Dear CJ,
Please accept my apologies for queueing up most postings that have been
coming in. I've been writing to a deadline, and will send out more
general postings soon.
I find Kurt's comments on the NWO article helpful, and will add some
responses of my own below his.
Thank You Kurt,
Richard
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Date: Sat, 5 Aug 1995 00:00:18 -0700
Sender: •••@••.••• (Kurt Guntheroth)
Subject: Re: Democracy & NWO -- Draft 2.0
I was not able to read your entire article. It's vastly longer than I
have time for. (I submit this alone as a defect). However, I will
take issue with the beginning of it.
There is a difference between the actual practice of a free market, and
the clamoring for a "free market"; specifically free of some particular
regulation that hampers the unlimited exploitation of some resource,
some customer, or some loophole in another law.
It is not clear that a functioning free market has ever existed. It is
therefore unclear whether criticism of free markets as destructive or
inhumane can be supported by reference to the historical record.
A free market is a microeconomic ideal. It consists of a multitude of
buyers and sellers great enough to insure maximum total utility and
minimum profit.
A free market is not necessarily a market free of regulation. Indeed a
government role to assure a "level playing field" is essential to a
free market. Otherwise a single entity might dominate a market to the
point of distortion. In this case we have monopoly (oligopoly).
Utility is not maximized and profit is not minimized.
And this is the central issue. Some people preach the free market
because they want the microeconomic ideal (which I believe is
achievable by the way), and some people preach the "free market"
because what they actually want is a market that is free of government
intervention against their schemes to corner the market. Actually
corporations ought to completely hate the idea of a free market,
because the better and more efficiently it operates, the narrower their
profit becomes. A perfect market operates with zero profit.
----
By the way, the body of your article seems to be about the "New World Order"
as if this was a conscious conspiracy with a visible center; a corporation,
a governing body, or a secret society. A great number of people are turned
off by such arguments. Conspiracy theories are the province of streetcorner
lunatics. If your thesis is that there *is* a coordinated conspiracy, your
article is way to lean on evidence. If (as I suspect) the conspiracy in
your article is uncoordinated grasping by many greedy individuals, you need
at the least a humungous disclaimor when you introduce the acronym NWO, or
at best a thorough rewrite to remove that concept from your text.
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Editor:
The article is long for a net posting, but normal for a magazine article,
which it is. I have since tightened it up considerably (trimmed about
1,000 words).
I will expand a bit on my discussion of the free market. A clearer
distinction will be made between laissez-faire, and the more general
free-market concept. As Kurt points out, the microeconomic ideal has
seldom been achieved (I'd say the personal computer marketplace has brought
us some of the best examples of it -- with faster & more powerful growing
increasingly cheaper & smaller -- although monopoly is more and more coming
to the fore as the market matures.)
I'll probably say that free markets inevitably trend toward being
moderated, and that whenever government has taken a _fully_ laissez-faire
approach, the moderation role has historically gravitated toward amoral
monopoly robber-barons. I'll work in "level playing field" -- that's a
very expressive image.
---
As Kurt points out, the "conspiracy" label will need some explicit
discussion -- I hope this doesn't push my word-count up again. I will
_not_ include everything I'm including here...
My firm judgement is that conspiracy is not too strong a word for what
demonstrably exists behind the NWO.
At one level, you have very explicit and not-secret plans of the corporate
community -- these can be studied if you dig up the relevant right-wing
journals, think-tank reports, and the like. These are inadequately
reported by the media, and hence don't enter the public debate. So it is
fair to describe them as an "offline" conspiratorial dialog. These
incontrovertably exist, and they reveal intentions that are contrary to the
public rhetoric of government and corporate spokespeople. Do you call
these a conspiracy or not? I guess it's a matter of definition.
At another level, you really do have secret conspiracies. These by no
means micro-manage the world -- but they tune & perturb "systems" as
necessary.
Here are a few random examples of such conspiracies (out of hundreds that
are fairly well documented):
1) In Stockwell's "In Search of Enemies", we read a first-hand report of
how the war in Angola was being stirred up, funded, and armed by the CIA,
even as Kissinger was testifying before Congress that the CIA was
definitely not involved there.
2) the whole Iran/Contra episode --- plus a whole panapoly of related
escapades that Congress agreed not to discuss -- whether or not you believe
the far-fetched proposition that Reagan himself "didn't know"
3) The overthrow of the democratically elected Allende regime in Chile was
largely encouraged and managed by ITT, and involved an extensive,
multi-year conspiracy between U.S. intelligence and the Chilean military.
4) the now-revealed direct participation of U.S. agents in a decade of
death squad activities in Latin America -- in support of corporate
investors, who wanted left-wing political activism and labor organizers
suppressed
---
One of the most prominent conspiracies going on at this very moment -- of
which we won't know the full extent for a while -- is the U.S. campaign to
stir up a wider war in the Balkans. I'm working on a piece about this.
Here's just one interesting snippet from my research:
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>>From NewsHound, 27 Jun 1995
Subject: US Gen. Sewall in BOSNIA
[CLIPS follow]
Sewall, a 33-year Army veteran, West Point graduate and Rhodes scholar, formerly
worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Gen. Colin Powell. He was involved
in strategic planning during both the invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf
War. He made a point of noting, however, that his job was working with allies
and building coalitions, rather than planning combat.
Sewall said he is advising the Bosniac -- as the Muslims now prefer to be called
-- and Bosnian Croat armies on how to organize into one force under joint
command. He called it ``nonlethal'' work. ``I'm in the game of how do you design
a federation army,'' Sewall said.
The degree of suspicion reflects concern among U.S. allies and at the United
Nations that the Clinton administration may be playing a clandestine military
role as fighting in Bosnia escalates.
Such a scenario would rankle the allies because the United States has no troops
among the 22,000 U.N. peacekeepers on the ground in Bosnia who would be
endangered by a widening conflict. And any active assistance to the Bosnians
would violate United Nations policy.
Already, there are media reports that the administration is looking the other
way as weapons flow into Bosnia from Iran, Turkey and Pakistan. The supplies --
mostly ammunition and small weapons -- are coming via Croatia, which skims off
one-third of the shipments for its own arsenals, according to a Washington Post
report.
Both the Croatian minister of defense, Gojko Susak, and the Bosnia's Muslim vice
president, Ejup Ganic, have inferred that their forces have either been trained
or schooled by Americans, Woodward said.
Woodward, who has just finished a book, ``Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution
After the Cold War,'' said the truth is hard to determine amid the swirl of
military personnel and uniforms in the area.
``There's always been speculation,'' she said. But ``you don't hear about the
things the United States government doesn't want you to hear about.''
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"Motives" are always the key to any conpiracy investigation, although
they're not by themselves proof. But they guide the research. In this
case, the motives seem to be:
-to undermine the U.N. -- in favor of other policing mechanisms
-to get the Slav/Christian-Orthodox bloc to "fight it out" with the
Muslim/Arab bloc -- weakening all those countries and economies to the
real-politik benefit of the "West" (in addition to the lucrative arms
sales)
-to generate public support for establishing the NWO Police
Strike Force
-rkm
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Posted by Richard K. Moore (•••@••.•••) Wexford, Ireland (USA citizen)
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