And On the Other Hand (A French Farce?) No - A World Tragedy! (Trying To Understand "Reality" and Escape the Matrix Before It's Too Late) BushWhacked?

I wasn't planning to deal with Diamonds Jamie today, but he leaves me no choice. (P.S. I guess I better stop publishing such interesting "journalism" (or truth about the powers-that-be) as I'm becoming even more of a stopping place for readers from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, several suburban DC CIA-connected locations and the NSA than usual. Contributions to this effort are, of course, always welcomed!)

JP Morgan Chase CEO warns of US defaulting

The greatest bankster (ever - check his PR!) who stole trillions under false pretenses wants us to feel responsible for his actions. Wonder if he had enough self-esteem classes in the primary grades?

Even our straightest friend in economics writing/chatting, James Kunstler of Clusterfuck Nation, thinks we need a larger perspective (and without an ironical bone in his very serious body aligns himself with Paul Craig Roberts (ex-Reaganist) and all the Lefties left):

Wasn't it poor Karl Marx, driven mad first by capital and then by boils, who said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." Conveniently, the bedroom farce is something at which the French excel. So much dignity, so little impulse control. Not to go overboard with quotations right off top, but cuddly ole T.S. Eliot famously informed us that "...this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper." I suspect the whimper was emitted by DSK in his Harlem jail cell when he discovered that the standard Sunday morning breakfast issued by the New York City Department of Corrections is a baloney sandwich. Quelle horreur! A French convict serving thirty years for tunneling into a Toulon bank gets a brioche, at least!

The question all this raises is: can you think of any other high-up officials, say in American finance or banking, who have tried to jam their generative member someplace it was not exactly invited? I can think of a few, starting with, oh, Hank Paulson. He stuck it to a couple hundred million US taxpayers and is now scott-free in the marshes of Maryland pursuing his beloved wild birds with the Swarovski EL 8x32 binoculars ($1,879.00, retail w/discount) and the excellent Sibley field guide. Only a week or so ago Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations sent a bill of particulars to the US Department of Justice outlining the spectacular misdeeds of Goldman Sachs executives Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks, et. al, alleged to have performed a kind anal rape on customers who did not have that kind of "yield" in mind when they came through the door at 200 West Street. Sources tell me that Attorney General Eric Holder has been using the report as a cocktail coaster.

One poor slob, Raj Rajaratnam of the Galleon Group hedge fund was convicted in a federal court last week for plain old insider trading, something a child of seven could understand. With a little luck, Raj will join Bernie Madoff's round-robin ping-pong caucus at the federal penitentiary in Butner, NC, and the days will seem to fly by. Apparently the scams that went down at Goldman Sachs and lots of other so-called banks were too complex for rafts of regulators and federal attorneys to figure out. But you never know. If DSK was too dim to hire a nice discreet $1500-an-hour hooker prior to his unspeakably tedious business-class flight back to Paris, then maybe Lloyd Blankfein will fly out of a broom closet in Jackson Hole this summer dressed like Norman Bates's mother and commence to paddle Ben Bernanke with a 10-inch chef's knife. One can only hope.

You can't blame regular folks for not knowing what the heck to pay attention to these days. Most of the US public is not preoccupied with the doings of the Greek finance ministry, the IMF, foreign bond spreads, CDS ratios, and the spooky action in the commodities pits. Especially not with Big Muddy rising and all those oil refineries waiting downstream like so many cypress stumps, not to mention two nuke plants at River Bend and Waterford, Louisiana. Wouldn't that make some hot gumbo?

While I feel for the people fleeing their homes down there, I have a feeling that this week's action will be set in the more abstruse precincts around European finance. With DSK on ice in Harlem, who will coordinate the beating out of brushfires that could burn down the European banking system? Remember, it's not about the countries. They'll still be there. The goats will still be grazing in wild thyme on the Greek hillsides no matter what happens in some Frankfurt board room. The layabouts will still be at their tables in the Lisbon café. But the Société Générale and Commerzbank AG could go up in a vapor faster than you can say Dominque Strauss-Kahn. The great rattling fear that lives within European business minds is that the whole bloody system is flat broke and any interruption to the daisy-chain of revolving obligations will reveal the awful naked truth - perhaps like seeing DSK fly out of the hotel bathroom with his florid organ aloft and a wicked gleam in his eyes

Anyway you cut it, it can't be a good week for the Euro. But with all currencies spiraling towards worthlessness, and even gold and silver hemorrhaging value, what is the world of money coming to? Maybe the stuff is obsolete. If you wait three weeks, you'll be able to walk into any Wal-Mart and just pick up the stuff you want for free. Until it's all gone.

He may have gone a little far on that thought, but not really far enough according to some real world-traveled economists and philosophers. Mike Whitney says this probably all arose because Strauss-Kahn had aligned himself on the wrong side of the ones who are always "winning" the argument. Remember that he played an entirely surprising role in Matt Damon's Inside Job when he was the only one to out the banksters/Wall Street? Not that any of us are getting out of this alive or anything (economically alive, I mean (and I've been economically dead and buried as a result of the following history/scenario for over a decade)), but that we still have to suffer through many interim "bad times" before the whole edifice comes crashing down. (Read the linked articles before you make up your mind. Right. They're mind blowing!)

Dominique Strauss-Kahn Was Trying to Torpedo the Dollar

It's all about perception management. The media is trying to dig up as much dirt as they can on Dominique Strauss-Kahn so they can hang the man before he ever sees the inside of a courthouse. It reminds me of the Terry Schiavo case, where devoted-husband Michael was pegged as an insensitive slimeball for carrying out the explicit wishes of his brain-dead wife. Do you remember how the media conducted their disgraceful 24 hour-a-day Blitzkrieg with the endless coverage of weepy Christian fanatics on the front lawn of the hospital while Hannity, Limbaugh and O' Reilly fired away with their sanctimonious claptrap? And now you're telling me that that same media is just "doing their job?" Give me a break. Whoever wants to nail IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has really pulled out all the stops. . . . whatever it takes to make a randy banker look like the South Hill rapist. And, that's not the half of it. The Big Money is exhuming every woman he's ever had contact with for the last 30 years hoping they can glean some damning tidbit of information that will convince the doubters that beneath that sophisticated manner and $25,000 suit lurks a closet Bluebeard ready to snap up your daughters and defile your wives. Next thing you know, they'll be trotting out Paula Jones and Tanya Harding claiming they spent a torrid night with the Marquis de Kahn in a trailerpark . . . . Where does it stop? Or does it stop? Are we in for another year-long Clinton-Lewinski feeding frenzy where everyday we hear more lurid details about the sexploits of people who don't really interest us at all? Aren't you at all curious about who's behind this "lynching by media" scam? This is an all-out, no-holds-barred, steel-cage, take-down. The big boys save that kind of action for the worst offenders, that is, for the insiders who have broken "Omerta" or wandered off the reservation. I mean, they locked him up on Riker's Island without bail, for Chrissake. What does that tell you? Even Bernie Madoff was allowed to stay in his $7 million Park Avenue penthouse while he waited for trial, but not Straus-Kahn. Oh, no. He get's the royal treatment, even though he has no criminal record and nothing but the sketchy accusations of a chambermaid against him, he's carted off to the state slammer where he can mingle with hardened criminals while dining on corn flakes and Wonder Bread. You call that justice? Can I tell you what this is all about? It's about the dollar. That's right. Strauss-Kahn was mounting an attack against the dollar and now the wrath of the Empire has descended on him like ton-of-bricks.

Go ahead. Read a little bit. Find out what (or a part of what) may be behind this particular curtain! (And this curtain covers quite a bit of unknown dirt - including how Strauss-Kahn's replacement Christine LaGarde (remind you of the appointment of Henry Kissinger to run the 9/11 Commission, anyone?) was trained in Chicago at the same time as Obama (more community activists?), is close friends with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Bruce Jackson, who is a pretty well-connected guy himself (Lockheed Martin VP, "Thanks to the . . . commissions presided over by Christine Lagarde, Jackson signed the contract of the century: the sale, in April 2003, of 48 F-16 Lockheed-Martin jet fighters to Poland for 3.5 billion dollars. The transaction caused great dismay in Europe as the Polish government was paying with the European Union’s funds for the preservation of its agricultural sector" and "Jackson was the main financial backer of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq"), and has advocated for years the "Arab Spring," which we are (surprise!) experiencing right now all over the MidEast!) Don't miss the comments!!!! (We are learning what is going on all around us - ever soooooooo sloooooowly.) [More on Christine LaGarde follows in With Christine Lagarde, US Corporations Enter the French Government:

Only supposing that Christine Lagarde abandoned her former duties and that she has no intentions of going back to them, would it be possible to admit that we are not witnessing a case of conflict of interests. However, when the political positions defended by the groups she presided over are analyzed, it is impossible to ignore that they are completely against the French position defended by Dominique de Villepin before the United Nations.

To conclude, we have to say that the statements made by the minister two days after her appointment seemed shocking for the French trade unions. Christine Lagarde promised to carry out a reform of labor law because, in her opinion, “it often represents an obstacle for employment and for a number of business decisions”. However, in order to understand her point of view, it is important to analyze her statements, not comparing them with the MEDEF speech, but linked to the positions that she has thus far supported. Christine Lagarde made big efforts to impose the Anglo-Saxon labor law model in Central and East Europe. Her goal was to promote the interests of the US firms, not those of the Old Europe.]

One thing that just keeps recurring in my mind's eye is the vision of Barbara Bush* picking her way through the "bombed-out" (so to speak) population in post-Katrina New Orleans and congratulating them on having better accommodations than they probably had previously as street people and then immediately jumping into proselytizing for her son Neil's "new business venture" in privatizing education for those poor people whose schools were heavily damaged by that totally unexpected hurricane. Well, that's enough to give me deja vue all over. And then there's Obama's latest "diplomatic" words to the Israelis about returning to the pre-Intifada geographic boundaries. Makes one fear for the obvious Israeli response (and how there'll just be nothing, NOTHING, we can do about that misstep of Obama's as the Israeli "counterterrorism maneuvers" take flight.) Or maybe I'm dreaming (yeah, right) and rightwing training organizations are for the little guys' benefit. Hope I'm wrong. But how could any of that speech have been actually true? Oh well. (See my comments tomorrow on it!) Richard K. Moore has given me more than enough to ponder strenuously for the rest of the year (and we do not have that much time to waste!). What do you think, friends? We're all in this together. (And notice how all those conflicts like the War on the Vietnamese are so well explained. Also, the "missing in action" of Dumbya, Cheney, Wolfowitz (first person to tell Bush that Iraq was 9/11 instigator), et al. from the Sixties Movements (not an oversight, Boo-Boo).)

Escaping the Matrix Richard K. Moore

The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises "the truth, nothing more." Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality - something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato's famous parable about the shadows on the walls of the cave, true reality is at least reflected in perceived reality. In the Matrix world, true reality and perceived reality exist on entirely different planes.

The story is intended as metaphor, and the parallels that drew my attention had to do with political reality. This article offers a particular perspective on what's going on in the world--and how things got to be that way--in this era of globalization. From that red-pill perspective, everyday media-consensus reality - like the Matrix in the film - is seen to be a fabricated collective illusion. Like Neo, I didn't know what I was looking for when my investigation began, but I knew that what I was being told didn't make sense. I read scores of histories and biographies, observing connections between them, and began to develop my own theories about roots of various historical events. I found myself largely in agreement with writers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, but I also perceived important patterns that others seem to have missed.

When I started tracing historical forces, and began to interpret present-day events from a historical perspective, I could see the same old dynamics at work and found a meaning in unfolding events far different from what official pronouncements proclaimed. Such pronouncements are, after all, public relations fare, given out by politicians who want to look good to the voters. Most of us expect rhetoric from politicians, and take what they say with a grain of salt. But as my own picture of present reality came into focus, "grain of salt" no longer worked as a metaphor. I began to see that consensus reality--as generated by official rhetoric and amplified by mass media--bears very little relationship to actual reality. "The matrix" was a metaphor I was ready for.

In consensus reality (the blue-pill perspective) "left" and "right" are the two ends of the political spectrum. Politics is a tug-of-war between competing factions, carried out by political parties and elected representatives. Society gets pulled this way and that within the political spectrum, reflecting the interests of whichever party won the last election. The left and right are therefore political enemies. Each side is convinced that it knows how to make society better; each believes the other enjoys undue influence; and each blames the other for the political stalemate that apparently prevents society from dealing effectively with its problems.

This perspective on the political process, and on the roles of left and right, is very far from reality. It is a fabricated collective illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that the Matrix is "the world that was pulled over your eyes to hide you from the truth....As long as the Matrix exists, humanity cannot be free.""

Consensus political reality is precisely such a matrix. Later we will take a fresh look at the role of left and right, and at national politics. But first we must develop our red-pill historical perspective. I've had to condense the arguments to bare essentials; please see the annotated sources at the end for more thorough treatments of particular topics.

Imperialism and the Matrix

From the time of Columbus to 1945, world affairs were largely dominated by competition among Western nations ⁽¹⁾ seeking to stake out spheres of influence, control sea lanes, and exploit colonial empires. Each Western power became the core of an imperialist economy whose periphery was managed for the benefit of the core nation. Military might determined the scope of an empire; wars were initiated when a core nation felt it had sufficient power to expand its periphery at the expense of a competitor. Economies and societies in the periphery were kept backward--to keep their populations under control, to provide cheap labor, and to guarantee markets for goods manufactured in the core. Imperialism robbed the periphery not only of wealth but also of its ability to develop its own societies, cultures, and economies in a natural way for local benefit.

The driving force behind Western imperialism has always been the pursuit of economic gain, ever since Isabella commissioned Columbus on his first entrepreneurial voyage. The rhetoric of empire concerning wars, however, has typically been about other things--the White Man's Burden, bringing true religion to the heathens, Manifest Destiny, defeating the Yellow Peril or the Hun, seeking lebensraum, or making the world safe for democracy. Any fabricated motivation for war or empire would do, as long as it appealed to the collective consciousness of the population at the time. The propaganda lies of yesterday were recorded and became consensus history--the fabric of the matrix.

While the costs of territorial empire (fleets, colonial administrations, etc.) were borne by Western taxpayers generally, the profits of imperialism were enjoyed primarily by private corporations and investors. Government and corporate elites were partners in the business of imperialism: empires gave government leaders power and prestige, and gave corporate leaders power and wealth. Corporations ran the real business of empire while government leaders fabricated noble excuses for the wars that were required to keep that business going. Matrix reality was about patriotism, national honor, and heroic causes; true reality was on another plane altogether: that of economics.

Industrialization, beginning in the late 1700s, created a demand for new markets and increased raw materials; both demands spurred accelerated expansion of empire. Wealthy investors amassed fortunes by setting up large-scale industrial and trading operations, leading to the emergence of an influential capitalist elite. Like any other elite, capitalists used their wealth and influence to further their own interests however they could. And the interests of capitalism always come down to economic growth; investors must reap more than they sow or the whole system comes to a grinding halt.

Thus capitalism, industrialization, nationalism, warfare, imperialism--and the matrix--coevolved. Industrialized weapon production provided the muscle of modern warfare, and capitalism provided the appetite to use that muscle. Government leaders pursued the policies necessary to expand empire while creating a rhetorical matrix, around nationalism, to justify those policies. Capitalist growth depended on empire, which in turn depended on a strong and stable core nation to defend it. National interests and capitalist interests were inextricably linked--or so it seemed for more than two centuries.

World War II and Pax Americana

1945 will be remembered as the year World War II ended and the bond of the atomic nucleus was broken. But 1945 also marked another momentous fission--breaking of the bond between national and capitalist interests. After every previous war, and in many cases after severe devastation, European nations had always picked themselves back up and resumed their competition over empire. But after World War II, a Pax Americana was established.

The US began to manage all the Western peripheries on behalf of capitalism generally, while preventing the communist powers from interfering in the game. Capitalist powers no longer needed to fight over investment realms, and competitive imperialism was replaced by collective imperialism (see sidebar). Opportunities for capital growth were no longer linked to the military power of nations, apart from the power of America. In his Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (see access), William Blum chronicles hundreds of significant covert and overt interventions, showing exactly how the US carried out its imperial management role.

Sidebar

Elite planning for postwar neo-imperialism . . . Recommendation P-B23 (July, 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of "stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investment for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions." During the last half of 1941 and in the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea for the integration of the world.... Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of maintaining effective control over weaker territories while avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure "security," and at the same time "avoid conventional forms of imperialism." The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a United Nations body. - Laurence Shoup & William Minter, in Holly Sklar's Trilateralism (see access), writing about strategic recommendations developed during World War II by the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the postwar years matrix reality diverged ever further from actual reality. In the postwar matrix world, imperialism had been abandoned and the world was being "democratized"; in the real world, imperialism had become better organized and more efficient. In the matrix world the US "restored order," or "came to the assistance" of nations which were being "undermined by Soviet influence"; in the real world, the periphery was being systematically suppressed and exploited. In the matrix world, the benefit was going to the periphery in the form of countless aid programs; in the real world, immense wealth was being extracted from the periphery.

Growing glitches in the matrix weren't noticed by most people in the West, because the postwar years brought unprecedented levels of Western prosperity and social progress. The rhetoric claimed progress would come to all, and Westerners could see it being realized in their own towns and cities. The West became the collective core of a global empire, and exploitative development led to prosperity for Western populations, while generating immense riches for corporations, banks, and wealthy capital investors.

Glitches in the Matrix, Popular Rebellion, and Neoliberalism

The parallel agenda of Third-World exploitation and Western prosperity worked effectively for the first two postwar decades. But in the 1960s large numbers of Westerners, particularly the young and well educated, began to notice glitches in the matrix. In Vietnam imperialism was too naked to be successfully masked as something else. A major split in American public consciousness occurred, as millions of anti-war protestors and civil-rights activists punctured the fabricated consensus of the 1950s and declared the reality of exploitation and suppression both at home and abroad. The environmental movement arose, challenging even the exploitation of the natural world. In Europe, 1968 joined 1848 as a landmark year of popular protest.

These developments disturbed elite planners. The postwar regime's stability was being challenged from within the core - and the formula of Western prosperity no longer guaranteed public passivity. A report published in 1975, the Report of the Trilateral Task Force on Governability of Democracies, provides a glimpse into the thinking of elite circles. Alan Wolfe discusses this report in Holly Sklar's eye-opening Trilateralism (see access). Wolfe focuses especially on the analysis Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington presented in a section of the report entitled "The Crisis of Democracy." Huntington is an articulate promoter of elite policy shifts, and contributes pivotal articles to publications such as the Council on Foreign Relations's Foreign Affairs (access).

Huntington tells us that democratic societies "cannot work" unless the citizenry is "passive." The "democratic surge of the 1960s" represented an "excess of democracy," which must be reduced if governments are to carry out their traditional domestic and foreign policies. Huntington's notion of "traditional policies" is expressed in a passage from the report:

"To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's 'Establishment'."

In these few words Huntington spells out the reality that electoral democracy has little to do with how America is run, and summarizes the kind of people who are included within the elite planning community. Who needs conspiracy theories when elite machinations are clearly described in public documents like these?

Besides failing to deliver popular passivity, the policy of prosperity for Western populations had another downside, having to do with Japan's economic success. Under the Pax Americana umbrella, Japan had been able to industrialize and become an imperial player - the prohibition on Japanese rearmament had become irrelevant. With Japan's then-lower living standards, Japanese producers could undercut prevailing prices and steal market share from Western producers. Western capital needed to find a way to become more competitive on world markets, and Western prosperity was standing in the way. Elite strategists, as Huntington showed, were fully capable of understanding these considerations, and the requirements of corporate growth created a strong motivation to make the needed adjustments--in both reality and rhetoric.

If popular prosperity could be sacrificed, there were many obvious ways Western capital could be made more competitive. Production could be moved overseas to low-wage areas, allowing domestic unemployment to rise. Unions could be attacked and wages forced down, and people could be pushed into temporary and part-time jobs without benefits.

Regulations governing corporate behavior could be removed, corporate and capital-gains taxes could be reduced, and the revenue losses could be taken out of public-service budgets. Public infrastructures could be privatized, the services reduced to cut costs, and then they could be milked for easy profits while they deteriorated from neglect.

These are the very policies and programs launched during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the US and Britain. They represent a systematic project of increasing corporate growth at the expense of popular prosperity and welfare. Such a real agenda would have been unpopular, and a corresponding matrix reality was fabricated for public consumption.

Matrix reality used real terms like "deregulation," "reduced taxes," and "privatization," but around them was woven an economic mythology. The old, failed laissez-faire doctrine of the 1800s was reintroduced with the help of Milton Friedman's Chicago School of economics, and "less government" became the proud "modern" theme in America and Britain.

Sensible regulations had restored financial stability after the Great Depression, and had broken up anti-competitive monopolies such as the Rockefeller trust and AT&T. But in the new matrix reality, all regulations were considered bureaucratic interference. Reagan and Thatcher preached the virtues of individualism, and promised to "get government off people's backs." The implication was that everyday individuals were to get more money and freedom, but in reality the primary benefits would go to corporations and wealthy investors.

The academic term for laissez-faire economics is "economic liberalism," and hence the Reagan-Thatcher revolution has come to be known as the "neoliberal revolution." It brought a radical change in actual reality by returning to the economic philosophy that led to sweatshops, corruption, and robber-baron monopolies in the nineteenth century. It brought an equally radical change in matrix reality--a complete reversal in the attitude that was projected regarding government. Government policies had always been criticized in the media, but the institution of government had always been respected - reflecting the traditional bond between capitalism and nationalism. With Reagan, we had a sitting president telling us that government itself was a bad thing.

Many of us may have agreed with him, but such a sentiment had never before found official favor. Soon, British and American populations were beginning to applaud the destruction of the very democratic institutions that provided their only hope of participation in the political process.

Globalization and World Government

The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognize this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilize national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability. Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework - and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond.

The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realize that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations - with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory "interference" - were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest "democracies," the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilizing, instead of stabilizing, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organization. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.

The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximize profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.

Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal "reform" packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the "international community," whose goal is to serve "humanitarian" causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his "Clinton Doctrine," in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, "If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it." This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that "assistance" usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that Clinton's handy doctrine enables him to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find "innocent civilians" wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalization is referred to as "reform," (the word is never used with irony). "Democracy" and "reform" are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn't, it must be your own fault: you aren't "competitive" enough. Economic failures are explained away as "temporary adjustments," or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. "Investor confidence" is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the "will of the gods."

Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington's "The Crisis of Democracy" report discussed earlier.

The Management of Discontented Societies

The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, "responding" to the programmed public will.

The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.

The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos--where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated--have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.

So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labor ⁽²⁾ . The Rubicon has been crossed - the techniques of oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to the core.

In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets - and you can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary - as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during recent anti-WTO demonstrations, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defenses into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control--standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with others for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population's energy will be spent in inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralized, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense - the matrix version of divide and rule.

The covert guiding of various social movements has proven to be one of the most effective means of programming factions and stirring them against one another. Fundamentalist religious movements have been particularly useful. They have been used not only within the US, but also to maximize divisiveness in the Middle East and for other purposes throughout the empire. The collective energy and dedication of "true believers" makes them a potent political weapon that movement leaders can readily aim where needed. In the US that weapon has been used to promote censorship on the Internet, to attack the women's movement, to support repressive legislation, and generally to bolster the ranks of what is called in the matrix the "right wing."

In the matrix, the various factions believe that their competition with each other is the process that determines society's political agenda. Politicians want votes, and hence the biggest and best-organized factions should have the most influence, and their agendas should get the most political attention. In reality there is only one significant political agenda these days: the maximization of capital growth through the dismantling of society, the continuing implementation of neoliberalism, and the management of empire. Clinton's liberal rhetoric and his playing around with health care and gay rights are not the result of liberal pressure. They are rather the means by which Clinton is sold to liberal voters, so that he can proceed with real business: getting NAFTA through Congress, promoting the WTO, giving away the public airwaves, justifying military interventions, and so forth. Issues of genuine importance are never raised in campaign politics - this is a major glitch in the matrix for those who have eyes to see it.

Escaping the Matrix

The matrix cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Under the onslaught of globalization, the glitches are becoming ever more difficult to conceal - as earlier, with the Vietnam War. November's anti-establishment demonstrations in Seattle, the largest in decades, were aimed directly at globalization and the WTO. Even more important, Seattle saw the coming together of factions that the matrix had programmed to fight one another, such as left-leaning environmentalists and socially conservative union members.

Seattle represented the tip of an iceberg. A mass movement against globalization and elite rule is ready to ignite, like a brush fire on a dry, scorching day. The establishment has been expecting such a movement and has a variety of defenses at its command, including those used effectively against the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to prevail against what seem like overwhelming odds, the movement must escape entirely from the matrix, and it must bring the rest of society with it. As long as the matrix exists, humanity cannot be free. The whole truth must be faced: Globalization is centralized tyranny; capitalism has outlasted its sell-by date; matrix "democracy" is elite rule; and "market forces" are imperialism. Left and right are enemies only in the matrix. In reality we are all in this together, and each of us has a contribution to make toward a better world.

Marx may have failed as a social visionary, but he had capitalism figured out. It is based not on productivity or social benefit, but on the pursuit of capital growth through exploiting everything in its path. The job of elite planners is to create new spaces for capital to grow in. Competitive imperialism provided growth for centuries; collective imperialism was invented when still more growth was needed; and then neoliberalism took over. Like a cancer, capitalism consumes its host and is never satisfied. The capital pool must always grow, more and more, forever - until the host dies or capitalism is replaced.

The matrix equates capitalism with free enterprise, and defines centralized-state-planning socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. In reality, capitalism didn't amount to much of a force until the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s - and we certainly cannot characterize all prior societies as socialist. Free enterprise, private property, commerce, banking, international trade, economic specialization--all of these had existed for millennia before capitalism. Capitalism claims credit for modern prosperity, but credit would be better given to developments in science and technology.

Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: "Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits."

The matrix defines "democracy" as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society's direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions--from the local to the global--on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonized through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonization.

In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonizes the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

It ain't left or right. It's up and down. Here we all are down here struggling while the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!.. --Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist

Email: richard@cyberjournal.org - web: http://cyberjournal.org

* And then there's always the Bush connections . . . . And Seymour Hersh's "secret handshake!" The following article is dated from 2008, but it contains a shirtload of eye-openers that I thought my readers would enjoy having access to. (Does anyone else have even a slight problem with the way all these "relations" get the best jobs without having any real education or background once thought of as necessary for them (other than knowing which palms to grease?)? And don't forget the latest MSM "distraction" that his wife is PREGGERS!!! As if.)

Operation Sarkozy : How the CIA Placed One of its Agents at the Presidency of the French Republic by Thierry Meyssan One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan decided to write the truth about the French Republic's president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility. War Criminals Bush and Sarkozy

Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this "hyper-president", seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating a total confusion.

Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was.

One must say the man has talents. Like a magician he tricked them. By offering them the spectacle of his private life and posing in People's magazines, he got them to forget his political history.

The aim of this article must be clearly understood. It is not to reproach to M. Sarkozy, his family, his friends or his professional ties, but the fact of having hidden those ties from the French who believed, wrongly, they were electing a free man.

To understand how a man whom all agree today to view as an agent of the United States and of Israel was able to become the head of the Gaullist party and the president of the French Republic, we must go back in time, very very far back. We must make a long digression in the course of which we will present the protagonists who are today taking their revenge.

The Family Secrets

At the end of the Second World War, the United States secret services relied on Italo-US godfather, Lucky Luciano, to control the security of American ports and prepare their disembarking in Sicily. The main contacts of Luciano — held at that time at a New York luxury prison — to the US intelligence services went notably through Frank Wisner, Sr. Later, when the "godfather" was liberated and chose to exile in Italy, they operated through his Corsican "Ambassador", Étienne Léandri.

In 1958, worried about a possible victory of the FLN in Algeria which could open the way to Soviet influence in Northern Africa, the United States decided to provoke a military coup d'Etat in France. The operation was jointly organized by the CIA's Direction of Planning – theoretically lead by Frank Wisner, Sr. – and by NATO. But Wisner had already become senile by that time and it was his successor, Allan Dulles, who supervised the coup. Out of Algeria, French generals organized a Public Salvation Committee which pressured the Parisian civilian authorities to vote full powers to General de Gaulle without having had to use force.

Yet, Charles de Gaulle was not the pawn the Anglo-Saxons had believed they could manipulate. In a first phase, he attempted to deal with the colonial contradiction by granting to the overseas territories a large autonomy within the French Union. But it was already too late to save the French empire; the colonized people didn't believe any longer in the promises of the Metropolitan France and demanded their independence. After victorious but fierce repression against those fighting for independence, de Gaulle decided to face reality, and in a rare show of political wisdom, he granted independence to each colony.

This turn about was perceived by most of those who brought him to power as a betrayal. The CIA and NATO supported then all kinds of plots to eliminate him, among which a missed coup and some 40 attempts to murder him. However, certain of his followers approved of his political evolution. Around Charles Pasqua, they created the SAC (Civic action services), a militia to protect him.

Pasqua was both a Corsican bandit and a former resistant. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made fortune during the prohibition and he directed the Ricard company who, after commercialising absinthe, a forbidden alcohol, won respectability by converting to the sales of another alcohol based on liquorice (anisette). The company continued however to serve as a cover for all sorts of traffics connected to the New York Italian American family of the Genovese (and) that of Lucky Luciano. It is therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Ambassador of Luciano) to recruit the hands that constituted the Gaullist militia. A third man played an important role in the formation of the SAC, the former body guard of de Gaulle, Achille Peretti, also a Corsican.

Thus protected, de Gaulle designs an audacious national independence policy. Even though asserting his belonging to the Atlantic camp, he questions the Anglo-Saxon leadership. He opposes the entry of the United Kingdom into the European common market (1961 and 1967); refuses the deployment of UN helmets into Congo (1961); encourages the Latin American states to become free of US imperialism (speech of Mexico, 1964); kicks NATO out France and withdraws from the Atlantic Alliance's integrated command (1966); he condemns Israeli expansionism during the Six Day war (1967); supports independence of Quebec (Speech of Montreal 1967), etc.

Simultaneously, de Gaulle consolidated the power of France by endowing it with a military industrial-complex including a nuclear deterrent and guarantying its energy provisions. He conveniently distanced the encumbering Corsicans of his entourage by entrusting them with foreign missions. Thus, Étienne Léandri became a leader of the ELF group (today Total), while Charles Pasqua the trusted man of the Francophone heads of State in Africa.

Conscious that he could not defy the Anglo-Saxons on all fronts at the same time, De Gaulle allied himself to the Rothschild family, choosing as Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, who was the fondé de pouvoir of the bank. The two men constituted an efficient tandem, the political audacity of the first never losing sight of the economic realism of the second.

When De Gaulle resigned in 1969, Georges Pompidou succeeded him briefly at the Presidency before being taken out by a cancer. The historical Gaullists did not admit his leadership, however, and worried about his anglophile proclivities. They howled treason when Pompidou, supported by the General Secretary of the Élysée, Edouard Balladur, had "perfidious Albion" join the European Common Market.

The Making of Nicolas Sarkozy

That decorum having been put into place, we can now return to our main character, Nicolas Sarkozy. Born in 1955 he is son to a Hungarian Catholic nobleman, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bosca, who sought refuge in France after fleeing the Red Army, and to Andree Mallah, a Jewish commoner from Thessalonica. After having three children (Guillaume, Nicolas and François), the couple divorced. Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa remarried with an aristocrat, Christine de Ganay, with whom he had two children (Pierre Olivier and Caroline). Nicolas will not be raised by his own parents alone, but will go back and forth within this recomposed family.

His mother became the secretary of De Gaulle's bodyguard, Achille Peretti. The latter, after founding the SAC, pursued a brilliant political career. He was elected Deputy and Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine, the richest residential suburb of the capital, and later President of the National Assembly.


Unfortunately, in 1972, Achille Peretti comes under grave accusations. In the United States, Time Magazine reveals the existence of a secret criminal organization « the Corsican Union » which controls a large part of the drug trade between Europe and America, the famous « French connection » which Hollywood popularized on the large screen. Based on parliamentary auditions and on his own investigations, Time names the name of a mafia boss, Jean Venturi, arrested a few years earlier in Canada, who is none other than Charles Pasqua's commercial delegate at the liquor society Ricard. The names of several families headed by the "Corsican Union" are cited, among which that of the Peretti. Achille denies, but is forced to renounce to the presidency of the National Assembly, and barely escapes a "suicide"…

In 1977, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa separates from his second wife, Christine de Ganay, who then gets together with the N°2 of the US State Department central administration. She marries him and settles in America with him. The world being very small, as everyone knows, her husband is none other than Frank Wisner, Jr, son of the previous. Junior's responsibilities at the CIA are unknown, but it is clear that he plays an important role. Nicolas, who remains close to his mother in law, his half brother and his half sister, begins to turn towards the United States where he "benefits" from training programs of the State Department.

During that same period, Nicolas Sarkozy adheres to the Gaullist party coming into frequent contact with Charles Pasqua, who was not only a national leader then, but also the head of the party's Haut de Seine department section.

Having finished Law School in 1982 and joined the Barr association, Nicolas Sarkozy married the niece of Achille Peretti. His best man was Charles Pasqua. As a lawyer, Sarkozy defended the interests of his mentors Corsican friends. He bought a property on the Island of Beauty, in Vico, and went as far as envisaging to make his name more "Corsican" by replacing the "y" by an "i": Sarkozi.

The next year, he was elected Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine in replacement of his uncle in law, Achille Peretti, thundered by a heart attack. However, it was not long before Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed his wife, and since 1984, he had a secret liaison with Cecilia, the wife of the most famous entertainer of French television at that time, Jacques Martin, whom he had met while celebrating their marriage, a function he exerted being mayor of Neuilly. That double life lasted five years, before the lovers decided to quit their respective couples in order to build a new home.

In 1992, Nicolas was best man in the marriage of Jacques Chirac's daughter, Claude, with an editorialist of Le Figaro. He couldn't refrain himself from seducing Claude and having a short liaison with her, while officially living with Cecilia. The cuckold husband committed suicide by absorbing drugs. The break was brutal and without pardon between the Chirac's and Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 1993, the left lost the legislative elections. President François Mitterrand refused to resign and entered into cohabitation with a right wing Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac who had ambitions for the presidency, and was thinking at that point of constituting, with Edouard Balladur, a couple comparable to that of De Gaulle and Pompidou, refused to be Prime minister and left his post to his "30 year long friend", Edouard Balladur. In spite of his sulphurous past, Charles Pasqua became Interior Minister. While keeping high hand over Moroccan marijuana trade, he took advantage of his situation to legalize his other activities taking control of casinos, gambling and horse races in francophone Africa. He wove ties with Saudi Arabia and Israel and became an officer of honour to the Mossad. Nicolas Sarkozy on his part, became minister of Budget and spokesman for the government.

In Washington, Frank Wisner, Jr. became the successor of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the Political Planning department of the Department of Defense. Nobody noticed at that time the ties to the spokesman of the French government.

It is then that tensions similar to those which rocked the Gaullist party 30 years earlier, broke out between the historical Gaullists and the financial right wing, incarnated by Balladur. The new element was that Charles Pasqua and along with him, the young Nicolas Sarkozy, betray Jacques Chirac in order to join the Rothschild current. Mayhem breaks out. The conflict will reach a climax in 1995 when Edouard Balladur ran for president, against his former friend, Jacques Chirac, and was beaten. Foremost, following instructions from London and Washington, the Balladur government opened negotiations for membership status to the European Union and NATO to States of Central and Eastern Europe who had freed from Soviet control.

Havoc reigns then in the Gaullist party where the friends of yesterday are ready to kill themselves today. To be able to finance his electoral campaign, Edouard Balladur attempts to grab the secret slush fund of the Gaullist party, hidden in the double deckered accounting of the books of the oil group ELF.

The Ride through the Desert

Through out his first mandate, Jacques Chirac keeps Nicolas Sarkozy at arms distance. The man was discrete during his ride through the desert. Discretely, however, he continued to weave ties to the financial circles.

In 1996, finally succeeding to bring to conclusion an endless divorce procedure, Nicolas Sarkozy marries Cecilia. Two billionaires were their best men, Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnaud (the richest man of the country).

The Final Act

Way before the Iraqi crisis, Frank Wisner Jr. and his colleagues at the CIA plan the destruction of the Gaullist current and the coming to power of Nicolas Sarkozy. They move in three phases: first, the elimination of the leadership of the Gaullist party and the take over of the party apparatus, then the elimination of his main right wing rival and the securing the nomination to the presidential election for the Gaullist party; finally, the elimination of any serious challenger on the left to make sure that Nicolas would win the presidential election.

During years, posthumous revelations by a real estate dealer kept the media on their toes. Before dying from a terminal disease, for reasons which remain unknown, he decided to video tape his confessions and for reasons which are even more obscure, the "cassette" landed in the hands of a Socialist party leader, Dominique Strauss Kahn, who addressed it indirectly to the media.

While the confessions of the real estate dealer did not lead to any juridical sanctions, they opened up the Pandora's Box. The main victim of the series of scandals was Prime Minister Alain Juppé. To protect Chirac, he assumed alone all the penal sanctions. The removal of Juppé from the front lodges opened the way for the take by Sarkozy of the leadership of the Gaullist party.

Sarkozy exploited then his position to force Jacques Chirac to take him into the government once again, in spite of their reciprocal hatred. In the end, he became Interior Minister. Mistake ! This post gave him control over the prefects and the internal intelligence apparatus which he used to gain positions of power over the large administrations.

He dealt also with Corsican affairs. Prefect Claude Érignac was murdered. Even though nobody claimed it, the murder was immediately interpreted as a challenge by the independentists to the Republic. Following a long hunt, the police managed to arrest a fleeing suspect, Yvan Colonna, son of a Socialist deputy. Caring little about the presumption of innocence, Nicolas Sarkozy announced the arrest, accusing the suspect of being the assassin. The news is too important, a mere two days away from the referendum the minister has organized in Corsica to modify the status of the island. Be as it may, the electors reject the Sarkozy project, who, according to some, favoured mafia interests. While Yvan Colonna was ultimately declared guilty, he always claimed his innocence and no material proof was ever found against him. Strangely, the man preferred to remain totally silent rather than reveal what he actually knew. We reveal here that prefect Érignac was not directly killed by the nationalists, but by a paid killer, immediately exfiltrated towards Angola where he was hired to the security of the Elf group. The mobile of the crime was precisely connected to the previous functions of Érignac, responsible for the African networks at Pasqua's cooperation ministry.

. . . A new scandal broke out then: phoney computer listings were circulating falsely accusing several personalities of hiding bank accounts in Luxembourg, at Clearstream. Among the defamed personalities: Nicolas Sarkozy, who filed a suit insinuating that he suspected his right wing rival to the presidency, Dominique de Villepin, to have organized this machination. Sarkozy didn't hide his intention either to throw him in jail. In reality, the false listings were put in circulation by members of the French American Foundation, of which John Negroponte was the president and Frank Wisner Jr, the administrator. What the judges ignored and which we reveal here is that the listings were fabricated in London by a common office of the CIA and of MI6, Hakluyt and Co., of which Frank Wisner is also an administrator.

Villepin denied the accusations, but was indicted, assigned to residence and, de facto, eliminated from political life temporarily. The road is thus free on the right wing for Nicolas Sarkozy. It remained for the opposition candidacies to be neutralized. The membership fees to the Socialist party were reduced to a symbolic level in order to attract new activists. Suddenly, thousands of youth take membership cards. Among them, there were at least 10 000 new members who are in reality militants from the "Lambertist" Trotskyite party, (named after its founder Pierre Lambert). This small extreme left group historically served the CIA against the Stalinist communists during the Cold War (it is the equivalent of the Social democrats/USA of Max Schatchman, who trained the US neo-conservatives). It is not the first time the "Lambertists" infiltrate the Socialist party. They introduced there two notorious CIA agents : Lionel Jospin (who became Prime minister) and Jean Christophe Cambadelis, the main advisor to Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Primaries were organized inside the Socialist party to designate its candidate to the presidential election. Two personalities were competing: Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal. Only the first was a danger for Sarkozy. Dominique Strauss Kahn came into the race with the mission to eliminate Fabius at the last moment. Something he did with the help of the votes of the infiltrated "lambertists", who voted not for him but for Royal.

The operation is possible because Strauss Kahn is since long on the pay roll of the United States. Frenchmen ignore that he teaches at Stanford, where he was hired by the prévot Dean of the University, Condoleeza Rice. From the beginning of his term, Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleeza Rice will thank Strauss Kahn by having him elected to the leadership of the International Monetary fund.

First Days at the Élysée

The evening of the second round of the presidential election, when polling agencies announced his probable victory, Nicolas Sarkozy gave a short speech to the nation from his general campaign quarters. Then, contrary to all custom, he didn't celebrate with the militants of his party, but went to Fouquet's. The famous brasserie at the Champs-Élysées, formerly the place of rendez-vous of the "Corsican union" is today the property of Casino magnate, Dominique Desseigne. It was lent to the elected president to receive his friends and main campaign donors. Some hundred guests crowded there, the richest men of France hobnobbing with the casino bosses.

The elected president then offered himself some days of well merited rest. Transported to Malta by a private Falcon 900, he relaxed on the Paloma, a 65 m yacht of his friend Vincent Bollore, a billionaire trained at the Rothschild bank.


Finally, Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurated president of the French Republic. The first decree he signed was not to enact an amnesty, but to authorize the casinos of his friends Desseigne and Partouche to multiply the money machines.

He composed his working team and his government. Without surprise, one finds there an ominous casino owner (the minister of Youth and Sports) and the lobbyist of the casinos of his friend Desseigne (who became a spokesman of the "Gaullist party".)

Nicolas Sarkozy relies above all on 4 men :

Claude Guéant, secretary general of the Elysée Palace, the former right hand of Charles Pasqua. François Pérol, under-secretary general of the Elysée, an associate manager of the Rothschild bank. Jean-David Lévitte, diplomatic advisor. Son of the former director of the Jewish Agency. French ambassador to the UN, he was removed by Chirac who judged him too close to George Bush. Alain Bauer, the man of the shadows. His name does not appear in the directories. He is in charge of the secret services. Former Grand Master of the French Great Orient (the most important Masonic organization in France) and former N°2 of the United States National Security Agency in Europe.

Frank Wisner Jr. who in the meantime was named "special envoy" to President Bush for the independence of Kosovo, insisted that Bernard Kouchner be named minister of Foreign affairs with a double mission priority: the independence of Kosovo and the elimination of France's Arab policy.

Kouchner started his career by participating in the creation of a humanitarian NGO. Thanks to financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy, he took part in operations of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan against the soviets, along sides with Oussama Ben Laden and the Karzai brothers. One finds him again in the 90's working with Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia Herzegovina. From 1999 to 2001 he was high representatives of the UN to Kosovo.

Under the rule of the youngest brother of president Hamid Karzaï, Afghanistan became the first world producer of opium poppies transformed in heroin locally and transported by the US Air force to Camp Bondsteed (Kosovo). There, the men of Hacim Thaci take charge of the drug and distribute it mainly in Europe and accessorily in the United States. The benefits are used to finance the illegal operations of the CIA. Karzai and Thaci are longstanding personal friends of Bernard Kouchner who undoubtedly ignores their criminal activities in spite of all the international reports which have been dedicated to them.

To complete his government, Nicolas Sarkozy named Christine Lagarde, minister of the Economy and Finances. All her career was made in the United States where she directed the prestigious law firm Baker and McKenzie. At the Center for International and Strategic Studies of Dick Cheney, she co-presided with Zbigniew Brzezinski a working group which supervised the privatisations in Poland. She organized also an intense lobbying effort for Lockheed Martin against French airplane producer Dassault.

New Escapade During the Summer.

Nicolas, Cecilia, their common mistress and their children went on holidays to the United States at Wolfeboro, not far from the property of President Bush. The bill was paid this time by Robert F. Agostinelli, an Italian-New Yorker investment banker, Zionist and a pure brand of neo-conservative who writes in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee.

The success of Nicolas had impact on his half brother, Pierre Olivier. Under the American name of Oliver, he was named by Frank Carlucci (formerly N°2 of the CIA after having been recruited by Frank Wisner, Sr.) Director of the new investment fund of the Carlyle Group (the common investment firm of the Bush family and Ben Laden). Having become the 5th largest business dealer in the world, he handles the main assets of the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore.

The popularity of the President is in a free fall in the polls. One of his communications advisors, Jacques Seguela (also consultant for political communication at the NED where he is in charge of diverse CIA operations in Western Europe and Latin America), proposes to distract the public's attention with new "people stories". The announcement of the divorce with Cecilia was publicised by Libération, the paper of his friend Edouard de Rothschild, to cover up the slogans of demonstrators in a day of general strike. Stronger even, the communications agent organized a meeting between the president and the former top model, Carla Bruni. Some days later, her liaison with the president became official and the media hammering covered up once again political criticism. Some weeks later, the third marriage of Nicolas occurred. This time, he chose as best men Mathilde Agostinelle (the wife of Robert) and Nicolas Bazire, a former cabinet director of Edouard Balladur who became assistant manager at the Rothschilds.

When will the French use their eyes to see what they have to do?

Posted by u2r2h

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