Greetings,
Finally I’m back in Wexford and almost settled in. As you know, I posted very little while on holiday. Very few of you responded to my comments re/ the meaning of the Obama phenomenon. I didn’t expect agreement, but I hoped for a few rebuttals, at least.
I watched the inauguration speech. Very impressive indeed. The guy has charisma, speaks with reason to the broad audience, and comes across like he means what he says. TV stations all over the world carried the speech live, and based on the coverage I saw on Irish and UK channels, the global response (at least in the West) was very, very positive. Not just America but the whole world feels a relief, and a new hope, under Obama’s eagerly anticipated leadership.
I was asked to be part of a panel this morning on the local radio station, the topic being Obama, his speech, etc. There were three of us, and the other two were quite positive on Obama. My perspective was different, and I’ll summarize briefly the points I made…
(1) Under the Bush regime, certain conditions have been created:
– A phony ‘war on terror’ has been used as an excuse for police-state legislation throughout the West.
– The same excuse has been used to launch imperialist wars for oil & other resources.
– Regulators sat on their hands while elite schemers destabilized the global financial system.
– The government responded with an insane ‘bailout’ that benefits only the perpetrators.
– Governments will end up in deep debt to the perps, in effect owned by them.
(2) Obama is accepting all of this as given, not to be challenged. In fact he personally intervened to encourage the bailout scheme.
(3) The Bush and Obama regimes need to be seen as a pair: the one destroys our world as we knew it, and the other says kind, sympathetic words to us while we ‘take responsibility’ for the consequences..
I was asked to give a closing remark:
Just remember that the same corporate media that sold us Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror, is now fully behind Obama. These media, owned by the corporate and banking elite, have not changed their stripes. We need to ask why they’re so enamored of Obama.
Bob, a recent subscriber to cyberjournal and newslog, continued this theme by sending in some interesting comments regarding a recent newslog posting. That’s below, along with my response. There’s a lot of recent stuff on newslog, you might give it a browse:
Also, please send in your own thoughts and feelings regarding these historic times.
cheers,
rkm
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From: bob
Date: January 21, 2009 8:22:09 PM GMT
Subject: of course it’s our fault;)
From “Inaugural address: Amid banalities, a call for austerity”
As for the deepest financial crisis in the history of American capitalism, no one at the top bears any particular responsibility, at least in Obama’s estimation. “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age,” he declared at the beginning of the speech.
This formulation holds tens of millions of workers facing the loss of their jobs and homes through no fault of their own equally responsible for the present crisis as Wall Street executives and hedge fund managers whose financial parasitism and criminality helped drag their own institutions and the world economy into ruin.
Hello Richard,
You bring up a very good (and I wish more would realize it) point.
Once again, its problem, reaction, solution, just repackaged.
Our new president, is telling everyone, that because of these problems, that we didn’t cause, they just happened (I guess), we have to be part of the solution. Which he and Rham Emanuel have been hinting and talking about for quite some time. We the people now have an obligation to our country to volunteer (mandatorily) to fix these problems. It appears it’s our fault for sitting back all this time.
There’s one very simple thing Obama could do to solve this financial mess, and we would be on to the road to a healthy economy. It’s what Jefferson, Andrew Jackson did, and what Ron Paul says we need to do…close down the Federal Reserve. Of course the chances of that happening are…wait, is that a pig flying? Nope!
Have you seen the youtube video of Rahm Emanuel, from a few months ago, telling an interviewer,that all young people (18-25) will have to volunteer for civil defense training?
And he also states, that this training will be “a real patriot act.”
The other youtube video is of Obama in Colorado, during the campaign saying to an applauding audience, that he’s going to create a civil defense organization that’s as big and as well funded as our milatry (I sometimes misspell words on purpose, I feel why give eschalon another email to read;)
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Here’s an open question to you, and maybe you could pose it to others. Obama is presented as a good guy. And a good guy wouldn’t do bad things, unless he was forced to because of circumstances. We all know things are going to change for the worse here in this country, and they’re going to happen in a very short time.
The question is, what do you think the circumstances will be that will force Obama to start doing the NWO thing, with the people following right behind him?
Bob
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Hi Bob,
Thanks for your comments and questions.
As regards the videos, I’d appreciate some working URLs, preferably with download capability. If I’m not mistaken, that Obama speech didn’t make it to his website.
Yes, you’ve put your finger on the classic, time-tested formula for pursuing elite agendas: problem, reaction, solution… prepackaged. You want to have a big, profitable war? First fund the Nazi movement, invest in rearming Germany, and then ‘discover’ at the end that Hitler needs to be stopped. Voila! Works like a charm. Who can protest a ‘solution’ once the ‘problem’ has been artfully created? And of course it’s always an ’emergency’, so any discussion of alternate solutions, to the one proposed by elites, would ‘take to long’. And so off we go, to wars, to Patriot Acts, to bailouts, etc. All of our wars have had their ‘suspicious problem‘, ie, Battleship Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Tonkin Gulf, Twin Towers, etc.
“Some of the biggest men in the United States are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere, so organised, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it”–President Woodrow Wilson
You focus right away on the Federal Reserve, and I share that perspective. It too was created with the classic formula: a contrived run on banks, a lying promise of stability, and voila we’ve got a Central Bank (The Fed) which (the best of) the Founding Fathers fought so hard to prevent. This secretive, private, for-profit corporation controls the health of the American economy. The financial elites who own the Fed, and their financial cronies, benefit from speculation cycles, from bubbles, from growth, and from depressions as well. Like a bicycle pump, it doesn’t matter whether the economy is going up or down. In either case, most of the wealth goes in just one direction – into the pockets of the financial elites.
The Fed actively encouraged all those sub-prime loans, sending out letters to banks recommending that they violate their normal lending rules. In collusion with this, crony Wall Street firms created all the ‘toxic instruments’, made toxic by the sub-prime loans. In collusion with this, the regulators ‘saw no evil’. The Fed is culpable in the collapse, and that is more than sufficient grounds to bring it into receivership.
But as you say, pigs don’t fly. Over the years the Fed’s owners, and their cronies, have leveraged their financial power so that they now control the major media, the major political parties, and the current and being-groomed star politicians. The same kind of process has been going on in Europe, which is why the whole West implemented similar bailout schemes. The loyalty of political elites has been co-opted by financial elites. This is not a new thing, but it has seldom in the past been quite so blatantly obvious.
Western economies were already stretched prior to the collapse, therefore all these billions and trillions in bailouts go into the deficit column. China won’t be buying all this debt, so in the end it will be borrowed from the same financial elites that are getting the bailouts! We’re borrowing from Peter to pay Peter, but we still owe Peter the balance. Such a racket, such chutzpa! Already the central banks in the US and UK are hinting that they will begin ‘simply printing money’ so they can loan it to governments. This may or may not lead to hyper-inflation (wheelbarrows of cash for a loaf of bread), but it surely leads to Western governments being owned by the financial elites, in the same way much of the global South is owned by the IMF.
With astronomical national debts, caused by the bailouts, budgets will be encumbered by dramatically higher debt repayments. If you thought national budgets were tight before, hand onto your hats. More loans will be required to enable minimal government functioning. Financial elites can set whatever terms they like. The alternative is societal collapse. They’ve re-created the IMF scenario in the West, and the IMF ‘restructuring programs’ have been insanely draconian. Privatization of everything under the sun, end of entitlements, medical care, worker’s rights, etc. Perhaps in the West they’ll be a bit softer, but note that Obama is preparing us for tough times ahead. We are to ‘take responsibility’ for the austerity that is is to be imposed. He is accepting that we are at the mercy of the financial elites; he helped bring that about. No wonder they like him.
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Thanks for your question, “…what do you think the circumstances will be that will force Obama to start doing the NWO thing, with the people following right behind him?”
First of all, we need to explain why we see a new world order as being ‘in the works’. Let’s start with a quote from one of these elite bankers, and there are many similar quotes from others:
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
– David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 6-11-6
Next we might consider the recent decades of the globalization project, which has undermined national sovereignty and viability, and has established powerful global institutions (IMF et al) with no pretense of democratic process, directly under the control of financial and corporate elites.
And then, with the illegal US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and to some extent Pakistan, precedents have been established which further abandon national sovereignty and all previously agreed notions of international law (Geneva Conventions, no preemptive wars, etc.).
Meanwhile the UN (under pressure largely from the US) has moved beyond peace-keeping and is now effectively a partisan in imperialist actions. The US has also been pushing for a stronger Secretary General role, reducing whatever level of democratic representation might still exist in the UN.
These are all concrete steps toward an elite-controlled world government, a goal that elites have been, by their own admission, pursuing for some time. Right-wingers are more aware of this than the rest of us, but they always assume the goal is a socialist or communist world government. Heaven knows where they get that idea. Feudalism more likely. But their videos and analysis of the one-world project are quite useful, eg The Money Masters (online, avail via google).
The engineered financial collapse, together with the charisma of Obama, provide the perfect conditions for finalizing the world-government project. The collapse (which is only beginning to unfold) provides the problem, and world government provides the solution. In their desperation, the people will welcome anything that promises relief. Same old formula. It’s the 1913 Federal Reserve scenario re-created on a global scale. You want financial stability? Then we need a global Central Bank. And it’s an emergency, sign here right now without reading the fine print. And once you have a global Central Bank, the global central government follows without much effort…
“The control of money and credit strikes at the very heart of national sovereignty.”
— A.W. Clausen, President of Bank of America, in a response to the suggestion of a global central bank. [Clausen later became the President ofthe World Bank].
“Once a nation parts with control of its currency and credit, it matters notwho makes that nation’s laws.”
— W.L. Mackenzie King, [former Prime Minister of Canada].
Obama has been launched on the world stage, acclaimed by the global media as the leader we have all been waiting for. He has been able to sell us on the inevitability of the bailout agenda and of forthcoming austerity, and he says he’ll be changing the rules, taking bold new decisions, leaving behind partisanship, ideology, and child-like ways. He’s clearly setting the stage for radical moves of one kind or another.
If this is not the final push for a world government, then when will the push come? What better conditions could possibly exist, and we know who has created these present conditions – including the red-carpet treatment Obama has received in the elite media at every step in his campaign, and including the fast-track that was prepared for him into the world of national politics. His talent, his ability to inspire, was recognized. He’s been boosted into his position. He is not going to cross his handlers, and he has shown no signs of doing so, despite campaign rhetoric.
They say power corrupts, but I think the more active ingredient is rationalization, rather than outright corruption. Obama believes sincerely in people taking responsibility for their lives, as shown by his early activism. In some sense he is pursuing his true principles, but he’s doing it within an abhorrent context. It is not hard to rationalize, with power and prestige as a prize, that one is ‘doing the best under the circumstances’. And as a professional leader, one understands that agendas must be sold as persuasively as possible, and certainly not by revealing what the eventual outcomes will be.
rkm
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