Between Da Protests (2020) by KRS-One

24 Thu Dec 2020

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Fascism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Racism, Anti-Totalitarianism, Anti-War, Civic Engagement (Activism), History of Hip Hop, Memoirs, Music, Police State

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Animal spirits (Keynes), Council On Foreign Relations, Donald John Trump (b. 1946), Dr. David Rockefeller (1915-2017), JP Morgan (1837-1913), KRS-One, Lawrence "Kris" Parker (b. 1965), Lord John Maynard Keynes 1st Baron Keynes CB FBA (1883–1946), Morganization, Sean Justin Penn (b. 1960), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

“There’s no justice in the courts. We are always taking shorts. They can shoot us like a sport. And it’s our trust that they want? Don’t fall for it…”

LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Happy holidays from KRS-One! The legendary MC has dropped a new album on YouTube, which we can all enjoy for free! And this is a good thing because we’re all too broke to buy anything, anyway, especially since the police state response to the COVID-19 outbreak gratuitously drove our economy off of a cliff. Thanks to my brother, Ramon David, for updating me on this exciting piece of news. It seems Kris just posted the full album a few days ago.

When Boogie Down Productions released their new video for “My Philosophy”, many of us thought that was the coolest hip hop video we’d ever seen. And “My Philosophy” was the coolest rap song many of us had ever heard. It simply blew our minds. It was easily my favorite track of the year—1988. The song and the groove is just so fonky that even the most repressed spirit will be liberated by it, and get loose and get free. For me, KRS-One was one of the few MCs I knew of, who somehow made a ton of sense philosophically, politically, and spiritually, despite being so hard. I thought Chuck D was hard, too. But, perhaps, I could relate more to KRS-One’s humanism versus Chuck’s black nationalism. Somehow, KRS-One was hard without straying into villainy, not that Chuck D, Paris, et al. did. Don’t get me wrong; I’m always gonna be a fan of MC Ren, MC Eiht, even MCs like Brotha Lynch Hung.

But KRS-One taught me, as a young teen, how to poise myself with strength within a culture of “soft violence” without eroding my humanity, without becoming callous. I was always a fan of the Native Tongues tribe. [1]

I’m borrowing that term—“soft violence”—from a Sean Penn interview I read once, where he described his Californian upbringing in Southern California, navigating the suburban streets, at times with his fists. Skateboard kids would invade empty backyards with empty swimming pools to skate. Turf tensions ensued, not unlike Kubrick’s simian watering hole in 2001‘s “Dawn of Man”. Only, instead of a sun-bleached bone hurling in space morphing into a space ship, it’d be a banana board being hurled by victorious teenaged purveyors of “soft violence” in the suburbs celebrating the conquest of their skating bowl. It would seem the Hobbesian pursuit of self-interest, of “war of all against all“, is the same where ever you go. Sean Penn’s descriptions reminded me a lot of my Californian upbringing in Northern California.

I’ll play the nine and you play the target
You all know my name; so I guess I’ll just start it
Or should I say start this, ‘cos teaching I’m the artist
Styles and new concepts at their hardest
Yo, ‘cos I’m a teacher; and Scott is a scholar
It ain’t about money ‘cos we all make dollars
That’s why I walk with my head up
When I hear whack rhymes, I get fed up
Rap is like a set-up, a lot of games
A lot of suckers with colorful names
I’m so-and-so; I’m this, I’m that
Huh, but they all just wick-wick-whack
I’m not white or red or black, I’m brown
From the Boogie Down…

Naturally, I memorized every single word of “My Philosophy” when I first heard it back in 1988. Rapping was fun as fuck, especially freestyling. It still is, if you still got it. (Of my rapping classmates in ’88, I remember Ayodele, Andre, Panch, Juan G., et al. Pam the Funkstress, of The Coup fame, could be found around the King Center in my hometown of San Mateo. So, we were hip to The Coup early on. We also had Totally Insane in East Palo Alto, R.B.L. Posse in San Francisco, Too $hort in Oakland, E-40 in Vallejo, we had Paris and Guerilla Funk, all kind of Bay Area hip hop, later Hieroglyphics, et al…) But “My Philosophy” was so infectious. And it all made so much sense. It just felt correct. KRS-One was the shit. And, guess what; he is back. Happy Holidays from KRS-One. Here is a brand new album, free of charge, a gift to America and the world.

I don’t battle young rappers, that’s child abuse.

Whooooo! Blastmaster KRS is back with straight fire. It’s like the second coming, or the second Return of the Boom Bap. 2020 wouldn’t be complete without KRS-One dropping some real talk in the year that Black Lives Matter founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, collectively made the TIME 2020 100 list of the 100 most influential people of the year.

Indeed. Without question, Black Lives Matter, as a protest movement is today one of the most important movements for the advancement of true, participatory democracy, not just for demanding justice for fascist policing, extrajudicial killing with impunity, and police terrorism, which perpetually results in the gunning down of black and brown. But it’s what happens Between Da Protests that matters.

Blastmaster KRS-One blasts liberals and the new crop of people of color joining the Republican Party on “Don’t Fall For It”. “Reps and Dems are the same,” he blasts. And he corrects our naivete, “America ain’t really sick; this is what it is.” Echoing the sentiments of Run The Jewels about the extent of liberal anger amounting to a Twitter rant, then back to the status quo. KRS-One raps, “Do not tell me what you’re gonna do; I see what you did…” Indeed. Actions speak louder than words. The best indication of future behavior is past behavior. Even some of my own childhood friends from San Mateo, who I thought would be eternally “conscious” have fallen for the political theater of Trump and Pelosi. They can’t see that it’s a two-party dictatorship, like Ralph Nader has been saying for decades. And some act like know-it-alls because there is no dialogue, no dialectic. Only opinions and minions. This is not democracy. This is not even politics anymore, as Dr. Peter Dale Scott has argued. When democracies fail, politics fails. Politics devolves into culture wars. When even culture wars fail, we’re done. There will only be the abuse of institutional power from above. As Alexa O’ Brien warned us during the Occupy Wall Street days: The culture wars are over. Everyone lost.

That’s electoral politics. But as long as we have truth-tellers, like Alexa O’ Brien and KRS-One, around, humanity still has a chance of overpowering these dark, corporate forces, who dare to challenge the power of our mighty ship of state, as one historic voice once said.

“I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 10: 1 May 1816 to 18 January 1817

But this “aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare” to “challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country”, has not stopped trying to wrest political power from the state since then. At a certain point, the most powerful industrialists of the late Victorian age, the tuxedoed, top-hat-wearing, so-called robber barons of America, turned against the state, as author Susan Berfield noted on Letters and Politics, discussing her book, The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism. She pointed out how industrialists, the capitalists, such as J.P. Morgan, didn’t mind the state, when it worked in their interest. But such powerful men have rarely had any patience with the democratic process.

But when Roosevelt tried to make the government function as a sincere representative of the people, the capitalists, decided they had to respond by developing an anti-statist philosophy, which seeks to undermine the state in order to supplant representative democratic power with their own oligarchic rule. Since the beginning of the nation, the USA, has always had a tension between the state and the most powerful entities, such as large corporations, or royal charters, and later industrialists, later Wall Street and Silicon Valley. When the USA first began, we had wilderness and mud. The men, who got shit done, unfortunately, were hard men. Like the movie, There Will Be Blood. Sometimes things require grit. But we, being the flawed human beings that we are, tend to overshoot. It’s hard to put the lion back in the cage, once you let him out. It’s difficult to cage the animal spirits. I think of my own father; and what he had to overcome to provide his family with a better life than he had been provided. I think of my own experience. I think of my kids. Life is hard.

Big enough to bail out the US, buy in a President & build the first billion dollar company. Meet JP Morgan.
https://www.history.co.uk/biographies/j-p-morgan, accessed 24 DEC 2020

Our young nation’s infrastructure could not have been advanced by the state at that time, during the late Victorian Age, at least not with their resources, not with their aristocratic economic ideas. So, the railroads and the oil mines were built, basically, by gangsters, who ended up forming cartels. Let’s face it. That’s what monopolistic competition is. When you have a few players controlling an industry, you have a cartel. They can fix prices and fix everything through collusion. In fact, it was J.P. Morgan, who first got the bright idea of forming the original American cartel. He said to the other tycoons of his day, let’s not fight amongst ourselves. We’ll be more successful if we stick together and rig the system in our favor. So, they did. The idea also occurred to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, aka El Jefe de Jefes (“The Boss of Bosses”), a convicted drug lord. Gallardo was one of the founders of the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1970s. At its height, the Cartel controlled much of the drug trafficking in Mexico and the corridors along the Mexico–United States border.

But, in the Late Victorian Age, we had the JP Morgan Cartel. But instead of shame and disgrace, it was showered with praise and political power, despite causing harm to society. Cartels, which seem to be an inevitable result of capitalist modes of production, always cause harm to society. “The process of creating a monopoly through the elimination of competition and the maximisation of profits by slashing the workforce and reducing their wages is named after JP Morgan.” It’s called Morganization.

cf., https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/jpmorgan-admitted-to-gentlemen-s-agreement-behind-alleged-cartel-20200213-p540g2

cf., https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/jpmorgan-took-a-bet-each-way-on-cartel-accusation-court-told-20200720-p55dpa

In fact, President Roosevelt was the first American president to stand up to the power of corporations and cartels. Our nation was never intended to be a sincere democracy. Aristocrats founded America. And they always intended to maintain power, to bridle the unruly masses. The people were considered illiterate and irrelevant by the American ruling class, the aristocracy, what Dr. Peter Phillips calls The Global Power Elite. When Alexis de Tocqueville travelled through America in the 1830s, he was skeptical that Americans would be able to keep their democracy together because of their illiteracy and hedonism coming out of the American Revolution as uneducated peasants. As Benjamin Franklin soberly stated in 1787. “There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.”

At- the time of de Tocqueville’s visit, political parties in America were undergoing great change as old ones died out and new ones emerged. The most significant development was the birth of the Democratic Party under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, elected president in 1828.

De Tocqueville observed a “constant agitation of parties,” each attempting to draw voters over to its side. In his notes he wrote that a party candidate “. . . must haunt the taverns, drink and argue with the mob; that is what is called Electioneering in America.”

De Tocqueville leveled some of his sharpest criticism against American political leaders themselves. He became convinced that outstanding men avoided elected office in order to pursue their private ambitions and careers. Those who did seek public office, he believed, were often poorly educated and open to corruption.

In one of his notebooks, de Tocqueville ridiculed Congressman Davy Crockett as a man “…who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent his time hunting, selling his game for a living, and spending his whole life in the woods.”

But instead of work to educate the American peasants or increase literacy, American mythology romanticized Davey Crockett’s outdoorsman spirit. After the Cuban Revolution, one of the first things the Cuban leaders did was send teachers out into the countryside to teach the peasants how to read. What did the American aristocratic leaders do after the American Revolution, in terms of leadership of the peasantry? Reinforce racism and slavery?

The American Revolution was, in its time, a radical event. Never before had a colonial people, who lived on what was then viewed as the fringe of the civilized world, risen up and thrown off an imperial power. Not only did the Revolution dispose of the King and parliament, it established a new government whose founding document, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, proclaimed universal human equality and the right to revolution when any government fails in its duty to protect basic rights.

It established a written constitution which asserted that the people are the ultimate repository of power. And it established a Bill of Rights, much under attack these days, that guaranteed basic democratic rights—the freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly; the right to be secure from government searches; the prohibition of torture. A republican revolution, it shattered the aristocratic principle, feudal economic structures such as primogeniture and entail, and drove out of the colonies the courtiers, King’s favorites and Loyalists, and in this way was a revolution “not just over home rule, but who would rule at home,” as one historian put it long ago.

The American Revolution made incarnate the thought of the Enlightenment, the period of intellectual rebirth that undermined the divinely sanctioned feudal order of the Middle Ages, and that grew in tandem with the incipient capitalist economy. Just as scientists—natural philosophers as they were then called—such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton challenged the feudal-religious conception of the natural world, so Enlightenment political philosophers began to raise questions about the political world—but not the social, which was only dimly understood prior to Marx. Why did kings rule? What was the purpose of government? What were the rights of man? Ultimately, in answer to these questions, the Enlightenment established that there existed natural rights—that is, rights that preceded government, or that exist in a state of nature.

WSWS, November 2019

The American Revolution may have celebrated Enlightenment ideals. The so-called Founding Fathers may have pondered upon the rights of man, but they didn’t give a damn about the rights of slaves. Perhaps, Thomas Paine stands alone among that bunch of revolutionaries as the only one enlightened enough to not only be pro-democracy, anti-monarchy, but also anti-slavery. It’s true the social world was “only dimly understood prior to Marx”. But “Marx, like generations of socialists, saw the particularly capitalist character of the New World’s slavery — and the inextricable link between the emancipation of the enslaved and the liberation of the entire working class.” Our so-called Founding Fathers clearly did not. Those aristocrats never wanted to see the link. And they didn’t want the peasantry to see the link, either. If they did, they would have launched a literacy campaign, like the Cubans did after their revolution.

3-Count Felon, JPMorgan Chase, Caught Laundering More Dirty Money

Meanwhile, back to the future, JPMorgan still doing dirt…

Before Theodore Roosevelt began questioning the status quo, American presidents thought Morganization was a great thing. They saw prosperity spreading into the hinterlands via the railroads, the internet of the day. And they thought the capitalist cartels were the bees knees. They couldn’t foresee what George Orwell or Hannah Arendt or Naomi Wolff or Peter Dale Scott would foresee. The interesting thing is how Dr. Peter Dale Scott shows us how those robber barons, those aristocrats, have lorded over our society. For example, David Rockefeller is famous for being a successful American banker at Chase. But few know Rockefeller was also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Very few even know what the Council on Foreign Relations even is, or why it matters to them. And even less is known about Rockefeller’s military background, which, includes military intelligence, “setting up political and economic intelligence units” in North Africa and France (he was fluent in French) during World War II, and “assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Paris. During this period, he called on family contacts and Standard Oil executives for assistance.” Fast forward to Trump, “Take the oil! Take the oil! Take the oil!”, before a rabid crowd foaming at the mouth. Not much has changed.

This is what happens Between Da Protests.

When it comes to the industrialists or robber barons, younger people will be more aware of the monopoly guy, than say David Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan. The real, historical American abusers of power are obfuscated and replaced with a benign caricature—“Rich Uncle Penny Bags“, the friendly banker, who showers you with cash, simply for passing “Go”, not unlike what is happening today. Heterodox economics has had an impact on neoclassical economics because the way that the monetary system truly works can no longer be denied. Neoclassical economists and conservative types have long argued that public spending for public good or public purpose would be inflationary. Modern Money Theory, or Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown how our money system actually works. And it has been proven true, as the government has created tons of bailout cash without the feared inflation. But the wealthiest got millions and billions, as the bottom got hundreds or thousands. Inequality, it seems, must always be preserved.

#MMT cash relief crumbs are being thrown out the windows of their leer jets as they fly over COVID-infected America to their gated green zones in the Calabasas mountains and whatnot. Those with the least get the least, for some reason. They get those measly checks. They are what rich people think is a lot of money to poor people. Wow! Look! Here’s $600! Those with a little more, get a little more. For example, if you own a small business, the CARES Act is providing paycheck protection. So, the comfortable middle class, especially those with small business and a few workers are happy with the bailout. It seems to be working for them. They don’t see what all the fuss is with over there in the poorer communities, in the ghettoes. Right-wing radio will tell them it’s their own fault for their own personal decisions. Then, when you get to the level of university courses, you learn about sociology and economics and stuff like that; and you realize the world is much more complex than we imagined. But, for some, simple schemas simplify things, but at unfortunate costs.

And what political theater we are witnessing, aren’t we? The absurdity is appalling. The news headline Friday was: Trump demands an increase to Pelosi’s measly $600 cash relief to $2,000. But what nobody was saying—not even top Dems, only low level Dems—was that the Republican Party had their chance to weigh in on the size of the proposed covid-lockdown-economic-crash cash relief checks. And Mitch McConnell blocked Dems at every turn. Yet, now, the headline is the Republicans will save the day? No. If Trump or Pelosi or AOC or the Republican Party or the Democrat Party or any of them cared about the American people, they would pass Medicare For All.

KRS-One says, “Don’t Fall For It”…

“The whole system’s a set-up!” “We’ve been about this revolution from the time we met up… Malcolm X in ’88… You are great. They are fake. Now, it’s time to demonstrate. Higher level mental states, conscious people congregate, show the love, not the hate. This is basic, no debate…“

When Boogie Down Productions released their new video for “My Philosophy, many of us thought that was the coolest hip hop video we had ever seen. And “My Philosophy” was the coolest rap song many of us had ever heard. It simply blew our minds. The song and the groove is just so funky that even the most repressed spirit will be liberated and get loose and get free. KRS-One was the hardest MC I knew, KRS-One taught me how to poise myself with strength within a culture of “soft violence” without eroding my humanity, without becoming callous. I grew up in a culture of “soft violence”, not unlike the suburban memories of actor Sean Penn, who described growing up in California and having to learn how to defend yourself in the streets with your fists. When I was a kid, fistfights were inevitable sometimes. And most kids formed little cliques, even in suburban neighborhoods. Everybody tried to act all hard back then.

I remember one rather epic conflagration in an alleyway across the street from the McDonald’s on El Camino Real & Barneson Avenue in San Mateo, down the street from Borel Middle School. Two of the most popular kids in school had agreed to a fistfight afterschool. This must have been 1988. Many of my friends wore African medallions made of leather and, sometimes, rope chains of gold. We all wanted fat gold chains, especially rope chains, just like Eric B & Rakim. I think even Italians in Jersey and whatnot were rockin’ the style. I was so spoiled that my parents bought me a gold rope chain, working-class thickness, though. Let’s just say rope chains were in. But so were the African medallions inspired by the conscious rap music and culture of the time. Also in style, were the preppy fashions of Gotcha shorts, Swatch watches, Billabong gear, Sperry’s boating shoes, and other preppy trappings. Admittedly, that was basically my attire in sixth grade at Borel. (Then, I gradually became cholo-ized, perhaps. Lol.)

But back to our narrative, my peers were sly enough to organize this afterschool fight between two of the most popular kids in school without any adults finding out. One was black. The other was white.

The San Mateo McDonald’s on El Camino Real would usually be jam-packed with afterschool kids on a regular afternoon. On this particular day, it was packed. McDonald’s could barely handle all the business. Unsupervised after-school kids were bouncin’ off the walls, getting their fill of cheeseburgers and fries before the big fight. It’s something that virtually the entire school knew this fight would happen, but not one kid told one adult. The fight actually went a few rounds. Both fighters fought valiantly and ferociously, although the white kid was taller. The fight took place in an alleyway across the street. A huge flash mob of kids encircled and concealed the teenaged gladiators before they engaged in several rounds of fisticuffs and before cops drove by and dispersed us kids.

That was 1988. Racial tensions simmered under the surface of waning 1980s materialism and naïve American giddiness. The following year, Spike Lee would release the historically-significant film, Do The Right Thing, in which the microcosm of one New York City neighborhood encapsulated America’s extant white supremacist illness with all of its attendant anxieties. The giddy ’80s were ending and neoliberalism was gnashing its teeth. Americans, those illiterate, unruly masses, were starting to find out about the cruelties of capitalist modes of production again, especially at the global scale. The 1960s Baby Boomer generation clearly read too many books because they were starting to reject war for profit, even reject capitalism altogether. So, the 1970s right-wing economic backlash to the earlier Keynesian policies, which helped America out of the Great Depression, disciplined workers into submission. President Reagan came down hard on labor unions. Things were so bad, people were just happy to survive at the bottom of the American barrel. In retrospect, the 1980s seems like a silly and giddy decade for American culture and politics. Despite the American Century of Capitalist Triumphalism, by the late 1980s, we were starting to see serious challenges to the new global capitalism: Berlin88, Paris89, Madrid94, J18, and the mother of all protests, Seattle/N30 aka the Seattle WTO protests. We had predominantly white protestors challenging global capitalism and people of color, waging a cultural revolution of sorts with “conscious hip hop” and “punk rock”, challenging the status quo, and winning hearts and minds.

And, culturally, American hip hop was increasingly aware of the socioeconomic realities of capitalism. Hip hop popularized a radical, leftist orientation in the late 1980s. There seemed to be many conflicts at the turn of the decade. Maybe that’s the way of the world. But by 1992, we had the Battle of Los Angeles, in which the lumpenproletariat made its presence felt.

Forget my memoirs, bruh, let’s’ listen to KRS-One’s new album. It’s so fucken dope. I wish my brother, Eric, could hear this. Where you at Eric? Are you hearing this, Eric? Panch? What you think, Guero? I guess I’m an old-head. So what? Leave your comments down below. We earned these years, like Patti Smith would say; we earned these wrinkles.]

***

[1] In hindsight, maybe KRS-One was always more like Fred Hampton, Sr. than Chuck D, or other black nationalists, in the sense of calling for the original rainbow coalition, of uniting all working class people, black, brown, and white. Jesse Jackson, of course, would later appropriate Fred Hampton’s idea of a “proletarian revolution” of all colors of working class people. Instead of a revolutionary mindset, Jesse Jackson appeared to be a compromised liberal reformist, who had betrayed Martin’s Dream (either before or) after Spring 1968. Ask Mumia Abu Jamal about the day he first met Jesse Jackson. Ask the Black Panthers. Jesse Jackson’s movement had no teeth, a milquetoast version of Fred Hampton’s original rainbow coalition, which Jackson called “Operation PUSH”, formally. But, informally, and despite having “a difficult relationship” with the Black Panthers, Jackson informally appropriated the term rainbow coalition to refer to the membership of his Operation Push organization. Despite valid critiques against his reformist politics and cultural appropriation, Jackson continued using the term and even copyrighted it. “In 1984, Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition. It merged with PUSH in 1996 [to become the “Rainbow/PUSH Coalition].”

***

[24 DEC 2020]

[Last modified on 25 DEC 2020 at 05:32 PST]

Guns and Butter Presents The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy (2016)

07 Wed Dec 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Fascism, Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Totalitarianism, Anti-War, Asia, Eurasia, Neoliberalism, Open Economy Macroeconomics, Political Economy, Political Science, Presidential Election 2016, Sociology, Turkey

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al-Qaeda, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (b. 1949), Bonnie Faulkner, China, Council On Foreign Relations, David Howell Petraeus AO (b. 1952), Donald John Trump (b. 1946), Dr. David Rockefeller (b. 1915), Dr. F. William Engdahl (b. 1944), Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh (b. 1882–1967), Dr. Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski (b. 1928), Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Global Research, Guns and Butter, hegemonic stability theory (HST), ISIS, KPFA, Michael Arthur Ledeen (b. 1941), Michael Thomas "Mike" Flynn (b. 1958), Muhammet Fethullah Gülen (b. 1941), mujahideen, Northwest University (China), Osama bin Laden (1957-?), Pacifica Radio Network, Plaza Accord (1985), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (b. 1954), Roy Marcus Cohn (1927–1986), Russia, Steven Terner Mnuchin (b. 1962), Strait of Malacca, transcript, Turkey, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (b. 1952), Walid Phares (b. 1957)

Guns_and_butter_logo LUMPENPROLETARIAT—On this week’s edition of free speech radio’s Guns and Butter, host Bonnie Faulkner broadcast an interview with American German historian, economic researcher and investigative journalist F. William Engdahl, author of The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy (2016). [1] Listen (and/or download) here. (Also see transcript below.) [2]

UPDATE—[14 DEC 2016] The Guns and Butter broadcast for December 14, 2016 was a fund drive special, which focused on the work of Dr. William Engdahl. (Also see transcript draft below.) [3]

UPDATE—[21 DEC 2016] The Guns and Butter broadcast for December 21, 2016, entitled “The Incredible Trump Deception” also focused on the work of Dr. William Engdahl. [4]

UPDATE—[28 DEC 2016] The Guns and Butter broadcast for December 28, 2016, entitled “The Lost Hegemon: How the CIA Lost Its Holy War Crusade” also focused on the work of Dr. William Engdahl. Excerpts of this interview with Dr. Engdahl were previously aired during a fund drive special broadcast (14 DEC 2016). [5]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Guns and Butter.]

GUNS AND BUTTER—[7 DEC 2016] [SASHA LILLEY: “Thank you all, who’ve called and pledged. We made the match. Thank you all so much.” C.S. SOONG: (overlapping) “Thank you sooo much.” MIKE BIGGS: “And this is KPFA; KPFB in Berkeley, 88.1; KFCF in Fresno, 97.5; K24ABR in Santa Cruz; and online at kpfa.org. It is 1pm; up next is Guns and Butter.”]

“This is Guns and Butter. [theme music]

“I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, J. William Engdahl. Today’s show: ‘The Incredible Trump Deception’.

“F. William Engdahl is an international best-selling author and political economist. He has specialised for more than 30 years in geopolitical analysis of global events with special focus on the interaction of economics with politics. He is currently Visiting Professor of Geopolitics at Northwest University in Xi’an [city], China. Among his best-known books are A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics; Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century; Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation; Target China: How Washington and Wall Street Plan to Cage the Asian Dragon. His latest English book is—The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy—about the CIA and political Islam. It was published in March of 2016. (c. 1:46)

“The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy is our thank-you gift, our premium today on Guns and Butter for a donation to KPFA of $110 dollars. We will talk a lot more about the specifics of The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy—about the CIA and political Islam. But today’s interview with William Engdahl is ‘The Incredible Trump Deception’. (c. 2:19)

“So, Mike, let’s get started with the very beginning of that talk I had with William Engdahl.” (c. 2:25)

Begin pre-recorded interview

BONNIE FAULKNER: “William Engdahl, welcome.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Thank you. I’m glad to be with you, Bonnie.”

On Trump’s true pedigree, which is “stagecraft“, but not the working class populism Trump portrayed during his campaigning. Dr. Engdahl cited an article he previously wrote about Donald Trump’s background entitled “The Mafia Don”.

BONNIE FAULKNER: “Your latest article is entitled ‘The Dangerous Deception Called ‘The Trump Presidency’‘. [6] Donald Trump put forth some populist ideas in his presidential campaign, such as his goal to have good relations with Russia; his criticism of the vicious ISIS jihadis; support for rebuilding domestic infrastructure; among others. What do you consider to be the dangerous deception?” (c. 2:56)

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “The dangerous deception is, number one, Donald Trump. Who he is, as a person, is not at all what people or the world, really, is hoping. He is a complete, uh, showman, a work of, I dunno, stagecraft. He has no qualification and no business being anywhere near the White House, and certainly not as president of the world’s largest and most powerful superpower.

“That being said, we have to look behind the people, who are elected president. Look at how it was with Obama when he came in on the banner of [hope]. And what did he do? The first thing he did was ramp up the Afghan War with a 30,000 troop surge—the Patraeus Strategy. And, ever since then, he’s been in Arab Spring, uh, wars across the Middle East: the destruction of Libya, trying to destroy Syria, uh. (c. 4:12)

“Every single financial appointment of Obama was dictated by Robert Rubin and the people at Goldman Sachs and Citi Group. So, we’ve had that experience with Obama. And, now, we have this thing called the Trump Presidency.

“Well, we, as human beings, love to hope. We love to have hopes. And I know so many, normally intelligent people , commentators, analysts, like myself, uh, who have a sense of world politics, who are just taken in by this shill called Donald Trump. The man’s—look at his background. And this I did back in March/April in a piece I wrote on my website called ‘The Mafia Don’. (c. 5:02)

“Donald Trump is a protégé of organised crime, full stop. His mentor was a mafia lawyer in New York named Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn, who’s famous—infamous in the Joseph McCarthy hearings back during the ’50s and the Cold War. Roy Cohn was a lawyer for the mob. He was connected with the Cardinal Spellman of New York back in the ’50s and the ’60s—one of the leading architects of the Cold War.

“And Roy Cohn, as a human being, was a—if you want to use the term—a despicable specimen. And he would take Donald Trump to Studio 54. I remember when I was—in those days, back in the 1970s, working as a journalist in New York City; and Studio 54 was infamous for its cocaine parties or its, uh, glitteria, that would come there. And Donald Trump, in his autobiography, some years ago, describes going there with Roy Cohn and watching eight breathtakingly beautiful models fornicating in the middle of the floor of Studio 54. Now, what role Donald Trump did or didn’t play in that, he didn’t bother to say. (c. 6:25)

“But, okay, let’s say he underwent a remarkable transformation. Then, we have to look a little bit into: who are the people around Donald Trump? In my view, Donald Trump is pure showtime. He’s a choice of, what I call, the American patriarchs, the David Rockefellers, the George Soros, and so forth. And the idea that a maverick, a real upsetter, a man of the raw blue-collar working people, who is gonna reverse all these trade policies and do this, that, and the other thing to make America great again, even though the banks of Wall Street aren’t gonna like it and the military industrial—whatever. That the people like David Rockefeller would sit there and have their jaws open and say, my gawd, we can’t do anything to stop this Trump phenomenon! What a crock! What a nonsense! You know? Wake up. (c. 7:29)

On the political theatre of Trump’s staged political competition, ‘perhaps even Hillary Clinton’s role was staged’, in exchange for a secured two-term presidency in 2020 or 2024, speculated Dr. Engdahl.

“Look at this. This was orchestrated. Probably, the Hillary thing was orchestrated as a part of the same theatre. But, certainly, the Cruz and Rubio and Ben Carson and Jeb Bush, you know, they were all given their roles to play that Trump would emerge as this phenomenon. You know; he certainly did, but with the full support of the critical media going—attacking Trump, so that the, uh, man on the street would think: Oh, this guy is against the mainstream establishment. Let’s look at him more closely. Well, let’s take a look at this grassroots revolution of Donald Trump in the form of the people, he’s appointed.

“Take, for example, Mike Flynn, a three-star general, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, supposedly, we are told, was fired from DIA by the Obama administration because he objected to the demonization of Putin and Russia and thought the military of the United States should focus more on ISIS and the Islamic terrorism in the Middle East.

“Well, Mike Flynn is—he will be, now—the National Security Advisor. He is, reportedly, sitting next to Donald Trump and making all the decisive votes on who shall be the other key figures for the Trump administration and in terms of defense, national security, uh, and so forth. (c. 9:12)

On US foreign policy under President Trump, advisor Walid Phares, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and their ostensible opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is ‘the mother of the mujahedeen, Al Qaeda’, et al.

“So, Mike Flynn, we are told that, uh, he’s a good guy because he later admitted, after being in favour of the invasion of Iraq by Bush in 2003, said that was actually a mistake, looking back on it. He said it’s a strategic mistake. It’s not a tragic mistake, but a strategic—he’s a military man. Okay.

“The Flynn policy is connected very much with the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. This may shock some of your listeners. But let’s go to another person—Walid Phares, Trump’s advisor on terrorism in the Middle East. Well, Walid Phares gave an interview in the Egyptian press where he said that Donald Trump plans to back legislation to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, keep in mind, Huma Abedin, the right-hand, uh—I don’t know what you want to call it—of Hillary Clinton for the last, since she was 19 years old, the estranged wife of, uh, Mr. Weiner, the former congressman. Huma Abedin is a Muslim Brother. She’s a member of a death cult out of Egypt called the Muslim Brotherhood. Her mother is a Muslim brother. They call it the Sisterhood ‘cos it’s an all-man’s society. But there are females. And Huma and her mother are members of that female branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. (c. 10:42)

“It’s a terrorist organisation. It’s the mother of organisation of the mujahideen, to al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. It’s a CIA project, that goes back to the 1920s in Egypt, but when British intelligence was working with them. But, uh, during the Second World War, they were in Nazi Germany broadcasting into Palestine hate broadcasts against the Jews. And this, now, is on the bad list of, apparently, of the Trump Presidency.

“But look more closely at: Who is Walid Phares, the advisor of Trump? You know? He didn’t just drop out of a tree somewhere. He’s a Senior Fellow on a very small and highly politicised think-tank in Washington called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Now, the FDD—let’s call it the FDD—was set up in the wake of September 11, 2001. The moneybags for it come from the notorious Sheldon Adelson, a friend of Donald Trump at the Las Vegas and Macao gambling casino billionaire, who gave the Trump campaign $25 million in the closing days and who, also, is the main financial supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Likud. (c. 12:07)

BONNIE FAULKNER: “[exhales]”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Other backers of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where’s Trump’s Middle East terrorist advisor comes from, include the whiskey heirs Samuel and Edgar Bronfman; Wall Street billionaire speculators Michael Steinhart and Paul Singer; every single one of them are Israel first-, Netanyahu/Likud-connected.

“The vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is a man [sic] called Toby Dershowitz. He spent 14 years as AIPAC communications head. For those of you, who don’t know, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been described by John Mearshiemer of the University of Chicago as, quote, ‘an agent of the Israeli government with a stranglehold on the United States Congress with its power and influence.’

“Donald Trump was a featured speaker in the March 2016 AIPAC annual meeting, as, of course, was Hillary. (c. 13:02)

“Okay, now, let’s slowly go back to Mike Flynn, the man, who will head up the National Security Council. But his plan is to change the powers of the National Security Council and the advisor to the president to make him the sole powerful figure of the entire U.S. intelligence community with power to hire or fire. If the director of the CIA doesn’t suit his liking, he’s gone. This is the bill, that Mike Flynn is advocating in the Trump Presidency. We’ll see how that goes.

“And Flynn agrees that the Iran Nuclear deal that Obama made with Iran should be scrapped. He calls Iran a state-sponsor of terrorism. So, that’s something, that Netanyahu finds very nice.

“But here’s the interesting thing. For those of you, who have the memory that goes back to the 1970s and world geopolitics, Flynn co-authored a book, that was published here this year with a man named Michael Ledeen. Now, I’m an author. I’ve written nine books in—over the years. And you don’t just co-author a book with any bloke on the street. You have to have someone, whose thoughts are in full harmony with yours, otherwise it doesn’t work. (c. 14:32)

“Well, who is Michael Ledeen? He’s also a freedom scholar at—well, isn’t this interesting?—at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Uh, CIA director James Woolsey III, a frothing-at-the-mouth neocon, who talked about a 30 Years War after 9/11, and whose rumoured for some top position in the Trump project, is a member of the FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ leadership council.

“So, now, we begin to get an idea this, uh, whole foreign policy of Trump. Let’s step back a little bit.

On the Shanghai Corporation, a ‘platform to erode the institutions of nation states in favour of global corporate rule

“A year ago, the foreign policy strategy, that had been followed since 9/11 by George W. Bush and Cheney by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, et al., was a catastrophic failure. The decision by Washington to create a coup d’état in Ukraine to drive a wedge between the European Union, especially Germany and Russia to break the economic links, that were growing very, very strong because it’s a natural fit.

“Well, that coup d’état had a backfire effect, a boomerang effect. It drove Russia closer to China. And it created the political nightmare, that Zbigniew Brzezinski talks about in his famous 1997 book, The Grand Chessgame [sic]. The cohesion of Eurasia—now, if anyone takes out a map and looks at the landspace of Russia, which goes all the way to the Pacific, Vladivostok, and the land space of China, and look a the countries, who are in between, are all members of something called the Shanghai Corporation organization. And the fact that China is building a network of high-speed, cutting edge, state-of-the-art railways, infrastructure, crisscrossing all of this space, including Russia, then we begin to see that the patriarchs, or the oligarchs, who viewed the United States as their kind of platform to destroy the world and destroy nation states all over the world, they were beginning to lose everywhere. And when the president of a small country, the Phillippinnes, which has been occupied by the United States since 1898, calls the President of the United States a son of a whore, then you know the the credibility and the, uh, the influence, the soft power of the United States is really hurting. [7] (c. 17:24)

“So, everywhere. Turkey, after the failed CIA coup with Fetullah Gulen back in July of this year. [Erdoğan] began making very, very strong moves toward cooperation, not only with Russia, but with the Shanghai Corporation countries, with Eurasia. And it’s a natural fit. The Turkish future isn’t the European Union. The European Union is collapsing. It’s falling apart. Turkey is beginning to sense its economic future lies with Russia, lies with cooperation with China and the high speed rail links, that would be a natural fit for the Turkish economy.

“So, something drastic had to be done. And that drastic something, from the standpoint of the US oligarchy or patriarchs—the silly old patriarchs, as I call them sometimes—is called Donald Trump. (c. 18:23)

“And the job of Donald Trump is, through deception, to split Russia from China. You have to divide and rule. That combination is something the US cannot defeat, as long as it’s growing. So, they have to start making a courtship of Putin and say, listen, let’s make a deal, like Trump would say [chuckles] and whisper pretty things in the ears of Vladimir Putin and most Russians. The Russian media, I know—I’ve travelled to Russia quite often. My books are translated in the Russian language, my articles as well. I know many, many Russians. The Russian media is probably more pro-Donald Trump than the US media. They think this is finally—you know, so tired of this: Every bad thing that happens in the world is because of Putin. It’s like being mobbed. And, finally, here comes Trump whispering friendly things. (c. 19:22)

“But that’s the game, to shift away from the Muslim Brotherhood card, that was the Obama administration geostrategy, using radical Islam as a proxy for expanding empire—if you wanna call it—to using Israel, using the Mossad, using the Israeli defence forces and all of the geopolitical leverage, that Israel has in the Middle East and other places, which is considerable as their strategic weapon. At the same time, this thing about making America great again, it’s more becoming clear what Trump and his economic advisors are talking about is a Reagan kind of rebuilding of the American military might. The Navy has been allowed to deteriorate over the last 20 or 30 years, significantly. The spending on the Pentagon is so out of control the auditor general last summer, uh, the inspector general, who is responsible for the audits of the service branches certified that there were $6.5 trillion dollars of US Army expenses in recent years, that doesn’t have a paper trail. There is no audit trail possible—$6.5 trillion dollars. Look at this all-purpose, all-service fighter jet. It’s gonna cost tax payers $1.3, $1.5 trillion dollars for something, that’s a heap of junk. It doesn’t work. (c. 21:09)

“So, with a shoe-string budget, after the invitation to intervene in Syria against the terrorists, Russia demonstrated that with a shoestring budget they had developed military technologies, that are leading edge, not just state-of-the-art, leading edge and, literally, shocked the Pentagon military strategists what Russia has accomplished in the last ten years, quietly.

“But when the US announced that it was going for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic in 2007, if you recall then, Vladimir Putin, in his first presidency, was invited to Munich for the International Security Conference, an annual conference. He gave a speech. And he said, to say that this missile defence in Poland and the Czech Republic is aimed at rogue states, like Iran or North Korea, is, as we say in Russia, like using your right hand to scratch your left ear. It’s nonsense. This is aimed at Russia. And it is aimed at Russia. (c. 22:18)

“So, since that time, of course, it’s greatly expanded. NATO troops are being mounted on the border of Russia. Uh, the US—Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary for eastern Europe and Europe—and Turkey also, by the way—uh, brought a bunch of neo-nazis into the regime in Kiev when they ousted the democratically-elected president—he may have been a thief; but he was democratically elected—and, uh, put in a bunch of fascist oligarchs, that are simply looting and plundering Ukraine and making war against the eastern parts of Ukraine. It’s just a—it’s a failed state. That is the US handiwork. That’s the Washington project.

“So, something had to be done. And that something is what you see shaping up with Trump. (c. 23:12)

“They’re going to make China into the enemy image. They’re gonna try to split off Russia through hook and crook, through disinformation, through—who knows what. They’ll probably lift the sanctions at some point, uh, to try to get Russia off guard and try to sow seeds of discord between Russian and China. And, then, with that, they’re gonna target China massively. They’ve already begun it with this so-called accidental phone call between Trump and the president of Taiwan, breaching some 40 years of diplomatic protocol. (c. 23:53)

Trump’s new team comes from the “war faction of the Bush-Cheney administration”

“So, this is the Trump presidency. Michael Ledeen is the godfather—the co-author with Flynn of this book—he’s the godfather of the neoconservatives. He’s the mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the war of faction of George W. Bush. This is Donald Trump.” (c. 24:13)

BONNIE FAULKNER: “You’ve been listening to the voice of author and political analyst William Engdahl. I’m Bonnie Faulkner. This is Guns and Butter. Today is the fund drive, our December Fund Drive on KPFA. (c. 24:31)

[Bonnie Faulkner continued with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA, the world’s original listener-sponsored free speech radio station, which PBS and NPR later copied, but in a non-free speech manner with corporate underwriting.] (c. 25:17)

“I’d love to get some support on the phone for KPFA radio, for the Pacifica Radio Network. Please give us a call. 1.800.439-5732. 1.800.439-5732. $110 tax-deductible donation to KPFA and we would be delighted to provide you with William Engdahl’s newest book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy. Of course, this is a history of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mujihedeen, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the United States CIA involvement with this War of Terror against Muslim jihadis. 1.800.439-5732. (c. 26:13)

“In about a minute or two, I’m going to play you a description of the book by the author, William Engdahl. The Lost Hegemon, of course, refers to the United States.

“In his foreword to the book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy, he talks about the Islamic state and the lost hegemon.

ISIS, later calling itself IS, had been created as a joint project by the CIA and Israeli Mossad to combine psychotic mercenaries, posing as Islamic jihadists gathered from around the world, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, even Chinese-Turkish Xinjian province in what the CIA called ‘Operation Hornet’s Nest’ when some Israeli journalist experts pointed out that the letters I-S-I-S stood for the English name of Mossad—Israeli Secret Intelligence Service. The jihadis quickly proclaimed, over YouTube, a new name—Islamic State, or IS—in what appeared to be clumsy cover-up attempt. (c. 27:27)

“That is just one paragraph from William Engdahl’s foreword to his new book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy.

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 28:08)

“I’m Bonnie Faulkner. This is Guns and Butter. I think what I would like to do right now is play you a brief six-minute description by the author of his new book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy.”

[broadcast cuts to pre-recorded interview clip] (c. 28:26)

BONNIE FAULKNER: “Could you talk a bit about your new book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy? What is your new book about?”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “It’s about an organisation. It’s about the Muslim Brotherhood, primarily. But, uh, it’s about the marriage—I call it, in the book, ‘a marriage made in hell’—between the Central Intelligence Agency, back in the early 1950s, at the end of World War II, beginning in the Cold War, and their discovery in Munich, Germany, of all places, of secret networks, that were discovered by the Nazis, Hitler, and used—they were networks—Muslim Brotherhood networks used against Soviet Russia and communism because they regard communism as the infidels. And the CIA realised that these particular Muslims had nothing to do with the religion. They had such a fanatical hatred, that they were a beautiful weapon. (c. 29:39)

“Well, then, they got more involved with the organisation. And the station chief of the CIA in Cairo at that time, Miles Copeland, years ago—I talked with him before his death when was retired—he kind of, you know, like old men do sometimes, uh, warriors or whatever, they wanna brag a little bit about what they’ve done. But, uh, he admitted that he smuggled the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt into Saudi Arabia after they had been banned by Nasser when they tried to assassinate him—the president of Egypt.

“And, there, began one of the most perverse marriages in modern history. The Muslim Brotherhood, with their political activism, their messianic political activism, combined—and it’s a death cult, explicitly a death cult, by the teachings of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of it in Egypt—together with the most reactionary, pre-feudal Bedouin stream of Islam; if you wanna call it a religion, call it Wahhabism. And the Muslim Brotherhood provided the scholars and the madrasas and the universities in Saudi Arabia because they didn’t have enough, uh—you know, you come out of the desert a generation ago and all you know how to do is take care of your camel. I’m not being cynical. This is the state of the culture in Saudi Arabia today. Look at how they treat women. (c. 31:19)

“So, that became—the oil riches of Saudi Arabia financed the worldwide agenda of the World Muslim League [sic], which is a Muslim Brotherhood. They expanded into Pakistan. They expanded into Afghanistan and many other countries in between and beyond. And that all became connected with the CIA, and became, what I describe in the book in great detail with footnotes and documentation, it became the project of the CIA called Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, the CIA project that took ten years to, uh, bring it to a close.

“And, then, the CIA, brought those Muslim Brotherhood and mujahideen. They flew them into former Soviet Union Azerbaijan, created a regime change, coup, a coup d’état there, that would save British Petroleum and the American oil companies against the Russian. And that used to be part of the Soviet Union, keep in mind, in 1991, ’92. (c. 32:29)

“And, then, they brought them into Chechnya, where an old Soviet pipeline went from Baku in Azerbaijan into Russia and on to the world market. Well, if British Petroleum is gonna build a pipeline, they’re gonna have to destroy the Russian pipeline. So, they brought in the terrorists to create the Chechen War during the time of Yeltsin. And, from there, Boznia and Herzegovina, in Yugoslavia against the Serbs and so on, right down to, uh, al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Syria morphed into something called the Islamic State in Iraq. And, then, I think somebody realised that I-S-I-S is the abbreviation sometimes used by the Mossad for, uh, the Hebrew designation of the Mossad. And they thought, maybe we better change it to I-S, so nobody is tempted to thread that connection. That’s speculation. But some Israeli journalists have made that speculation. (c. 33:29)

“In any case, the book deals with this, including in Turkey, a fascinating figure, that almost has totally taken over the institutions of power in Turkey over the past 30 years, named Fethullah Gülen, who lives in exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania since 1998, even though he, up until 2013, was a supporter of the party of Recep Erdoğan, the president of Turkey now. They had a falling out, [since] Gülen was behind a poorly organised CIA coup, once Erdoğan began to make rapprochement with Putin and turn east against the wishes of Washington. (c. 34:21)

“So, the book details this. It’s unique as far as the research, most of the literature on the subject. Uh, it puts together a pattern from the standpoint of U.S. geopolitics, that has not been done until now. But that’s the broad outline of the book.” (c. 34:44)

BONNIE FAULKNER: “That’s the voice of William Engdahl, describing his new book, which is our premium today for a $110 dollar, tax-deductible donation to KPFA.

“The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy” (c. 35:03)

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 35:23)

“He’s written some very famous, very incredible books.”

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 35:45)

“And, like he said, he doesn’t know any other author, who has written a book like this. It’s a full, detailed analysis and history of the mother of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mujahideen, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the War On Terror. This is a very, very important subject.

“Let me tell you a few of the chapters. It begins with The Islamic State and The Lost Hegemon. And, of course, the lost hegemon is the United States. He analyses this whole policy of the War On Terror and supporting, uh, the jihadists, violent jihadists as a failed policy.

“And, of course, as you heard in our interview today, ‘The Incredible Deception of the Trump Presidency’, there’s going to be, in his view, in his analysis, a shift away from support of Muslim Brotherhood, uh, violent jihadis, into a rapprochement with Russia and political geo-strategy of pulling closer to Israel. (c. 37:02)

“His introduction to the book is called Brotherhood of Death: Organising the New Terror Crusade. Jihad Comes to Germany. Iraq and Washington’s Crusade Against Islam. Roots of Islamic Rage: Sykes-Picot, Balfour, and British Perfidy. Death In the Service of Allah: the Muslim Brothers Are Born. Then, The Muslim Brotherhood Joins Hitler’s Holy War Against the Jews. From Munich to the Soviet Steps: The CIA Funds the Muslim Brothers. The CIA’s Afghan Crusade: Opium Wars, bin Laden, and Mujahideen. Globalizing Jihad: From Afghanistan to Bosnia. Holy War and Heroin In Kosovo and the Caucasus. CIA Backs a New Ottoman Caliphate In Eurasia.

“These are all chapter headings. So, you’ll know exactly the content of this book, The Lost Hegemon. The CIA’s Jihad Comes to Russia. A Holy War Against China. A War On Terror: Using Religion to Make War. And chapter 14, NATO’s Arab Spring And Unintended Consequences.

“Those are the chapter headings from The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy by William Engdahl, our gift to you today for a $110 donation to KPFA. (c. 38:45)

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA. Also mentioned is the KPFA Crafts Fair at the Craneway Pavilion.] (c. 41:10)

“We’re offering today, the newest book by William Engdahl, um, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy. And, that, of course, is a history of the Muslim Brotherhood and its involvement with the CIA over many, many decades, a global strategy, that William Engdahl says has been a basically a failure, a disaster. And he also—no, we’re gonna go back to, uh, in a few minutes—I wanna get some people on the phone, get some pledges coming in to KPFA, and we’ll go back to this interview.” (c. 41:44)

“This interview, hour-long interview, ‘The Incredible Trump Deception‘—uh, we’re gonna have the full hour-long interview up on the Guns and Butter website, GunsAndButter.org, within a few days, so you can hear the whole thing. We’ll get back to some of it. It’s his analysis of what the Trump Presidency means, where it’s going, who his appointees are, what the agenda is.

“Of course, he has talked in the beginning, that I broadcast at the beginning of the hour, about, um—well, I guess he hasn’t gotten to that part yet. We’re preparing for, he believes, the US is preparing for a new war, that it’s gonna take many, many years to get ready for this war. He doesn’t think they’re going to really pull it off. There’s gonna be a change in strategy, a geopolitical shift to have better relations with Russia to go after China. (c. 42:49)

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 45:00)

“Keep this precious resource on the air. I’ve noticed, as many of you have noticed, that there is a growing crackdown on information websites. The Washington Post had that article listing, uh, fake news websites, 200 of them. And I was reading the list and I thought, oh, my gosh, these are a lot of the websites, that I read every day.

“There is a real crackdown on freedom of speech, of information, uh, now, more important than ever to support KPFA, to support the Pacifica Network. This is an incredible resource, the kind of analysis and information and authors and analysts, that we bring you weekly on Guns and Butter wouldn’t be heard on any other radio station. This is so important to support KPFA. (c. 45:51)

“A $25 dollar donation makes you a Member of KPFA for a year. Those $25 dollar donations—donations in any amount—are very important to KPFA. Not everyone can afford to donate $110 dollars. $25 donations go a long way. The important thing to do is to call in and support the station. 1.800.439-5732.

“Well, as long as we have, uh, a few minutes left, I’d like to hear—let’s play a little bit more of this interview, that I did with William Engdahl.”

[broadcast cuts to pre-recorded interview clip] (c. 46:31)

On the “Oligarchs/Patriarchs” and “Plan B” for positioning Trump into power

BONNIE FAULKNER: “You’ve described the Trump Presidency as the install Plan B President.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Yeah.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “You’ve kind of started to talk about what Plan B is.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “M-hm.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “You have written that Donald Trump was put into office to prepare America for war.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Yeah.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “Now, of course, the people, that have been, uh, listening to his campaign would, uh, probably not think that.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Sure.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “But what in your view—what—” [overlapping]

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Well, he doesn’t want it. But he wants to win the power. The people behind him want him to win the power. They don’t want to freak the population out.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “Well, what, in your view, would this war look like? And what would be a time-frame? And maybe you can talk about that in conjunction with some of these other cabinet appointees. I mean—”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Sure.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “—he’s got quite a few of ’em now.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Yeah. I think what they realise is that the banks of Wall Street, the financial crash of 2008, the fact that the six criminal banks of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and so forth, have been on artificial life support, now, for eight years at point-two-five [.25] interest rate of the Fed. Uh, this this isn’t a military base to win a war. [sic] They want—Russia did in Syria, that tiny little shoestring budget, that they deployed in Syria. If that’s combined with the, uh, military buildup, that’s going on in China, then you have the capacity to defend the Eurasian landspace against anything the United States can send. (c. 48:17)

“Keep in mind the agenda of people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the agenda of David Rockefeller, the agenda of these oligarchs. And I assume that your listeners understand the term oligarch because that’s what these people are. They’re patriatrchs, really. Their agenda is new world order, one world government, glob—this isn’t conspiracy theory. This is their agenda. David Rockefeller even stated so on his autobiography several years ago. He said, if this is the charge I’m charged with, I’m proud of it.

“So, Zbigniew Brzezinski, back in the ’70s, in his Technotronic Era book, writes about the fact that the nation state has to be eliminated. [8]

“So, who are the strongest nation states in the world today? China, Russia, Iran. And the three of them are cooperating in a way, that never has taken place before. So, this is the war that they are preparing for. I think, my own guess is, it’ll take between four, six, or eight years, something of that time-frame. It won’t work in the end. It’s a failed strategy. But that’s all they know. Their mentality is going back to 1939, Roosevelt and the military buildup for World War II. That’s the, you know, template they have in their mind that we just do that again on a technology and blah-deeh, blah-dee, blah. (c. 49:51)

“So, it’s already—Trump has pledged the biggest naval buildup, under his presidency, since the huge naval buildup of Reagan. And, you know, you look at the Secretary of State—for the first time since George Marshall, the beginning of the Cold War—there’s a retired military general as Defense Secretary. There had been a tradition to always have a civilian as head of defense.

“Now, we’ve got a man, whose known as the Warrior Monk, Mad Dog Mathis. , the man that I would say, if I were a clinical psychologist, I would call him a psychopath from statements he’s made and things he’s done. The soldiers love him. When you’re in the trenches, he’s down there with you. That’s said to be the case.

“But, as Trump said, he’s the, uh—what did he call him?—uh, a modern-day General Patton. Well, General Patton wasn’t exactly [chuckles] a beautiful human being, either. So, this is really not a group of pacifists, that is coming around Trump. I think what you’re gonna see—the choice of Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary, together with his campaign manager, Steve Mnuchin, former partner at Goldman Sachs, as was his father. Steve Mnuchin, a former partner with the, uh, Soros Fund, management of George Soros. Steve Mnuchin, a business associate of Donald Trump, going back to Trump’s casino days. (c. 51:46)

“They are going to create, probably, some kind of national infrastructure bank or fund. They’re gonna have a strong dollar policy, the way, uh, Bush, Sr. had, or actually, Reagan-Bush from 1980 until about 1985, when the dollar got so high it was threatening everything. And they had this Plaza Accord meeting and had Japan, uh, bring the dollar down.

“But, uh, the policy will be to start interest rate increases with Europe in the critical bad shape its in, especially after the Italian referendum, the European Bank crises, and so forth, it won’t take much to create a massive capital flight out of the Eurozone into—where you gonna go?—the US dollar. Trump’s building infrastructure. There are new projects. So, there’s gonna be hundreds of billions of dollars coming into the dollar. That’ll drive up the dollar as well. That’ll suck capital out from China. [9] That’ll suck capital out from the emerging markets, the BRICS countries and so forth. And it’s gonna be as simple as that, I think. (c. 53:03)

“Wilbur Ross, he cut his teeth for about 14 years, as I recall, for Rothschild, Incorporated, the New York arm of the British and French Rothschild Banking group, restructuring bankrupt companies. So, he’s gonna restructure bankrupt America, perhaps. [10]

“But it has, as their aim, to rebuild as the Project for a New American Century said back in 2000, rebuild America’s defenses for war, not just to play monopoly or dominoes or something. And that’s a bit crazy, but that’s, you know, that’s—”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “It’s interesting what you’re saying about their economic plan because I was reading a financial analyst on the internet trying to sell his analysis to investors.”

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Yeah.”

BONNIE FAULKNER: “And he was saying exactly the same thing, basically, that there’s gonna be flight capital [sic] out of Europe into a safe haven. And it’s gonna create a stock market boom in the US.” (c. 54:14)

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “Yeah. It’s, uh, so clear to me. The people, that, you know—most of the intelligent people I speak with, here, in Europe, uh, where I live, in Germany, uh, they just don’t get it. They, they can’t quite see where it’s headed. But, today, the Prime Minister of Italy resigned because he lost a referendum, uh, Renzi. The Renzi government resigned.

“Now, the Italian banks—” [Bonnie Faulkner’s voice overlaps]

[end of pre-recorded interview clip]

BONNIE FAULKNER: “That’s the voice of William Engdahl. I was speaking to him about the coming economic situation, that Europe is going down. There’s gonna be flight capital [sic] out of Europe, creating a stock market boom here, at least temporarily, I suppose. He is the author of a new book, The Lost Hegemon—which refers to the United States—Whom the gods would destroy. This is a book, a brand new book, a history of the Muslim Brotherhood through the mujahideen; al-Qaeda; ISIS, their involvement with the CIA; the War On Terror as a failed strategy. (c. 55:25)

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 56:13)

“I just wanted to mention briefly that the entire hour-long interview on the coming Trump Presidency, all of his appointees, and how William Engdahl thinks this is gonna go, that will be up—the full interview—at GunsAndButter.org within the next few days. I’d also like to say that, next week, we’re gonna do—I’m gonna do—a whole hour-long interview with William Engdahl on his book about The Lost Hegemon, about the Muslim Brotherhood. (c. 56:44)

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 56:57)

“I’m so excited to have him on the show. I’ve wanted to have William Engdahl on for years. And I just haven never gotten around to it, until now. (c. 56:06)

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, focusing on appeals for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.] (c. 59:00)

“But, you know, the fundraisers are kind of fun. It gives me a chance to come in live, which I always enjoy. And, also, it’s a way to give sort of an extended platform to some of these incredible books and authors and DVDs.

“1.800.439-5732. I’m Bonnie Faulkner. This is Guns and Butter. Please send me an email with any of your comments to faulkner@gunsandbutter.org. Visit William Engdahl’s website at WilliamEngdahl.com. He has a newsletter, that he sends out. You could sign up for that. GunsAndButter.org. I’ll have his full interview up in a week. And, also, I’m hoping to see a lot of you at the Craneway Crafts Fair. 1.800.439-5732.

“Thank you so very—” (c. 59:59) [7 DEC 2016]

Learn more at GUNS AND BUTTER.

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Guns and Butter.]

GUNS AND BUTTER—[14 DEC 2016] (synopsis) “A program that investigates the relationships among capitalism, militarism and politics, hosted by Bonnie Faulkner.”

[“Thank you.” Board operator: “It is now one o’clock here at KPFA, 94.1 FM in Berkeley; 89.3 KPFB in Berkeley; 88.1 KFCF in Fresno; 97.5 K24ABR in Santa Cruz; and online at kpfa.org. Please stay tuned for Guns and Butter.”]

“[via telephone] This is Guns and Butter. [Guns and Butter theme music begins]

“I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, F. William Engdahl. Today is a fundraiser for KPFA. And I’m offering two of William Engdahl’s books, The New Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy [sic] and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. Both of these books are very important. Today, we’re going to start with William Engdahl’s overview of the American century, or what he calls the debt-slavery system. Lucretia, let’s hear that first track.” (c. 1:25)

On global capitalist imperialism, post-WWII

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “What I would like to do is talk about how I see the world since 1945, since the end the Second World War. And I wanna go back to a project, that was initiated in 1939. It was done in top secrecy. Today, some of the archives have been released by the Council On Foreign Relations, the think-tank set up at the end of the First World War in London, or Versailles, rather, by the bankers, JP Morgan and Rockefeller, their representatives there as well as the leading circles of British strategic policy called the Roundtable. And they created the newer Council On Foreign Relations to coordinate with the Chatham House in London, that they also created at the same time—the Royal Institute for International Affairs—to coordinate a grand strategy across the Atlantic, that would more or less dominate the world. (c. 2:36)

“And, in 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, before the German Nazi Panzers had rolled into Poland and formally began World War II, the New York Council On Foreign Relations was given a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation to do a project, a top secret project, called War and Peace Studies. War and Peace Studies.

“And the project gathered together some of the top minds, political minds, of America and brought them in. One of the leading figures was Professor Isaiah Bowman, then, the president of Johns Hopkins University and a geographer, interesting enough In other words, geography of the world was his expertise. He even called himself, unfortunately—he realised that—America’s Haushofer because Karl Haushofer was the architect, or the ghostwriter, actually, in the 1920s of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf when he was in prison. (c. 3:49)

“And this group operated under the assumption that World War II was about to unfold. And they said: We have to plan now so that America is the survivor of that war and will replace all other contenders as the dominant power on the planet.

“So, they, literally, brought in experts of every part of the globe—central Asia; Asia, Burma; China; India; South America; uh, Africa, of course; Middle East, with the oil. And they worked out plans for dominating the key nations, the key geography spots, the Straits of Malacca with the Navy; the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, all these chokepoints for oil flows or trade flows.

“And they created what was called a project called ‘The United Nations Organisation’, that became official at Dumbarton Oaks. And the idea was to create a geopolitical map of the world where the power of the United States military could dominate that world. And that, more or less, was what emerged from World War II. They waited, these strategists, and Roosevelt was informed of their plans, they waited until quite late into the war—1942—sometime after Pearl Harbor, December 1941, which Roosevelt also had foreknowledge of through cracking the Japanese codes, but let happen in order to mobilise the rage and fear of the American population for a war, a war that was not, initially, against Nazi Germany and Europe. [11]

“And, after that war, the United States emerged. The Federal Reserve Bank had the largest reserves of monetary gold in the world, 70% by some estimates. They had much of the gold of the defeated powers—the Nazi gold and others—and American industry, because of war mobilisation—the aluminum industry; the aircraft industry; the vehicle industry of Detroit; the steel industry, that was used to feed that—was strongest in the world. It was American quality, that was in demand everywhere. Europe was in an ash-heap of rubble and bombed-out cities.

And Europe, also, had no credible currencies. So, they desperately needed to have dollars. And the Marshall Plan, that was proposed and implemented in the end of the ’40s, early ’50s, was actually a way of giving taxpayer dollars, so that they could buy American goods, buy American oil for their own recovery. So, it was not an act of pure charity. It was a very calculated act to get dollars in circulation in Europe. And that allowed the dollar to dominate the reserves of the emerging post-war central banks of Europe—the Bank of England; the Bank of France; the Bank of Italy; and so forth; and, ultimately, the Bundesbank, when that was allowed to be created. (c. 7:49)

“The process of American hegemony went flawlessly, one could almost say. It wasn’t quite flawless. They made a coup d’état in Iraq with the CIA and MI6 of Britain in the eraly 1950s against a nationalist, who wanted to have a fair share of the revenues of British Petroleum from the extraction of Iranian oil. His name was Mohammad Mosaddegh. (c. 8:24)

[snip]

[On Nixon unilaterally closing the gold window, effectively ending the gold standard when he ended convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold by declaring that he’s ripping up the Bretton Woods agreement, which were signed in 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference; Dr. Engdahl incorrectly refered to it as a “treaty”.]

(c. 15:00) [Bilderberg Group meets in May of 1973. Its organisers hand-picked 78 ruling class elites, including Henry Kissinger to discuss a challenge to the power of the OPEC nations and what to do about “recycling oil dollars” or “petrodollars into their banks.]

[USA jacks up its interest rates, causing global financial turmoil, such as the Latin American financial crisis. Then, austerity politics and privatization and neoliberalism prevailed thereafter.]

(c. 28:00) [Misunderstanding (or being unaware of) modern monetary theory (MMT), Dr. Engdahl incorrectly stated the U.S. is ‘more than $3 trillion dollars in deficit’. We recall Bonnie Faulkner flew to Rimini, Italy in 2012 to cover an international conference on MMT. Faulkner broadcast seven hours worth of coverage on Guns and Butter, during which Dr. Stephanie Kelton (UMKC) taught us that, at the federal level, “taxes don’t pay for anything”. This is an undisputed fact of our monetary system. So, the USA doesn’t need to tax its populace to raise money for government spending. Another common myth, which Dr. Engdahl unfortunately seems to believe, suggests that the USA needs to borrow dollars from China and other places. It is incorrectly believed that the interest, which the USA owes to its bondholders, for example, is the USA ‘borrowing’ dollars from China and so forth. Yes, the USA issues bonds, for which it pays interest. But the USA every day makes good on those bonds, which many Americans also hold. The USA faces no risk of insolvency as it is the sovereign currency issuer of the US dollar. For more on MMT, check out the blog for the heterodox economics department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC); it’s called NewEconomicPerspectives.org.]

[Bonnie Faulkner continued with her remarks, but with a focus on appealing for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.]

[Bonnie Faulkner played another clip from her interview with Dr. Engdahl on his ‘description of the Lost Hegemon’.]

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, but with a focus on appealing for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.]

[Bonnie Faulkner played a clip from an upcoming Guns and Butter show with Dr. Engdahl on the ‘Trump Deception’.]

[Bonnie Faulkner continues with her remarks, but with a focus on appealing for listener sponsorship of free speech radio KPFA.]

[additional notes pending]

[snip] (c. 59:59)

Learn more at GUNS AND BUTTER.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints, and/or demand or resources, allow.]

***

[1] About the author: F. William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst, strategic risk consultant, author, and lecturer. He has authored nine books that have been translated into 14 foreign languages including Chinese, German, Japanese, including the international best-selling A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics; Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation; Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order His works trace the basis of the rise of the US as an international superpower, the emergence after 1945 of America as a new kind of Empire, one not based upon sole military occupation. It was an ‘informal empire,’ where control of finance, of the basic food chain, of energy—above all of oil, would be the basis for what would become the greatest concentration of power in history, an American Hegemon, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. William Engdahl grew up in Texas. After earning a degree in politics from Princeton University, and graduate study in comparative economics at Stockholm University, he worked as an economist and investigative journalist in the USA and Europe. He was Named Visiting Professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and delivers talks and private seminars around the world on different aspects of economics and politics with focus on geopolitical events. www.williamengdahl.com.

[2] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Guns and Butter, this one-hour broadcast hosted by regular host Bonnie Faulkner, Wednesday, 7 DEC 2016, 13:00 PDT.

Also recall HST:

Hegemonic stability theory (HST) is a theory of international relations, rooted in research from the fields of political science, economics, and history. HST indicates that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, or hegemon.^[1] Thus, the fall of an existing hegemon or the state of no hegemon diminishes the stability of the international system. When a hegemon exercises leadership, either through diplomacy, coercion, or persuasion, it is actually deploying its “preponderance of power.” This is called hegemony, which refers to a state’s ability to “single-handedly dominate the rules and arrangements …[of] international political and economic relations.”^[2] HST can help analyze the rise of great powers to the role of world leader or hegemon, which have been ongoing since the 15th century. Also, it can be used to understand and to calculate the future of international politics through the discussion of the symbiotic relation between the declining hegemon and its rising successor.^[3]

Research on hegemony can be divided into two schools of thought: the realist school and the systemic school. Each school can be further sub-divided. Two dominant theories have emerged from each school. What Robert Keohane first called the “theory of hegemonic stability,”^[4] joins A. F. K. Organski‘s Power Transition Theory as the two dominant approaches to the realist school of thought. Long Cycle Theory, espoused by George Modelski, and World Systems Theory, espoused by Immanuel Wallerstein, have emerged as the two dominant approaches to the systemic school of thought.^[5]

Charles P. Kindleberger is one of the scholars most closely associated with HST, and is regarded by some as the theory’s father.^[6] In the 1973 book The World in Depression: 1929-1939, he argued that the economic chaos between World War I and World War II that led to the Great Depression was partly attributable to the lack of a world leader with a dominant economy. Kindleberger’s reasoning touched upon more than economics, however: the central idea behind HST is that the stability of the global system, in terms of politics, international law, and so on, relies on the hegemon to develop and enforce the rules of the system.^[7]

In addition to Kindleberger, key figures in the development of hegemonic stability theory include George Modelski, Robert Gilpin, Robert Keohane, Stephen Krasner, and others.^[8]^[9]

[3] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Guns and Butter, this one-hour broadcast, a Fund Drive Special, hosted by regular host Bonnie Faulkner, Wednesday, 14 DEC 2016, 13:00 PST.

[4] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Guns and Butter, this one-hour broadcast, entitled “The Incredible Trump Deception“, was hosted by regular host Bonnie Faulkner, Wednesday, 21 DEC 2016, 13:00 PST.

[5] Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving: Guns and Butter, this one-hour broadcast, entitled “The Lost Hegemon: How the CIA Lost Its Holy War Crusade“, was hosted by regular host Bonnie Faulkner, Wednesday, 28 DEC 2016, 13:00 PST.

[6] “The Dangerous Deception Called ‘The Trump Presidency’” by F. William Engdahl, 25 NOV 2016, GlobalResearch.org:

The project called the Trump Presidency has just two months before its formal beginning. Yet already the hopes and fantasies of much of the world are making him into something and someone Donald Trump most definitely is not.

Donald Trump is yet another project of the same bo2ring old patriarchs who try again and again to create a one world order that they control absolutely, a New World Order that one close Trump backer once referred to as universal fascism.

Ignore the sometimes fine rhetoric in some of his speeches. Talk is cheap. If we consider rather the agenda that’s taking form even in these very early days of cabinet naming, we can see that Donald Trump is the same agenda of war and global empire as Obama, as Bush before him, as Bill Clinton and Clinton’s “tutor”, George H.W. Bush before him. There is no good side to what the world is about to experience with President Trump.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, It’s Showtime!’ Today we give you Donald Trump.

He will tell you just what many of you want to hear. Trump the showman will tell you he will make America great again; Trump will say he will ship at least 3 million illegals back across the Rio Grande; Trump will introduce a bill to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization; Trump will bring jobs back to America from China and other low wage countries; Trump will sit down with Putin and work out some kind of a deal to calm things down; Trump will scrap the Iran nuclear deal of Obama…

Often during this election campaign, which was more a Hollywood “D1” grade movie than any honest debate of policies and ideas candidate Trump made statements that resonated with the “silent majority” of not only so-called blue collar workers, but also the disenfranchised middle class whose earnings have been declining in real terms since the 1970’s. Trump, like an earlier actor-President named Ronald Reagan, has a talent to make himself sound sincere.

[snip]

Learn more at GLOBAL RESEARCH.

[7] Of course, President Rodrigo Duterte may not hold much credibility as a character witness, given the fact that his administration is being charged with human rights violations and killings. See Hard Knock Radio for 21 DEC 2016.

[8] Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in the book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era:

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

[9] Fact-check pending.

[10] Fact-check pending.

[11] The apparently deliberate and self-serving late entry of the United States armed forces into WWII is also documented in Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States.

***

[7 DEC 2016]

[Last modified at 21:43 PST on 15 JAN 2017]

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Dr. Laurence Schoup: Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014

22 Mon Feb 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Fascism, Anti-Imperialism, Global Labour Movement

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AFL-CIO, Berkshire Hathaway, Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Club, Bohemian Grove, business unionism, Chase (bank), Chase Manhattan, Coca-Cola, Council On Foreign Relations, David Rockefeller (b. 1915), Davos, Dennis Bernstein, Dr. Laurence Schoup, Dr. Noam Chomsky, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, Joe Biden, Koch Brothers, KPFA, Mellon Family, Mickey Huff M.A., Nazism, neoliberalism, Pacifica Radio Network, Project Censored, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, transcript, Trilateral Commission, Vanderbilt Family, Warren Buffet, white supremacy, World Economic Forum, Zbigniew Brzezinski (b. 1928)

larry_shoup-150x230 LUMPENPROLETARIAT—One of the most pressing issues facing world peace and prosperity for humanity the world over is the persistent scourge of imperialism. Just as capitalist modes of production manage to shape-shift over time in order to survive, zombie-like, repeated economic crashes and crises, the imperialist mode of geopolitics continues to shape-shift to perpetuate its aims, often white-supremacist aims, of geopolitical hegemony and conquest.

Imperialism may be viewed through an economist’s lens, revealing monetary and productive forces, which demonstrate the power to subjugate sovereign nations through sheer concentration of capital and, thus, power. [1] But imperialism may be viewed through a political scientist’s lens as well, revealing the political and governmental forces, which have historically subjugated popular desire for democracy by capturing the ship of state through political, intelligence, and military power. A few groups, or think tanks, have been predominantly influential in these spheres, including the Council On Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bohemian Club, which meets yearly at Bohemian Grove, a 2,700 acre campground sheltered within old-growth redwood trees in northern California.

Here is where the scholarship of one Dr. Laurence Schoup comes in. Dr. Laurence Schoup decided to focus his Ph.D. dissertation on the power elite behind the USA’s foreign policy, i.e., behind the USA’s imperialism, namely the Council On Foreign Relations. Adding to his canon of work, Dr. Schoup has now published a new book entitled, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014. In support of his new book, as well as the liberating and enlightening work of free speech radio KPFA, Dr. Schoup has given one of 2016’s most interesting lectures (we’ve encountered). Listen to (or download) excerpts of that lecture here. [2]

Messina

***

[Transcription by Messina for Lumpenproletariat, Project Censored, and Flashpoints]

FLASHPOINTS—[22 FEB 2016] “Today on Flashpoints, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014. That’s Henry Kissinger’s group. That’s the guy Hillary Clinton loves. I’m Dennis Bernstein, all this ahead on Flashpoints. Stay tuned.

“And you’re listening to Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio. And I am delighted to be able to present to you a brand new speech by Laurence Schoup. Laurence Schoup has just authored Wall Street’s Think Tank. This is an extraordinary book. Let me tell you what some people have said about it. Here’s what [Noam] Chomsky has to say about it:

“‘A revealing account of how a small group of planners drawn from sectors of concentrated private and state power, closely linked, along with experts, whose commitments are congenial to their ends have set the contours for much of recent history, not least the neoliberal assault, that has had a generally destructive impact on populations, while serving as an effective instrument of a class war. A welcome and very valuable contribution.’

“And Michael Parenti says:

“‘Lucidly written and deeply informed, a treasury of insights, that seldom gets the attention it very much needs.‘

“Well, it’s gonna get a lot of attention now because we are delighted and proud to present to you a recent speech by Laurence Schoup, who was really speaking for KPFA/Pacifica Radio. Listen to this.” (c. 2:05)

[Audio from Laurence Schoup speech presented by KPFA and Project Censored on 20 JAN 2016 at The Hillside Club in Berkeley, California]

DR. LAURENCE SCHOUP: “Thank you, Bob, and thank you KPFA, the progressive left voice in the [SF] Bay Area here for 67 years, for organising this event tonight. Thank you all for coming.

“The Council On Foreign Relations is a behemoth. And it took, I took, 352 pages and 798 footnotes to document it. And it could’ve been a lot bigger book. I will endeavor, tonight, to cover it in one hour. My talk will have five parts.

“The first part is some anecdotes, impressionistic statements by people, or information about the Council On Foreign Relations, its importance and some aspects of the Council On Foreign Relations. So, first, just kind of anecdotal information.

“The second part will be a portrait on the Council On Foreign Relations, its organisational history, its network, its funding, its activities. So, you know about the organisation itself.

“Thirdly, I’ll go into the Council On Foreign Relations’ worldviews, which I call Neoliberal Geopolitics, by way of three examples: the Iraq War, US-China Policy, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“Fourth, I’ll go into the world, that’s been created, by this world-view and the Council On Foreign Relations’ power, how what kind of world we have is developed out of this.

“Fifth, my opinion on the world we need to strive for and create. (c. 3:29)

“So, first the anecdotes: When I was a graduate student in 1972, I had decided to write a dissertation on the Council On Foreign Relations. So, I was at Northwestern University. And I was having dinner one night with a French student, who had just arrived from France. He phoned in just a few days before. And we had mutual friends. And he came to dinner.

“And, so, we had casual conversation around the dinner table. And this French student said, ‘Larry, what are you writing your dissertation on?‘ I said, ‘Well, I’m interested in the ruling class forces behind American foreign policy.’ And this French guy says, ‘Oh, you mean the Council On Foreign Relations?‘ [laughs] And I said, ‘Yes, you’re right. But I didn’t say anything about the Council On Foreign Relations. No one around this table said anything about the Council On Foreign Relations. How do you know?‘ He said, Oh, my uncle is the head of the French CIA.’ [laughs; audience laughter] And he said, ‘I worked for my uncle. And I was in the official French CIA archives. And I was looking to—because I was coming to the United States to study at Northwestern. I wanted to see what they had said about the power structure of the United States. I looked there. And it says the shadow government of the United States is the Council On Foreign Relations.‘ The official French government analysis, according to this guy.

“Now, how can I prove that? No, I can’t prove it. But it’s an interesting anecdote. And, together with other anecdotes, it shows that the power structures of other countries know that the Council On Foreign Relations is important. And that’s reflected, if you look at the Council On Foreign Relations annual report and you see who has come to visit the Council On Foreign Relations, you’ll right away see: Wait, a minute. They seem to know something, that maybe us, we, don’t know so well. An example of that—the foreign governments being aware of the Council On Foreign Relations’ importance—when the Iranian president, [Hassan] Rouhani, was elected he came to the United States. He spoke with Obama on the phone. He met with the Council On Foreign Relations. [chuckles] He went to speak before them; and he met with the president of the Council On Foreign Relations. He didn’t meet with the president of the United States. He met with the president of the Council On Foreign Relations. It’s interesting, huh?

“Then, when Fidel—even revolutionaries are aware of this. When Fidel Castro came to power in late 1959, and he came to speak to the UN, he was invited to speak to the Council On Foreign Relations, and, apparently, he knew it was important to go there.

“So, Fidel Castro went to speak before the Council On Foreign Relations. And, after his speech, they began to ask him questions about: What was gonna be the result of my property ownership with your revolution? I own a lot of sugar plantations in Cuba. I own the nickel factory. I own some oil facilities. What happened?

“Fidel said: Well, if you took a poor man, which does he care about? Legal technicalities or a plate of beans?

“And, then, they kept asking him the same kind of questions. Finally, they said, one of the CFR people said: Fidel, how much does Cuba want? And Fidel took a deep breath and said: We don’t want your money. We want your respect.

“And, then, the same kind of questions continued. And Fidel walked out of the Council On Foreign Relations. He said: I can see I’m not among friends. And he walked out.

“Now, this story came from someone who was there, but interestingly enough didn’t wanna say that they were reporting on it because an aspect of the Council On Foreign Relations is secrecy.

“It can be overstated. You can find out a lot. And I have learned a lot about the Council On Foreign Relations. But they have an annual report, for example. And they have a website, that has a lot of information available. If you’re interested, CFR.org is where you can find out a lot more information about the Council On Foreign Relations, current things. (c. 6:53)

“So, anyway, these other countries, the leaders of these other countries, know that the Council On Foreign Relations is important.

“The Council On Foreign Relations likes to downplay its own importance. And, here, I have a little anecdote from the co-author of my first book, Imperial Brain Trust, on the Council On Foreign Relations. [3] It came out in 1977. Bill Minter was able to interview the ex-president of the Council On Foreign Relations, Henry Wriston. And he asked the ex-president of the Council On Foreign Relations: Well, isn’t the Council On Foreign Relations a very powerful organization? And this ex-president said: Oh, no. We’re not powerful. We’re not powerful at all. I’ll give you an example of how we have no power. This is an example from the president of the Council On Foreign Relations of how they have no power. Okay; let’s see what he said.

“He said: Well, when Eisenhower was president of Columbia University in the late ’40s, he became active in the Council On Foreign Relations. And he was at a—he came to a study group—and I’ll talk about the study groups at the Council in a minute—he came to the study group at the Council and he was very angry. And he started cursing like only an army general can curse. He was swearing a blue streak. And Allen Dulles saw him in the corner swearing. Allen Dulles was there at the meeting and went over and said, Ike, what’s the problem? He said, well, Truman just appointed me to be the Supreme Commander in Europe. But he put on limitations, that I don’t like. I’m really angry about these limitations, no political contact, other limitations. The President of the United States has appointed me. I have to take the job. I’m an ex-general. But I don’t like the conditions. And Dulles said, look, we have a nice group here at the Council, important people, no problem. Sit down and write out what your conditions are. We’ll go over it. I’ll take the night train to Washington, D.C.. And we’ll see what can be done.

“So, Allen Dulles did that. They wrote another—Eisenhower wrote out his conditions. The group modified them. It was typed up. Allen Dulles took the night train; and had breakfast with W. Averell Harriman, a director of the Council On Foreign Relations, who was also Harry Truman’s Chief of Staff. [4] Gee, what a coincidence. [chuckles] This is how the system works: In and out. You know? W. Averell Harriman was a big businessman. He went into the government. Then went out of the government, and so on. This time, he was in the government as Harry Truman’s Chief of Staff. So, Dulles gave him the memo. The memo was the first thing on President Truman’s desk in the morning. And W. Averell Harriman says, you should sign this. Truman says, you think so, W? Okay. He signs it.

“That’s an example of the presidents of the Council On Foreign Relations’ having no power. The presidents of the Council On Foreign Relations saying they have no power. [laughs]

“So, my co-author, Bill Minter said: Wait a minute. That looks like a lot of power to me. You get right to the president. And he makes a decision in your favour. Isn’t that a lot of power? [Harriman replies:] No, no. That’s not power. It’s the people at the Council, that have a lot of power, not the Council. The Council doesn’t have any power. It’s the people at the Council. That’s what this ex-president [of the Council On Foreign Relations] said. Of course, the Council organises these people, brings them to the same table. They work as a network. And this is how it works. So, that’s an example of how they have no power, according to the ex-president of the Council. (c. 10:02) [SNIP]

(c. 21:04) “Another aspect is they have meetings, the continuous Conference On International Affairs, they call it. And I mentioned previously examples, where Fidel [Castro] came and so on. They have [Hassan] Rouhani of Iran. Whenever a big, foreign dignitary comes to the United States they almost invariably go speak before the Council On Foreign Relations. So, they have many hundreds of meetings every year talking to important people from other countries.

“Then, they have a vast network. I have a whole chapter on their network. It’s incredible, their network. Of course, it’s starts with the corporations, as I’ve already alluded to; they have corporate members. But, beyond that, they have corporations, that have board of directors, that are also members of the Council On Foreign Relations. Some corporations, of course, are closer to the Council. The Wall Street ones, of course, are the closest. And also some other ones, you know, Berkshire Hathaway, for example, Warren Buffet; his son is also a member of the Council On Foreign Relations, another director is a member of the Council On Foreign Relations. Berkshire Hathaway has a big stake in a lot of corporations. And a lot of them are big on the Council, like Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola has a lot of interests abroad, so they’re interested in being in the Council.

“Then, I go into, in the book—oh, I should mention a couple of other things, I guess, before I do that: The foundations are important in donating to the Council. There is [sic] risk advisory groups of different kinds heavily interlocked in the Council, like [Henry] Kissinger or the Albright Stonebridge Group, other groups, that do risk assessments for corporations. They get paid big money to assess risks. They’re heavily interlocked with the Council On Foreign Relations. Unions, some unions, are interlocked with the Council, including the AFL-CIO are interlocked with the council. [5] The AFL-CIO head was a director of the Council. This was true for a number of years. And, of course, this is business unionism. And I think that is a corruption. Unions should be organisations by, and for, working people, fighting for working people, fighting for the entire working class, not cooperating as junior partners to imperialism, junior partners to the corporations. So, that’s something—[scant applause]. Thank you.

“So, we need to fight business unionism. I’ve been a union member, every chance I’ve got my whole life. I’m a member of the United Auto Workers, 1981, retired, the writers union. I’ve been a member of two other unions. I’ve always fought for industrial unionism. (c. 23:25)

“The universities, of course, I already mentioned. There were a lot of interconnections with the universities.

“In the book, I cover the international side because it’s very interesting, the international side of the Council On Foreign Relations. Now, you’ve heard, probably, the Bilderberg Group. And that’s—you know—right wingers are always talking about this as an international conspiracy of socialists or something. It’s ridiculous. It’s actually a group—and you can go on their website and you’ll find—because Bilderberg have a website now. So, you can look at and see who the leaders are. And you’ll find that they’re European nobles. [laughs] That’s who the leaders of the Bilderb—along with the CFR. 92% of the U.S. members of the Bilderberger meet—people that meet at the Bilderberger, 92% are members of the Council On Foreign Relations. So, it’s an alliance between the Council On Foreign Relations and the European Nobles. And, unless you define socialism as, you know, roads, or schools, or, you know, water systems or something, if you define socialism as that, well, then, I guess the Bilderbergers and the Council, in general, wants the big state. They want the big state for their, for corporate benefits, for corporate welfare, to protect themselves, to conquer other countries, so they can get markets there. You know, that’s—they like the big state. So, they’re in counter-distinction to the Koch Brothers approach or a more Libertarian part of the capitalist class, that doesn’t like the big state. The Koch Brothers are not in the Council On Foreign Relations. They don’t have very many connections. There may be. A few of their advisors might be; but it’s very small.

“So, the Bilderbergs is one group. And it’s interesting that [David] Rockefeller was one of the main Bilderberg people that started meeting. It started in 1954. It’s named after the hotel where they had their first meeting. And it’s a policy group, that meets and talks about policy. But they don’t have ongoing study groups. It’s not the same as the Council On Foreign Relations, of course.

“But, at one meeting in the early 1970s, Rockefeller, who was a director and was the chairman of the Council On Foreign Relations by then, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a director of the Council, went to the Bilderberger. And they said—you know. They said: You know, the Japanese are becoming important. So, we should really bring them into the Bilderberg dialogue, don’t you think? And these European nobles: No. We don’t want Japanese in our group, not at all. We’re against it. So, Rockefeller’s memoirs said: We raised it. We tried to persuade them. But we were politely, and firmly, told: No, we’re not gonna have Japanese in the Bilderberg Group, period.

“So, Brzezinski and Rockefeller went on to form another group, that would include the Japanese. It’s called the Trilateral Commission. So, the Trilateral refers to the Japanese, Western Europe, and North America. So, that’s the Trilateral Group. And it was more like the Council On Foreign Relations, in terms of planning policy, etcetera. That’s what the Trilateral Commission does. And, of course, they got some unwelcome publicity early on because they, uh—the Trilateral Commission had a report that said there was an excess of democracy in the west, in the United States and other countries. It was too much democracy. We oughta take care of that. [chuckles] Well, neoliberalism has worked pretty hard to take care of the democracy in the United States and other places. So, that’s what they’re doing.

“So, anyway, now you see Davos, of course. Davos [i.e., the World Economic Forum] is now going on in Switzerland. Of course, that’s a meeting of big businessmen. You have to pay something like $500,000 dollars to your group—you know, maybe five people or something like that, that go there. But, still, you gotta pay vast amounts of money to go to Davos. I saw [current U.S. Vice President under Obama] Joe Biden is there; I guess he’s paying to go to Davos. Or, maybe, they’re giving him a free pass. But, anyway, that’s where the big businessmen network and plan policy and think about policy. Well, there’s no list of all the people that have gone to Davos. It’s way too big. But if you look at the report that they did have one year, almost all of them were from the Council On Foreign Relations. It’s amazing, the overlap, the Council Directors, Council Members, all kinds of ’em. (c. 27:41)

“Then, finally, there’s some other things, of course, in that chapter of the international. But, moving on, the Council has an International Advisory Board of about 40 people. And, if you look at this International Advisory Board—it started in 1995; it had a different name then—but, anyway, if you look at it over time—and I’ve been collecting Council On Foreign Relations’ annual reports since the early ’70s, so I can look at all these things and analyse ’em. It’s very interesting that there’s a number of fascists, actual fascists, for example, that have been on this International Advisory Board. Giovanni Agnelli, fought with the Italian Blue Division against the Russians on the Eastern Front in World War II. [6] And he was a fascist. And he killed, you know, Russians, who were fighting for Russian ind—you know, not being defeated by the Nazis. He was fighting for the Nazis. And he was on the International Advisory Board. He was a very good friend of David Rockefeller. And he was on the Chase Manhattan International Advisory Board, too.

“And there’s a lot of billionaires on this International Advisory Board in the Council. One of them, just to cite an example—and I could go on and on about these billionaires. One of them is pretty interesting because he has the biggest private home on Earth. It cost a billion dollars to build his private home. It’s in Mumbai. It’s, uh, was it 40 stories high? I forget all the details. But it’s just an amazing place. It’s got hanging gardens, you know, three different gyms. It’s got three helicopter pads, you know, so they can fly in. So, they have to have their own, uh, you know—what do you call those, to make sure—air traffic control. They have their own air traffic control. They have 600 servants. He’s on the International [Advisory Board]. The guy who owns that is on the International Advisory Board of the Council.

“So, in terms of funding, I could go on on the Council’s funding. But it’s a plutocracy. I have on my website. I also have a lot of information on my website, that I didn’t wanna put into the book because it seemed to be overkill. So, if you go to my website, LaurenceSchoup.org you’ll see the listing of all the plutocratic donors. [7] And it’s the typical, you know, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Du Ponts, you know, I could go on and on and on. It’s the old plutocracy that’s funded. (c. 30:12) [SNIP] (c. 30:46) Okay. So, there’s the plutocracy.

“Okay. Let’s go on to Section II: The Council’s Worldview. What’s the Council’s worldview? Now, the Council’s worldview is neoliberal geopolitics. And those are two distinct things. One is an economic idea—neoliberalism. The other is world politics—geopolitics. So, the Council focuses on the richest and most powerful three sections of the world in their neoliberal geopolitical framework, or worldview: North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, including China. (c. 31:23) [SNIP] (c. 31:49)

“So, neoliberal geopolitics is dedicated to promoting the expansion of US economic power abroad and trying to create pro-capitalist utopias around the world where free market capitalist fundamentalism can dominate, resulting in high profits due to low labour costs and low costs to resources. And the best way to explain it is to give a couple of examples. And I’ll give three brief ones: Iraq, China, and the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (c. 32:26) [SNIP]

Learn more at FLASHPOINTS.

[This transcript will be expanded as time constraints allow.]

***

[1] Of course, those of us trained in economics at a high quality heterodox economics department, such as the University of Missouri-Kansas City, understand the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to adequately address economics. Other notable heterodox economics departments in the USA include: the New School for Social Research (New York City), UC Riverside (Riverside, California), University of Massachusetts-Boston, University of Utah, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, among others. Unfortunately, most economics departments throughout the USA, and much of the world, model their economics departments after neoclassical orthodoxy, as exemplified by the Chicago School of Economics, which seeks to constrain the discipline of economics within narrow mathematised boundaries, completely divorced from the real world and real human behaviour, so as to serve the interests of capital, those who horde capital, and the ruling classes.

[2] This particular radio broadcast is entitled, “Laurence Schoup: Wall Street’s Think Tank” and broadcast by Flashpoints (KPFA, 94.1 FM, Berkeley, CA). But, perhaps, this speech was originally broadcast by KPFA’s Project Censored radio show. Excerpts of this lecture were also broadcast on:

“Laurence Schoup Special“, 24 FEB 2016, 11:00 PDT, 94.1 FM, KPFA (Berkeley, CA).

Also see the docudrama The American Ruling Class (2005) for more information and somewhat of an insider’s view of the Council On Foreign Relations.

[3] For a PDF file of Dr. Schoup’s book, co-authored with William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, see here: http://goodtimesweb.org/overseas-war/0595324266_ImperialBrain.pdf

[4] W. Averell Harriman (1891-1986) was also a core member of the group of foreign policy elders known as “The Wise Men“. Notably, after attending Groton School in Massachusetts he went on to Yale where he joined the American ruling class elite’s secretive Skull and Bones society. Ater graduating in 1913, Harriman inherited the largest fortune in America at the time and became Yale’s youngest Crew coach. Harriman took his fortune to expand into various business ventures, including dealing with Nazis. Harriman’s banking business was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen; who was a financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938. The Trading With the Enemy Act (enacted on October 6, 1917) classified any business transactions for profit with enemy nations as illegal, and any funds or assets involved were subject to seizure by the USA’s government. The declaration of war on the U.S. by Hitler led to the U.S. government order on October 20, 1942 to seize German interests in the USA, which included Harriman’s operations in New York City.

[5] Perhaps, deservedly, the AFL-CIO is also known as the AFL-CIA.

[6] Perhaps, Dr. Schoup meant a descendant of Giovanni Agnelli, as Giovanni Agnelli died in 1945. Yet, Dr. Schoup says that the International Advisory Board of the Council On Foreign Relations “started in 1995, although it had a different name then.” So, perhaps the International Advisory Board was named differently prior to 1995 and after the founding of the Council On Foreign Relations circa 1918-1921.

[7] Perhaps, Dr. Schoup meant LaurenceSchoup.com because LaurenceSchoup.org doesn’t seem to exist.

***

[25 FEB 2016]

[Last modified 13 APR 2016 13:58 PDT]

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