which, in the years since the subprime meltdown turned swaths of suburbia into ghost towns, has spread out of cities.

Under Reagan, federal spending on subsidized housing — including state-owned public housing, in which the poor and working class can live for a set percentage of what income they have; and housing vouchers, in which the government helps close the gap between the cost of housing and a person's ability to pay — dropped from $26 billion to $8 billion, barely enough to maintain the government's existing stock of public units.

As much a champion of conservatives as he is nemesis and near-Antichrist for liberals, Reagan's influence is seen in every tent encampment in San Francisco.  “Every park bench in America — everywhere a homeless person sleeps — should have Ronald Reagan's name on it,” says Peter Dreier, an urban policy analyst and the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

But Reagan is not solely to blame. Other American presidents are at fault — in fact, everyone who has come since.  As with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, other nations around the world have signed onto international treaties that declare housing a basic human right…

Beginning in the Great Depression, Americans looked to the federal government for that safety net. And for most of the 20th century, federal assistance wasn't only for poor people; it created wealth and gave a foundation for a middle class.  After World War II, eight out of 10 American men were eligible for no-money-down home loans from the Federal Housing Administration under the G.I. Bill.

Forty percent of all mortgages issued in 1946 and 1947 went to veterans. There was clear racial discrimination — white veterans received more housing mortgages than black veterans, who were subjected to racially motivated tactics such as redlining. But if the lasting legacy for veterans of the War on Terror is PTSD, for their grandfathers coming home victorious from Europe and the Pacific, it was a house.

Those unable to purchase their own home could still rely on the government to help house them. Construction of public housing boomed in America following World War II, and was used by working-class individuals and families on their way to the middle class. (Mayor Lee lived in public housing in Seattle; as one of six children raised by a single mother, it's not inconceivable for someone in that situation today to end up homeless.)

Never perfect, public housing has been all but orphaned by the government. Today, there are about 1.2 million units of public housing in the United States, far less than the U.K. and France, where the state owns 11 percent and 16 percent of the total housing stock, respectively.

In 1976, the year Reagan first ran for president, the outgoing administration of President Gerald Ford asked Congress to fund 506,000 new low-income housing units, including 400,000 rent vouchers to pay for privately owned housing in the Section 8 program. That was the high-water mark for federal assistance. Under Reagan, funding for new subsidies dipped below 100,000 units per year…

“If we had provided 500,000 additional low-income units every year since 1976, we would now have about 14 million families living in federally assisted low-income housing,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote in 2002. “But we moved in the opposite direction, and so now there are still more very-low-income renter households with 'worst case' housing needs than there are families living in federally subsidized, low-income housing.”

This is strongly felt in San Francisco, where local government has adapted to the Reagan-inspired federal exit from housing by handing over operation of public housing to nonprofit housing providers…

With the federal government's safety net disappearing, local governments are tasked with filling in the gaps with far fewer resources — and not just for housing. With Reagan-admiring Republicans in Congress, federal money for other infrastructure like transportation has vanished, forcing vital regional resources like BART to turn to local voters to ask for tax increases to fund routine maintenance.

San Francisco police now spend $18.5 million a year responding to over 50,000 911 calls and other demands for service from the public directly related to homelessness. This fall, local politicians — including Supervisor Mark Farrell, a 2019 mayoral hopeful, and state Senate hopeful Supervisor Scott Wiener — will ask voters to approve a law giving police the ability to clear a tent encampment within 24 hours.

Reagan, were he alive, would surely approve. He would definitely recognize the landscape. It's just as he left it.

Reagan is beloved by the Federalist lawyers and bankers who occupy the government.  Many of them served in the Reagan Administration and many Democrats espouse the same Federalist religion that has put America on the brink of collapse.  From Black Agenda Report:

Excerpt:

The Bankers’ “Power Revolution” -- How the Government Got Shackled by Debt
    
There is no reason for the government to borrow trillions from capitalists – except to enrich the financial classes and enforce austerity.  “The government is at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued by its own central bank.”

The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising.

In 2018, the Fed announced plans  to raise rates by 2020 to “normal” levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at the rate of $50 billion monthly, further growing the mountain of federal debt on the market. When the Fed holds government securities, it returns the interest to the government after deducting its costs; but the private buyers of these securities will be pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers’ bill.

In fact it is the interest, not the debt itself, that is the problem with a burgeoning federal debt. The principal just gets rolled over from year to year. But the interest must be paid to PRIVATE BONDHOLDERS annually by the taxpayers and constitutes one of the biggest items in the federal budget.

Currently the Fed’s plans for “quantitative tightening” are on hold; but assuming it follows through with them, projections are that by 2027 U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan every year, and it is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors holding most of the bonds.

Where will this money come from? Crippling taxes, wholesale privatization of public assets, and elimination of social services will not be sufficient to cover the bill.

Bondholder Debt Is Unnecessary

The irony is that the United States does not need to carry a debt to bondholders at all. It has been financially sovereign ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard domestically in 1933. This was recognized by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a 1945 presentation before the American Bar Association titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.”

“The necessity for government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments,” he said, “but it is not true for a national government.” The government was now at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued by its own central bank. It could do this until price inflation indicated a weakened purchasing power of the currency…

The government could be funded without taxes by drawing on credit from its own central bank; and since there was no longer a need for gold to cover the loan, the central bank would not have to borrow. It could just create the money on its books…

The “Power Revolution” — Transferring the “Money Power” to the Banks

Currently the federal government is not allowed to borrow directly from the Fed and is required to have the money in its account before spending it. After the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, Congress could have had the Fed just print money and lend it to the government, cutting the banks out. But Wall Street lobbied for an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, forbidding the Fed to buy bonds directly from the Treasury as it had done in the past.

The Treasury can borrow from itself by transferring money from “intragovernmental accounts” — Social Security and other trust funds that are under the auspices of the Treasury and have a surplus – but these funds do not include the Federal Reserve, which can lend to the government only by buying federal securities from bond dealers…

According to Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, the prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly from its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the behest of those bond dealers that have an exclusive right to purchase directly from the Fed.

A historical review on the website of the New York Federal Reserve quotes Eccles as stating , “I think the real reasons for writing the prohibition into the [Banking Act] … can be traced to certain Government bond dealers who quite naturally had their eyes on business that might be lost to them if direct purchasing were permitted.”

“The prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly from its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the behest of those bond dealers.”

The government was required to sell bonds through Wall Street middlemen, which the Fed could buy only through “open market operations” – purchases on the private bond market. Open market operations are conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which meets behind closed doors and is dominated by private banker interests. The FOMC has no obligation to buy the government’s debt and generally does so only when it serves the purposes of the Fed and the banks…

Feeding Off the Real Economy

That massive Wall Street subsidy was the subject of testimony by Eccles to the House Committee on Banking and Currency on March 3-5, 1947. Patman asked Eccles, “Now, since 1935, in order for the Federal Reserve banks to buy Government bonds, they had to go through a middleman, is that correct?” Eccles replied in the affirmative.

Patman then launched into a prophetic warning , stating, “I am opposed to the United States Government, which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying private bankers for the use of its own money. … I insist it is absolutely wrong for this committee to permit this condition to continue and saddle the taxpayers of this Nation with a burden of debt that they will not be able to liquidate in a hundred years or two hundred years.”

The truth of that statement is painfully evident today, when we have a $22 trillion debt that cannot possibly be repaid. The government just keeps rolling it over and paying the interest to banks and bondholders, feeding the “financialized” economy in which money makes money without producing new goods and services. The financialized economy has become a parasite feeding off the real economy, driving producers and workers further and further into debt…

A Model We Can No Longer Afford

Today, the debt-growth model has reached its limits, as even the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Switzerland, acknowledges. In its June 2016 annual report, the BIS said that debt levels were too high, productivity growth was too low, and the room for policy maneuver was too narrow. “The global economy cannot afford to rely any longer on the debt-fueled growth model that has brought it to the current juncture,” the BIS warned .

But the solutions it proposed would continue the austerity policies long imposed on countries that cannot pay their debts. It prescribed “prudential, fiscal and, above all, structural policies” — “structural readjustment.” That means privatizing public assets, slashing services, and raising taxes, choking off the very productivity needed to pay the nations’ debts. That approach has repeatedly been tried and has failed, as witnessed for example in the devastated economy of Greece…

We need a new model, one designed to serve the needs of the public and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder profits at public expense.

Your damn right we need a new model, one designed to serve the needs of the public and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder profits at public expense.  But unless we restore the Thirteenth Amendment this is what we get, a congress is rife with “special honors” for themselves and their special interests.  From WhoWhatWhy:

Excerpt:

POWERFUL DEMOCRAT LIVES LARGE ON CORPORATE CASH

As the new chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) is being showered with campaign contributions — more than a half million dollars in the first quarter of 2019.

Journalist David Daley, who lives in Neal’s district, reviewed the fundraising and spending reports in a recent column in the Boston Globe (see link below). He found contributions from lobbyists and the corporate interests they work for, like Amazon, GE, Deloitte, Eastman Chemical — and most of those corporations paid no federal taxes last year.

One donor, H&R Block, saw progress on a longtime legislative goal: banning the IRS from providing its own online tax preparation system.

Federal Election Commission filings show that Neal spent over $467,000 in the first quarter, much of it for big-dollar fundraising events at five-star restaurants, at extravagant hotels (including a Ritz-Carlton), and on luxury suites at sporting events and concerts.

Neal is leading the Democrats’ effort to get the Internal Revenue Service to deliver President Donald Trump’s tax returns to him, as required by law. A recent news report also notes that Neal has declined to release his own tax returns.

Speaking of tax returns, who is currently the head of the IRS?

Excerpt:

Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service: Who Is Charles Rettig?

President Donald Trump has chosen a Beverly Hills tax attorney to be the next commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). If confirmed by the Senate, Charles “Chuck” Rettig will face the daunting challenge of implementing the new $1.5 trillion tax law passed by Republicans last year, despite Republican-led measures that since 2010 have cut the IRS budget by $900 million (17%) and reduced its staff by 21,000 (23%).

Rettig will also be responsible for overseeing the ongoing audit of Trump’s tax returns by the IRS’s Global High Wealth Industry Group. Rettig once called scrutiny by the “Wealth Squad,” “the audits from hell that your grandfather warned you about.”

Rettig’s nomination breaks a 20-year precedent of IRS leaders having backgrounds in business or management, but not tax. Rettig would succeed John Koskinen, whose term from December 2013 to November 2017 was marred by false allegations that the agency had singled out conservative-leaning political groups for scrutiny.

While congress parties hardy at big-dollar fund raisers at five-star restaurants and extravagant hotels, how is the average American faring?  From Vox.com 

Excerpt:

America’s anti-poor tax audits, in one infuriating map
A map from ProPublica shows who the taxman really inspects.

You would think that the IRS, in an effort to bring in more money, would focus primarily on auditing wealthy taxpayers. But as ProPublica’s Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger found in an incredible, disturbing piece from late last year, recipients of the earned income tax credit (EITC) — one of the US’s biggest anti-poverty programs, aimed almost exclusively at the working poor — were twice as likely to be audited as people earning $200,000 to $500,000.

Now, to drive home this inequity, Kiel and his colleague Hannah Fresques have released a follow-up report, putting together a map of every county in the US by income tax audit rate. And what they found isn’t surprising, but nonetheless still appalling.

The darker counties on the map have higher audit rates — and if you know a bit about US geography, you’ll notice that the audits tend to spike in areas with large black populations, large Latino populations, or Indian reservations.

The sociologist Kieran Healy has joked that most data visualization maps of the US show one of two things: population density or the percentage of the population that’s black. This is decidedly one of the latter maps, with the notable additions of heavily Latino counties in southern Texas and Indian reservations in South Dakota and Montana.

Indeed, looking at the opposite map — where audits are less common than average — versus a county-by-county map of the share of the population that identifies as white, one notices a certain resemblance:   Percent white in 2010, by county..

Kiel and Fresques are working off of data collected by Kim Bloomquist, a former economist at the IRS, who found, as Kiel and Fresques put it, that “Because more than a third of all audits are of EITC recipients, the number of audits in each county is largely a reflection of how many taxpayers there claimed the credit.” In other words: This is mostly a map of low-income taxpayers, and consequently, in large measure, a map of black, Latino, and Native American taxpayers.

The background context for all this is that the IRS has been gutted, budgetarily, since 2010 through successive cuts to “non-defense discretionary” spending, a big, wonky term that includes everything from tax enforcement to the FBI to environmental enforcement to scientific research. This was a remarkably shortsighted policy decision.

The National Taxpayer Advocate’s office, a watchdog group in the federal government, has estimated that every $1 in budget cuts to the IRS costs the government about $7 in lost revenue, both from increased erroneous payments and from laxer enforcement of fraud.

Indeed, budget cuts have reduced audit rates across the board. But they’ve fallen less for EITC recipients than they have for millionaires or the near-millionaire wealthy, who have more resources to fight audits. Kiel and Eisinger found that while audits for EITC recipients fell 36 percent from 2011 to 2017, audits for people earning more than $10 million fell 52 percent. Audits for people making $200,000 to $5 million fell by more than 70 percent. The budget cuts’ primary effect was to help the rich get off scot-free while low-income people get audited.

One obvious fix for this would be to increase the IRS’s budget so it can take enforcement seriously again. Another would be to instruct the agency to prioritize high earnings with complex capital income above low-income families claiming EITC so they can afford basic necessities. Neither is likely to happen, given who’s in charge of the Senate and the executive branch.

The founding fathers recognized the danger lawyers and bankers posed to the nation.  These fascist monsters have robbed the American treasury blind.  America needs another revolution this time against the Federalists that have illegally seized control of our country.  Restore the Thirteenth Amendment and purge these treacherous heathens from our country.



Sunday, July 14, 2019

If Trump wants to stop the southern invasion fire Bolton/Pompeo/Abrams and stop overthrowing elected governments in South America




"In [civil war-era] Guatemala, Israel, acting on behalf of the Reagan administration, stepped in to supply military equipment, including helicopters and Galil rifles, and training that had been cut off during the previous Carter administration. Israel also supplied [the Guatemalan regime with] computers, software, and other equipment used for surveillance. This was at the height of the genocide, which ultimately left 200,000 dead, including many Mayans." ~ acclaimed author and historian Greg Grandin

They’re back…   The criminal cabal that wreaked havoc in South America during the Reagan Administration really never left.  What Tucker Carlson aptly called Bureaucratic Tape Worms, Bolton, Pompeo and Abrams continued to do their dirty work during the administrations of W. Bush and Barack Obama, sometimes through “Stink Tanks” and sometimes through the State Department.  They are responsible for the throngs of illegal immigrants charging through our borders to escape the U.S.-Israeli backed death squads in throughout South America, particularly where elected leaders have been replaced with CIA installed strongmen.

These criminals should be prosecuted for treason as they really hate America and want to destroy our once great nation in their service to Zionist controlled Israel.  Donald Trump is right to want to stop the flow of the indigenous people of South America but the way to do that is to fire the Bolton/Pompeo/Abrams cabal and let the people of South America be ruled by their elected leaders not the tyrants installed by the Bureaucratic Tape Worms.  Americans need to learn the history of what has been happening in South America since the 1970’s.  From Belen Fernandez in Aljazeera (2013):


Excerpt:

Death by 'security': Israel's services in Latin America

The country has supported repressive governments in the region to suppress indigenous movements and uprisings.

According to a Mexican news article that surfaced in May, the Israeli military will begin training the police force in Mexico's southeastern state of Chiapas, where the predominantly indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army is based.

Yaron Yugman, Israel's defence ministry representative in Mexico, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, is quoted as affirming that "a country's security is fundamental to its growth" and that human rights would be one of the focuses of military instruction.

Of course, "security" and "growth" aren't luxuries usually intended for domestic indigenous groups. A May article in The Electronic Intifada recalls the aftermath of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, which coincided with the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement:

"The Mexican government found itself needing to respond to the dictates of foreign investors, as a famously leaked Chase-Manhattan Bank memo revealed: 'While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy'."

As for the alleged focus on human rights, Israel's expertise in oppressing indigenous populations and squelching dignity happens to be more marketable.  The Israeli embassy in Mexico has reportedly denied military machinations in the southeast, but not even Fox News Latino is convinced:

"The Israeli Embassy's denial of its government working in Chiapas is puzzling, given the long history that Israel's government has of working with Mexico. Since the early 1970s, the Mexican government has purchased airplanes, helicopters, missile boats, small arms and other weapons from either the Israeli army or Israeli military contractors."

Contributions to genocide

Mexico's indigenous Mayans are not the only group to have found themselves on the receiving end of Israel's arsenal.  In an email to me, acclaimed author and historian Greg Grandin outlined a previous episode of such charitable regional intervention:

"In [civil war-era] Guatemala, Israel, acting on behalf of the Reagan administration, stepped in to supply military equipment, including helicopters and Galil rifles, and training that had been cut off during the previous Carter administration. Israel also supplied [the Guatemalan regime with] computers, software, and other equipment used for surveillance. This was at the height of the genocide, which ultimately left 200,000 dead, including many Mayans."

Investigative reporter Jeremy Bigwood, who as a photojournalist covered Latin American civil wars in the 1980s and 1990s, confirmed that the Israelis were "up to their ears in the genocide" in Guatemala. He said the Israelis had supplied the military with Arava STOL planes and armoured personnel carriers, and established an ammunition factory in the city of Coban. Bigwood added: "The Israelis used telephone analysis - similar to what the NSA is now doing - and were able to utterly destroy the Guatemalan urban guerrillas. They assisted in the countryside by mapping out each family farmhouse and identifying the politics of the inhabitants."

A 2012 report entitled Israel's Worldwide Role in Repression by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network notes that Israel's extensive experience in displacing Palestinians enabled the state to assist in the planning and implementation of "scorched earth" policies in both Guatemala and El Salvador.

According to the report, the Guatemalan operations "were combined with 'development poles' - concentrated villages of displaced populations that allowed for greater government control over the popular movement and the repression of any grassroots organising".

Going back further, a 1986 article by the Middle East Research and Information Project quotes a former member of the Knesset foreign affairs committee as defending Israeli involvement in Guatemala: "Israel is a pariah state. When people ask us for something, we cannot afford to ask questions about ideology. The only type of regime that Israel would not aid would be one that is anti-American".

From Palestinian laboratory to 'trail of terror'

One advantage to being forced to comply "[w]hen people ask us for something", obviously, is that sizable profits accompany weapons sales.

As for Israel's alleged pariah-hood, this tragic scenario is seemingly contradicted by Bigwood's 2003 article for Al Jazeera, Israel's Latin American trail of terror, in which he lists countries in the region where Israel has supplied, trained, and advised right-wing groups and regimes: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. So much for lonesomeness.

Ideology's negligible importance is confirmed in Bigwood's article by Israel's support for the Argentine military junta's dirty war of 1976-1983 - which was characterised by mass forced disappearances and torture - despite, as Bigwood notes, the junta's anti-Semitic orientation.

Ideological overlap is, however, seen in the case of Colombia, where President Juan Manuel Santos has not only appeared in a promotional video for an Israeli private security firm but has also announced: "We've even been accused of being the Israelites [sic] of Latin America, which personally makes me feel really proud."

Inside Story - The shift in the global arms trade

Beyond verifying Santos' clunessness, this statement is particularly relevant given that Carlos Castano - the founder of modern Colombian paramilitarism - was trained in Israel and acknowledged copying the paramilitary concept from the Israelis.

Israel's hobby of collective punishment has, it seems, proven especially instructive; although formally disbanded, Colombian paramilitaries continue to terrorise civilian populations, often reportedly in concert with the military - which is itself famous for slaughtering civilians and dressing the corpses up as anti-government guerrillas. A primary goal of this terrorisation is to clear land of indigenous groups, campesinos, and other people whose existence impedes the proper exploitation of resources.

In Chiapas, meanwhile, the indigenous movement has rudely imperiled the flourishing of neoliberalism. The Electronic Intifada article explains: "The Zapatistas took back large tracts of land [from the government] on which they have since built subsistence cooperatives, autonomous schools, collectivised clinics and other democratic community structures."

Enter the Israeli army.

John Collins, chair of the Global Studies Department at New York's St Lawrence University, describes Israeli military collaboration with the Mexican government in Chiapas as "further evidence of how tools of surveillance and repression field-tested on Palestinians are being used throughout the world", quoting Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper's assessment that "[t]he Israeli economy is based on exporting the occupation [of Palestine]".

Although Israel may contend that "a country's security is fundamental to its growth", the fact is that global insecurity is fundamental to Israel's growth.

There is no way to secure our southern border when these murderous thugs are causing the mass migration from the South American countries they are pillaging.  These so-called “Judeo-Christians” murder indigenous people on a massive scale and do not value human life at all.  They seized back control of the United States government in 2000 and will not give up their power easily.  They hate the American people and have become extremely wealthy feeding off the U.S. treasury.  They run a shadow government worth trillions of taxpayer dollars.  These are very dangerous zealots.  From Whitney Webb at Mint Press:

Excerpt:

The Untold Story of Christian Zionism’s Rise to Power in the United States

Well before Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the foreign policy of both nations in service to a religious obsession end times prophecy.

The largest pro-Israel organization in the United States is not composed of Jews, but of Christian evangelicals, with a total membership of 7 million, more than 2 million more members than the entirety of the American Jewish community.

Members of this organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), met in Washington on Monday, attracting thousands of attendees and featuring speeches from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. CUFI’s leader, controversial evangelical preacher John Hagee, has met with President Donald Trump several times and was recently part of an exclusive White House meeting in March on the administration’s upcoming “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine.

CUFI is but one of many organizations throughout American history that have promoted the state of Israel and Zionism on the grounds that a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine is a requirement for the fulfillment of end-times prophecy and necessary for Jesus Christ to return to Earth — an event Christians often refer to as “the Second Coming.”

While organizations like CUFI and its predecessors have long seen the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the later Israeli victory and conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, there is one prophecy that this sect of evangelical Christians believes is the only thing standing between them and the Second Coming.

There are estimated to be more than 20 million of these Christians, often referred to as Christian Zionists, in the United States and they are a key voting bloc and source of political donations for the Republican Party.

As was explored in previous installments of this series, these Christian Zionists, much like religious Zionist extremists in Israel, believe that the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock must be replaced with a Third Jewish Temple in order to usher in the end times…

This alliance, based on a mutual obsession with hastening the coming of the Apocalypse, continues to this day and now, more than at any other time in history, these groups have reached the heights of power in both Israel and the United States…

Yet, this fire-and-brimstone vision of the end times has long been a guide for prominent figures in American history and the American elite, even predating Zionism’s founding as a political movement. Thus, Christian Zionism’s influence on Trump administration policy is merely the latest of a long list of examples where prophecy and politics have mixed in American history, often with world-altering results.

 Puritans, Prophecy and Palestine

Accounts of the role of European and North American Christians in the creation of the state of Israel often begin with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, but the efforts of certain Christian groups in England and the United States to create a Jewish state in Palestine actually date back centuries earlier and significantly predate Zionism’s official founding by Theodore Herzl.

Among the first advocates for the physical immigration of European Jews to Palestine were the Puritans, an offshoot of Christian Protestantism that emerged in the late 16th century and became influential in England and, later, in the American colonies. Influential Puritans devoted considerable interest to the role of Jews in eschatology, or end-times theology, with many — such as John Owen, a 17th-century theologian, member of parliament, and administrator at Oxford — believing that the physical return of Jews to Palestine was necessary for the fulfillment of end-time prophecy.

While the Puritan roots of what would later become known as Christian Zionism are often overlooked in modern accounts of where and why American evangelical support for Israel began, its adherents still clearly acknowledge its legacy. For instance, on Monday at the CUFI conference, Pompeo, himself a Christian Zionist known for his obsession with the end times, told the group the following:

Christian support in America for Zion — for a Jewish homeland — runs back to the early Puritan settlers, and it has endured for centuries. Indeed, our second president [John Adams], a couple years back, said… ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.’

These Puritan beliefs, which persist today and have only grown in popularity, became more entrenched in England and colonial America with time, especially among the monied political class, and led to a variety of interpretations regarding exactly what the Bible says about the end times…

Hagee is the pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, which has an active membership of over 22,000. A charismatic Christian who believes in dispensationalist eschatology and thinks that Christians are biblically required to support Israel, Hagee has long been a major advocate for Israel within evangelical and charismatic Christianity circles and has raised over $80 million for Israel since he first began hosting “A Night to Honor Israel” events in the early 1980s.

In 2006, Hagee sought to create the “Christian AIPAC” and revived a then-defunct organization previously founded in 1975 known as Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, mentioned at the beginning of this installment. Since its re-founding, CUFI has grown exponentially, now counting 7 million members, a figure that exceeds the Jewish population of the United States, which stands at around 5.7 million. Hagee chairs its executive board, which included Jerry Falwell up until Falwell’s death in 2007.

CUFI is exempt from paying U.S. taxes and from publicly disclosing its finances because it is officially registered as a church, though it is often likened to an arm of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and actively promotes and funds illegal West Bank settlements. CUFI also advocates for Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount and the construction of a Third Temple.

Much has been written about CUFI’s influence in the Republican Party, which began under the George W. Bush administration soon after its founding. As journalist Max Blumenthal noted in a 2006 article for The Nation: “Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).”

As a result of these meetings, CUFI aligned itself tightly with the neoconservatives that were well represented in the Bush administration, even appointing neoconservative and Christian Zionist Gary Bauer to its board and naming Bauer the first director of its lobbying arm, the CUFI Action Fund. Bauer is a founding member of the highly controversial and now-defunct neoconservative group, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and has also served on the executive board of the neoconservative group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

CUFI has since won powerful allies and counts neoconservative Elliott Abrams; former CIA director James Woosley; neoconservative archon Bill Kristol; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee; Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence among its staunchest supporters. At a CUFI summit last year, Netanyahu described CUFI as a “vital part of Israel’s national security.”

In addition, CUFI has close ties to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the top donor to President Trump and the entire Republican Party. Adelson even received a special award from Hagee at a 2014 CUFI event. “I’ve never had a greater warm feeling than being honored by Pastor Hagee,” said a beaming Sheldon Adelson at the time.

At the most recent CUFI summit, held on Monday, the Trump administration sent Pence, Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Assistant to the President and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, all of whom spoke at the summit…

While Hagee’s influence and the influence of his organization CUFI are stronger than ever with Trump in the White House, his political clout with the Trump administration is, at least partially, due to the presence of staunch Christian Zionists in two of the top offices in the executive branch: vice president and secretary of state.

Pence and Pompeo push “holy war”

Though several Trump officials spoke at the recent CUFI summit, two stand out — not just for their high-ranking positions but also for their open admissions that their Christian Zionist beliefs guide their policies. These officials are Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

After Trump chose his running mate, Pence’s religious fervor came under media scrutiny, with several outlets noting that he was known to be an ardent Christian Zionist. Pence’s faith gained particular attention owing to his past statements on Israel, which he has often described in prophetic terms…

Though many of the initial concerns about Pence revolved around his likely effects on domestic policy, much of his influence has instead been seen in foreign policy, including the administration’s Middle East policy. His public identification as a Christian Zionist and his speech to the 2017 CUFI summit, the first vice president to ever speak at the annual event, have led some to worry that the Christian Zionist view of prophecy is guiding Pence’s political actions.

Following Pence’s first speech at CUFI, Daniel Hummel, a scholar and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Washington Post:

Christian Zionism has a long history in American politics, but it has never captured the bully pulpit of the White House. Past administrations often used general biblical language in reference to Israel, but never has the evangelical theology of Christian Zionism been so close to the policymaking apparatus of the executive branch… 

Though Mike Pence is the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration who is openly a Christian Zionist, it is Pompeo that is the most overt and open about how his religious beliefs regarding the end times guide his decision-making as head of the U.S. State Department.  

For much of his political career, Pompeo has framed U.S. counterterrorism policy as a “holy war” between Christianity and Islam, which he believes is the earthly equivalent of a cosmic battle between good and evil. In 2017, as CIA director, Pompeo claimed:

Radical Islamic terror [will] continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [and] truly the only solution for our world.”

That same year, Pompeo created a new CIA “mission center” targeting Iran headed by Michael D’Andrea, whose CIA nickname is “The Prince of Darkness.” Pompeo, like many Christian Zionists, believes that war between the United States and Iran is part of the end times, a belief that is outright alarming given his prior control over CIA covert operations and his focus on Iran, as well as his current role as the U.S.’ chief diplomat, in which he has also been laser-focused on promoting an aggressive policy towards Iran.

In addition to his views on “holy war,” Pompeo also frequently discussed his views on the rapture while serving as CIA director. TYT reported last year that Pompeo had spoken about the rapture so frequently that it had reportedly frightened top CIA officials.

According to Michael Weinstein — founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and intelligence community — who was quoted in the TYT report:

He [Pompeo] is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused — they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”

A 2015 video of Pompeo that surfaced while he was CIA director also shows the former congressman describing politics as “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

Sheesh, if the CIA agents are scared shitless of Pompeo what chance do the American people have?  This guy is seriously mentally ill and he’s America’s top diplomat.  Trump needs to dump these people fast, like yesterday.  These are the same people who are terrorizing South American indigenous people who are now storming our southern border.  Trump’s “special envoy” to Venezuela is war criminal and Zionist Elliott Abrams.  From Branko Marcetic at Jacobin Mag.

Excerpt:

The Tragic Life of the War Criminal Elliott Abrams

Elliott Abrams was once an innocent child. And then he decided to spend the rest of his life covering up brutal atrocities and defending right-wing dictatorships.  Elliott Abrams once said the animating force behind his and Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was that the world is “an exceedingly dangerous place.” And this is true, largely because men like Elliott Abrams exist in it.

Last month, Abrams was tapped by Trump to serve as his special envoy to Venezuela, to essentially help steer the Trump administration’s slow-burn effort to topple that country’s government — or as Mike Pompeo put it, “restore democracy” in the country.

It should go without saying that the idea the Trump administration is pursuing regime change in Venezuela for the sake of democracy and human rights is as laughable as calling Jamal Khashoggi’s murder a surprise party gone wrong. But in case you need to explain this to politically confused friends and relatives, here are eight good reasons why the appointment of Abrams, in particular, makes a mockery of any such high-minded rhetoric.

1. He was knee-deep in human rights atrocities

Let’s start with the most obvious point, which is that Abrams’ chief claim to fame is his role in Ronald Reagan’s blood-soaked foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s, for which he earned the nickname, “contra commander-in-chief.” The contras were the brutal right-wing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua who terrorized civilians throughout the decade, cutting a swath of torture, rape, and murder aimed at everyone from the elderly to children.

Their methods were similar to those of right-wing paramilitaries in the other countries of the region, including El Salvador and Guatemala, all of which were supported by the Reagan administration. If you have the stomach to read about them, there’s no shortage of sources that outline their barbarity…

2. He covered up brutal acts of terror

Key to Abrams’ role under Reagan was playing down and denying the copious human rights abuses being committed by the forces and governments he and the administration supported.

As Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar pointed out in her grilling of Abrams earlier this week, part of the Reagan administration’s “fabulous achievement” in El Salvador was the horrific El Mozote massacre, which took place shortly before Abrams took up his post.

In his attempt to convince the Senate to certify that El Salvador’s government was improving its human rights record — a precondition for receiving US aid — Abrams testified that the massacre had been “publicized when the certification comes forward to the committee,” and was “being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” He claimed he had sent military officers to investigate the reports, and that the massacre couldn’t be confirmed.

Another incident was the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed on the orders of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, one of the administration’s partners in the country. “Anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool,” said Abrams. In fact, two such cables existed…

Meanwhile, as Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt embarked on a campaign of genocide in the country, Abrams said he had “brought considerable progress” on human rights. He defended Reagan’s lifting of a military aid embargo on Montt’s government, claiming the slaughter of civilians was “being reduced step by step” and that it was “progress” that had to be “rewarded and encouraged.”

3. He’s an unrepentant liar

Abrams told Omar that it is “always the position of the United States” to protect human rights, including in Venezuela, and he stressed the US didn’t want to arm anti-Maduro forces. Besides his well-documented record of doing exactly the opposite, Abrams’ words are even less relevant when you consider his history of outright lying.

We’ve already seen how Abrams regularly lied to cover up or play down abuses by the right-wing forces he supported. This practice would ultimately land him in trouble when he misled Congress about the Iran-Contra affair with statements that ranged from outright lies (“we’re not in the fund-raising business”), to lawyerly parsing of the truth (“I said no foreign government was helping the contras, because we had not yet received a dime from Brunei,” he would write later)…

4. He hates democracy

Abrams has also shown a lifelong contempt for the very thing he’s now meant to be advancing: democracy.

When the Uruguayan military government imprisoned Wilson Ferreira, the country’s most popular politician and a fierce liberal opponent of its rule, Abrams defended the Reagan administration’s meek response, which the New York Times had called “stunning.” Abrams explained that “the transition [to elected government] itself is more important than the immediate situation of any individual politician.” Abrams had earlier insisted there was no evidence the Uruguyan military was stifling political freedom, even as it closed newspapers, arrested its opposition, and continued to ban political leaders, among other things…

In 2002, Abrams reportedly “gave a nod” to the military coup that attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to remove the democratically elected Hugo Chavez from power. The Observer, which broke the story, called Abrams “the crucial figure around the coup.” Abrams has had his eye on toppling Venezuela’s government for some time.

When Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, Abrams, then the point man for George W. Bush’s Middle East policy, helped implement a scheme to nullify the results by fomenting a Palestinian civil war which, they hoped, would remove Hamas from power. When the plan backfired, with Hamas emerging victorious and in full control of Gaza, Abrams accused Hamas of staging a “coup.”

5. His only political principle was anticommunism

Abrams’ disregard for democracy is part and parcel of his general philosophy, which views left-wing governments uniformly as threats to be stamped out…

In 1984, Abrams quite candidly explained to Policy Review that his human rights policy was one of double standards: fierce opposition to communist rights abusers, and coddling of oppressors friendly to the US…

In other words, no matter how brutal or outright fascist a government, it was by default preferable to a communist one, a philosophy he applied in obvious ways to his work in the Americas. It was also evident in his treatment of Cuba, whose prisons he denounced in 1984 as “barbaric” and whose leader, Fidel Castro, he labeled “oppressive” and accused of “betrayal…”

At literally the same time he was doing this, Abrams publicly defended Turkey, a key regional ally, from criticism of its human rights record. Abrams praised Turkey, which had recently been pilloried in an Amnesty International report for widespread torture of its people, for “extraordinary progress,” charging that “some who criticize Turkey’s human rights situation have no interest in human rights in Turkey or anywhere else,” but “simply use this issue as a weapon with which to attack a vital member of the Western alliance.”

6. He dislikes journalists and accountability

Abrams no doubt sympathized with Turkey’s rulers because he himself had first-hand experience dealing with pesky journalists and human rights groups…

While Abrams didn’t have a police state at his disposal, that didn’t prevent him from lobbing heavy-handed broadsides against reporters he didn’t like. He refused to be questioned by or debate certain journalists he perceived as critical. Most infamously, from 1986 to 1987, Abrams accused left-wing Colombian journalist Patricia Lara of being a “Cuban agent” and “an active liaison” between Colombian terrorist organization M-19 and “the Cuban secret police.” In October 1986, Lara was stopped by New York immigration officials and imprisoned, before being sent back home, without explanation.

Abrams claimed to have “concrete evidence” that Lara was “heavily engaged” with M-19, but when challenged to reveal evidence, claimed it was based on “intelligence information” that he couldn’t reveal. The Colombian Defense Ministry, then battling M-19, categorically denied they had any such information, and assigned her a bodyguard because Abrams’ accusation had put her in danger. The country’s foreign minister said “we don’t know where the US government obtained” such information.

7. He’s a fan of regime change

Like any neoconservative worth his salt, Abrams has an abiding faith in the US government’s ability to simply remove world leaders it dislikes at will. (He’s also continued the neocon tradition of never personally fighting in any war, avoiding Vietnam thanks to a hurt back that happened to clear up once the war was over.)

When Abrams wanted to remove former ally Manuel Noriega from power in Panama, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan wrote, he threatened sanctions, then actually imposed sanctions, then established a Panamanian government-in-exile on a US military base. Abrams finally called outright for the US military to topple Noriega, in an op-ed titled “Noriega Respects Power. Use It,” which is what George H. W. Bush ultimately did. It was a chilling preview of where US policy on Venezuela may now be heading if Maduro stays in power…

In 2013, Abrams told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the US had to get militarily involved in Syria. Why? Because “a display of American lack of will power in Syria will persuade many Iranian officials that while we may say ‘all options are on the table,’ in reality they are not — so Iran can proceed happily and safely toward a nuclear weapon...”

8. He’s beloved by the Right

In case anyone still believes the fiction that “anti-Trump” conservatives actually oppose Trump, Abrams is a living reminder that there’s no daylight between Trump and the establishment Right that pretends to dislike him.

Abrams was once an “anti-Trump” Republican who signed a letter opposing his candidacy in 2016. He tutored Paul Ryan in foreign policy when he was Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate, and served on Marco Rubio’s so-called National Security Advisory Council in 2016. It’s no surprise the Florida senator, long viewed as an establishment-friendly, “sensible” conservative alternative to Trump, is now all but directing Trump’s Latin American policy, sounding virtually indistinguishable from Abrams.

Abrams has now served in every Republican administration since he first entered government bar one. In between, he’s worked at the Heritage Foundation (whose head of Latin American policy just called him “a patriot and dedicated voice for repressed communities”), helped found “anti-Trump” Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century, was a fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government’s arm for foreign political meddling…

That someone like Abrams, who’s now leading Trump’s regime change efforts in Venezuela, is warmly embraced by the coterie of establishment and “never-Trump” conservatives should tell you everything you need to know about these groups.

Yes Elliott Abrams is a Bureaucratic Tapeworm who never really left the body politic and whose specialty is overthrowing democratically elected governments in South America and supplying arms to murder indigenous people.  Don’t for a second believe that the Democratic Party is any different.  Self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden’s presidency would not look any different from that of a Republican.  It was the Obama Administration that overthrew the democratically elected government of Honduras.  From Stephen Zunes at NCR Online:

Excerpt:

The US role in the Honduras coup and subsequent violence

On March 3, Berta Cáceres, a brave and outspoken indigenous Honduran environmental activist and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was gunned down in her hometown of La Esperanza. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director for Amnesty International, noted how "For years, she had been the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment and threats to stop her from defending the rights of indigenous communities."

She is just one of thousands of indigenous activists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, journalists, environmentalists, judges, opposition political candidates, human rights activists, and others murdered since a military coup ousted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya in 2009.

Despite being a wealthy logger and rancher from the centrist Liberal Party, Zelaya had moved his government to the left during his four years in office. During his tenure, he raised the minimum wage and provided free school lunches, milk for young children, pensions for the elderly, and additional scholarships for students. He built new schools, subsidized public transportation, and even distributed energy-saving light bulbs.

None of these were particularly radical moves, but it was nevertheless disturbing to the country’s wealthy economic and military elites. More frightening was that Zelaya had sought to organize an assembly to replace the 1982 constitution written during the waning days of the U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz Garcia.

A non-binding referendum on whether such a constitutional assembly should take place was scheduled the day of the coup, but was cancelled when the military seized power and named Congressional Speaker Roberto Micheletti as president.

Calling for such a referendum is perfectly legal under Article 5 of the 2006 Honduran Civil Participation Act, which allows public functionaries to perform such non-binding public consultations regarding policy measures. Despite claims by the rightist junta and its supporters, Zelaya was not trying to extend his term. That question wasn’t even on the ballot. The Constitutional Assembly would not have likely completed its work before his term had expired anyway. 

The leader of the coup, Honduran General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, was a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training program nicknamed “School of Assassins” for the sizable number of graduates who have engaged in coups, as well as the torture and murder of political opponents…

There is no evidence to suggest that the Obama administration was behind the coup. However, a number of U.S. officials -- most notably then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- played an important role in preventing Zelaya’s return to office and the junta consolidating its power in the face of massive nonviolent protests.

Clinton insisted the day after the coup that "all parties have a responsibility to address the underlying problems that led to yesterday’s events." When asked if her call for "restoring the constitutional order" in Honduras meant returning Zelaya himself, she didn’t say it necessarily would.

State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly evaded reporters' questions as to whether the United States supported Zelaya's return, placing the United States at odds with the Organization of American States, the Rio Group, and the U.N. General Assembly, all of which called for the "immediate and unconditional return" of Zelaya.

U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, reflecting the broad consensus of international observers, sent a cable to Clinton entitled "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," thoroughly documenting that "there is no doubt" that Zelaya’s ouster "constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup."

Similarly, Ann-Marie Slaughter, then serving as director of Policy Planning at the State Department, sent an email to Clinton strongly encouraging her to "take bold action" and to "find that [the] coup was a 'military coup' under U.S. law."

However, Clinton's State Department refused to suspend U.S. aid to Honduras -- as required when a democratically-elected government is ousted in such a manner -- on the grounds that it wasn’t clear that the forcible military-led overthrow actually constituted a coup d'état.

Emails released last year by the State Department also show how Clinton rejected calls by the international community to condemn the coup and used her lobbyist friend Lanny Davis -- who was working for the Honduran chapter of the Business Council of Latin America, which supported the coup -- to open communications with Micheletti, the illegitimate interim ruler installed by the military.

Leaders of Latin American nations, the U.N. General Assembly and other international organizations unambiguously demanded Zelaya’s immediate return to office. However, in her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton admits that she worked to prevent restoring the elected president to office: “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

The elections, held under military rule and marred by violence and media censorship, were hardly free or fair. The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) declared they would not recognize elections held under the de facto government and the Organization of American States drafted a resolution that would have refused to recognize Honduran elections carried out under the dictatorship, but the State Department blocked its adoption.

In the subsequent six years, the horrific repression and skyrocketing murder rate -- now the highest in the world -- has resulted in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing for safety in the United States. Ironically, as Secretary of State, Clinton rejected granting political asylum and supported their deportation.

Clinton’s role in supporting the coup in Honduras is a reminder that the Middle East is not the only part of the world in which she is willing to set aside principles of international law and human rights to advance perceived U.S. economic and strategic interests. Indeed, it may be a troubling indication of the kind of foreign policies she would pursue as president.



So where are we going with all of these wars that the U.S. is waging across the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia?  The Christian Zionists have bankrupted America and these wars for Empire are not sustainable.  From Umair Haque at Eudaimonia and Co


Excerpt:

(Why We Should All Celebrate) The End of American Empire

America Fought a World War Against Social Democracy. It Lost. Will the World be Better For It?

There’s a strange myth Americans are taught, which is also a simple one. It goes like this: having an empire is good for them, and good for the world, too.  It’s not so odd when you think about it. Every empire from Rome to Britain has told itself this myth. Sometimes, it’s even true — in ways. But in America’s case, both parts are false.

One of the conditions necessary for America to make progress again — instead of the grim, bleak, light-speed regress it’s currently making — is to give up on empire.  Let’s take those points one by one, and along the way, I’ll explain what I mean by “American empire” — though I’d bet you already have a hint.

Was American empire good for the world? Let’s think about the long, long list of countries America destabilized, toppled, and destroyed. Chile, Argentina, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua…the list is almost endless.

It’s a myth — and a particularly dangerous one that American empire was some kind of gift to the world. DC insiders and American pundits see America as some kind of benevolent policeman, standing guard over the world, leading its peoples to freedom.

Americans are weaned on the milk of this myth. But ask a Chilean how they feel about Pinochet’s death squads, an Iraqi how they felt about Saddam — and then being bombed to remove Saddam, anyone from southeast Asia about America’s decades long wars against them.

America was never a benevolent guardian of global peace or freedom. In fact, what was happening was this. Much of the rest of the world — almost every single country on my list above, in fact — didn’t want to choose the American path: capitalism, greed, violence, narcissism. It wanted something very different: social democracy.

Why? Because while Americans — at least white ones — might have enjoyed the fruits of global capitalism, it was the rest of the world which paid the price. With its labour, with its raw materials, with endless drudgery. And more crucially, with a lack of human rights, basic freedoms, or democracy. Hence, this rest of the world was much more influenced by European thinkers than American ones. From Marx to Fanon to Adorno. Latin Americans would name their kids Lenin, and Asia saw powerful socialist and unionist movements arise.

America wasn’t giving the world freedom. It was taking it away. The world wanted social democracy. But America wasn’t about to have it. Because American capitalism couldn’t work in isolation. It needed cheap oil, minerals, trees, meat. It needed capital and labour and markets, the more speculative and destabilizing, the better. But this was exactly what the world didn’t want.

Outside America, the fans of extreme, aggressive, predatory capitalism were few and far between. Almost nonexistent, in fact. What other region of the world chose it? Europe didn’t. Canada didn’t. Australia didn’t. But see the point: these were regions of the world that were free to choose — countries too rich, powerful, and altogether white for America to interfere much with. Yet if a country wasn’t any of those things — bang!

I really want you to reflect on this point. Outside America, nearly nobody on earth wanted to be a capitalist society. For good reason: they’d seen the ills firsthand that capitalism brought with it, from pollution to inequality to despair. America wouldn’t see them until the 2010s or so.

So what did America do? Well, it set to work forcing the world to become capitalist societies, anyways. Any way its elites deemed necessary. And if they couldn’t be capitalist ones, then America would settle for authoritarian ones. Hence, dictators like Saddam and Pinochet were installed — at least they were people Americans could “do business” with, aka people who would sell oil and labour cheap.

But this — America installing authoritarianism in country after country, to ensure capitalism’s health — also meant that the world never evolved the way it wanted to. It meant that the world was less free than it should have been. Think about it, if you’re American. If Chileans or Iraqis wanted social democracy — who are you to tell them they can’t have it?

And yet that’s exactly what American institutions did. In hard ways — they made war, with bullets and bombs. In soft ways — they used propaganda and money and disinformation.

Let me come to the point. Over the last century or so, the world has not become as free as it should have been: the net effect of American hegemony is that the growth of global social democracy was stifled and suffocated and strangled. Simply ask the question: if America hadn’t acted like a violent, greedy, bully — how many countries would have been stable social democracies long ago? A long, long list — just the same list above…

Do you see how starkly opposed the myth and the reality are? American empire is seen in America as a moral crusade — “we bring peace and prosperity to the world!” But the world laughs at this kind of naivete — precisely because the reality is that America’s missiles and bombs have brought not just death and despair, but decades of the lack of progress the world should have rightly seen, wanted, and freely chose for itself, over and over again.

Now. If American empire had a steep price for the world — country after country wanted to be a social democracy, but America used force and power to make them capitalist societies, or authoritarian states — what about America? Did America pay a price for empire, too?

Can you already see it coming?...

It’s true — America spent trillions on wars, sacrificed countless lives, wasted its time and energy, its “human capital.” There was a deeper price. Just as America denied the world the chance to progress into social democracy — it never could, either.

Today, America is the world’s first poor rich country. A 15 year old in Bangladesh has a higher chance of living to 50 than an American boy does. Think about that for a second. Isn’t it staggering? But how did it happen? It wasn’t just because America was busy making war on the world. There was a subtler effect happening.

The more that America fought against what the world wanted — social democracy — the less it could ever have it at home. It’s collective mind — its public sphere, its discourse, its ideas, its thinking — all became stunted, polluted, crippled. The basic ideas of social democracy were presumed to be sinful, horrific crimes — in a kind of Soviet way.

Nobody could ever argue for, say, public healthcare, education, retirement — and hope to have a career as an American thinker, academic, intellectual, pundit. But that was only logical. America was fighting a global war against social democracy — though nobody in America could ever even that much — and a society can’t allow itself to argue for the thing its fighting against.

It was only left able to think in terms of violence, in the end. “Which country should we bomb this year, Morning Joe?” “I don’t know, Ezra Klein — maybe Iraq?” “Let’s see what David From and Max Boot think!” “They love the idea!” “Let’s run it by Paul Ryan and the gang!” America’s intellectual class became a cesspit of the world’s most foolish, violent, and clueless men. Men who wouldn’t stand a chance as thinkers in any other country at all. But what do you expect when you’re fighting a war against what the world wants?

In the end, something genuinely bizarre and remarkable happened. Something that history will remember — and shudder — but something we don’t understand yet.

America built the most perfect killing machine ever made. Click, tap, swipe — Wham!! An entire village, town, city goes up in flames. From the comfort of an air-conditioned room, by pressing a button, just by glancing at a screen, the operator could kill literally anyone, anywhere on earth…

But at the same time, Americans didn’t have any of the following. Healthcare. Retirement. Affordable education. Stable incomes. Savings. Community, trust, happiness. Their lives cratered.

The average American lived paycheck to paycheck, couldn’t raise $500 for an emergency, and, shockingly, died in a mountain of debt. He never broke even his whole life long. And yet American economists — Soviet, by now — pronounced that all was well in the empire.

But all wasn’t well. The price of American empire for America was that it could never progress to the stage of social democracy — because that was the very thing it was fighting a world war against. All it could do were violent things, which had precisely no benefit to anyone, really whatsoever. Like building the most perfect killing machine in history. But not hospitals, schools, retirement systems, and so forth.America regressed as a society — because it couldn’t advance.

It grew more and more violent, focused on violence, in love with violence, until at last, authoritarianism arose. The very kind it had installed around the globe. But that wasn’t a surprise, either. Capitalism had to be kept afloat. By any means necessary. If authoritarianism was ok with Americans in Chile, Iraq, Argentina — why wouldn’t it be in America, too, in the end?

We’ve barely begun to understand the price of America empire yet, as a world — or as Americans. But that price has been crippling. It has been ruinous. Shattering. American empire cost the world freedom, development, happiness, peace, maturity — the world chose social democracy, but America prevented it, violently.

It fought a world war against social democracy. But the price for America was that it never became a social democracy, either. It became a more and more predatory, extreme, aggressive capitalist society — what else could it become.

America became the kind of society that built history’s most perfect killing machine. But couldn’t give its own people insulin, an education, healthcare, retirement. And that kind of society, my friends, implodes — just as America’s doing today.

America’s world war against social democracy failed. America lost — not because an enemy defeated it, but because the costs were too steep to ever be borne. And so we should all celebrate — if we are thinking, decent, humane, worldly people — the end of American empire.

President Trump ran for president on a platform of social justice.  President Trump said he was going to end these endless wars that have devastated America.  Yet the very people who are responsible for America’s decline, the Bureaucratic Christian Zionist Tapeworms have hijacked his foreign policy that is the key to Make America Great Again.

The people charging our southern border do not want to leave their beautiful, resource rich home countries, they just want what they voted for, a social democracy.  Regime change begins at home and if Trump want to stop the flood of refugees storming our border, fire the Bureaucratic Christian Zionist Tapeworm Criminal Cabal and restore our Democracy in America.  Bolton/Pompeo/Pence and Elliott Abrams must be fired and tried for treason.  These tapeworms should be excised from the body politic for good.