"The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the Cold War." Albert Einstein
“For years it was pretended that the threat was from the Russians, the routine pretext for violence and subversion all over the world.” Noam Chomsky
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Winston Churchill in the “iron curtain” speech
Starting with the unilateral rejection of the ABM treaty, the current Bush Administration has taken a number of aggressive steps toward Russia. The resulting increase in tensions with Russia has caused some commentators to speak of a new Cold War. Clearly, the U.S. bears the major share of responsibility for this current situation. But, what about the “first” Cold War? How responsible was the U.S. for its origin?.
World War II ended on September 2, 1945 when the Japanese formally surrendered on board the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. Within a few years, the Cold War was underway and dominated America’s view of the world. The Soviet Union and communists in general, were portrayed as enemies so irrevocably bent on destroying our country that negotiation and peaceful co-existence were impossible.
Like most Americans living through the Cold War, I accepted this view of Communism and believed that the Cold War started because the Soviets, in their pursuit of world domination, directed an aggressive foreign policy at the U.S. But, recent analysis and newly available documents reveal quite a different picture. It was the Truman Administration that first adopted an aggressive policy toward the Soviets - a policy that relied heavily on the U.S. monopoly in atomic weapons. The Cold War was the inevitable result of Truman’s policy decisions.
Recently published correspondence shows that Franklin Roosevelt had a vision of peaceful cooperation with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in the postwar years. [See My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin, edited by Susan Butler.] This cooperative spirit prevailed at the Yalta conference, held in February 1945, and resulted in a compromise on the postwar government of Poland that was amenable to the Soviets. But, just eleven days after taking office, Harry Truman, with absolutely no experience in foreign affairs, began the destruction of Roosevelt’s vision of peaceful cooperation.
“The rapport that had been established between the two leaders would quickly be aborted by FDR's successor. In Truman's first meeting with Molotov at the White House on April 23, the new President gave him a dressing-down over Poland. "I've never been talked to like that in my life," was the stunned Molotov's comment.”
Two and a half months later, Harry Truman traveled with his close advisor and newly appointed Secretary of State, James Byrnes, to the Potsdam conference of victorious WWII allies. On the voyage across the Atlantic they planned a strategy for tough bargaining with Stalin. The poker playing Truman thought of the atom bomb as his ace in the hole. On July 16, 1945, one day before the conference started, Truman got good news. The test of the world’s first atom bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico had been a success. Truman was overjoyed. He had postponed the meeting at Potsdam twice, hoping that a successful atom bomb test result would be available when the meeting started. Now, he had his ace in the hole and could use it as leverage against Stalin.
On Aug 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The belief that the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan was necessary to end the war with Japan, in a way that would avoid enormous U.S. casualties, has become one of the great myths of our culture. And, it is just that, a myth. Japan was, in fact, ready to surrender before the bomb was dropped and this was known by Truman. Japan’s only condition was the retention of the emperor as figure head leader of their country. [See The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, by Gar Alperovitz] At Potsdam, at Truman’s urging, the allies rejected this possibility by drafting a resolution demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. When Japan didn’’t comply, Truman with the support of Byrnes ordered the military to drop the atom bomb. It’s perhaps revealing of their true motives, that after Japan’s surrender, the Truman administration did allow Japan to keep their emperor. The atom bomb attack on Japan was really intended to send the message to Stalin that the U.S. would not be squeamish about using this horrendous new weapon. [See We Can Be Friends: Origins of the Cold War, by Carl Marzani.]
The military advantage conferred by the sole possession of the atom bomb was the big stick in the Truman Administration’s postwar foreign policy. They were confident in this policy because they believed that the Soviets could not develop their own atom bomb for twenty years, or so. True, scientists who had developed the bomb for the U.S. testified before Congress that the Soviets had the technical skill to develop their own bomb in three to five years. But, General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan project which developed the atom bomb, held secret meetings with key political leaders and told them that the Soviets would be stymied in their atom bomb development because the west controlled the world’s Uranium supplies. [See A Most Deadly Illusion, by Gregg Herken]
During the war, the United States obtained the uranium it needed for the Manhattan Project from mines in the Belgian Congo. At the time, these mines were the biggest source of uranium in the world, and Western control of them was a major part of Groves’ argument that the Soviets could not obtain the Uranium they would need to build an atom bomb. But, General Groves didn’t tell political leaders about another important source of Uranium, namely the mines at Jáchymov Czechoslovakia. The existence of these mines was well known because, some fifty years earlier, they had supplied Madam Curie with Uranium samples for her pioneering experiments in radioactivity. After WWII, the Soviets gained control of Czechoslovakia, and obtained uranium for their atom bomb project.
The first test of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union came on August 29, 1949. Truman and other U.S. leaders were shocked. Instead of taking twenty years for the Soviets to develop their own atom bomb, it took only four years. Truman’s atom bomb policy was about to turn into the nightmare of the atomic arms race. When a scapegoat was needed, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg paid the price for Groves’’ deceit - they were executed in 1953. Although the Rosenberg case has been the source of considerable controversy, it’s now known that Julius Rosenberg did, in fact spy for the Russians, but the information that he passed on to them was insignificant.
During much of the Cold War, U.S. policy relied on the threat to use nuclear weapons to maintain military superiority. But, national policy could not be expressed in such blunt terms. It first needed to be wrapped in a publicly acceptable ideology. The policy of containment filled this need and became the official version of U.S. policy toward Russia. This policy was first enunciated by George Kennan when he sent the, now famous, Long Telegram to Secretary of State, James Burns, on February 22, 1946. In this telegram, and in a subsequent article in the July, 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan identified the USSR as an enemy which must be contained by every available means. Speaking of the will of the Soviets to destroy us, Kennan wrote in the Long Telegram:
“In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”
Other important steps helped establish the ideological basis for the Cold War. These included: Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech delivered on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Also, in an address to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, Truman asked for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Turkey and Greece, arguing that, without this aid these countries would inevitably fall to communism. Known as the Truman Doctrine, this address contained the first public declaration of Kennan’s policy of containment.
One more important piece had to fall in place, before the Cold War could be said to be fully underway. Military spending had to be increased. By 1947, the costs of WWII had wound themselves out of the budget, and military expenditures were back to what might be called normal for a country at peace. Aircraft makers and other manufacturers who had profited handsomely from the war were not happy. They now faced much smaller earnings, or even bottom line loses. With the air force as an ally, they pressured Truman to increase military spending; arguing in part that increased military spending was needed to avoid a post-war depression. Truman responded with the “war scare” of March, 1948. As anticipated, the defense budget was increased in 1948, as were military orders for new aircraft. [See Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation, by Frank Kofsky.]
After a long struggle, the Nationalist forces on mainland China finally collapsed during October, 1949. Following close on the heals of the first Russian A-bomb test, this second shock to the American people and their rulers paved the way for the excesses of McCarthyism in the early fifties, but even more significantly, because of its long term effect, the adoption of NSC 68 on April 14, 1950. [See NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security] NSC 68 was a formal recommendation from the National Security Council, which had been created three years earlier by the National Security Act of 1947. NSC 68 has been called the blueprint for the Cold War, but more than that it has turned out to be the blueprint for a nation permanently dominated by militarily activities.
NSC 68 was written by a joint State-Defense Department committee, under the supervision of Cold War super hawk, Paul Nitze. This document, which remained secret until 1977, changed Kennan’s policy of containment into a policy calling for complete military domination of the Soviet Union. The State Department website summarizes NSC 68 as follows:
“NSC-68 concluded that the only plausible way to deter the Soviet Union was for President Harry Truman to support a massive build-up of both conventional and nuclear arms. … In order to fund the substantial increase in military spending this conclusion demanded, the report suggested that the Government increase taxes and reduce other expenditures.
Initially, a number of U.S. officials strongly opposed NSC-68’s recommendations. … However, the invasion of South Korea by Soviet and Chinese-backed North Korean forces in June 1950, and continuing charges by Congressional critics that the Administration was soft on Communism, quickly settled matters in favor of the report’s recommendations. NSC 68’s recommendations thereby became policy and the United States Government began a massive military build-up.'
Because of NSC 68 and the Korean War, military budgets were increased dramatically in the early fifties, and would never return to anything near peaceful levels. Also, the atomic arms race got underway in earnest. As more and more atomic weapons were built by both sides, fear was always a decisive ally of those advocating war and/or more military preparations. Kennan strongly opposed NSC 68. He realized that “an atomic arms race would be a disaster, assuming a momentum that would be unstoppable and produce dangers unrelated to the political views that launched it.” But, Paul Nitze, not Kennan, now held power in the State Department run by Dean Acheson.
The Cold War lasted until the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1989. On November 9, 1989 the East German government announced, after several weeks of civil unrest, that entering West Berlin would be permitted. Crowds of East Germans climbed onto and crossed over the Berlin wall to join West Germans on the other side in a long awaited celebration. East Germany and other Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe quickly collapsed, until on Christmas Day 1989, Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife were condemned to death by a military court, and Romania, the last of these dictatorships, fell.
That Christmas, the people of the Western world breathed an enormous sigh of relief. We all felt a release from the sometimes repressed, but ever lurking fear of nuclear war. We dared to hope that real peace had finally arrived. However, that hope would soon be dashed. Secretary of defense Dick Cheney, Chief of Staff Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and others in the Pentagon had different plans for the post-Soviet world. [See Dick Cheney's song of America: Drafting a plan for global dominance, by David Armstrong in the October, 2002 issue of Harpers Magazine]
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6672=== the other side of the "COIN" ==========
| BUSH'S BOGUS BAILOUT: INTRODUCTION TO TONY SOPRANO ECONOMICS 101, By Carolyn Baker |  |
| Sunday, 02 September 2007 | |
| We have only begun to see the reverberations of the mortgage meltdown. They will be as sweeping and mindboggling as global warming or an earthquake measuring 10 on the Richter scale.
From them I have learned to more skillfully read the tea leaves of the current economic upheaval that is brewing within the United States and is now rippling into the global financial markets. Furthermore, I have realized that my government and the economy of the United States is being run as a criminal syndicate, and that the most useful way to understand the subprime mortgage meltdown and its implications was to familiarize myself with the economics of Tony Soprano, that infamous main character of the HBO TV series "The Sopranos", Mr. King of New Jersey "waste management" and proprietor of the Bada Bing.
On Friday morning I opened an email from a friend who sent me an article by an old "leftie" I've admired since my college days, historian Gabriel Kolko, entitled "The Predicted Financial Storm Has Arrived." Writing about the subprime mortgage crisis, Kolko noted that, "What the subprime market did was unleash a far greater maelstrom involving banks in Germany, France, Asia, and throughout the world, calling into question much of the world financial system as it has developed over the past decade." After explaining the international ramifications of the crisis, Kolko concludes:
We are at an end of an era, living through the worst financial panic in many decades. Now begins global financial instability. It is impossible to speculate how long today's turmoil will last-but there now exists an uncertainty and lack of confidence that has been unparalleled since the 1930s-and this ignorance and fear is itself a crucial factor. The moment of reckoning for bankers and bosses has arrived. What is very clear is that losses are massive and the entire developed world is now experiencing the worst economic crisis since 1945, one in which troubles in one nation compound those in others.
But later that day, President Bush stepped up to the cameras and declared that the U.S. government would provide assistance to borrowers in the U.S. who had been hit by the subprime crisis. Knowing full well that anything this government promises in the way of "relief" or "assistance" is almost guaranteed to be as "helpful" and "assisting" as that which it provided New Orleans in the throes of Katrina, I wanted to put this so-called bail out under the microscope and comprehend its actual substance. You Mean This Didn't "Just Happen?" I started with Catherine Austin Fitts's statement on her Solari site that "As we work to mitigate investment losses in the mortgage market and the harm done to communities through the fraudulent inducement of debt, we are well served to understand what has happened, who is benefiting, and why." And what is fraudulent inducement? Nothing more or less than inducing people who cannot pay their debts to borrow huge sums of money. The subprime crisis has now revealed the myriad "creative" methods used by lenders to make this happen. Tony Soprano would not only be proud of them, but would promote them. In a CNN Money article "Mortgage Meltdown: Here Come The Judgments" from August 21, a California real estate attorney speaking about the many lawsuits that are resulting from the mortgage meltdown, stated that "Most claims will be against mortgage brokers for putting them into loans where they shouldn't have been." A property law professor at the University of California added that "...overly exuberant brokers and loan officers told clients not to worry about concerns like their ARMs (adjustable rate mortgage) resetting; they could always refinance and, anyway, interest rates were bound to fall." The end result, of course, has been millions of people with houses, which as one Florida real estate law attorney stated, they can't refinance, they can't sell, and they can't afford. For many of those borrowers, class action suits are the only way they can find some sort of remedy for their nightmare. I was now getting clearer on what fraudulent inducement really means and the tragic ramifications for borrowers victimized by it. None of this, obviously, "just happened." Or as Fitts asserts: Recently, we have seen numerous press accounts of bank and hedge fund losses from sub-prime mortgages. Remarkably, these reports imply that the losses are the result of a market downturn or contracting credit cycle. But there has been no mention of the extraordinary profits that were generated or who reaped them. There is no mention of who is poised to make a fortune on the bubble collapse. Even the most sophisticated commentators of our day are describing this financial coup d'etat as the unintentional consequence of "market forces". But how exactly did this work? And how exactly does the "bail out" serve the interests of lenders, not borrowers? My research has led me to conclude that the bail out will unfold in the following manner: The Federal Reserve is lending money-that is, digital entries into accounts payable to hedge funds based on worthless mortgages, meaning that the these funds can borrow money cheaply in ways that will enable them to make huge profits. This is essentially a back-door subsidy from the Fed. At the same time, the Fed is most likely pumping credit into the market to pull it up because while feigning calm and cool, the Fed is terrified about the markets tanking. As Steven Weisman wrote in the New York Times on August 31, "Despite the assertion that affecting the markets is not the goal, one administration official said concern about Wall Street's reaction did affect the timing of the briefing. He said there was a fear that if the White House announced in the morning that Mr. Bush would be making an announcement on housing, there could be confusion as buyers and sellers of mortgage securities guessed what the announcement would be." As a result of Bush's announcement, of course, the markets spiked. Or perhaps it wasn't just as a result of the bogus "bail out." After all, John Crudele has been writing profusely about the Wall St. Plunge Protection team, euphemistically referred to as the President's Working Group On Financial Markets which was established on March 18, 1988 by Executive Order 12631. In a June 8, 2006 New York Post article, Crudele stated:
Back during a stock market crisis in 1989, a guy named Robert Heller - who had just left the Federal Reserve Board - suggested that the government rig the stock market in times of dire emergency. ..... Proposed as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it's a seminal argument that says when a crisis occurs on Wall Street "instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thus stabilizing the market as a whole." Had Heller been any other schmoe who writes op-ed pieces for The Journal this would have been long forgotten. But he had served for three years as a governor at the Fed and this proposal had the look of a trial balloon since stocks had just fallen sharply on Oct. 13, 1989, and memories of the 1987 crash were still fresh. Over the next few years people like me ... suspected that Heller's plan was indeed in effect. Whenever the stock market was in trouble someone seemed to ride to the rescue. Often it was a Wall Street firm that seemed more courageous than fiscally responsible. Often it appeared to be Goldman Sachs, which just happens to be where Paulson and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin worked. ...For a while I thought something called the Currency Stabilization Fund - which actually exists at the U.S. Treasury but is meant for currency stability - was the slush fund used for this venture. I was told by people who claimed to know that this part of the theory wasn't so.
WWTSD? (What would Tony Soprano do?) The Bush bail out means that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will refinance mortgages in trouble, but this put borrowers in debt-yet again. In addition, it's important to understand that the FHA has two funds: The General Fund and the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund which provides insurance for single family homes. Essentially, what the bail out will do is create a huge pool of mortgages guaranteed by the FHA which are eligible to be put into a Ginnie Mae pool which will end up bailing out, not borrowers, but mortgage investors! Investors from hedge and other funds, will buy these mortgages, guaranteed by FHA, resulting in both borrowers and investors being defrauded. Basically, what we have is a scenario comprised of three players: the borrower, the middleman (mortgage lenders), and the investor. The middle man is fraudulently inducing borrowers to borrow, and investors to invest, but the bail out helps no one except the fraudsters. Government guarantees have become virtually the only priority for the fraudsters. They care little about anything else. For example, some years ago, Dick Ravitch, Chairman, AFL-CIO Housing Trust, Developer of HUD & Mitchell Lama Housing in NYC, said, "As long as I get government subsidies, what do I care if people have education or jobs?" Is this not the crux of the matter--that fraudsters in government and corporate America care about nothing but profits and are willing to sell our souls and even their own for them? Michael Panzner, author of Financial Armageddon writes: Even assuming that some troubled borrowers manage to hang on, the truth is that enabling more of the same kind of bad behavior that got people in trouble in the first place will only make matters worse. The hair of the dog that bit them isn't a cure. It merely delays the moment of reckoning. In reality, guaranteeing loans for homeowners who can't afford the payments, encouraging mortgage-holders to hang on until they've been bled dry, and giving false hope to those who would be better off cutting their losses really only benefits one group: The lenders. Commenting on "the greedy global financiers", The London Observer's Will Hutton states: "Little people's taxes are underwriting the mistakes of big people, who in the process have made riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Globalisation, it is now clear, is run in the interests of a global financial class which has Western governments in its thrall." Calling the mortgage meltdown exactly what it is, theft, Hutton continues: The last few days have seen some recovery in the financial markets and some hopes for a return to normality, but what does normal mean? The system that has delivered hundreds of billions of dollars of written-off loans with a global impact can hardly carry on as if nothing has happened. The banks at the epicentre of the crisis should go bust and heads should roll. The hedge funds which bought the debt, traded it and sold it on to banks globally should also be allowed to go bust and be subjected to much closer surveillance and regulation.... Instead, most central banks and governments across the West are straining every muscle to limit the fall-out, assure banks and hedge funds that there is limitless public money on tap and that governments' first aim is to get back to 'normal'. The explanation is obvious. The Western financial system is too important to be allowed to implode; credit is any economic system's life-blood and if the supply lines get gummed up because of a collapse of confidence and severely punctured balance sheets, everybody suffers. Quite right, but at least we can be careful in future about the terms on which supportive cash and potential bail-outs are made, as well as drawing larger conclusions about the nature of the implicit contract between finance and society. The last thing borrowers need is more debt! Instead of a refinancing arrangement, the borrower needs a higher income and lower expenses which will allow him/her to pay down debt and improve his/her skills. In the current George W. Bush-Tony Soprano scheme, every time a corporate player commits fraud, he gets to keep the profits, and borrowers have to pay an inflation tax as a result. Eventually, this results in the fraudsters owning more and more of the nation and world economy until they own it all. Money is simply printed out of thin air to bail out the fraudsters which causes all of our expenses to rise because we don't have the rigged income to hedge those costs as the fraudsters do. The REAL Ownership Society One of the key fraudsters for more than a decade has been Goldman Sachs which not only fraudulently induced a plethora of borrowers and investors, but promoted the outsourcing of millions of jobs during the Clinton administration so that lucrative jobs that could have employed borrowers and enabled them to pay off their mortgages were moved offshore. Goldman Sachs has given us two Secretaries Of the Treasury in the past 15 years: Robert Rubin (Clinton Administration) and Henry Paulson (Bush II). It appears that the primary fraudsters are New York Federal Reserve member banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and AIG (American International Group) which has also been deeply connected with drug trafficking and money laundering. These are also the same players involved in the housing bubble of the 1980s and other scandals and such as Enron, World Com, and the shady Harvard Endowment Fund. In his August 7 blog, Charles Hugh Smith asks "Is the USA a Giant Enron?" noting that our financial system is based on cooked books, lies and deceptions such as: Bogus inflation numbers; unemployment statistics manipulated downward; a GDP back-adjusted every quarter; balances sheets of corporations, pension funds, and government agencies massively understating liabilities and egregiously overstating assets and future earnings; and visible, laughable lies from the mouths of top officials, all spoken with a straight face. Economist Peter Schiff forecasts that: "Issued by government agencies, interpreted by spokespersons for the Government and the financial community ... the information we get has been manipulated to mould a public understanding favourable to the agenda of the powers that be." Schiff's prediction of economic doom has everything to do with the US mortgage and housing meltdown, a prophecy he made in the book before the latest market turmoil. We have only begun to see the reverberations of the mortgage meltdown. They will be as sweeping and mindboggling as global warming or an earthquake measuring 10 on the Richter scale. Tony Soprano economics aren't necessarily noisy, but they are gargantuan in their reach and ramifications. Global economic meltdown, initiated by the ruling elite of the United States with full knowledge of omnipresent, pervasive global resource depletion-or as some have called it "Peak Everything", will obliterate the American middle class and result in the ownership of the planet by a voracious ruling elite. Tony's predecessor said it best decades before Tony was even a twinkle in his father's eye: Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class. Al Capone | |
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I'm an historian, not an economist, so anything about economics-macro, micro-whatever, has been as foreign to me for most of my adult life as soil samples from Mars. But several years ago I had an epiphany that shattered my then-left-liberal/progressive world. I awakened from decades of delusion that I could adequately grasp world and national events without understanding the essential nature of how money works in the capitalist economy in which I live. I realized that until I acquired that understanding, all of the other subjects I preferred to talk about-war, social justice, race, gender, environment, energy depletion, civil liberties, globalization, and many more were inextricably connected with the financial machinations of the imperial beast within whose belly I reside. Today, I do not claim for one moment to be an authority on economic issues, but I have studied the works of some folks who are, such as http://carolynbaker.net/site/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=109&pop=1&page=0
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