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Posts Tagged ‘Roosevelt’

Is Collectivism Inevitable?

Posted by M. C. on May 22, 2023

And most importantly, Liberty is under continual attack. Fear-based propaganda, particularly that portion generated by the COVID-19 scare, is converting a majority of citizens into sheep who now reflexively comply with every new control on their freedom, for the “greater good.”

Is Collectivism Inevitable?

by Jeff Thomas

Collectivism

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“Whichever party gains the day, tyrants or demagogues are most sure to take the offices.”

The quote above may cause the reader to nod his head, as throughout much of the world today, we are witnessing a distinct lack of choice in “democratic” elections – a “damned if you do; damned if you don’t” choice of equally incapable and even dangerous candidates.

However, the quote is from 1841 and was made by New York Assemblyman Clinton Roosevelt, a distant cousin of Franklin Roosevelt.

The Roosevelt family occupies a recurrent and pernicious place in American political history. Other relatives of President Roosevelt include not only the obvious Theodore Roosevelt, but John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren.

More interesting is that, early on, the idea of a dominant central government became the focus of the Roosevelt family.

As early as 1791, John Adams became a member of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party, which sought federal diktat in preference to individual states rights.

Later, in 1841, decades prior to the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Clinton Roosevelt proposed a scheme for central economic planning and the control of society.

The concept was for a totalitarian government in which individuality is required to give way to collectivism. It was to be run by a small elite group, of which he, not surprisingly, would be a part.

Mister Roosevelt acknowledged that, for this to be fully effective, the US Constitution would, at some point, need to be scrapped.

Years later, in 1922, socialist editor Benito Mussolini created, with the financial assistance of the J.P. Morgan company, a corporatist/collectivist state, very much in the vein of the 1841 scheme by Clinton Roosevelt.

Then, in 1933, newly-elected President Franklin Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which bore an uncanny resemblance to the 1841 plan.

Two years later, the US Supreme Court voted unanimously that the NRA was unconstitutional.

Undaunted, the Roosevelt government replaced the NRA with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

The Roosevelt argument in favour of the NLRA was that the Great Depression was caused by market instability that could be corrected only by government intervention and control through a central planned economy.

Historians are fond of telling the tale of Messrs. Jefferson and Madison who argued so strenuously for Freedom in the late eighteenth century that the new United States is said to have begun as the freest country that has ever existed.

That view is quite true, but in stating it by itself, we may overlook the fact that a concurrent effort was also very much in play at that time.

See the rest here

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Presidents Are at Their Worst In War | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on February 2, 2021

Today’s “liberals” aren’t very liberal at all; they see actual liberal principles like due process and respect for the dignity and autonomy of the individual as having been rendered obsolete by faith in science—tendentiously defined—and expertise. Those old liberal principles would just get in the way of the plans of the powerful who sit in the topmost quarters of the state-corporate nexus.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/presidents-are-at-their-worst-in-war/

by David D’Amato

Last week, as he began his administration, President Biden vowed to wage a “full-scale wartime effort” against Covid-19, signing several executive orders, including a new interstate travel mask mandate. That Joe Biden desires to be and sees himself as a wartime president offers hints as to his attitudes about the power of the presidency and government power more generally.

Today’s “liberals” aren’t very liberal at all; they see actual liberal principles like due process and respect for the dignity and autonomy of the individual as having been rendered obsolete by faith in science—tendentiously defined—and expertise. Those old liberal principles would just get in the way of the plans of the powerful who sit in the topmost quarters of the state-corporate nexus. And there’s nothing secret or conspiratorial about this; it plays out in the open, for all to see.

We must ask what a “full-scale wartime effort” might look like as a practical matter; here, history may offer some lessons. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln infamously and unilaterally suspended habeas corpus and effectively substituted an arbitrary, dictatorial military government for a constitutional government—even threatening the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with arrest for opposing Lincoln’s usurpations of both congressional and judicial powers.

World War I witnessed the passage of the Sedition Act of 1918, among American history’s most shameless and egregious assaults on the freedom of speech, under which many opponents of the war were imprisoned for no more than sharing their sincerely-held opinions.

During World War II, the United States government forced over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens, into concentration camps. This heinous and racist violation of the most fundamental individual rights was accomplished outside the democratic process, by an order from the desk of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s successor distinguished himself by unleashing the terror of two atomic bombs, overseeing the establishment of the CIA, and attempting to seize private property during the Korean War. The mere invocation of wartime, it seems, suffices to immediately supplant the constitutional separation of powers, due process, and individual rights.

The aftermath of the September 11th attacks gave us an almost cartoonishly evil series of lies, civil liberties abuses, and foreign policy crimes completely beyond the reaches of the democratic process—indeed, our elected officials were lied to and spied on with total impunity. American citizens were extrajudicially murdered, the U.S. government maintained programs of torture and indefinite detention, and secret courts allowed extremely opaque national security agencies to spy on citizens. All of this was barely news, the national security and intelligence community being insulated from scrutiny by a media establishment that prefers to host the very worst actors in the above-listed episodes as vaunted guests.

Such policy abominations reflect our leaders’ philosophy of government, under which the individual is a mere subject, her rights entirely dependent on the arbitrary vagaries of a small power elite. This philosophy may be only tacit, learned and absorbed so thoroughly as to make it invisible to the one who holds it and acts on it. America’s political leaders (in both parties, I hasten to add) want to cultivate and create policy in an environment of permanent war and emergency, with citizens in a posture of fear and meek acceptance of “temporary” powers.

The pretext employed to effect such a fear-dominated environment isn’t important to politicians and bureaucrats. It could be the threat of global communism, or Islamic terrorists, or white supremacists, or a novel virus; as long as citizens can be cowed and controlled, the stated reason is only incidentally important. The idea of crisis is what’s ultimately important. This is hardly to argue that the threats to which politicians gesture are imagined or made up out of whole cloth—it is only to say that they are exaggerated and exploited cynically by people with their own designs.

As economic historian Robert Higgs argues, “Without popular fear, no government could endure more than twenty-four hours.” Higgs has long studied the politics of fear and the accretion of new government powers through what he has labeled “the ratchet effect:” these new powers, introduced as temporary and contingent, never actually go away when a crisis recedes, hence the continued ratcheting of state power.

In their book The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister build on Higgs’s work, arguing “that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis—the never-ending series of crises, real or imagined, that are hyped by the media and lead to cures too often worse than the disease.”

A wartime president is exactly what we don’t need. We know how that story ends—dissent is branded “sedition” and forbidden, the enemies of tyranny are called “terrorists” and imprisoned indefinitely without due process, citizens are spied on and encouraged to inform against their neighbors, torture and other crimes against humanity become acceptable means, innocent people die needlessly.

Americans need a peacetime president, one who will promote public policies that respect individuals, their freely-made choices, and their property rights, allowing them to run their own lives in peace.

This article was originally featured at the American Institute for Economic Research

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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 75: The Decision to Drop the Bomb on Japan and the Genesis of the Cold War – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on August 6, 2020

According to Szilard, Byrnes was very concerned about the role of the Soviet Union in the postwar era. The Soviets’ massive armies had already steamrolled into Eastern Europe, and America was faced with the difficult task of figuring out how to get them out of these nations after Hitler was defeated. Byrnes told Szilard “that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.”

Unlike Stimson, however, the navy secretary believed that the United States should exhaust all alternatives to dropping the atomic bomb in order to get Japan to surrender. Forrestal’s views were shaped more by his strong anticommunist position than they were out of any moral qualms about using the atomic bomb. He firmly believed that if a face-saving mechanism could be found to entice Japan into surrender, the geopolitical situation in the Pacific could be stabilized before the Soviet Union could shift its resources away from Europe.

…Stalin and the Russians during the Second World War, the fact is that the Soviets were all too aware of what was transpiring inside the secret weapons plants in the United States and Britain.

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/05/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-decision-to-drop-the-bomb-on-japan-and-the-genesis-of-the-cold-war/

By Scott Ritter

Even by the heightened standards of a nation’s capital during wartime, the gathering of generals, admirals, and high government officials in the White House Cabinet Room on the afternoon of Monday, June 18, 1945, was impressive. Only one, however, could claim resident status—the newly sworn in president of the United States, Harry S. Truman.

A veteran of the First World War and a long-serving Democratic senator from the state of Missouri, Truman was an unlikely candidate for the job he now held. A compromise candidate for the office of vice president in 1944, Truman was no close confidant of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Indeed, he had little insight into Roosevelt’s thinking about postwar relations with the Soviet Union and no knowledge of the existence of a major program—the Manhattan Project—to produce an atomic bomb.

In a series of meetings conducted shortly after being sworn in as president, Truman overcame this deficit, maintaining a pledge to adhere as closely as possible to the policy directions set forth by President Roosevelt. But some decisions would have to be taken by the new president, which is why he had convened the Cabinet Room meeting. [Minutes]

Joining Truman was General George Catlett Marshall, the distinguished 64-year-old chief of staff of the U.S. Army. In addition to managing the problems associated with waging global war, General Marshall was also a member of a high-level committee (the “Top Policy Group,” formed in October 1941) overseeing the effort by the United States to construct an atomic bomb.

Marshall had left most day-to-day decisions about the atomic bomb program in the hands of Major General Leslie Groves and had limited his own role to that of making sure Congress continued to underwrite the project financially and to a lesser extent of policymaking about the use of an atomic weapon.

As recently as May 31, 1945, Marshall had told a gathering of atomic bomb scientists, administrators, and policymakers that he felt the United States would be in a stronger position in any postwar environment if it avoided using an atomic bomb against the Japanese. He also recommended that the United States invite the Soviet Union to attend tests of the atomic bomb.

The majority attending that meeting ruled against Marshall, including soon-to-be Secretary of State James Byrnes, who feared the United States would lose its lead over the Soviets in nuclear weapons if the Russians became a de facto partner through such cooperation. In any event, Marshall viewed any decision to use or not use an atomic bomb, given the horrific ramifications, to be a purely political question, outside the purview of the military.

‘Barbaric’

Joining Marshall were two senior naval officers, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King—the commander of the U.S. Fleet and chief of naval operations (the only person ever to hold such a joint command)—and Admiral William Leahy, the 70-year-old chief of staff to the commander in chief, U.S. Army and Navy. Admiral King was an abrasive, hard-drinking man who openly disdained any use of American resources for purposes other than the total destruction of the Japanese.

Unlike King, Admiral Leahy was a proponent of avoiding a bloodbath fighting the Japanese and was sympathetic toward the idea of reaching a negotiated surrender brought on by the combined pressure of an economic blockade of the Japanese islands and conventional aerial bombardment. Leahy was against any use of the atomic bomb against civilian targets, a concept he viewed as “barbaric.”

The Army Air Force was represented by Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker. General Eaker had almost single-handedly made strategic bombing an accepted practice when as the commander of the 8th Air Force in Europe, he convinced British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to continue the controversial strategy, noting that “round the clock bombing” would “soften the Hun for land invasion and the kill.”

Ira Eaker was standing in for the flamboyant Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Air Force, General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold. Sidelined by health issues, General Arnold was an unabashed proponent of strategic bombing and had, through sheer force of will, positioned the Army Air Force to carry out massive aerial bombardment campaigns against both Germany and Japan.

Like Arnold, General Eaker carried the secret that it was the 20th Air Force, flying the B-29 “Superfortress” bomber, which would deliver the atomic bomb to a Japanese target should the president decide on its use.

Rounding out the meeting’s attendees was a trio of civilians. At 78 years of age, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was by far the senior man present. Like General Marshall, Stimson was a member of the Top Policy Group overseeing the atomic bomb project. Stimson was the first official to brief President Truman about the existence of the atomic bomb, on April 25, 1945.

At that meeting Stimson warned Truman that “with reference to this weapon, the question of sharing it with other nations and, if so shared, upon what terms, becomes a primary question of our foreign relations. Also, our leadership in the war and in the development of this weapon has placed a certain moral responsibility upon us which we cannot shirk without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.”

From that meeting, Secretary Stimson, at the request of Truman, formed the “Interim Committee,” the purpose of which was to advise the president on the utility of using the atomic bomb. The Interim Committee’s report, delivered on June 1, 1945, strongly advocated for the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese. Unlike General Marshall, who also attended the Interim Committee’s meetings, Stimson supported this decision.

Navy Secretary James Forrestal was also a member of the Interim Committee. Unlike Stimson, however, the navy secretary believed that the United States should exhaust all alternatives to dropping the atomic bomb in order to get Japan to surrender. Forrestal’s views were shaped more by his strong anticommunist position than they were out of any moral qualms about using the atomic bomb. He firmly believed that if a face-saving mechanism could be found to entice Japan into surrender, the geopolitical situation in the Pacific could be stabilized before the Soviet Union could shift its resources away from Europe.

McCloy’s Suggestion

Accompanying Stimson and Forrestal was the junior civilian present, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. McCloy was a complex individual. A veteran of the First World War, McCloy served as a legal counsel for the German chemical company I. G. Farben. His links to Germany led him to be somewhat sympathetic to the rise of Adolf Hitler, whom McCloy was photographed sitting with at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. However, his status as a lawyer and manager led to his appointment in 1941 as the assistant secretary of war.

For the bulk of the meeting, President Truman and his military chiefs wrestled with the decision to invade Japan. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tyler Kent and the Roosevelt Whistle-blow Job – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on November 22, 2019

Americans overwhelmingly did not want war. FDR wasn’t just misleading the voters; he was misleading them in a way that would have genuinely mattered at the ballot box.

https://www.takimag.com/article/tyler-kent-and-the-roosevelt-whistle-blow-job/

David Cole

Remember that time Democrats hated a whistle-blower so much they turned him over to a foreign government to be imprisoned on an island? Think Gilligan’s Island but without the laugh track. There was a millionaire, however…a cuddly cripple with a fondness for war and a penchant for collusion. I speak, of course, of that most “problematic” Democrat icon, Franklin Roosevelt.

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…

In April 2016, when then candidate Trump dared to utter the words “America First” during a foreign-policy speech, FDR acolytes clutched their collective pearls. Susan Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, took to CNN to explain why Trump’s new catchphrase was the most Hitlery thing a Hitler could holler. “‘America First’ was the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler,” explained the FDR author and historian. According to Dunn, the only thing standing in the way of Roosevelt’s coveted war against European fascism was the backwoods hootin’ of America’s hicks and hillbillies: “There would soon be several hundred America First Committee chapters and almost a million members, two-thirds of whom resided in the Midwest,” fumed Dunn.

Damned Midwesterners! Why can’t they just grow our crops and milk our cows and shut the hell up about matters that are intellectually beyond their ken? According to Dunn, America First was powered by anti-Semites in states like Iowa and Kansas, Neanderthalic nose-pickers whose petty hatreds blinded them to the wisdom of FDR’s crusade.

I wrote Professor Dunn an email, and I’ll confess that I sent it pseudonymously, as I wanted her to think I was one of those ignorant Midwestern lummoxes. In between grunts of “gluurp” and “braaak” and whatever other sounds I assume Kansans make when they’re attempting to cogitate, my uneducated avatar pounded out the following missive:

I once read that during a campaign stop in Boston on October 30, 1940, President Roosevelt, at the time running for reelection, said, “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Is this a genuine quote, or an urban legend?

Five minutes later, Professor Dunn replied:

Hi! It’s definitely a real quote. He wanted to win the election and was willing to make that promise. In his mind, he thought that if the US is attacked, it’s not a “foreign” war. But he shouldn’t have made that promise.

Naughty Roosevelt, he shouldn’t have lied like that just to win the election! But all is forgiven, because in his mind he thought it’s not a foreign war if we’re attacked (fun fact: Nazi Germany never attacked us).

Of course, my low-IQ Kansan’s first email was just the lure on the line. Time to reel the flounder in with a second one:

One quick follow-up: If FDR felt the need to make that statement in Boston, in other words, if he believed that doing so IN BOSTON would assist his reelection bid, then surely the desire to keep the U.S. out of war in 1940 was not limited to the Midwest. Is that accurate?

And I never heard from Professor Dunn again!

“Kent was Robinson Crusoe’d and a new Great War proceeded unhindered. Yay!”

The above story illustrates the most troublesome aspect of FDR worship, even more problematic than the internment camps and the book-banning: FDR lied his way to reelection in 1940, publicly promising to keep “our boys” out of Europe’s growing conflagration, while privately doing everything he could to override the will of the voters and get us neck-deep in war. No one—not even an FDR fangirl like Susan Dunn—can deny that. And what troubles these folks even more than the president’s actions is the fact that isolationism had widespread support across the U.S. It wasn’t just a mania among cornhuskers and cross-burners. The public’s will was reflected in the three Neutrality Acts passed by Congress between 1935 and 1939.

Americans overwhelmingly did not want war. FDR wasn’t just misleading the voters; he was misleading them in a way that would have genuinely mattered at the ballot box.

Enter the whistle-blower who tried to expose FDR’s secret machinations prior to the election…the guy who witnessed (and not secondhand via hearsay) an American president engaging in dirty dealings with a foreign power, in violation of U.S. policy and in complete contradiction to what he was promising on the campaign trail.

Surprisingly, even as present-day D.C. is in turmoil over a “whistle-blower” who supposedly exposed a president’s mischief with a foreign leader, no one’s mentioning Tyler Kent. Our mainstream media loves invoking historical references, but only when they reinforce a beloved narrative. Emmett Till’s in more newspapers than Marmaduke. But Tyler Kent? Who dat?

Tyler Kent was true-blue-blooded Virginian aristocracy. His daddy was a diplomat, and he shared DNA with presidents and Founding Fathers. Fancy boarding schools, Princeton, the Sorbonne, by age 20 Kent spoke more languages and had shagged more debutantes than you’ve had hot meals. By his late 20s, Kent was working as a cipher clerk at the U.S. embassy in London. All American missions in Europe routed their coded dispatches through the London embassy’s code room, and Kent was one of four code clerks who got to see everything.

And what he saw was collusion, true collusion, low-down and dirty. FDR was secretly conspiring with Churchill to violate U.S. neutrality and accelerate American involvement on behalf of Great Britain. That this coded exchange was going on behind the back of Neville Chamberlain, the head of state (and therefore the man FDR was obligated to deal with), made an already ugly example of collusion even worse. FDR was not only violating the policy of neutrality that had been established by Congress, he was also undermining the democratically elected prime minister of an allied nation. And he did all of this while free-wheeling in his Jazzy Power Chair from one election stop to another promising “again and again and again” to keep the U.S. out of any foreign wars.

What Tyler Kent saw in the code room was top-grade political dynamite. In the words of Boston University historian Peter Rand:

The covert communiqués had started in September 1939, as Churchill assumed the position of First Lord of the Admiralty for the second time, and continued through winter and into spring, when Churchill became prime minister. In their exchanges, Churchill and Roosevelt, assuming they were writing in confidence, mulled how FDR might slip Britain war materiel in bald violation of U.S. law.

As Rand points out, if “word of this got to the press,” the impact on November’s presidential election could have been devastating. And Kent, deciding it was his duty to inform the American public of the president’s violation of the Neutrality Act, resolved to leak the information to isolationists in the State Department and the British Parliament. Sadly, Churchill became prime minister before Kent could act on his plan, and he had the young code clerk imprisoned on the Isle of Wight as (in the words of Professor Rand) “across the Atlantic, the Democrats nominated FDR a third time, and his campaign unfurled without a whisper that the president had trampled the Neutrality Act.”

Kent was Robinson Crusoe’d and a new Great War proceeded unhindered. Yay!

For those of you keeping score, there were technically two instances of collusion at play here. First, there was the FDR/Churchill collusion aimed at secretly violating the Neutrality Act, and second, there was the FDR/Churchill collusion to imprison Kent once it became clear he was going to blow the whistle. On the American side, Kent’s diplomatic immunity was revoked and the Brits were told they could do with him as they pleased. On the British side, Kent’s “trial” was conducted in secrecy in a shuttered room (a SCIF, basically).

I spoke with the Institute for Historical Review’s Mark Weber, my old friend and the author of an essential essay on Kent. Mark stressed that perhaps the most vile aspect of the Kent affair was that FDR’s cronies blatantly admitted that British needs took precedence over U.S. law and the rights of a U.S. diplomat:

In an official statement on the Kent affair, the State Department acknowledged that in this case the US government had put British interests ahead of American interests and US law. The Roosevelt administration, it declared, had sanctioned Kent’s imprisonment because “The interest of Great Britain in such a case, at a time when it was fighting for its existence, was therefore preeminent.”

America last.

In 1945, with the war over and FDR dead (his brain having literally exploded with delight from the knowledge of how many Germans and Japs he’d immolated), Kent was quietly released by the British into a world that no longer gave a damn about the secrets he’d uncovered. He died penniless in a Texas trailer park in 1988, almost assuredly not in the company of a debutante named Muffy.

Though Tyler Kent’s name has been lost to history, when he is invoked, it’s almost always to question his character. He was a “Nazi sympathizer,” or a “KKK racist,” or a “Russian spy” (to the left, the neocons, and deep staters of all stripes, that’s the holy trifecta of slander: Nazi, racist, and Russian bot).

Speculation over Kent’s motives is an effective way to distract from the established facts that require no speculation: FDR was indeed colluding with a foreign power to violate U.S. law, and Tyler Kent wanted people to know about it. Even if Kent had been a goose-stepping Klan-hooded Marxist, it wouldn’t have made FDR’s actions less wrong, or the voters less deserving of the truth.

One can argue that Kent’s spirit lives on today in people like Julian Assange, but at least we as a society have evolved to the point where we no longer put people like that in pris…oh, shit. Right.

Assange, like Kent, is all about transparency. That’s a key difference between the Kent affair and the septic carnival going on right now in D.C. With Kent, we had a true whistle-blower who wanted to empower voters by exposing secret plots and schemes. The current so-called whistle-blower, and the leprous carnies sequestering him behind the freak-show curtain, are all about secret hearings, rumors and hearsay, and a belief that the deep state should have veto power over election results. Tyler Kent, a genuine whistle-blower who relied on primary sources, wanted nothing more than to be heard. The current supposed whistle-blower, who relies on secondhand gossip and speculation, wants so badly to hide from the public eye that he might as well have confined himself to an island.

That’s progress for you; we’ve bred the self-interning whistle-blower, one who assists and enables secret star-chamber hearings instead of fighting against them.

I’m sure that FDR, wherever he may be (most likely giving a significantly hot fireside chat), would appreciate how far we’ve come.

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Robert Stinnett, Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and ...

 

 

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The ‘Special Relationship’ Is Collapsing… and That’s a Good Thing — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on August 3, 2019

With FDR’s death, these British operatives took over American foreign policy and wiped out the remaining pro-American forces in the State Department, disbanding the OSS and reconstituting America’s intelligence services as the MI6-modelled CIA in 1948.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/01/special-relationship-collapsing-thats-good-thing/

Matthew Ehret

 

British Ambassador Kim Darroch’s return to London from his failed mission in America is being hailed by many naïve commentators as yet another proof that President Trump is a crazed ego-maniac who cannot take criticism from a seasoned professional diplomat.

During the weeks since the “Darroch memo” scandal erupted, mainstream media has totally mis-diagnosed the nature of the breakdown in US-British relations, and has brushed over the most relevant evidence that has been brought to light by Darroch’s cables. This spinning of the narrative has made it falsely appear that the Ambassador merely criticized the President as “clumsy, diplomatically inept, unpredictable and dysfunctional” and was thus unjustly attacked by the President causing the poor diplomate to resign saying “the current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would like.” Former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt went so far as to say that Darroch was “the best of Britain” and encouraged all diplomats to continue to “speak truth to power.” International press on both sides of the ocean followed suit portraying Darroch as a hero among men.

Hog wash.

The reality is that Darroch’s messages to the British Foreign Office go much deeper and reveal something very ugly that challenges the deepest assumptions about recent history and modern geopolitics.

Sir Darroch and Britain’s Invisible Hand Exposed

Sir Darroch, (Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George) is not your typical British diplomat. The Knight made a name for himself as a leading agent of Tony Blair while acting as Ambassador to the European Union from 2007-2011 in an effort to win international support for a regime change operation against Iran, Syria and Libya.

Blair and the highest levels of the British oligarchy had managed America as its “dumb giant” throughout the entire post-9/11 regime change program on the Middle East. While many have labelled this policy as “American”, we shall come to see that it was merely the carrying out of the “Blair Doctrine” announced in the 1999 speech in Chicago calling for a post-nation state (post-Westphalian) world order.

It is important to remind ourselves that the dodgy WMD dossier  had been crafted by the British Foreign Office before being used by neo con hawks such as John Bolton and Cheney as justification to blow up Iraq in 2003. It was also the earlier Anglo-Saudi sponsored BAE black operation run by Prince Bandar bin Sultan which funded and directed 9/11 earlier. As US Ambassador beginning in January 2016, Sir Darroch was instrumental in vetting Christopher Steele as “absolutely legit”. Steele’s “dodgy dossier” on Trump was used to justify the greatest witch hunt of a sitting President in history.

When viewed in the same light as the British-directed Russia-gating of the President, these memos shed valuable light upon the Byzantine methods which British intelligence has used to conduct its subtle manipulation of America for a very long time.

Trump Whisperers and Britain’s Other Tools

In his memos, Sir Darroch called for “flooding the zone” with Trump whisperers who can influence the President’s perceptions of the world and push him towards the British agenda on issues such as de-carbonization, Free Trade, and war with Iran.

Sir Darroch said to his superiors that “we have spent years building the relationships; they are the gatekeepers… the individuals we rely upon to ensure the U.K. voice is heard in the West Wing.” Who are these voices who been built up over years? National Security Advisor John Bolton is a long-standing visitor to the British embassy and former Chief of Staff John Kelly has had regular early morning breakfast dates. A Washington Post assessment of July 8th described Darroch’s “coterie- including Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Mick Mulvaney, Sarah Sanders and Trump ally Chris Ruddy” who have met at the embassy and “share about the President and his decision-making.”

Darroch also revealed that Trump’s resistance to the British position on war with Iran was not acceptable when the President chose to cancel an attack on Iran on June 21st after an America drone was shot down. Moments after Trump’s cancellation of the attack, a Darroch memo complained that Trump was “incoherent and chaotic” and that Trump could fall into line once he was “surrounded by a more hawkish group of advisers… Just one more Iranian attack somewhere in the region could trigger yet another Trump U-turn.”

Only two weeks after sending this cable, Britain orchestrated a crisis by seizing an Iranian ship on July 5th which snowballed into an Iranian seizure of a British tanker and greater danger of confrontation amongst the NATO axis and Iran.

The biggest confusion spread by the controllers of “officially accepted narratives” when assessing such things as 9-11, regime change wars, or the current debacle in Iran is located in a sleight of hand that asserts that America leads the British in the Special relationship. This belief in an “American empire” betrays a profound misunderstanding of history.

The Fallacious History of US-British “Friendship”

For much of the 19th century, Americans generally had a better understanding of their anti-colonial origins than many do today. Even though the last official war fought between Britain and America was in 1812-15, the British failure to destroy America militarily caused British foreign policy to re-focus its efforts on undermining America from within… generally through the dual infestation of British-sponsored ideologies contaminating the American school system on the one hand and British banking practices of Wall Street’s ruling class on the other. This attack from within required more patience, but was more successful and led to the near collapse of America in 1860 when Lord Palmerston quickly recognized the Southern slave power’s call for independence from the Union. Britain’s covert military support for the Confederate cause was exposed by the end of that war and led to Britain’s payment of $15 million settlement to America as part of the Alabama Claims in 1872.

As the informative 2010 Lpac documentary “The Special Relationship is for Traitors” showcased, during the early 20th century leading American military figures like Brig. General Billy Mitchell understood Britain’s role in supporting the Confederacy and Britain’s manipulation of global wars. General Mitchell fought against the “special relationship” tooth and nail and led the military to create “War Plan Red and War Plan Orange” to defeat Britain under the context of an eventual war between the English-speaking powers. These plans were made US military doctrine in 1930 and were only taken off the books when America decided it was more important to put down London’s Fascist Frankenstein threat than fight Britain head on in WWII.

The Rhodes Scholars Take Over

Before the “Churchill gang” (that Stalin accused of poisoning FDR) could take control of America, Franklin Roosevelt described his understanding of the British influence over the US State Department when he told his son: “You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

With FDR’s death, these British operatives took over American foreign policy and wiped out the remaining pro-American forces in the State Department, disbanding the OSS and reconstituting America’s intelligence services as the MI6-modelled CIA in 1948.

In 1951, the Chicago Tribune published a incredible series of exposes by journalist William Fulton documenting the cancerous penetration of hundreds of Oxford Trained Rhodes Scholars who had taken over American foreign policy and were directing America into a third world war. On July 14, 1951 Fulton wrote: “Key positions in the United States department of state are held by a network of American Rhodes scholars. Rhodes scholars are men who obtained supplemental education and indoctrination at Oxford University in England with the bills paid by the estate of Cecil John Rhodes, British empire builder. Rhodes wrote about his ambition to cause “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British empire.” The late diamond and gold mining tycoon aimed at a world federation dominated by Anglo-Saxons.”

Sir Kissinger Opens the Floodgates

A star pupil of William Yandall Elliot (a leading Rhodes Scholar based out of Harvard) was a young misanthropic German named Henry Kissinger.

A decade before becoming a Knight of the British Empire, Kissinger gave a remarkable speech at a May 1981 event on British-American relations at London’s Royal Institute for International Affairs. At this event Kissinger described the opposing world views of Churchill vs. Roosevelt, gushing that he much preferred the post-war view of Churchill. He then described his time working for the British Foreign Office as Secretary of State saying: “The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic”.

As Kissinger spoke these words, another anglophile traitor was being installed as Vice-President of America. George Bush Sr. was not only the son of a Nazi-funding Wall Street tool and former director of the CIA, but was also made a Knight of the Grand Cross and Order of Bath by Queen Elizabeth in 1993. The most disasterous foreign policies enacted under Reagan’s leadership during the 1980s can be traced directly back to these two figures.

The Potential Revival of the ‘Real’ America

Think what you may of Donald Trump. The fact is, that he has not started any wars which a Jeb or Hillary were happy to launch. He has reversed a regime change program active since 9/11. He has fought to put America into a cooperative position with Russia. He has undone decades of WTO/City of London free trade. He has called for rebuilding productive industries following through by reviving the protective tariff. To top it off, he has been at war with the British-directed deep state for over three years and survived. Now that Bolton has been outed as an ally of Sir Darroch, there is an open acknowledgement that Trump is gearing up to replace the neocon traitor as we speak. Trump has many problems but being a British asset is not one of them.

If you’ve made it this far, you shouldn’t be surprised that the collapse of the special relationship is a very good thing, since America now has a real opportunity to rediscover its true anti-imperial nature by working with Russia, China, India and other nations under the new cooperative framework of space exploration and the Belt and Road Initiative.

 

 

 

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Ocasio-Cortez’s Selective Memory on the New Deal | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 12, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/ocasio-cortezs-selective-memory-new-deal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez never misses the opportunity to bash capitalism.

At the 2019 South by Southwest festival, the Congresswoman derided capitalism, describing it as “irredeemable.” She says that the U.S. is currently facing the consequences of “putting profits over everything else in our society.” Curiously, the freshmen congresswoman pivoted her rant towards a critique of the New Deal.

How could such a staunch leftist like Ocasio-Cortez — who fashioned her pet legislation as the “Green New Deal” — criticize its 20th-century predecessor? She was able to do so by turning this discussion into a matter of race.

In her view, Roosevelt’s New Deal cut African Americans a raw deal:

“The New Deal was an extremely economically racist policy that drew little red lines around black and brown communities and it invested in white America.”

Ocasio-Cortez continued expanding on the New Deal’s harmful effects: “It allowed white Americans access to home loans that black Americans didn’t have access to, giving them access to the greatest source of intergenerational wealth.”

Misinterpreting the New Deal’s Racist History

The congresswoman is correct about the New Deal’s racist policies, albeit from an observational standpoint. I wrote about this previously, detailing how the federal government promoted segregated housing during the New Deal at the African-American community’s expense.

However, Ocasio-Cortez’s talk about the New Deal flagrantly omits other government interventions that clearly affected racial minorities in a negative way. The Wagner Act of 1935 — which established labor-union monopolies — gave incumbent unions tremendous power to exclude low-wage workers. During this period, union heavyweights discriminated against black workers in order to keep wages artificially high for white workers.

Similarly, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 allowed the executive branch to create industrial cartels to restrict output and enact minimum-wage policies. This resulted in approximately 500,000 blacks being pushed out of the labor market thanks to high, non-market wages.

Despite these overlooked aspects of the New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez continues to race hustle and thinks that more government intervention will somehow “correct” past injustices that the government itself created.

How Limited Government Made African Americans Prosperous

In contrast to the New Deal, markets have historically helped racial minorities. It was during the Gilded Age that the African-American community was able to first establish itself as an economic force. This was an era when there was no welfare state, no federal tax maze, nor an alphabet soup of bureaucracy to impede capital accumulation and business creation.

During this time, African American civil society was at its peak. David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to Welfare State was a seminal work in demonstrating how the African-American community thrived without any form of government assistance before the New Deal. Civic organizations like the Independent Order of Saint Luke and the United Order of True Reformers “specialized initially in sickness and burial insurance,” and became leading institutions in African-American civil society.

The Independent Order of Saint Luke stood out for its entrepreneurial endeavors and ended up establishing the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond, which had the honor of having Maggie L. Walker as the first, black female bank president in American history…

Be seeing youmlk

 

 

 

 

 

 

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