The Straight and Narrow

The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla

John — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:28:33 +0000

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer. He was one of the most important contributors to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Source: Wikipedia

“TAKING THE RED PILL” - THE REAL MATRIX

John — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:38:05 +0000

Source: News With Views

The Matrix, easily the most thought-provoking film in a generation, tells the story of a computer hacker going by the alias Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) who discovers that the world he has taken for granted his entire life is an illusion. The “Matrix” is a virtual-reality simulation created by a powerful artificial intelligence. Since birth Neo has been wired directly into an immense computer system that can project a panorama of sensory information directly into his brain and central nervous system. This creates the illusion of his living in a world where by day he is Thomas A. Anderson, a programmer for a software giant. One of the working premises of the film is that the majority of human beings are born, live out their lives, and die inhabiting cocoon-like structures, plugged into this system, never suspecting the truth. Their life-experiences are fabricated, while their life-energies sustain the ruling entity.

Neo has long suspected that something is amiss without being able to put his finger on it. It was this something that drew him into hacking and into the world of computers generally. His presence became known to Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), leader of a band of rebels fighting to free the human race from bondage to the artificial intelligence. Of course, Neo’s nocturnal computer explorations have also become known to the “agents,” living programs who service the artificial intelligence. The first half-hour or so of the film is a race to see which side can get to him first.

Click below to continue…

One of the rebels, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), hacks into his computer and lures him to a Gothic nightclub. There she confronts him with his unease:

“I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer. You’re looking for him. I know, because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us, Neo. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did.”

Neo: “What is the Matrix?”

Trinity: “The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you, if you want it to.”

The pivotal scene occurs when she introduces Neo to Morpheus. With a thunderstorm in the background, some gripping dialogue ensues:

Morpheus: I imagine that right now you’re feeling a little like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit-hole…I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth…Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Neo: The Matrix?

Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?

Neo: (nods)

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when you go to church, or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. (Produces a box containing two colored pills, one blue and one red.) This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you awake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Pause. Neo reaches for the red pill.) Remember: all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more. (Neo swallows the red pill with a glass of water.)

After that, things happen pretty quickly. Neo is jerked free of the artificial intelligence and finds himself in the “desert of the real,” with Morpheus, Trinity and the others on board the Nebuchadnezzar who are struggling to free the human race from control by the artificial intelligence, while simultaneously battling superhuman “agents” and monstrous mechanical “sentinels” sent to destroy them.

Science fiction, right?

Unquestionably, many viewers watched The Matrix convinced that all they were seeing was a science fiction action film—entertainment, without further significance.

I believe it’s more. The Matrix—which has begun to generate a secondary literature in academic disciplines like philosophy and cultural studies—may be seen an allegory for our present situation after the past hundred-plus years. The allegory is about power and concealment. The “real matrix” is then a world most of middle America takes for granted—a world where “they hate us because we are free,” and where the public schools educate. A world where we can trust the federal government and believe Dan Rather. A world where the former obeys its founding document, the U.S. Constitution. In other words, a fantasy world.

Let us conduct a thought experiment. Let us remove the obviously evil artificial intelligence and its minions—“agents” and “sentinels”—and substitute a power system controlled by a few hundred extremely wealthy and well-placed individuals—a super-elite, I will call it. I use this term to distinguish it from visible, national elites. This super-elite operates at an international level, outside all national loyalties. Its only loyalties are to money and power. It exercises control by controlling not just much of the Western world’s finances but much of the information released to the public. It controls the mainstream mass media (television networks and newspapers mostly owned by six or so megaconglomerates) and most education through top-down policies permeating the prevailing form of education in this land: government (“public”) schools. So-called higher education is part of this system. The super-elite bent academic disciplines such as history and psychology in the direction it wanted them to go by generously supplying foundation and grant money to compliant graduate students who then become compliant professors and administrators. Through the endowment system it gained control over Ivy League universities. The latter, via their enormous prestige and control of flagship organizations within academic disciplines (such as the American Historical Association or the American Psychological Association), set the course for those disciplines that others can be expected to follow automatically.

Members of the super-elite that controls this power system were never elected to anything, but elected officials in national elites answer to them. Those without the tacit approval of the super-elite have no chance of coming within a thousand miles of the Oval Office. The masses of people, meanwhile, will have been “educated” to adjust to society, which in this context means following the crowd and automatically withholding support from anyone who “can’t get elected.” Combine these two, and you have a reason why no Libertarian Party or Constitution Party candidate has a chance of becoming President of the United States or even reaching high office at the state level as long as this power system remains in place. The media elites continue to promote a system which plays Democrats against Republicans although both parties are controlled at the top. There exists, in other words, a strict gatekeeping system. Only those with certain values and attributes, and a certain mindset, need apply.

Let’s now go beyond the thought-experiment stage. Does this super-elite really exist, or is this just more armchair “conspiracy theory”? It is not a theory. It is now quite well documented. The information is available to anyone willing to seek it out. To paraphrase what Trinity told Neo in their initial conversation, the answers are out there, and will find you if you want them to. Or, you can find them, if you go looking.

Like most of academia’s tenured class, Professor Carroll Quigley of the School of Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University dumped on “conservatives.” In the Cold War environment of the mid-1960s, it was kosher to ridicule the McCarthyite idea that a legion of communists had infiltrated our government—and represented a dangerous leftist conspiracy run out of Moscow.

Quigley, after all, knew the truth. The real agenda was not run out of Moscow but from banking empires long established in New York City, London, and elsewhere. These empires had actually bankrolled communism. They had maneuvered nations into wars by secretly financing both sides and then setting them against one another. Quigley’s 1,300-plus page tome Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time mocks the conspiracy theory of the anticommunists as a “myth” but then suddenly offers one of the most extraordinary revelations ever penned by someone of Quigley’s stature:

This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known. (p. 950, emphasis mine)

Professor Quigley was openly telling us of a hidden power system—a super-elite—operating behind the scenes. He identified it as “the Round Table Groups.” These controllers “wish to remain unknown” as they work out their plans for the world. What are their plans for the world? Quigley elaborated:

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups. (p. 324)

In other words, the super-elite wanted both wealth and power, and this meant placing the rest of us at a systemic disadvantage in our own pursuits. Later, Quigley outlined the truth about the two-party system in America:

The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy… [E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of those things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies. (pp. 1247-48)

Quigley identified shadowy organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations based in New York and the Royal Institute of International Affairs based in London as front organizations for the Round Table Groups he mentioned—sometimes specific individuals such as J.P. Morgan, the banking titan. He claimed to have studied the super-elite’s secret records for twenty years, and to identify with its goals and most of its policies. His only major disagreement was with its desire to “remain unknown.” This disagreement got Tragedy and Hope into trouble. Its publisher, Macmillan, allowed the book to disappear despite thousands of back orders. Inquirers were told it had gone out of print. In addition to the disappearance of nearly every copy, the original plates were destroyed, making new printings impossible given the technology of the time. There can be no doubt of an attempt to suppress the book. Quigley lost control of his own work, as pirated editions began to appear. He wrote near the end of his life that the book “has brought me many headaches as it apparently says something that powerful people don’t want known.” A smaller companion volume, The Anglo-American Establishment, failed to find a publisher during his lifetime.

Quigley’s account of these organizations and their development, both in Tragedy and Hope and in The Anglo-American Establishment is authoritative and definitive. Under no circumstances can we dismiss Quigley as a “conspiracy nut.” Quigley was established, with a solid reputation as a macrohistorian: a historian specializing in the larger, long-term tendencies governing the rise and development of entire civilizations. Earlier, he had written an important and very well-received work of macrohistory, The Evolution of Civilizations. Carroll Quigley would not have deliberately sabotaged an ideal career, one with enormous perks, privileges, and access to the centers of influence. There can be no reasonable doubt that he knew what he was talking about.

Quigley became mentor to one William Jefferson Clinton, and helped Clinton get the Rhodes Scholarship that sent him to Oxford. (We will say more about Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes Scholarships below.) Quigley was the one person Clinton would thank by name after assuming the presidency in 1993. That was the year our nation took a quantum leap towards globalism: beginning with so-called “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development put in place in response to a United Nations “soft law” document called Agenda 21.

What results from taking Quigley seriously is a quite different picture of American and Western political history from what we get from history and political science textbooks—and of the political process from what we get from the mainstream media. It suggests that the conventional picture, in which the history of the past hundred years just a series of series of unfortunate accidents and blunders, is a masquerade—and partly the result of the hijacking of academic disciplines such as history. We come to realize that most Americans are indeed plugged into a “matrix”—created not by a malevolent sci-fi machine, of course, but by controls over their education and the information that reaches them. They are “plugged in” as children, attending first public schools and then colleges and universities. They “learn” to trust government information, the academic-bureaucratic complex, and the mainstream news media. This creates the “real matrix.” A few, like Neo in The Matrix, may suspect that something is wrong. But fear of being branded paranoid usually ensures their silence. If they write down their suspicions and publish them, they are ignored. There is, after all, enormous loyalty to the fabricated world. Those “plugged in” have their own gatekeeping systems. Certain ideas—e.g., those having to do with “conspiracy theories”—are automatically screened out. The super-elite then need not work so hard, or even remain entirely secret. If the schools do their job right, its members need not micromanage every institution to make sure everyone follows the rules. The power system runs on a kind of autopilot.

This state of affairs did not develop overnight. This much should be clear. What is behind it?

Within any society, there appears to be a minority that thinks in terms of power and measures the worth of all actions in terms of whether they increase the personal reach of the actors and increase their capacity for control. This is why practically every society of any size is hierarchical, and why hierarchy is never eliminated, only replaced by a different hierarchy—the same wine in a new bottle.

Where to begin the story is a tough question. Some would cite the Bavarian Illuminati, started by a renegade Jesuit priest named Adam Weishaupt in 1776, the same year our Declaration of Independence was written. Weishaupt, however, found financial support through the Rothschild banking empire. The European bankers had discovered fractional reserve banking and the fine art of creating “wealth” out of thin air. They had learned they could exercise control over governments by loaning them money at interest and then extending the loans—attaching conditions to the extensions. The Rothschilds were the first internationalists of the incipient industrial era. They had established banks in five centers of influence: London (England), Paris (France), Frankfurt (Germany), Vienna (Austria) and Naples (Italy). These banks cooperated closely with one another, and they doubtless wielded enormous influence on the course European history took during the 1800s. J.P. Morgan became the American equivalent, eventually followed by the Rockefeller clan. John D. Rockefeller Sr. had made a fortune running Standard Oil. His children soon learned that there were even larger fortunes to be made in banking, and in socking as much money as possible into tax-exempt foundations created in the wake of the founding of the Internal Revenue Service in 1913. But alas, I get ahead of myself.

There are people who believe that the group Weishaupt founded still exists, and is still orchestrating all the more recent secret or semi-secret organizations from behind the scenes. Others would hold out for the Freemasons, with which Weishaupt had been involved. I have not been able to produce any original documentation supporting such theses (Weishaupt’s group was in fact outlawed in his own country in 1785). But secrecy was around in the form of the Skull & Bones organization founded at Yale in 1832. Numerous members of this group became prominent bankers, businessmen, ambassadors, other government officials, and so on, down through the ages. Antony Sutton argues in America’s Secret Establishment that Skull & Bones has been at the center of it all since its being brought to this country from Europe (specifically and interestingly: Germany). Skull & Bones still exists, of course. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry are members.

We know that a man named John Ruskin came to Oxford University to teach fine arts in 1870, and that he had a social philosophy of reform that took English upper-class youth by storm. Ruskin taught that English upper-class values needed to be extended to the masses and spread worldwide. The English upper classes would need to redistribute at least some of their wealth, or face the overwhelming of English civilization by an uncontrollable “rabble.” Karl Marx had preached that the violent overthrowing of capitalism was historically inevitable. Ruskin’s response: Marxian upheavals were preventable, but only by undertaking the immense project of extending English upper-class wealth and values as a means of remaining in control. In other words, create a global empire with Great Britain at its helm.

Ruskin’s most famous pupil was Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes kept the notes he’d taken on certain of Ruskin’s lectures with him the rest of his life. Other students of Ruskin’s were Alfred Milner and Arnold Toynbee. Rhodes became a multibillionaire mining gold and diamonds in South Africa (he received support, interestingly, from Lord Rothschild and later from Alfred Beit, an immensely wealthy German-born financier who became his partner in De Beers Consolidated Mines). We know that prior to his death, Rhodes willed a substantial portion of his fortune to the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship program mentioned above. Less well known is that in five previous wills he wrote of setting up a secret society the long-term goal of which was to create world government: “the extension of British rule throughout the world” including “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire …”

Rhodes’s secret society was in fact organized in 1891 (Lord Rothschild was one of its members, as were Milner and Toynbee). Rhodes and those he recruited for his project believed that furthering this kind of plan was the only means of putting an end to war and extending the British Empire worldwide. Thus were the Round Table Groups Carroll Quigley mentioned begun. Milner took over following Rhodes’s death in 1902. According to Quigley (Tragedy and Hope, p. 132), these groups “still function in eight countries.” Quigley pursues in vivid detail the careers of the major players in The Anglo-American Establishment. With the reputations made possible by Oxford educations and enormous financial resources at their disposal, the men running the Round Table Groups literally became “the establishment”—despite the fact that except for Rhodes and Toynbee their names remained almost unknown. The anonymity did not bother them. They did not want fame. They wanted power.

A banking and industrial elite had already established itself in America (it is likely that Rothchild money had helped out here as well). Starting with banking titan J.P. Morgan, then the Rockefellers, and finally steel magnate turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (among the first to float the idea of a “league of nations”), a globalist mindset with enormous resources to back it up also developed here. G. Edward Griffin, in his classic The Creature From Jekyll Island, recounts the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. This gave them control over essentially the entire banking apparatus of the country—driving smaller, independent banks out of business. That same year, of course, saw the rise of the Internal Revenue Service. For the first time in U.S. history, every working individual’s personal income was taxed, and every individual would soon have to report his earnings to the federal government. It is fair to say that by the time these efforts were complete, wealth and power were flowing to the center. The ordinary citizen was losing control, and he didn’t even know it!

The super-elite was able to gain control of what became the mainstream media. In another of those rare moments of total candor and lucidity by a professional politician, U.S. Congressman Oscar Calloway, stated in 1917:

In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press….They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.

An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.

G. Edward Griffin describes the equivalent hijacking of academic history, alluded to above:

They selected twenty candidates at the university level who were seeking doctorates in American History. Then they went to the Guggenheim Foundation and said, “Would you grant fellowships to candidates selected by us, who are of the right frame of mind, those who see the value of collectivism as we do? Would you help them obtain their doctorates so we can then propel them into positions of prominence and leadership in the academic world?” And the answer was “Yes.”

So they gathered a list of young men who were seeking their doctoral degrees. They interviewed them, analyzed their attitudes, and chose the twenty they thought were best suited for their purpose. They sent them to London for a briefing….At this meeting, they were told what would be expected if and when they won the doctorates they were seeking. They were told they would have to view history, write history, and teach history from the perspective that collectivism was a positive force in the world, and was the wave of the future.

Now let’s go to the words of Mr. Dodd himself [then principal investigator for the Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations] as he described this event before our cameras in 1982. He said:

This group of twenty historians eventually formed the nucleus of the American Historical Association. Then toward the end of the 1920s the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 [a huge amount of money in those days] for a study of history in a manner that points to what this country can look forward to in the future….

With the media and academic disciplines undergoing transformation by these monied interests, and infiltrated by the Round Table Groups, organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie financial empire began to pursue the globalist agenda (see The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 183). The Carnegie Endowment for Peace, in true Orwellian fashion three decades before Orwell would pen 1984, would maneuver the U.S. into the latest European war—on the side of the British, of course. The super-elite’s man in the Wilson Administration was “Colonel” Edward Mandell House. Some would later say that House was the real president during those years. Wilson himself referred to House as his “second personality.” House had anonymously published a book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator, a blueprint for the adoption of totalitarian socialism in America thinly disguised as fiction. Staying by Wilson’s side, he convinced Wilson to abandon a 1916 campaign pledge and enter the conflict going on in Europe. What ensued became known first as the Great War and later as World War I.

The super-elite had created the conditions for world war. It followed a pattern familiar to students of the highly influential German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Create conditions for a major disruption (thesis); allow the disruption to provoke a distraught reaction (antithesis); then, with a major crisis at hand, step in with the solution (synthesis). The super-elite’s solutions to the crises it engineered invariably involved a power grab. Its members have always liked wars. Wars destabilize nations. They leave behind ruined lives and economies, as well as frightened populations who will turn to anyone who promises to put an end to their suffering.

The super-elite’s promise was an end to the threat of world war through an incipient world government, to be called the League of Nations. became a strong proponent of the League of Nations. European nations began joining. Efforts to pull the U.S. into its orbit were torpedoed in the Senate. Lack of U.S. support would sink the League of Nations. Such an entity could not survive without U.S. participation. It would be noticed, nevertheless, that the whole tenor of U.S. foreign policy had changed. Our first president, George Washington, had warned famously in his Farewell Address against the “foreign entanglements” that would become inevitable under an interventionist foreign policy. Until the Wilsonian era, the U.S. had stayed out of foreign conflicts and refrained from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. No more. The goal of the new interventionism, in a phrase current during the time, was “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Their first attempt at an incipient world government scuttled, the super-elite regrouped, and in 1921, founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in England and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) here, as front organizations for the promotion of globalism and world government. Quigley tells us:

Through Lord Milner’s influence, these men were able to win influential posts in government, in international finance, and become the dominant influence in British imperial affairs and foreign affairs up to 1939. In 1909 through 1913, they organized semi-secret groups known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries….

Once again the task was given to Lionel Curtis who established, in England and each dominion, a front organization for the local Round Table Group. This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing, submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company (Tragedy and Hope, p. 132, pp. 951-52).

One cannot overstress the CFR’s importance in directing the course of American policy, domestic as well as foreign. It went almost unnoticed for decades, even as its leading members (financed by Rockefeller dollars) created their next attempt at a world government: the United Nations. This time the U.S. signed on board. That was the early 1940s. We had fought and won a second world war, even more destructive than the first, and created the basic infrastructure of the welfare state. The Cold War had started. What is variously called the “military-industrial complex” or the “welfare-warfare state” became the dominant force in this hemisphere.

In 1961, a man named Dan Smoot would write a book about the CFR entitled The Invisible Government. The book was ignored. Smoot was an outsider—a radio broadcaster with a strong independent streak. Then Quigley came along. He was one of the insiders.

Here (courtesy of G. Edward Griffin’s exhaustive research for Freedom Force International) is a list of past presidents who have been members of the CFR: Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Here is a list of Secretaries of State who were CFR members: Dean Rusk, Robert Lansing, Frank Kellogg, Henry Stimpson, Cordell Hull, E.R. Stittinius, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Christian Herter, William Rogers, Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, Alexander Haig, George Schulz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagelberger, Warren Christopher, William Richardson, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and now Condoleezza Rice (President Bush’s new replacement for the recently departed Powell). Here is a list of Secretaries of Defense who were CFR members: James Forrestal, George Marshall, Charles Wilson, Neil McElroy, Robert McNamara, Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, Casper Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, Richard Cheney, Les Aspin, William Perry, William Cohen and Donald Rumsfeld. Here is a list of Central Intelligence Agency directors who were CFR members: Walter Smith, William Colby, Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, John McCone, James Schlesinger, George H.W. Bush, Stansfield Turner, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates, James Woolsey, John Deutch, William Studeman and George Tenet.

CFR influence permeates the mainstream media. Leading media personalities who are or were CFR members include David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, William Buckley, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. Members of the CFR hold controlling management positions at major newspapers, leading news services, publications, and publishing houses. A sampling: The Army Times, American Publishers, American Spectator, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Associated Press, Association of American Publishers, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Forbes, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Dow Jones News Service, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Times Mirror, Random House, W.W. Norton & Co., Warner Books, Atlantic, Harper’s, Industry Week, Naval War College Review, Farm Journal, Financial World, Insight, Washington Times, Medical Tribune, National Geographic, National Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Newsday, NewsMax, Newsweek, Political Science Quarterly, The Progressive, Public Interest, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Time-Warner, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Weekly Standard, World Policy Journal, Worldwatch, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, PBS, RCA, and Walt Disney.

Tax-exempt foundations and think tanks with CFR members in controlling positions include: The Sloan and Kettering Foundations, Aspen Institute, Atlantic Council, Bilderburg Group, Brookings Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Hudson Institute, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, RAND Corp., Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee, Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Trust Fund, the Trilateral Commission, and the UN Association.

The number of past or present university presidents, administrators, professors and departmental chairs, or members of boards of trustees who are or were CFR members is around 563. This is greater than the number of CFR members in financial institutions including banks, the Federal Reserve system, stock exchanges and brokerage houses: around 284. Many corporations, finally, have been controlled by past or present CFR members: Atlantic Richfield, AT&T, Avon, Bechtel, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chevron, Coca Cola, Consolidated Edison, Exxon, Dow Chemical, du Pont, Eastman Kodak, Enron, Estee Lauder, Ford Motor, General Electric, General Foods, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Co., Lockheed, Lucent Technologies, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Northrup, Pacific Gas & Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Proctor & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Yahoo, Shell Oil, Smith Kline Beecham (a pharmaceutical giant), Sprint, Texaco, Santa Fe Southern Pacific Railroad, Teledyne, TRW, Southern California Edison, Unocal, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Warner-Lambert, Weyerhauser, Xerox.

Labor unions have also been had CFR members in dominant roles: the AFL-CIO, United Steel Workers of America, United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, Bricklayers and Allied Craft, Communications Workers of America, Union of Needletrades, and Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan is a CFR member. So were 14 of his predecessors.

This is just a sampling. What it shows is that something like 80 percent of the power centers in American political and economic life have people in controlling positions who are members of the same organization—an organization with around 4,000 members total. Isn’t this curious in and of itself? And shouldn’t one be even more curious that most of the rest of the population of this country has never heard of the organization? Many of those who have, would respond that the CFR is no more than a job-finding service for the well-connected. While it is very dubious that all 4,000 of its members are involved in directing the machinations discussed here, there is doubtless an inner circle, the Round Table Group at its center, and here we will find the “secret government” Smoot wrote about, and which Quigley documented in detail.

James Madison warned in the Federalist Paper #47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” As a society we desperately need to “take the red pill” and unplug before it is too late! But how did we get so complacent?

The super-elite had two long-term goals. One we have covered at some length: that of gradually taking the West toward a socialist world government, whether by creating an Anglo-American empire or through the UN.

The other, a necessary flipside of the first goal, was social engineering, to create a population that would accept world government—either because they embraced or had even learned to love the idea or because they didn’t care. We saw strong hints of this in our account of the hijacking of the mainstream media and academic disciplines like history. But now our focus must be broadened to middle America generally—the ordinary people working at ordinary jobs and attempting to raise ordinary families. For the social engineering project to work, its targets must learn as little as possible about the principles guiding our original Constitutional republic. They must have been educated—or, rather, trained—not to think, just to follow orders. They must be conditioned for an existence permeated by dependency of various sorts. And they must be continually distracted, so as never to be motivated to put two and two together and get four.

In other words, a “real matrix” had to be constructed around middle America, quietly, quietly. Or as the idea was expressed openly at Carnegie Endowment facilities: “We must control education in the United States.” Centralization, of course, makes control easier. It is far easier to impose policy or a single line of thought on a centralized, top-down educational system than it is to impose it on hundreds of privately owned, independent schools and autonomous districts. The government school system was perfect for what the super-elite wanted.

The Founding Fathers simply assumed that education would not be a function of the federal government. The Constitution does not mention education. The Founding Fathers themselves were privately educated. It is clear, also, from such events as the publication of the Federalist Papers in the major New York newspaper of the time, or from the literature that was published and sold well at the time (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper’s difficult, philosophically dense novels) that early generations of Americans had a command of language and intellect that is superior to today’s masses.

Government schools got their start in the 1840s, when Horace Mann returned from Prussia bearing news of an amazing school system. The Prussian system was also rooted in Hegelian thought. Hegel had believed we lived in a universe of Absolute Reason that would be expressed politically as the Absolute State—the exact opposite of the limited government the Founding Fathers had established. In the Prussian system children were educated not for intellectual accomplishment but for obedience to the state. The word kindergarten is, in fact, Prussian. It suggests growing children, as in a garden (which may recall that disturbing scene in The Matrix where, under the malevolent supervision of AI machines, humans “are no longer born, we are grown”).

Massachusetts, Mann’s home state, bought into the idea, and became the first state (in 1852) to enact a compulsory attendance law. Government schools did not catch on right away. A number of theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of their dangers. But very slowly, the American population began to accept them. Compulsory education laws were passed in one state after another. Numerous state constitutions (including my own state of South Carolina) adopted planks committing state governments to financing government school systems. The consolidation and centralization of education had begun.

The super-elite watched all this with great interest. They saw, in government schools, a path to a controlled population—a population of “sheeple.” The earliest incarnation of what would become the Rockefeller Foundation, before the turn of the century, began with the meeting between John D. Rockefeller Sr. and one Frederick Taylor Gates. Rockefeller Sr. had begun giving money to a variety of causes, many of them very worthwhile. He had bankrolled the University of Chicago, for example. Gates had ideas of his own about how to use Rockefeller money. He would lead Rockefeller’s eldest son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., into an interest in education that would lead to the founding of the General Education Board in 1902. In his Occasional Letter No. 1, a publication of the General Education Board, Gates penned the following chilling two paragraphs:

In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.

The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops on the farm.

Concealed within these words is a goal of social control—via a system of education that stresses vocationalism at the expense of challenging students cognitively or intellectually. This system would eventually transform government schools into laboratories of social engineering in order to produce “sheeple” who would neither know nor care about, much less challenge, the goal of socialist world government.

John Dewey was the lynchpin figure here. Dewey had doubtless come to the attention of the Round Table Groups very early. A youthful psychology professor at the University of Chicago, he had studied the new “experimental psychology” under G. Stanley Hall, who in turn had been the first American student of the German philosopher-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who had begun the “experimental psychology” movement at the University of Leipzig in the 1870s. Wundt’s school promoted a militant empiricism: nothing counted for science except what could be directly observed in the laboratory. Since thoughts, free will, the soul, etc., could not be observed, it was pointless to theorize about them. “Experimental psychology”—the parent of behaviorism—eliminated them in favor of ideas bound to interest would-be social engineers. Children were organic stimulus-response machines. Human beings, in this materialist view, are exclusively products of their environment. Change the environment and you produce a new human being. A whole new way of “educating” seemed about to open up.

Dewey’s progressive education picked up where “experimental psychology” left off. For Dewey—schooled in both Hegelian and Marxist thought as well as Wundtian psychology—the purpose of education is not to communicate knowledge and the accumulated wisdom of our civilization, or to offer children intellectual challenges, but to adjust them to a “changing” society. To the progressive educators, even basic literacy was a mere option and not a necessity. Dewey wrote that “it is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work for the first two years.”

Essentially, under progressive educators government schools mounted a systematic attack on children’s minds as those of unique individuals. Dewey also wrote:

The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.

So education became socialization, the adjustment of the individual to the group and the adoption of the idea that truth equals consensus—which invariably bows to the authority of the strongest personality in the group (or operating behind the scenes).

What developed was an educational system where what mattered was the group, which takes priority over the individual. We encountered the term in passing above: collectivism, the philosophy at the heart of every form of socialism (and, in fairness, much of “capitalism” as it currently exists). Whether the individual learns anything beyond what is needed to adjust to the group and serve the interests of the state and the corporations is, in this view, irrelevant. Funded by Rockefeller dollars via the General Education Board, Dewey took up residence at the newly created Columbia State Teacher’s College at Columbia University in New York City, where he was able to surround himself with the “best and the brightest” of progressive educators.

The trajectory American education pursued after this has been well charted. The story is far too long and involved to tell here. Suffice it to say, even if government education was a bad idea to start with, the super-elites (via their control over tax-exempt foundations, major universities and professional education groups ranging from textbook publishers to the National Education Association) proceeded to destroy whatever might have been left of genuine education in this country—all the while increasing its price tag. I recommend the following three books: Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of america, John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, and B.K. Eakman’s The Cloning of the American Mind. The first two are large books, and fairly expensive (over $40 each). Get them anyway! These will be the best investments you will make this year toward understanding the “real matrix” and “unplugging” from it. The dumbing down of this country was not an accident. It was deliberate. It was the second component in preparing the West for the advent of world government. The following quotation from Iserbyt’s volume should clinch the argument (as well as demonstrate super-elite involvement via the CFR):

Mr. O.A. Nelson, retired educator, has supplied the vitally important documentation needed to support the link-up between the textbooks and the Council on Foreign Relations. His letter was first printed in ‘Young Parents Alert’ (St. Elmo, Minnesota). His story is self-explanatory.

“I know from personal experience what I am talking about. In December 1928, I was asked to talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On December 27th, naïve and inexperienced, I agreed. I had done some special work in teaching functional physics in high school. That was to be my topic. The next day, the 28th, a Dr. Ziegler asked me if I would attend a special educational meeting in his room after the AAAS meeting. We met from 10 p.m. until after 2:30 a.m.

“We were 13 at the meeting. Two things caused Dr. Ziegler, who was Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, to ask me to attend… my talk on the teaching of functional physics in high school, and the fact that I was a member of Progressive Educators of America, which was nothing but a Communist front. I thought the word ‘progressive’ meant progress for better schools. Eleven of those attending the meeting were leaders in education. Drs. John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, from Columbia University, were there, and the others were of equal rank. I checked later and found that all were paid members of the Community Party of Russia. I was classified as a member of the Party, but I did not know it at the time.

“The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! we spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called ‘Modern Math.’ At one point I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said, ‘Nelson, wake up! That is what we want… a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!’ That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Brechner was substituted but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don’t blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless. (the deliberate dumbing down of america, pp. 14-15)

This, of course, was the origin of the “new math” which left a generation of high school students unable to multiply and divide, understand fractions, or do other simple arithmetic operations without calculators! The “new math” was just one species of the more general attack on the individual’s basic reasoning ability. Frustrated by bad teaching methods, many students doubtless decided they were “no good at math” and gave up. Others, schooled with destructive, whole-language approaches to reading, never became good readers. They gave up on subjects like history and civics, which require an ability to read and process information. Students would receive less and less, with each passing generation, about the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Finally we reached the point where it became possible to focus on the fact that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, among the worst of sins in these politically correct times. Such matters would loom far larger in the academic portrayal of those who original built our Constitutional republic than any ideas they might have had, especially about limited government. Such students, conditioned not to think but to respond emotionally, became perfect cannon fodder for the School-To-Work and Workforce Investment programs of the 1990s—programs sometimes beginning as early as elementary school, designed to adjust them for a “global workforce”—under the watchful eye of emerging “global governance.”

In this environment, it indeed became possible for two major presidential candidates—George W. Bush and John Kerry—to be members of the same supersecret organization, Skull & Bones, and it not be news! In the “real matrix,” such an election becomes one of the most important in history because of the vast differences in philosophies between the two. Democratic and Republican “sheeple” were practically at each other’s throats prior to Decision 2004. In the real world—the “desert of the real”—Bush’s and Kerry’s agendas were more alike than they were different. Both were pledged to an internationalist foreign policy and to the UN. Both planned to continue, and even expand, the Iraq War. Both accepted intrusive domestic policies such as the USA Patriot Act. Both would increase federal spending and expand entitlements, in a financial environment guaranteed to continue and even accelerate our nation’s growing debt. And none of this was news!

Other areas that have gone into the construction of our “real matrix” include the sexual revolution, the build-up of Hollywood and the entertainment industry generally, the growth of movements such as Sustainable Development, and the continued manipulation of the country’s finances and of employment patterns. Here the field enlarges rapidly, so we must limit ourselves to a few remarks. Consider the first. One may begin with the Kinsey reports, one of which was published in 1949 and the other in 1952. “Sexologist” Alfred C. Kinsey’s so-called “research” (which we now know involved the criminal sexual torture of children and even infants by Kinsey’s group of homosexuals and pedophiles) was also bankrolled by Rockefeller Foundation dollars. Kinsey claimed to have demonstrated—on the basis of what is clearly a biased sample (a blatant statistical fallacy) that behind the façade of Judeo-Christian sexual morality was a vast diversity of sexual practices including homosexuality and pedophilia, and that even small children were sexual beings. The result was the undermining of the Judeo-Christian ethic that until then had governed accepted sexual conduct and confined it to marriage between a man and a woman.

There can be no doubt that the sexual urge is one of the most powerful in human biology. Its control by a moral view of sexuality is therefore imperative. The Kinseyite view, however, is that there is no connection whatsoever between sexuality and morality. This became standard sex education dogma, also introduced into government schools alongside the dumbing down of reading and math curricula. The divorce between Judeo-Christian morality and sexual conduct entered popular culture with a vengeance when Hugh Hefner embraced the Kinseyite view of sex and founded Playboy, which quickly became a financial empire, launching the age of permissiveness that took off in the 1960s.

Sex has been a distraction in our culture ever since. This doubtless vastly understates the case. Sexuality permeates Hollywood, and via Hollywood, much of the entertainment industry. A people preoccupied with sex—whose educational system has already been undermined by other forms of anti-intellectualism—is unlikely to be alert to the dangers spelled out in essays like this one! Most will be more focused on the bedroom exploits of a constantly changing parade of celebrities!

Now consider Sustainable Development. Agenda 21, dating from 1991 and mentioned above, is the bible of the Sustainable Development movement. It is an enormous, book-length blueprint for control of the world’s resources—land, oceans, rivers, forests, air, oil, minerals, other natural resources, human resources, and so on—at the global level. That’s right—according to the worldview of Sustainable Development, human beings are a resource like any other resource, which is why nearly every large enterprise in the country in the business of employing others has its human resources department, not its personnel department.

Sustainable Development goes far beyond this, however. Its full implementation would not just end all semblance of property rights in America, it would end our sovereignty as an independent nation. Skeptics about the existence of the kind of agenda being outlined here need only go to the United Nations’ own website where they can read the document for themselves. We should probably worry when the authors of such a treatise place it in full view, available to anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet. Sustainable Development is deserving of a lengthy article in its own right, as it has taken over the mindsets of one community after another and captivated people who don’t realize that they are working towards world government and the end to U.S. sovereignty.

Sustainable Development has incurred suspicion and even opposition here and there, so when implemented at a local level, it seldom goes by that name. In my home town of Columbia, for example, it is called Town & Country; in neighboring Greenville to the north it is called Vision 2025. Such projects often have the backing of the local Chamber of Commerce. Business and community leaders are encouraged to believe that they are in control, at the local level. This, again, is life inside the “real matrix.” In the real world, the “desert of the real,” business and community leaders caught up in such movements are advancing the goals of the UN and the super-elite as spelled out in Agenda 21. Whenever you hear phrases like smart growth, open spaces, biodiversity, wildlife preserves, habitats, urban ecology, etc., you may know you are dealing with Sustainable Development, regardless of what it is called.

Finally, we should speak to the manipulation of global markets from the highest level, best exemplified in international agreements masquerading as “free trade.” In instances of genuine free trade, if I have something you want and are both able and willing to pay for, we trade for perceived mutual benefit. No one else—especially government—need get involved. Such a thing has not existed anywhere in the Western world on any large scale for well over a century. NAFTA, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, which could come up for a vote on the floor of Congress in early 2005) are not genuine free trade agreements. One does not need tens of thousands of pages to have a free trade agreement; but one might need this many pages if one’s real goal is to create a huge globalist bureaucracy aimed at outlining regulations and implementing complex compliance procedures.

One should keep this in mind as we document the number of good-paying American jobs that went to Mexico following the passage of NAFTA in 1994, and the “outsourcing” of jobs to China and India that has occurred more recently. High taxes and burdensome regulations have made it increasingly difficult to conduct business in the United States, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford the cost of compliance. They must choose between “outsourcing” jobs for cheaper labor and operating at a loss! Yet it is perplexing that few businesses will stand up to the regulatory state. Moreover, not all the businesses “outsourcing” jobs are small. Even Microsoft has done it. Wal-Mart, of course, relies almost exclusively on foreign labor to ensure low prices.

What is the explanation? Many business leaders today are products of the kind of education outlined above, aimed at adjustment to an environment. They have become good “global citizens” with no loyalty to their country, much less to their employees. They will support, e.g., the naturalization of illegal immigrants, because such people will work for peanuts. As a result, good-paying jobs are disappearing for Americans. In the past, entire occupations were wiped out and replaced by better ones. Today, entire occupations are being wiped out and not being replaced (at least, for those qualified to do more than flip burgers or work as store clerks or in call centers). We are threatened with the slow diminution of the prosperity achieved in the 1950s and 1960s until we become the first high-tech third world nation.

It is important to understand the origin of the predicament we are in. It began when the super-elite was able to seize control of the finances of our nations and, by extension, its economic system. Most people probably believe our economy really is capitalist—that “capitalism” triumphed over “communism.” We won the Cold War, correct? Most people probably believe that they have property rights in their homes, automobiles, the money in their wallets, bank accounts, stock portfolios, etc., and in other possessions. They manage to rationalize property taxes, automobile taxes, capital gains taxes, and myriad other instances where they must answer regularly to the central government. Outside the “real matrix,” in the “desert of the real,” dichotomies such as “capitalism” vs. “communism” have become increasingly meaningless. They do not reflect reality. Our economic system is highly centralized, with all important activity regulated to the teeth. There are no substantive “property rights,” as becomes evident if one studies real estate even superficially. There is no such thing as a real estate transaction today without government involvement.

Control is a matter of degree, of course. The super-elite and its minions do not care whether you buy Bach or the Beatles when you buy CDs. They do not care whether you purchase The Matrix or Dumb and Dumber. They will not make you turn off Oprah and turn on PBS instead. They will not move to stop anyone’s enjoyment of sports, or of fashion, or of nightclubs, or probably even of pornography unless the latter can be used as an excuse to impose control over the Internet. These all constitute distractions—and, perhaps, outlets. At this level, our economy is free. But in the “desert of the real,” all the important decisions are being made at the financial power centers: , Washington, D.C., and to a lesser extent, in other metropolises like Chicago, Los Angeles and possibly Atlanta.

Thomas Jefferson once warned, “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.” – The Coming Battle, page

This, of course, is very likely the goal of the super-elite. Its members knew all along that because of the strength of the Protestant work ethic here, and that of the Judeo-Christian worldview, breaking the back of America would be difficult, and that the American public would probably be the last public to accept the coming of world government. They substituted real, gold-backed dollars with fiat money, and began a process of devaluing the currency. The dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913. The super-elite undermined all the ideas and intellectualism on which both political and economic liberty in the United States was founded. The majority of high school graduates today have no idea what is in the Constitution, although they may know how to put on a condom and they know the exploits of sports teams and, in a lot of cases, which celebrity is sleeping with which other celebrity.

With various forms of relativism and subjectivism now dominant in academia, with the sexual revolution permeating popular culture, and with the overall dumbing down of the educational system and its manipulation to produce human worker bees rather than citizens of a free society, the super-elite’s work is almost complete. If the FTAA should pass, we will see the merging of all the economies of the Western Hemisphere and borders between nations effectively dissolved. Control over trade will be placed in the hands of globalist bureaucrats. Foreign wars such as the Bush Administration’s misguided effort in Iraq will continue to drain our resources as our own national debt continues to skyrocket. The last step will be the merging of the globalist bureaucracies overseeing the European Union with those of Great Britain and the United States. The kind of empire envisioned by Cecil Rhodes and the early Round Table Groups will come to pass at last. Today the most current term for it is the New World Order.

Although fixing specific dates is hazardous—predicting the future has never been an exact science—if nothing happens to alter or impede the goals of the super-elite, we can probably expect to see all this happen during the lifetimes of many people reading this article. After all, with the quantum leap into larger and more intrusive government taken by the Bush Administration following the 9/11 attacks, events are happening quickly. Almost every new policy, whether coming from government or developed by big business (or via the “public-private partnerships” that are the legacy of the Reinventing Government movement of the noxious 1990s), is taking us into a more and more centralized world. In this world, individuals have less and less room to maneuver. Should the country experience another major crisis, be it another massive terrorist attack or a sudden hyperinflationary spiral, we may well see marshal law declared and the Constitution suspended. Then all bets will be off, as those in power will be able to do as they please without restriction.

Let me begin summing all this up with an important clarification. Have I been arguing that there is One Grand Conspiracy that is bringing about a New World Order? Yes and No. Yes, Virginia, there is a super-elite. No, however, because this super-elite is not always unified, is not omnipotent, and cannot control everything. Doubtless there have been the same divisions, in-house squabbles and political infighting such as is bound to occur in any group made up of human beings. The super-elite has had setbacks, such as the torpedoing of the League of Nations. What its members fear most is the kind of exposure that would create a critical mass of educated, independent-thinking voters that will put a stop to globalism when they see its ghastly price tag: the end of U.S. sovereignty and of government that must at least pay lip service to the Constitution.

The super-elite had a close call when Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope was published, simply because of Quigley’s obvious credibility. It is possible that it experienced another close call with the George Wallace movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Maurice Bessinger, author (of the book Defending My Heritage), barbecue entrepreneur and political activist based here in Columbia, reports how he knew Wallace personally and worked closely with him to coordinate several of his campaigns in South Carolina. Wallace was both tough (he had boxed professionally while in college) and courageous. Although Wallace didn’t discuss the matter publicly, Bessinger reports that he knew what the globalists were up to and had every intention, if elected to high office, of stopping them. But in 1972, in Bessinger’s words, “they shot him down like a dog.”

Wallace, victim of an assassination attempt by a man who had been shadowing him for weeks, survived, but the attack left him paralyzed from the waist down and in constant severe pain. This ended his candidacy and, eventually, his political career. Was the man who shot him, Arthur Bremmer, working for the super-elite? We don’t really know, of course. Bessinger thinks so; Bremmer denied having any other motivation than a desire for fame. Wallace had the largest following of any independent politician, however, especially in the South where regional loyalties run strong and where resistance to globalism is in evidence. Running as a Democrat in 1972, Wallace had been leading George McGovern, who finally received his party’s nomination that year to run against Nixon (he lost in a landslide). George Wallace’s violent subtraction from the picture was, if not the work of the super-elite, an example of an amazing coincidence!

The third and most recent close call might have come indirectly with Ross Perot’s populist campaign in 1992. Perot did not talk about super-elites either, but he did talk about the harm trade agreements such as NAFTA would do to the U.S. economy, and he warned about the irrational fiscal policies being pursued in Washington. He received 19 percent of the popular vote—almost 20 million votes. Since 1992, the cost of running a credible campaign has skyrocketed. Today, only extremely wealthy and well-connected Demopublicans have a chance at being elected to highest office in the land. Commentator Patrick J. Buchanan ran a Reform Party campaign in 2000 based on both social and cultural conservatism and economic populism, but failed to break through as Perot had.

So there is a super-elite and it has itself pretty well insulated on the political front, but still, how much control does it actually wield? I am not asserting—as some skeptics will doubtless accuse me of doing—that One Grand Conspiracy is responsible for everything from Bush’s re-election to the impossibility of telephoning a business and speaking to a human being. What has been done—much of it through the government school system—is the creation of a cultural consensus, especially about the political, corporate and financial system of the country. This consensus does not ask questions, and sets out to prevent others from asking them. The term is groupthink, naming a process which rewards those who think alike and weeds out those who think differently.

Much so-called education in government schools involves immersion in groupthink. Those so immersed, when they become adults (assuming they even follow current events), speak of “democracy,” of how “capitalism” won out over “socialism,” or how “they hate us because we are free.” They have been trained mentally to ignore the vast similarities between the two dominant political parties, skyrocketing debts both public and private, as well as the rapidly widening gulf between the extremely rich (members of the “Davos culture,” one might call it) and those being harmed by their economic policies. They might even become convinced that waging a war of aggression against a country with a fundamentally different culture from ours that posed no genuine, substantive threat to us (Iraq) is the right way to reduce the threat of another lethal terrorist attack on U.S. soil!

The consensus, reinforced daily in newspapers and on television news broadcasts—as well as in classrooms all across the country and at school board meetings and at Chamber of Commerce meetings—constitutes the “real matrix,” enslaving people without their even being aware of it. The point of consensus is to have as few real controls as possible, because the “sheeple” willingly accept de facto slavery as normal. In this environment, most people don’t need to be told what to do or how to act. Gatekeepers are firmly in place, however. The person with the wrong politics or the wrong attitude toward government, or toward “public schools,” is not going to be appointed, say, to the editorial board of the local newspaper. The person with the wrong views about sex and morality, or about homosexuality, will be refused work at state agencies whose business is dealing with public health issues. The person with the wrong views about “diversity” or about educating “global citizens” will be refused employment in education. And so on. This does not mean that those doing the hiring are answering directly to the CFR. They may be among the millions who have never so much as heard of the CFR. Their education and training has ensured that they will “follow the rules” without supervision, as we said above. They are fully plugged into the “real matrix.” If presented with arguments such as the one here, they will take the blue pill and waking up in their beds the next day laughing the whole thing off.

That is the choice I leave to my readers, who might find the “desert of the real” as presented here not just unpalatable but literally unbelievable. No one can be forced to believe something against his will, no matter how great the evidence. So to paraphrase Morpheus, after having read all this—assuming you’ve read this far—you have the same choice Neo was given in The Matrix. You may take the blue pill: tuning this out and returning to your academic specialty or your sports or your business. You will wake up in your bed tomorrow believing what you want to believe.

Some have taken the blue pill. Rush Limbaugh pooh-poohed the whole thing, commenting sarcastically back in 1995:

You see if you amount to anything in Washington these days, it is because you have been plucked or handpicked from an Ivy league school-Harvard, Yale, Kennedy school of government—you’ve shown an aptitude to be a good Ivy league type, and so you’re plucked so to speak, and you are assigned success. You are assigned a certain role in government somewhere, and then your success is monitored and tracked, and you go where the pluckers and the handpickers can put you.

And Ira Strauss, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, contended back in 1996 that:

Conspiracy theory is doing America real harm. Long incubating underground, it has grown into the greatest enslaver of human minds since communism. It irrationalizes thinking on every issue. It kills. It turns millions of Americans against their own country. It undermines foreign policy by vilifying our government’s every effort.

Take that! But Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who like Carroll Quigley was in a position to know, commented that “in politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”

And Woodrow Wilson before him, observed ominously:

Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

And U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said in 1952, “The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.”

So you may take the blue pill, listening to popular commentators and ignoring the reports of scholars such as Carroll Quigley or the warnings of numerous figures who have risen to prominence in our government.

Or you may take the red pill, and investigate this Wonderland, or more exactly, this “desert of the real.” Everything I’ve said here can be checked, by tracking down and reading the works I have cited or by going to the perpetrators’ own websites (Agenda 21 is an example).

You’ll find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes. It might not be easy. But as Morpheus tells Neo in another of those pivotal moments in The Matrix:

“I didn’t say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.”

End.

Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?

John — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:48:29 +0000

Source: NYBooks

On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges’s “labyrinth of letters,” this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Click below to read the rest…

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10²⁴ Bytes) by 2015.”^[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

In the near decade since September 11, the tectonic plates beneath the American intelligence community have undergone a seismic shift, knocking the director of the CIA from the top of the organizational chart and replacing him with the new director of national intelligence, a desk-bound espiocrat with a large staff but little else. Not only surviving the earthquake but emerging as the most powerful chief the spy world has ever known was the director of the NSA. He is in charge of an organization three times the size of the CIA and empowered in 2008 by Congress to spy on Americans to an unprecedented degree, despite public criticism of the Bush administration’s use of the agency to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance as part of the “war on terror.” The legislation also largely freed him of the nettlesome Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). And in another significant move, he was recently named to head the new Cyber Command, which also places him in charge of the nation’s growing force of cyber warriors.

Wasting no time, the agency has launched a building boom, doubling the size of its headquarters, expanding its listening posts, and constructing enormous data factories. One clue to the possible purpose of the highly secret megacenters comes from the agency’s British partner, Government Communications Headquarters. Last year, the British government proposed the creation of an enormous government-run central database to store details on every phone call, e-mail, and Internet search made in the United Kingdom. Click a “send” key or push an “answer” button and the details of the communication end up, perhaps forever, in the government’s data warehouse to be scrutinized and analyzed.

But when the plans were released by the UK government, there was an immediate outcry from both the press and the public, leading to the scrapping of the “big brother database,” as it was called. In its place, however, the government came up with a new plan. Instead of one vast, centralized database, the telecom companies and Internet service providers would be required to maintain records of all details about people’s phone, e-mail, and Web-browsing habits for a year and to permit the government access to them when asked. That has led again to public anger and to a protest by the London Internet Exchange, which represents more than 330 telecommunications firms. “We view…the volume of data the government now proposes [we] should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall level of intrusion into the privacy of citizenry,” the group said in August.^[2]

Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T’s major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America’s version of the “big brother database” rejected by the British.

Matthew M. Aid has been after the NSA’s secrets for a very long time. As a sergeant and Russian linguist in the NSA’s Air Force branch, he was arrested and convicted in a court-martial, thrown into prison, and slapped with a bad conduct discharge for impersonating an officer and making off with a stash of NSA documents stamped Top Secret Codeword. He now prefers to obtain the NSA’s secrets legally, through the front door of the National Archives. The result is The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency , a footnote-heavy history told largely through declassified but heavily redacted NSA reports that have been slowly trickling out of the agency over the years. They are most informative in the World War II period but quickly taper off in substance during the cold war.

Aid begins his study on the eve of Pearl Harbor, a time when the entire American cryptologic force could fit into a small, half-empty community theater. But by war’s end, it would take a football stadium to seat the 37,000 military and civilian “crippies.” On August 14, 1945, as the ink dried on Japan’s instruments of surrender, the linguists and codebreakers manning the thirty-seven key listening posts around the world were reading more than three hundred diplomatic code and cipher systems belonging to sixty countries. “The American signals intelligence empire stood at the zenith of its power and prestige,” notes Aid. But within days, the cryptanalysts put away their well-sharpened pencils and the intercept operators hung up their earphones. By the end of December 1945, America’s crypto world had shrunk to 7,500 men and women.

Despite the drastic layoffs, the small cadre of US and British codebreakers excelled against the new “main enemy,” as Russia became known. The joint US-British effort deciphered tens of thousands of Russian army and navy messages during the mid-to-late 1940s. But on October 29, 1948, as President Truman was about to deliver a campaign speech in New York, the party was over. In what became known within the crypto world as “Black Friday,” the Russian government and military flipped a switch and instantly converted to new, virtually unbreakable encryption systems and from vulnerable radio signals to buried cables. In the war between spies and machines, the spies won. The Soviets had managed to recruit William Weisband, a forty-year-old Russian linguist working for the US Army, who informed them of key cryptologic weaknesses the Americans were successfully exploiting. It was a blow from which the codebreakers would never recover. NSA historians called it “perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history.”

In the 1970s, when some modest gains were made in penetrating the Russian systems, history would repeat itself and another American turncoat, this time Ronald Pelton, would again give away the US secrets. Since then, it has largely been a codemaker’s market not only with regard to high-level Russian ciphers, but also those of other key countries, such as China and North Korea. On the other hand, the NSA has made significant progress against less cryptologically sophisticated countries and, from them, gained insight into plans and intentions of countries about which the US has greater concerns. Thus, when a Chinese diplomat at the United Nations discusses some new African venture with a colleague from Sudan, the eavesdroppers at the NSA may be deaf to the Chinese communications links but they may be able to get that same information by exploiting weaknesses in Sudan’s communications and cipher systems when the diplomat reports the meeting to Khartoum. But even third-world cryptography can be daunting. During the entire war in Vietnam, writes Aid, the agency was never able to break the high-level encryption systems of either the North Vietnamese or the Vietcong. It is a revelation that leads him to conclude “that everything we thought we knew about the role of NSA in the Vietnam War needs to be reconsidered.”

Because the book is structured chronologically, it is somewhat difficult to decipher the agency’s overall record. But one sees troubling trends. One weakness that seems to recur is that the agency, set up in the wake of World War II to prevent another surprise attack, is itself frequently surprised by attacks and other serious threats. In the 1950s, as over 100,000 heavily armed North Korean troops surged across the 38th parallel into South Korea, the codebreakers were among the last to know. “The North Korean target was ignored,” says a declassified NSA report quoted by Aid. “North Korea got lost in the shuffle and nobody told us that they were interested in what was going on north of the 38th parallel,” exclaimed one intelligence officer. At the time, astonishingly, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the NSA’s predecessor, didn’t even have a Korean-language dictionary.

Unfortunately for General Douglas MacArthur, the codebreakers were able to read the communications of Spain’s ambassador to Tokyo and other diplomats, who noted that in their discussions with the general, he made clear his secret hope for all-out war with China and Russia, including the use of nuclear weapons if necessary. In a rare instance of secret NSA intercepts playing a major part in US politics, once the messages were shown to President Truman, MacArthur’s career abruptly ended.

Another major surprise came in the 1960s when the Soviet Union was able to move large numbers of personnel, large amounts of equipment, and many ballistic missiles to Cuba without the NSA hearing a peep. Still unable to break into the high-level Soviet cipher systems, the agency was unaware that the 51st Rocket Division had packed up and was encamped in Cuba. Nor did it detect the move of five complete medium-range and intermediate-range missile regiments from their Russian bases to Cuba. And it had no knowledge that Russian ballistic missiles were on Cuban soil, being positioned in launchers. “Soviet communications security was almost perfect,” according to an NSA historian.

The first clues that something unusual was happening had come in mid-July 1962, when NSA analysts noticed record numbers of Soviet cargo and passenger ships heading for Cuba. Analysis of their unencrypted shipping manifests led the NSA to suspect that the ships were delivering weapons. But the nuclear-armed ballistic missiles were not detected until mid-October, a month after their arrival, and not by the NSA; it was the CIA, acting on information from its sources in Cuba and Florida, that ordered the U-2 reconnaisance flight that photographed them at launch sites on the island. “The crisis,” Aid concludes, “was in fact anything but an intelligence success story.” This is a view shared by the agency itself in a candid internal history, which noted that the harrowing events “marked the most significant failure of SIGINT [signals intelligence] to warn national leaders since World War II.”

More recently, the NSA was unaware of India’s impending nuclear test in 1998, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the 1998 bombing of two of America’s East African embassies. The agency first learned of the September 11 attacks on $300 television sets tuned to CNN, not its billion-dollar eavesdropping satellites tuned to al-Qaeda.

Then there is the pattern by which the NSA was actually right about a warning, but those in power chose to ignore it. During the Korean War, the AFSA picked up numerous indications from low-level unencrypted Chinese intercepts that the Chinese were shifting hundreds of thousands of combat troops to Manchuria by rail, an obvious signal that China might enter the war. But those in charge of Army intelligence simply refused to believe it; it didn’t fit in with their plans.

Then, by reading the dispatches between India’s well-connected ambassador to Beijing and his Foreign Office, it became clear that China would intervene if UN forces crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. But again, says Aid, the warning “was either discounted or ignored completely by policymakers in Washington,” and as the UN troops began crossing the divide, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into North Korea. Even when intercepts indicated that the Chinese were well entrenched in the North, officials in Washington and Seoul remained in a state of disbelief, until both South Korean and US forces there were attacked by the Chinese forces.

The pattern was repeated in Vietnam when NSA reporting warned on January 25, 1968, that a major coordinated attack would occur “in the near future in several areas of South Vietnam.” But neither the White House, the CIA, nor General William Westmoreland at US military headquarters in Saigon believed it, until over 100,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops launched their Tet offensive in the South five days later on January 30. “The [NSA] reports failed to shake the commands in Washington and Saigon from their perception,” says an NSA history. Tragically, Aid notes, at the end of the war, all of the heroic Vietnamese cryptologic personnel who greatly helped the NSA were left behind. “Many,” the NSA report reveals, “undoubtedly perished.” It added, “Their story is yet untold.” Then again in 1973, as in Korea and Vietnam, the NSA warned that Egypt and Syria were planning “a major offensive” against Israel. But, as Aid quotes an official NSA history, the CIA refused to believe that an attack was imminent “because [they thought] the Arabs wouldn’t be ’stupid enough’ to attack Israel.” They were, they did, and they won.

Everything seemed to go right for the NSA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the agency had accurately forecast. “NSA predicted on December 22 [1979], three full days before the first Soviet troops crossed the Soviet–Afghan border, that the Russians would invade Afghanistan within the next seventy-two hours,” writes Aid, adding, “Afghanistan may have been the ‘high water mark’ for NSA.”

The agency also recorded the words of the Russian fighter pilot and his ground controllers as he shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983. Although the agency knew that the Russians had accidently mistaken the plane for a potentially hostile US military aircraft, the Reagan administration nevertheless deliberately spun the intercepts to make it seem that the fighter pilot knew all along that it was a passenger jet, infuriating NSA officials. “The White House’s selective release of the most salacious of the NSA material concerning the shootdown set off a firestorm of criticism inside NSA,” writes Aid. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the NSA’s product was used for political purposes.

The most troubling pattern, however, is that the NSA, through gross incompetence, bad intelligence, or deliberate deception through the selective release of information, has helped to push the US into tragic wars. A prime example took place in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, one on an eavesdropping mission for the NSA, were twice attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Those attacks were then used to justify the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. But Aid cites a top-secret NSA analysis of the incident, completed in 2000, which concluded that the second attack, the one used to justify the war, never took place. Instead, NSA officials deliberately withheld 90 percent of the intelligence on the attacks and told the White House only what it wanted to hear. According to the analysis, only intelligence “that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials.”

Not having learned its lesson, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq the NSA again told the administration only what it wanted to hear, despite the clearly ambiguous nature of the evidence. For years beforehand, the agency’s coverage of Iraq was disastrous. In the late 1990s, the Iraqis began shifting much of their high-level military communications from radio to buried fiber optic networks, and at the same time, Saddam Hussein banned the use of cell phones. That left only occasional low-level troop communications. According to a later review, Aid writes, NSA had “virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that was one of the United States’ top intelligence priorities.” And the little intelligence it did have pointed away from Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. “We looked long and hard for any signs,” said one retired NSA official. “We just never found a ’smoking gun’ that Saddam was trying to build nukes or anything else.” That, however, did not prevent the NSA director, Lieutenant Gen. Michael V. Hayden, from stamping his approval on the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate arguing that Iraq’s WMDs posed a grave danger, which helped prepare the way for the devastating war.

While much of the terrain Aid covers has been explored before, the most original areas in The Secret Sentry deal with the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the NSA was forced to marry, largely unsuccessfully, its super-high-tech strategic capabilities in space with its tactical forces on the ground. Before the September 11 attacks, the agency’s coverage of Afghanistan was even worse than that of Iraq. At the start of the war, the NSA’s principal listening post for the region did not have a single linguist proficient in Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan’s two principal languages. Agency recruiters descended on Fremont, California, home of the country’s largest population of Afghan expatriates, to build up a cadre of translators—only to have most candidates rejected by the agency’s overparanoid security experts. On the plus side, because of the collapse of the Taliban regime’s rudimentary communications system, its leaders were forced to communicate only by satellite phones, which were very susceptible to NSA monitoring.

Other NSA tactical teams, Aid explains, collaborated on the ground with Special Forces units, including in the mountains of Tora Bora. But it was a new type of war, one the NSA was not prepared for, and both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar easily slipped through its electronic net. Eight years later, despite billions of dollars spent by the agency and dozens of tapes released by bin Laden, the NSA is no closer to capturing him or Mullah Omar than it was at Tora Bora in 2001.

Disappointingly, the weakest section of the book, mostly summaries of old news clips, deals with what may be the most important subject: the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping and its targeting of American communications. There is no discussion, for example, of the agency’s huge data-mining centers, mentioned above, currently being built in Utah and Texas, or to what extent the agency, which has long been confined to foreign and international communications, is now engaged in domestic eavesdropping.

It is a key question and we have no precise answer. By installing its intercept rooms in such locations as AT&T’s main switching station in downtown San Francisco, the agency has physical access to domestic as well as international communications. Thus it is possible that the agency scans all the e-mail of both and it may also eavesdrop on the telephone calls of both for targets on its ever-growing watch lists. According to a recent Justice Department report, “As of December 31, 2008, the consolidated terrorist watchlist contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities.”^[3]

Aid’s history becomes thin as it gets closer to the present day and the archival documents dwindle, especially since he has no substantial first-person, on-the-record interviews. Beyond a brief mention, he also leaves other important aspects of the NSA’s history unaddressed, including the tumultuous years in the mid-1970s when it was investigated by the Senate’s Church Committee for decades of illegal spying; Trailblazer, the nearly decade-long failure to modernize the agency; and the NSA’s increasingly important role in cyberwarfare and its implications in future wars.

Where does all this leave us? Aid concludes that the biggest problem facing the agency is not the fact that it’s drowning in untranslated, indecipherable, and mostly unusable data, problems that the troubled new modernization plan, Turbulence, is supposed to eventually fix. “These problems may, in fact, be the tip of the iceberg,” he writes. Instead, what the agency needs most, Aid says, is more power. But the type of power to which he is referring is the kind that comes from electrical substations, not statutes. “As strange as it may sound,” he writes, “one of the most urgent problems facing NSA is a severe shortage of electrical power.” With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas. And as it pleads for more money to construct newer and bigger power generators, Aid notes, Congress is balking.

The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger data centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the more reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more political power for the agency.

Rather than give the NSA more money for more power—electrical and political—some have instead suggested just pulling the plug. “NSA can point to things they have obtained that have been useful,” Aid quotes former senior State Department official Herbert Levin, a longtime customer of the agency, “but whether they’re worth the billions that are spent, is a genuine question in my mind.”

Based on the NSA’s history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio. Were it a corporation, it would likely have gone belly-up years ago. The September 11 attacks are a case in point. For more than a year and a half the NSA was eavesdropping on two of the lead hijackers, knowing they had been sent by bin Laden, while they were in the US preparing for the attacks. The terrorists even chose as their command center a motel in Laurel, Maryland, almost within eyesight of the director’s office. Yet the agency never once sought an easy-to-obtain FISA warrant to pinpoint their locations, or even informed the CIA or FBI of their presence.

But pulling the plug, or even allowing the lights to dim, seems unlikely given President Obama’s hawkish policies in Afghanistan. However, if the war there turns out to be the train wreck many predict, then Obama may decide to take a much closer look at the spy world’s most lavish spender. It is a prospect that has some in the Library of Babel very nervous. “It was a great ride while it lasted,” said one.

Notes

^[1] The MITRE Corporation, “Data Analysis Challenges” (December 2008), p. 13.

^[2] David Leppard, “Internet Firms Resist Ministers’ Plan to Spy on Every E-mail,” The Sunday Times , August 2, 2009.

^[3] “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices,” US Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, Audit Report 09-25, May 2009.

Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit

John — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:39:05 +0000

Source: wired.com

The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.

Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to squash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of the Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.

The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:

“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery White disagreed and ruled on September 24 that the feds had to release the names of the telecom employees that contacted the Justice Department and the White House to lobby for a get-out-of-court-free card.

“Here, the telecommunications companies communicated with the government to ensure that Congress would pass legislation to grant them immunity from legal liability for their participation in the surveillance,” White wrote. “Those documents are not protected from disclosure because the companies communicated with the government agencies “with their own … interests in mind,” rather than the agency’s interests.”

The feds were supposed to make the documents available Friday, but in a motion late Thursday, the Obama administration is asking for a 30-day emergency stay (.pdf) so it can file a further appeal.

Dollar loses reserve status to yen & euro

John — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:16:52 +0000

Source: NY Post

Ben Bernanke’s dollar crisis went into a wider mode yesterday as the greenback was shockingly upstaged by the euro and yen, both of which can lay claim to the world title as the currency favored by central banks as their reserve currency.

Over the last three months, banks put 63 percent of their new cash into euros and yen — not the greenbacks — a nearly complete reversal of the dollar’s onetime dominance for reserves, according to Barclays Capital. The dollar’s share of new cash in the central banks was down to 37 percent — compared with two-thirds a decade ago.

Currently, dollars account for about 62 percent of the currency reserve at central banks — the lowest on record, said the International Monetary Fund.

Bernanke could go down in economic history as the man who killed the greenback on the operating table.

After printing up trillions of new dollars and new bonds to stimulate the US economy, the Federal Reserve chief is now boxed into a corner battling two separate monsters that could devour the economy — ravenous inflation on one hand, and a perilous recession on the other.

“He’s in a crisis worse than the meltdown ever was,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. “I fear that he could be the Fed chairman who brought down the whole thing.”

Investors and central banks are snubbing dollars because the greenback is kept too weak by zero interest rates and a flood of greenbacks in the global economy.

They grumble that they’ve loaned the US record amounts to cover its mounting debt, but are getting paid back by a currency that’s worth 10 percent less in the past three months alone. In a decade, it’s down nearly one-third.

Yesterday, the dollar had a mixed performance, falling slightly against the British pound to $1.5801 from $1.5846 Friday, but rising against the euro to $1.4779 from $1.4709 and against the yen to 89.85 yen from 89.78.

Economists believe the market rebellion against the dollar will spread until Bernanke starts raising interest rates from around zero to the high single digits, and pulls back the flood of currency spewed from US printing presses.

“That’s a cure, but it’s also going to stifle any US economic growth,” said Schiff. “The economy is addicted to the cheap interest and liquidity.”

Economists warn that a jump in rates will clobber stocks and cripple the already stalled housing market.

“Bernanke’s other choice is to keep rates at zero, print even more money and sell more debt, but we’ll see triple-digit inflation that could collapse the economy as we know it.

“The stimulus is what’s toxic — we’re poisoning ourselves and the global economy with it.”

9/24/09 Total Economic Collapse - Deception

John — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:05:25 +0000

This next piece is from a blog called What’s Happening. Pretty good newsletter that sums up what’s going on economically right now and in the near future. Check it out…

The “News” is telling us each night that the Recession is OVER.
The Government is announcing “Green Shoots”

They’re lying.

We are all being set-up for a MUCH bigger fall
Not one issue that brought us to the 2008 Economic collapse has been addressed.
In fact, most are MUCH WORSE.
The “toxic assets” remain, the derivatives problem is MANY times bigger than the ENTIRE World GDP, Commercial Real Estate hasn’t even tipped over yet, and the second round of mass-foreclosures (residential) is approaching

And the Banksters stole the TARP money without loaning it to us as promised…

They sent it overseas….

And the Fed can’t find TRILLIONS… it just… disappeared.

And China, Russia, and the rest of the World are dumping the Dollar.

But…

We’ve learned our lesson, right? We won’t forget & make the same “mistakes” again, right?
Surely we couldn’t forget about something so HUGE…
Americans can’t remember what year 9/11 happened
Link to YouTube

NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
EVERY trap that led us into last year’s collapse still remains…. And is EVEN BIGGER

Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman
By Mark Deen and David Tweed
Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”…
Link to Bloomberg

Housing is doing well, at least
U.S. mortgage delinquencies set record

By Nick Zieminski Nick Zieminski – Mon Sep 21, 8:32 pm ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) – High U.S. unemployment keeps pushing up the rate of mortgage delinquencies, which could in turn drive personal bankruptcies and home foreclosures, monthly data from the Equifax Inc (EFX.N) credit bureau showed on Monday.
Among U.S. homeowners with mortgages, a record 7.58 percent were at least 30 days late on payments in August, up from 7.32 percent in July, according to the data obtained exclusively by Reuters.
August marked the fourth consecutive monthly increase in delinquencies, and the report showed an accelerating pace…
Link to Yahoo News

But The FDIC will protect my money, right?
CORRUPTION: Reverse-Insurance?! (FDIC)
Let me pose a question to you.
Let’s say you own a $200,000 house free and clear.
Let’s further say that you would like fire insurance. Just in case you are a klutz in the kitchen, for example.
So you sit down and write yourself a fire insurance policy. You promise to pay yourself $200,000 to rebuild your house if it burns to the ground.
You then put your “insurance policy” in the safe and pat yourself on the back - you’re insured!
Now, you want to re-do your kitchen and add a pool, so you go to the bank to get a mortgage to finance those improvements.
The mortgage company would accept your self-written policy as proof of insurance, right?
Oh wait - they’d call that fraud?
Well gee, what’s this then?

Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors…
Link to Denninger.net

Well, no. They’re broke

FDIC May Ask Banks for a Bailout

FDIC, GOVERNMENT, INSURANCE, DEPOSIT, BANKS, BAILOUT, FUNDS

The New York Times

| 22 Sep 2009 | 12:39 PM ET

Tired of the government bailing out banks? Get ready for this: officials may soon ask banks to bail out the government…
Link to CNBC

Well at least we’ve got a partial solution…

September 19, 2008
hp-1147

Treasury Announces Guaranty Program for Money Market Funds
Washington- The U.S. Treasury Department today announced the establishment of a temporary guaranty program for the U.S. money market mutual fund industry. For the next year, the U.S. Treasury will insure the holdings of any publicly offered eligible money market mutual fund – both retail and institutional – that pays a fee to participate in the program….
Link to USTreas.gov

Oh.
Well.
One year later…

Is the Treasury Out to Kill Money Market Funds?

– Posted Thursday, 17 September 2009 | | Source: GoldSeek.com

By David Galland, Managing Editor, The Casey Report

Tim Geithner, the Goldman Sachs Secretary of the Treasury, has gone on record as saying that the government will withdraw its $3 trillion backstop guarantee from the money market fund industry, on schedule, this September 18….
Link to Goldseek

We’ll just push up the limits
U.S. about to hit debt ceiling - again
The $12.1 trillion debt ceiling is fast approaching ‘over the limit’ status. Unless Congress raises it, Uncle Sam won’t be able to pay what the country owes.

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer

Last Updated: September 16, 2009: 10:34 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Congress has raised the debt ceiling four times in the past two years and will probably have to do it again in the next month.
With the government borrowing record amounts of money, the nation’s current debt ceiling of $12.1 trillion will be pierced soon…
Link to CNN Money

This is coming…
“Option” mortgages to explode, officials warn

Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:49pm EDT

By Lisa Lambert
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The federal government and states are girding themselves for the next foreclosure crisis in the country’s housing downturn: payment option adjustable rate mortgages that are beginning to reset.
“Payment option ARMs are about to explode,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said after a Thursday meeting…
Link to Reuters

Nothing’s changed… so this is coming as well… This will collapse hugely

Wall Street Stealth Lobby Defends $35 Billion Derivatives Haul
By Christine Harper, Matthew Leising and Shannon Harrington
Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) — Wall Street is suiting up for a battle to protect one of its richest fiefdoms, the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market that is facing the biggest overhaul since its creation 30 years ago.
Five U.S. commercial banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., are on track to earn more than $35 billion this year trading unregulated derivatives contracts…
Link to Bloomberg

And will be helped along…

The Most Critical Time Of Day For Bulls

Graham Summers
September 14, 2009

In case you have not heard the news, China has announced that it will be instructing its state-owned enterprises to potentially default on their derivatives contracts. As I have written extensively in the past, the derivatives market is a massive time bomb just waiting to go off. China’s latest move may be the match that lights the fuse…
Link to Gold Eagle

They’re only PRETENDING to try to stop it..
Derivatives Proposal Is Too Soft, Regulator Says
Agency Chief Concerned About Rule Exemptions

By Zachary A. Goldfarb

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 20, 2009
A top federal regulator has urged Congress to adopt tougher rules to govern betting in exotic financial instruments known as derivatives than the Obama administration has proposed, warning that the administration’s new vision of market regulation could contain loopholes.
One of the Obama administration’s top priorities in its revamp is to regulate both derivatives and firms that trade them.
But Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, warned key lawmakers in a letter this week that provisions of the administration’s proposed legislation could leave significant elements of the derivatives market out of the reach of regulators and undermine efforts to combat fraud….
Link to Washington Post

Some are telling the truth

Economist warns of double-dip recession
By Robert Cookson and Sundeep Tucker in Hong Kong
Published: September 14 2009 15:01 | Last updated: September 14 2009 15:01
The world has not tackled the problems at the heart of the economic downturn and is likely to slip back into recession, according to one of the few mainstream economists who predicted the financial crisis.
Speaking at the Sibos conference in Hong Kong on Monday, William White, the highly-respected former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements, also warned that government actions to help the economy in the short run may be sowing the seeds for future crises…
Link to ft.com

Countries of the World are dropping the Dollar as their reserve currency.
Even without the multiple bear-traps facing our Economy, This alone spells trouble
Dollar headed for collapse?

by Larry Edelson on September 17, 2009
So far in my emails to you on the future of the U.S. dollar, we’ve seen how President Obama and U.S. Fed chief Bernanke pretty much have no choice but to destroy the greenback’s value:
It is the ONLY way Washington can ever hope to service the more than $100 trillion it now owes to investors and seniors.
Plus, we’ve also seen how China and other foreign investors have already begun to stampede for the exits, accelerating the dollar’s demise:
Dumping greenbacks is the ONLY way they can hope to insulate themselves from what many believe is the inevitable demise of the dollar.
In more normal times, either one of the twin crises outlined above would cause reasonable investors to expect the dollar to plunge even faster going forward.
But now, a new, global movement has begun that points to an even faster decline for the U.S. dollar in the weeks and months ahead …
The warning signs are crystal clear to anyone who follows global economic news with an open mind. Nevertheless, this third shoe to drop in the dollar’s collapse will come as a complete surprise for the vast majority of all U.S. wage-earners, consumers, savers and investors.
By the time they see the story about this new assault on the greenback on the evening news, trillions of dollars in personal wealth will have been vaporized. Every dollar they’ve earned, saved, invested and have socked away for retirement will have been gutted of its value…
Link to Uncommon Wisdom Daily blog

So what’s the REAL reason for this collapse?

FROM JEROME CORSI’S RED ALERT
U.N. calls for replacement of U.S. dollar
Joins Russia, China and G20 with demands IMF step forward

Posted: September 14, 2009
1:26 pm Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily
World organizations, including the United Nations, are openly calling for the creation of a one-world currency to replace the dollar – and the Obama administration’s trillion-dollar deficits are serving as a trigger for the currency switch,…
Link to WND.com

Here it comes

New world currency order starts to unfold

Joe Prendergast

* Last Updated: September 21. 2009 7:17PM UAE / September 21. 2009 3:17PM GMT

The US dollar still retains a disproportionately large representation in international trade transactions, official reserves and exchange rate regimes.

This is largely due to the many institutional arrangements and incumbencies which remain from the Bretton Woods era of 1944 to 1971 when the gold-linked dollar provided the formal anchor for the world monetary system.

Now, though, this privileged, inherited status of the paper dollar is under threat from the falling relative economic size of the US and its cyclical influence and the scale of the excesses that very privilege has allowed…
Link to The National

There are literally hundreds of stories I could post about dozens of Countries that are RIGHT NOW calling for a Global Government and a Global Currency.

Maybe I’ll have an edition devoted to that in the future.

The point of this is DO NOT BELIEVE what the Corporate Spokesmen tell you each night on the “News”.

Be cautious. Read the signs for yourselves. Don’t WAIT to be told what to think.

Protect Yourselves.

Pray, & get right with God.

Since I started this Newsletter, I’ve had many tell me that the Info is Important, and that they’re using it.
If that’s the case and it’s proving useful, then know that every edition (eventually), as a resource, is now available HERE ScrumpTheTexan Blog as well as in the attached What’s Happeningnew.doc that accompanies each Newsletter.

I’m Still Alive…

John — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:22:19 +0000

Hey, sorry about the lack of updates lately. I’ve been pretty busy with work, family and life in general. I’ll get some new stuff up soon.

Thoughts on Iran

John — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:11:34 +0000

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Okay… what to make of the situation in Iran? Well first of all, I’m inclined to believe that this “uprising” was setup by the West. I believe that the whole situation has been setup so that people here in the U.S. will think, “Awww, those poor Iranians! They don’t have the freedom to choose their leaders! They’re being oppressed by that regime!” This way, with the people already thinking this, it won’t be so hard to sell the idea of invasion to “liberate” them in the way that only USA can. I mean, look how happy the Iraqis are now that they’ve been liberated!

How much different would he make if he were the president? I mean, the Iranian president doesn’t even have full authority! Their “Supreme Leader” does. The Supreme Leader can override anything the President sets in motion. They are exactly what their title says… the Supreme Leader.

Anyway, be cautious of what you believe. Pray for discernment!

Update: This video illustrates what I believe is currently happening.

Osama Bin Laden Rises From The Grave Once Again…

John — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:18:26 +0000

…To produce another audio tape. Do you ever wonder why he only releases audio tapes now? Do you realize how long it’s been since we’ve seen video of him? The last one from several years ago, didn’t even look like him so I guess they realized it was too risky to keep pretending. IT’S BECAUSE HE’S DEAD!

In a November 2, 2007 interview, less than two months before she would be assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was asked by reporter David Frost of Al-Jazeera English about a letter that she had sent to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf. The letter outlined who she believed should be investigated in the event of her assassination. While giving her answer, she listed as one of the suspects a “key figure in security… a former military officer in Pakistan” who had dealings with, among others, “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin-Laden.”

Jump to 1:37 to hear this portion of the interview. And keep in mind that she is now dead. Most likely to silence her.

Russian President May Push Proposal To Create New World Currency

John — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:31:26 +0000

What would a New World Order be without its own neat little currency? Well, looks as if we’ll be seeing a push for a global currency from our friend Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president. Check out the piece here.