Perhaps because he fears retaliation for his government"s deliberate - and unsubstantiated - interference in last year"s US presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin is apparently worried that foreign powers might interfere in Russia’s upcoming federal election. So, nearly a year after US intelligence agencies first blamed Russia for conspiring against their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, and throwing the vote to Trump, Putin is ordering Russia’s security services to “erect a safe barrier” to prevent foreign powers from meddling in federal elections set for March.
In a speech to security and intelligence personnel on Wednesday, Putin urged everybody in attendance to work tirelessly to try and prevent foreign influence from creeping into Russian society and politics, according to Russia Today.
Putin’s request, which is an obvious, if indirect, sleight against the US despite the recent “collusion” between US and Russian intelligence that helped prevent a terror attack in St. Petersburg.
“There is a great responsibility on the intelligence services to erect a safe barrier against external meddling in our social and political life, and to counteract the work of foreign security agencies, which are doing all they can to ramp up their level of activity in Russia,” Putin said.
Russia’s security services should also remain alert as terrorists from Muslim-majority areas of the former Soviet Union return home, and try to carry out attacks in densely populated urban centers.
“Agents must work to destroy the financial and recruitment networks, and to prevent radicals from influencing youths, and spreading the ideology of hate, intolerance, and also aggressive nationalism,” he said.
Earlier this year, Putin said that up to 7,000 Muslims from the former Soviet Union, primarily from predominantly Muslim regions in the Caucuses and Central Asia, had flown to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State. Since Syrian Army forces - aided by Russian troops and aircraft - drove ISIS out of Syria, many of its former foreign fighters have tried to sneak back into their home countries.
The Stanford mathematician William J. Perry was a strategic nuclear advisor to U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and then he became U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton.
He stated in a speech on November 28th at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, that “inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers,” and he went so far as to make clear why "I believe that the likelihood of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe today is actually greater than it was during the Cold War."
He explained why the increase in tensions between the U.S. and Russia isn’t merely restoring those dangers, but is now exceeding them, despite the elimination of what were supposed to have been the threats that gave rise to the Cold War: the ideological threat of communism, and the threat of the monolithic Soviet bloc which ended in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the threat of the Soviets’ military alliance, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of America’s NATO military alliance, the Warsaw Pact — all of whose alliance-members are now, or are on the way to becoming, members of America’s NATO alliance, targeting against the now lone nation of Russia.
Since no transcript of Perry"s very important speech is yet available to the public, I’ve created my own transcript, though summarizing, or sometimes editing-out, extraneous courtesies and verbal slip-ups and corrections of himself (which self-corrections appear to have been due to difficulties he had reading from his typed text). This edited version of the speech he delivered on November 28th thus includes everything that’s of general public interest in what he said. Occasionally, I’ve added time-marks so that one can locate specific passages in the video of his address:
THE SPEECH
5:10 Secretary Perry: Till 8:00 he analogized himself to a carpenter who worked on building Noah’s Ark and who tried to warn the townspeople of the coming disaster, the flood, but who was ignored until it was too late. “I am like that carpenter who helped Noah build the ark. I am seeking to avert that disaster.” He said, however, he noted that, unlike the flood, this is a “preventable disaster.” He also noted that he had himself helped “contribute to the building of nuclear weapons for the Cold War.” So: he had participated in having created the danger, but is now at the time of his life when he is trying to un-do perhaps some of the danger that he had helped to produce. Here is his speech:
8:33 When the Cold War ended, I believed that we no longer had to take that risk [nuclear annihilation] so I put all my energy into efforts to dismantle the deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War. During my period as the Secretary of Defense in the 90s, I oversaw the dismantlement of 8,000 nuclear weapons evenly divided between the United States and the former Soviet Union. And I thought then that we were well on our way to putting behind us this deadly existential threat, But that was not to be.
Today, inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers. … We are doing this without any serious public discussion or any real understanding of the consequences of these actions. We are sleepwalking into a new Cold War, and there’s very real danger that we will blunder into a nuclear war.
If we are to prevent this catastrophe, the public must understand what is happening. …
I’m going to justify these assertions by first looking back at the Cold War and explaining how we averted disaster then, and then I will compare it with our present situation.
10:25 When I lecture about the Cold War in my class at Stanford, a student will often ask me, ‘What led us to build 70,000 nuclear weapons? Why were that many weapons needed for deterrence? Wouldn’t a thousand have been more than enough?’ And I patiently explain that our nuclear policy was built on the assumption that the Soviet Union was planning to strike us with a surprise attack, a bolt out of the blue, which we affectionately called a BOOB, a bolt out of the blue. We assumed that the Soviet Union believed that if they could destroy 90% of our weapons in a surprise attack, we would then surrender, and they would then have conquered the world. Based on that premise, we believed that we had to build a significant excess of weapons so that enough of them would survive a first strike to still conduct our retaliatory strikes of deterrence, and then, just to be sure, we built 50% more. The Soviet Union, seeing what we were building, would assume that we must be planning a surprise attack. So they built enough weapons to survive that attack, and then, just to be sure, 50% more. And those assumptions led to an ever-escalating arms race.
Before that insanity stopped, the United States and the Soviet Union combined had reached the obscene and absurd level of 70,000 nuclear weapons.
I believe that the Cold War arms race was built on a faulty premise, that in fact neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were planning to conduct a surprise attack on the other. The real danger, and this was a very real danger during the Cold War, was that we would blunder into a nuclear war. Indeed, we came very close to a civilization-ending war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. … I was there during that crisis, and I will never forget it. I was part of a small team that worked all day analyzing the intelligence data collected that day, and by midnight, we prepared two reports for President Kennedy’s brief the next morning. So, I knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, every morning when I went into the analysis center I believed would be my last day on Earth.
After the crisis, President Kennedy said he thought there’s about one chance in three of the Cuban Missile Crisis ending in a nuclear catastrophe — not very good odds when the end of civilization was at the other end of it. But, I have to say that I believe that Kennedy’s statement was optimistic. He did not know, as we now know, that the Soviet Union had already placed tactical nuclear weapons on the island, and that they were fully operational. And if Kennedy had accepted the unanimous recommendation of his Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Cuba with a conventional military force, our troops would have been decimated on the beachhead by tactical nuclear weapons and a general nuclear war would surely have followed.
14:10 The miscalculations of Soviet and American leaders almost led to a nuclear holocaust. And I believe that we avoided that catastrophe as much by good luck as by good management.
Also during the Cold War we faced the risk of an accidental nuclear war, if our missile attack warning system experienced a false alarm. How likely was that? During the Cold War, there were three such false alarms in the United States and at least two that I know about in the Soviet Union. That averages to be about one every eight years. I personally experienced one of those false alarms, and it changed forever my way of thinking about nuclear dangers. It occurred in October of 1979, when I was the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Awoken from a sound sleep at 3 o’clock in the morning, as I sleepily put the phone to my ears, the voice on the other end identified himself as the watch officer for the North American Air Defense Command. The general got right to the point: he told me that his computers were showing 200 ICBMs on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. For one heart-stopping moment, I thought we were about to experience the holocaust that we had narrowly avoided during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the general quickly explained they had already concluded there was a false alarm. He was calling me to help him determine what had gone wrong with his computer.
There were actually two separate false alarms during the period I was undersecretary. The most dangerous occurred one night when the computer operators changed shifts, and the new operators mistakenly instead of putting in the operating tape put in a training tape. The training tape, of course, was designed to look like a realistic attack scenario. It was human error. That is, our system, with all of its safety features, was still vulnerable to a single person potentially bringing about the end of our civilization. Two things saved the world from that fate.
First one was the watch officer that night was exceptionally thoughtful and responsible, for which we can all be thankful.
And second the context for the [thought] attack was benign. There were no international incidents under way that made a Soviet attack especially plausible. But what if that false alarm had occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or during one of our Mideast crises when we had our forces on high alert? In that context, the watch officer surely would have passed the alarm on to the President, who, after being awoken at 3 o’clock in the morning, would have less than ten minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs before they were destroyed in their silos.
17:30 Had he ordered the launch, there would be no way of recalling the missiles or destroying them in flight; the President would have accidentally started a global nuclear war.
Well, that was then. What about now? I have written that I believe that the likelihood of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe today is actually greater than it was during the Cold War. … Why do I believe that? Because the United States and Russia today are confronting each other with a hostility that is recreating the geopolitical dangers of the Cld War, and because the United States and Russia are rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenals, there’s recreating the military dangers of the Cold War.
So, today, we are still vulnerable to blundering into a nuclear war if we have a crisis with Russia comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And when I consider the possibility of another false alarm, I notice humans will err again. Machines will malfunction again. And so we will have another false alarm.
Even in the face of this, Russia and the United States still today have a policy of launch on warning. And both Russia and the United States are building new ICBMs to replace the ones built during the Cold War.
That means ultimately the future of civilization will depend on the judgment of an anonymous watch officer and the judgment and the temperament of the American President or the Russian President, who have the sole authority to launch a nuclear attack.
19:40 Beyond those dangers, which are comparable to the dangers we faced during the Cold War, there are two dangers that did not exist during the Cold War.
The first of them is a regional nuclear war, Pakistan, India, North Korea today, have large numbers of nuclear weapons. Pakistan and India have more than a hundred each, and North Korea has 20 and building.
Beyond that there is danger of a nuclear terror attack, which is the nuclear danger we face today I consider the most likely. …
So [if people ask me what we can do to avert the disaster], I start by telling them that we will never take the actions needed to avert a nuclear disaster until our public understands just how great the danger is. We do not now have the political will to act in reducing nuclear dangers, because we do not understand fully how real and how great those dangers are.
A decade ago, the same situation existed with another existential threat, a global climate disaster. But in that field, a serious and creative education program has [become] under way. Today, there are still climate deniers, but a large majority of our people understand the dangers of a global climate disaster, and are willing to take actions, sometimes expensive actions, to reduce those dangers. Even with this Administration pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, other countries, and most states, are acting to reduce emissions. In particular, Governor Brown, the Governor of my home state of California, is leading an international effort to reduce CO2 emissions, and his efforts have been remarkably successful. So I remain hopeful that the world will be able to avert that existential disaster.
21:55 To deal with the nuclear dangers we face, we need first of all to have a creative energetic education program that is as effective and as robust as the education in climate change, and I am doing what I can to promote such education.
But this is a daunting problem, such a daunting problem it’s tempting to throw up one’s hands. Indeed, many have asked me, how can one person make a significant impact on a problem so great. My response is, I am one person. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. Indeed, I am devoting the remainder of my career to doing what I can to educate the public on nuclear dangers. And I think we are beginning to get some traction on this problem.
I do this with a hope, if we succeed in our education task, others will pick up the task of political action. …
I am galled by Perry’s credulous acceptance of GW Bush’s blatant lie — also repeated by Obama — that advanced US ABM/radar sites currently placed on the Russian border are there to defend Europe against an alleged Iranian missile threat.
How can a brilliant individual such as Perry swallow this obvious hogwash?
In truth, there is no Iranian missile threat - not to Europe nor to the US. The US ABMs/radars are not in Romania for the defense of Europe but for offense — part of a US nuclear first strike option. They are aimed at Russia. I know it’s insane but facts are facts.
Back in the day, Perry’s negative assessment of Star Wars (SDI) was absolutely correct. It’s unfortunate he failed to follow through and alert the American people to the grave danger we are now facing. Why did Perry wait until 2015 to publish his invaluable memoirs?
If Perry is the best the US has to offer, then we are screwed because it seems our best has not been good enough. Not by a long shot. No wonder so many young Americans are deep into drugs, despondency, suicide and despair. They know something Perry does not — that the future has been stolen.
However, that review assumes Perry’s pumping such lies to have been done out of ignorance, not out of psychopathy and a sheer desire to sell as many books as he can, and otherwise to continue being the enormously successful person that he is. His entire life has been serving as a crucial member of America’s military-industrial complex (the owners of Lockheed Martin etc.), and he has brought enormous profits to them, such as the great investigative historian Nafeez Ahmed detailed about Perry in his 25,000-word article, “How the CIA Made Google”, which I subsequently condensed down to 7,400 words and there placed into a somewhat broader context.
I think that Perry knows quite well that we are heading into a world-destroying nuclear war if the U.S. Government continues ignoring the fact that the ‘aggressions’ that it charges against Russia — such as Russia’s having accepted the overwhelming public clamor in Crimea to refuse being ruled by the racist-fascist anti-Russian regme that the U.S. Government under Obama had just installed to lead Ukraine after Obama’s Ukrainian coup in February 2014 - aren’t actually aggressions at all (such as the U.S. regime and its allies charge) but are instead essential defensive measures that the sovereign nation of Russia, now increasingly surrounded by NATO and U.S. missiles on its very borders, needs to take against the U.S. regime’s plan ultimately to conquer Russia.
“After he came to office, Putin came to believe that the United States had an active and robust programme to overthrow his regime. … And from that point on a switch went on in Putin’s mind that said: I’m no longer going to work with the west ... I don’t know the facts behind Putin’s belief that we actually had a programme to foment revolution in Russia but what counts is he believed it. … In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at the actions that Putin has taken,” in Ukraine, and in Syria.
Perry isn’t likely to be so stupid as to have actually believed that. The Guardian reporter said that Perry “emphasised that in the past five years it has been Vladimir Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere that have driven the downward spiral in east-west relations.” Could it be that Perry had never even heard about the coup that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014 — which the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor called “the most blatant coup in history”? Could it be that Perry didn’t know the truth about what U.S. propaganda, still to this day, calls by such phrases as “Ukraine’s democratic revolution”, and the “the Maidan revolution” or, as it’s called at the CIA-edited Wikipedia, the “2014 Ukrainian revolution”? Does he really not know that whereas a coup comes from above, a revolution comes from below? Does he not know that in U.S.-Russia relations, it is ‘our’ side (the U.S. aristocracy, no U.S. ‘democracy’ at all) that is the perpetrator, and Russia (the sovereign nation of Russia) that is the victim? He doesn’t know these things?
“We are sleepwaling into a new Cold War, and there’s very real danger that we will blunder into a nuclear war,”
he knew quite well that the public in the U.S. and in its vassal-nations, are sleepwalking into a nuclear invasion of Russia, and that instead of “we will blunder into a nuclear war,” the U.S. billionaires who own and control the U.S. military-industrial complex or MIC are — and have been, ever since 24 February 1990 — aiming to use that MIC in order to win a nuclear war, not (as Russia continues to do) in order merely to maintain the pre-1991 system of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Perry knows that his friends were — and now are (even if it might be possible that Perry himself wasn’t and isn’t) — out for Russian blood. And he was only pretending when he said: “inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers.” He knows what the explanation of that “rebuilding” is, because he was surrounded by it and never went public exposing it. Sure, that would have taken courage, but, the point is, Perry clearly does not have it; or, else — worse still — he’s totally a hypocrite, and all of his nicey-nicey verbal gyrations are merely fakes, pure PR.
At the very top in America is sheer hypocrisy and psychopathy. That’s not unusual; instead, it’s the general worldwide norm. The U.S. Government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an exception to this norm; but, now, the U.S. Government is worse than it has ever been, and it’s becoming yet worse; it’s becoming worse and worse — especially after 9/11.
Bill Perry wants to continue being comfortable and widely respected, and not to become a threat to the people (the entire U.S. MIC) whose mega-crimes against humanity and everything, have so profitably employed his services. He remains an impeccable careerist. So: what he pretends not to know, isn’t even possibly unknown to him, because he served as an essential cog in that machinery, building towards ultimate, sudden, nuclear global death (but-with-the-ringmasters-to-be-deep-in-their-luxurious-bunkers).
He is, himself — and long has been — a servant of the American aristocracy. He’s not the shocking but benign idiot that he might seem, to even such knowledgeable readers as Mark H. Gaffney.
The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach.
Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.
The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing.
Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.
Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab”posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:
“11/02/17 12:31pm Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.
Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.
(I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…) If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.
Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”
This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.
These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.
Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.
The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.
China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17.
Here is an excerpt from that important article:
For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives.
The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.
The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.
That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.
In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State? The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17. This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:
Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark. The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit .
China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.
China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars. The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:
The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower. The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”
There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”
As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens.
The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.
Disarmed and docile Europeans pose no meaningful threat to their governments’ depredations.
All sorts of reasons have been advanced for declining birthrates. SLL spotlights Europe as an advanced case and offers a hypothesis: its testicles have gone missing.
What does it do to a continent when a country 3,000 miles and an ocean away strikes the decisive blows in two of its cataclysmic wars? What does it do to that continent when that distant power assumes control over much of its defense? At a primal level, the very essence of manhood is the ability to defend one’s self and loved ones. Perhaps ceding responsibility for doing so is not emasculation, but it made Europe the little brother who must rely on big brother to fight his battles.
Naturally, big brother calls the tune. During the Cold War, that meant accepting one’s place under the US defense umbrella and toeing the US line on the Soviet Union. Only French President Charles de Gaulle challenged US domination, and that was more show than substance. With a nuclear arsenal and geographic proximity, the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to Europe, even more than it did to the US. If the Soviet Union had invaded during the de Gaulle era, France would have quickly rejoined a US-led alliance.
European politicians had another reason for accepting US domination. They were erecting the world’s most generous welfare states. Money saved on defense spending was spent on benefits. With little protest Europeans also swallowed high and steeply progressive tax rates in return for state-provided largess.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 posed an existential threat to the US military-industrial-intelligence complex. NATO could have been disbanded and responsibility for Europe’s defense handed back to Europe. The US could have significantly cut military spending. It took ten years and 9/11, but the complex overcame the threat and preserved the status quo. It ginned up a story that Islamic extremism posed a danger to the West of the same magnitude as the former Soviet Union.
Islam has historically been riven with sectarian strife, notably the Sunni-Shia schism. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were living in caves when the US and United Kingdom invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Not one Islamic nation, and certainly none of the Islamic non-state groups, had any appreciable industrial capacity. Only one Islamic government, Pakistan’s, had nuclear weapons, and its arsenal was tiny compared to the West’s and Israel’s. To rate the Islamic “threat” as anything but minuscule compared to that posed by the Soviet Union was absurd
The only way the West could lose to Islam was if it defeated itself (see “How to Defeat Your Enemies,” SLL). To their credit, the governments of Germany, France, and New Zealand refused to swallow the US’s concocted rationales for the 2003 Iraq invasion—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was fomenting terrorism—or support it. Globally an estimated 36 million people protested the invasion. The Guinness Book of Records lists a protest by three million in Rome as the largest ever antiwar rally.
We’ll see what happens if the US reneges on the Iran Nuclear Agreement, but to date 2003 remains the highpoint of European opposition to big brother. If they had known the consequences of US incursions into the Middle East and Northern Africa, they would have protested even more vociferously. The US has made a complete hash of it. The war against terror creates more terrorists, and turning the area into a hodgepodge of hell holes has prompted millions to flee, often to Europe.
They find a continent that economically has seen better days. The welfare state guarantees everything but the opportunity to work hard, keep what you earn, and make a better life for yourself. State favored companies use regulation to squelch smaller, less-connected competitors and stop innovative startups before they get started. The European Union is a bureaucratic, centralizing engine run amuck, creating more daunting obstacles to companies and entrepreneurs. There’s the usual corruption that comes with centralized bureaucracies. Monetary authorities are all-in on debt monetization and interest rate suppression policies that discourage honest savings and productive investment but encourage stock, bond, property, and derivatives speculation.
No surprise then that the European economy hasn’t grown much, if it all, the last few decades. Nor that it’s eating America and Asia’s dust in high-tech. It’s not even a surprise that this state of affairs evokes little protest among Europeans. When the government provides cradle-to-grave, you shut up and get with the program. Even if means you live with your parents into you’re thirties or forties, never have a real job or meaningful occupation, never marry or start a family, and nobody can remember one memorable thing you’ve done at your state-provided funeral.
Instead of taking an honest look at why Europeans are not having babies, politicians and other well-credentialed idiots have decreed that immigration is just the trick for declining birth rates and aging populations. They’ve been lucky; big brother America’s interventionist policies have created all sorts of refugees.
Islamic immigration is a focal point for all that ails Europe. Since 2003, there’s been no real opposition to the US’s refugee-creating policies. The refugees have found not just refuge, but state-provided benefits. Europe’s so-called leaders, apparatchiks, and media assure the population that Muslims bear no animus towards Europe. The fable goes that they will readily assimilate and become part of the taxpaying work force, forestalling the impending insolvency of the welfare state.
Only actual facts and a few alternative media outlets challenge this codswallop, for the most part Europeans have bought it. Are they fooled or neutered? The continent responsible for much of Western Civilization probably didn’t get stupid in a generation, which argues for the latter.
The isolated sparks of opposition are met with opprobrium, threats, fines and criminal sentences. Not a month goes by in which a prominent European politician doesn’t call for restrictions on the internet, the one forum that’s not completely cowed (or is it steered?). A few Eastern European nations are the resistance, pariahs. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for them if Angela Merkel-led “proper Europe” cut them off entirely.
One has to wonder if Europe’s preening politicians would be quite so obliviously oppressive (having old ladies beat up to stop them from voting and the like), if Europe’s population would be so docilely delusional, and if its Islamic immigrants would be better behaved if guns were as available as they are in the US. Pseudo-intellectuals smirk that guns are “potent phallic symbols.” True perhaps, but as noted, defending one’s self and loved ones is the first responsibility of the phallically endowed. Guns are a lot more effective than Tasers, knives, baseball bats, or calling the police.
There have been odious incidents of European women being groped, stripped, and sexually assaulted by Islamic criminals in public venues, unchallenged by what passes for European manhood. Just as odious is the pressure brought to bear on those seeking to publicize such incidents. In the US, your “intellectual” credentials aren’t in order unless you hail Europe as a “model.” It’s a model all right, for what happens when governments have no fear of their citizens. Europe’s emasculation is a potent argument for full firearms freedom in the United States.
The Secretary-General of NATO said this on October 9th, speaking in NATO member Romania, right across the Black Sea from Russia’s region of Crimea (which had always been part of Russia except for the brief period 1954-2014, when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — i.e., the Soviet dictator had made Crimea ‘Ukrainian’, and only in 2014 was a plebiscite actually held there in order to determine what the people there wanted, and more than 90% chose to be restored to the Russian Government). He said, on October 9th, that NATO is “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders”, but NATO actually had expanded up to Russia’s borders; in no way had Russia expanded up to NATO’s borders. NATO’s leader was importantly misrepresenting history, there.
In fact, Romania, itself, used to be a member of the former Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact military alliance of nations, which had been set up by the Soviet Union in response to America’s having established in 1949 its NATO military alliance with Western European nations. After the Cold War ended, on Russia’s side, in 1991, and has been secretly continued by the U.S. Government and its allies right up to the present time, Romania became a member of the NATO anti-Russian alliance in 2004, under George W. Bush’s Administration. But Bush’s father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, had, as the U.S. President, established, in 1990, the foundation for what NATO now is doing in Romania, against Russia — even though Russia had, in fact, ended the Cold War on its side, in 1991.
When the Cold War ended in 1991, it was on the basis of the promise by the Soviet Union that the U.S.S.R. would end, and would become its component separate independent states (one of which was Russia), and end its communism, and end its Warsaw Pact military alliance with nations adjoining the Soviet Union - that all of this would happen if the United States and its NATO allies would not expand NATO, and that especially NATO would not move “one inch to the east” (i.e., toward Russia) by adding, to the NATO military alliance, any of the nations (such as Romania) which had been in the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact, nor especially any nations that had been a part of the former Soviet Union itself (such as Ukraine). The U.S. Government wants to bring Ukraine into NATO, to become its 29th member-nation. But Ukraine is not yet a member, and NATO therefore doesn’t yet have any legitimate business there, at all. NATO isn’t, and can’t yet be, ‘defending’ Ukraine — no matter how much NATO might possibly want to go to war against Russia.
For NATO to be alleging to be “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders” is amazing, since NATO is militarily building up not only “close to” Russia’s borders, but right on Russia’s borders (such as in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and is now seeking to add Ukraine as a member, but already has other formerly Russia-allied nations: Poland, East Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and, this year, Montenegro - and is attempting to draw in the few remaining ones, but especially Ukraine, which it claims to be ‘defending’.
However, American and other NATO ‘news’media, lie about this entire matter, and present NATO as being purely a ‘defensive’ organization, instead of what it actually is: a major component in the U.S. dictatorship’s effort ultimately to checkmate Russia or else to kill Russians entirely and take over their natural resources to be controlled by U.S. and other international corporations. NATO is an international mega-criminal gang, which enormously increases the likelihood of World War III, but which also is enormously profitable for its ultimate backers, Lockheed Martin and other NATO weapons-makers, whose controlling ownership also happens to own and control, and to advertise their other corporations’ products and services in, the ’news’ media in those nations. Media-profits are thus connected — both directly and indirectly — to that military-industrial complex, which needs invasions, even if it doesn’t actually need to conquer Russia or any other country. But perpetual war for perpetual ‘peace’ is the most essential thing of all for NATO (and, since nuclear weaponry is the most expensive type of all, the anti-Russian agenda is especiallyimportant to NATO, even without Russia’s natural resources). That’s what actually is behind NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s speech on October 9th near Russia’s border, in which he alleged, “Our deployments are a direct response to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine,” and, “We are concerned by Russia’s military build-up close to our borders.” He said there, “We do not want to isolate Russia. NATO does not want a new Cold War. Our actions are designed to prevent, not provoke conflict.”(Even Hitler had said, prior to the start of WW II, that he was merely ‘defending’ Germany, against other countries.) He knows, as well as anyone possibly can, that, on the U.S. regime’s side, the Cold War never stopped, and that it has escalated sharply and re-invigorated NATO itself, with the Obama-regime’s takeover of Ukraine, and he knows that the ‘aggression’ which NATO and the U.S. regime blame against Russia, constitute actually Russia’s defensive actions which necessarily result from Obama’s Ukrainian coup on Russia’s very doorstep — a coup which was even documented on recordings, such as here and here (and many other key moments) (and the key background for which coup has, by now, also been documented, going all the way back to 2011, when the planning for organizing Obama’s coup was already begun in 2011 inside the U.S. State Department), and which therefore cannot even be denied (except in the persistently lying U.S.-NATO team’s ‘news’media).
It’s all a big ‘jobs program’ for the U.S. and other extremely corrupt-at-the-top nations - the U.S. aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies in Europe and elsewhere, and their lying ‘news’media, who can’t deny the evidence, and so they simply ignore the evidence, and they instead stenographically ‘report’ the U.S. Government’s lies as ‘truths’, much the same as had happened prior to the U.S. Government’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, only on a much larger scale now.
So, these ugly facts are not reported in the NATO press, because they’re true - their truth is why they’re not allowed to be broadcast and publicly debated. Their being true is blocking those ‘democracies’ from allowing their respective publics to know anything about any of this.
We are, thus, all living in the type of situation that the allegorical novel 1984 described; but the means by which it operates, in reality, turn out to be far more sophisticated than in the fictional version.
Hundreds of thousands of Catalonians took to the streets - estimated by the police at 350,000 people, though organizers said it was twice that - to demonstrate against independence this weekend:
“Catalonia is not all for independence,” said José Manuel Alaminos, a 64-year-old lawyer. He said that Carles Puigdemont, the regional president who has led the independence movement, “is supposed to represent all of us.”
The separatist push has brought about one of Spain’s worst constitutional crises since the end of the Franco dictatorship nearly 43 years ago.
“But we are Catalonians too! The world doesn’t know the truth,” Mr. Alaminos said, pointing to the enormous crowd. “This is the truth.”
Despite the overwhelmning results of the referendum, the region remains, in fact, deeply split over independence.
Additionally, in an interview with El Pais newspaper, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he will consider taking the so-called "nuclear option" - the dramatic measure of suspending Catalonia"s autonomous status - as Catalan leaders escalate threats to declare independence from the country, which could culminate with a parliamentary announcement as soon as Monday.
Asked if he was ready to trigger article 155, Rajoy told El Pais newspaper:
“ I am not ruling out anything that the law says. What I have to do is do things at the right time, which is the most important thing right now. The ideal situation would be to not have to take drastic solutions, but for that to happen there would have to be rectifications."
It remains unclear just how the current Spain crisis is resolved: the past week in Catalonia has been nothing short of chaotic, but James George Jatra, via The Strategic Culture Foundation, has one potential solution: All Of Spain Should Vote On Catalan Independence.
There is a certain frame of mind that believes that secession by ethnic minorities is an absolute good in itself. Asked the question, “Should Region X have the right to secede from Country Y?”, a lot of people will answer with a resounding “Yes!” without knowing or even caring where X and Y are or who lives there.
Others are more selective, relying instead on the Bolshevik principle of kto-kovo (“who-whom”), which relegates the righteousness of secession to whether or not the observer likes or dislikes the state in question. This is typical of western governments. Good secessions are from countries we don’t like – Serbia above all, of course. Independent Kosovo: good. Montenegro’s separation from its union with Serbia: good. But Republika Srpska’s possible separation from Bosnia and Herzegovina: bad. Independence of Serbian Kraijinas from secessionist Croatia: emphatically bad. Northern Kosovo and Metohija’s separation from “sovereign, independent Kosovo”: very, very bad.
The only constant: Serbs are always wrong.
The same subjective kto-kovo frames conflicts in the former Soviet Union. The deus ex machina independence of all the former Union Republics was an automatic and positive development. But the desire of any portion of them – Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Adzharia (Georgia), Pridnestrovie, Gagauzia (Moldova), Crimea, Donbass (Ukraine) – to leave its former Union Republic is per se illegitimate, notwithstanding the 1990 Soviet law on secession requiring separate referenda in such entities.
The desire of Catalans – or more precisely, of some undetermined portion of people living in Catalonia – to secede from Spain is different because it doesn’t fit into the usual kto-kovo international lineup. One finds among Catalan sympathizers many of the usual partisans of biased western selectivity as well as some of their fiercest critics (such as the usually sound Pepe Escobar). Likewise, members of both of the usual camps have expressed opposition to Catalan secession, either out of mechanical support for “western institutions” (the European Union, the US) or consistent support for the principle of state sovereignty (the government of Serbia and most of the countries that oppose an independent Kosovo).
In the court of public opinion, the pro-independence camp has gained the upper hand. While the Catalan referendum was clearly illegal under Spanish law and the Spanish authorities had every right to shut it down, the TV images of police using physical force to prevent people from casting a ballot played badly against Madrid – which is no doubt what was intended. If, as expected, Catalan independence is declared in the coming days, Madrid will have little choice but to suspend Catalonia’s autonomy, further radicalizing the situation. (Remember how the west falsely cited Slobodan Milosevic’s supposedly “abolishing” of Kosovo’s “constitutionally guaranteed autonomy” in 1989 as proof of an impending “final solution” against the province’s Albanians.)
First, who decided that Catalonia as a subdivision of Spain, or of Catalans as a distinct nation, is in a position to asset a sovereign, united “will” apart from the rest of Spain? As was the case with Kosovo (and just a week ago, in Iraqi Kurdistan), Catalonia demonstrates the futility of granting autonomy to a region based on a minority ethnic, linguistic, or religious identity. Doing so only whets that minority’s demand for more cession of power, culminating in the demand for independence. (Hence, in Serbia the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina endorsed the Catalan referendum.)
Second, granting presumptive sovereignty to an aspiring secessionist entity always ends up shortchanging those who don’t want to secede. This can take more than one form. One example is the “West Virginia” model, whereby one region within the entity doesn’t want to leave; comparable to Pridnestrovie, South Ossetia, Republika Srpska, etc. Another is intimidation of citizens who are loyal to the common state – who according to polls represent a majority in Catalonia. As stated by film director Isabel Coixet i Castillo in El País:
I see now, with horrifying clarity, that no matter what happens next, there is no room here for me or for anybody who dares to think independently, even though this is my birthplace. Today it is insults against me, yesterday it was insults against members of my family; the day before it was insults against friends of mine whose other friends openly criticize the fact that the former are still friends with me. And tomorrow, it will be something worse. [ . . . ]
Because if, when you condemn the (Spanish) government’s actions, you don’t also condone the Catalan government’s actions, you immediately become an enemy, a fascist, a fascistoid, a Franco follower, the scum of the earth. And you think about the fear that has already covered, like spores, the skin of all those people who keep quiet but who secretly come tell you that they’re on your side – that they are grateful for what you are doing, and then they tell you that they don’t even talk about the situation inside their own homes, for fear that their children will hear them and get into trouble at school.
These are not mere anecdotes. This is the reality on the ground for those of us who live here. This is the new, shocking fracture of a society that used to live in peace and without fear, with logical differences of opinion and different values and different criteria, but always on a foundation of respect.
Madrid has stumbled badly. Whether the situation is already unsalvageable is unclear at this point. What is clear is that increasing confrontation and repression, however legal and even necessary, will bolster the intolerant, revolutionary repression of Spanish patriots and embolden secessionists.
When Catalan authorities scheduled their referendum, Madrid could have coopted it by saying, “Great idea! The whole of Spain will vote on whether Catalonia should be independent.”
Not only would that have given the rest of the country a voice, it would have allowed the cowed and silent majority within Catalonia to express its will. Perhaps even at this late date it’s an idea the Spanish government should consider.
Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Russia in Syria against Washington’s interests since last year and has recently placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system.
Similarly, the Saudi King Salman, who is on a landmark state visit to Moscow, has signed several cooperation agreements with Kremlin and has also expressed his willingness to buy S-400 missile system.
Another traditional ally of Washington in the region, Pakistan, has agreed to build a 600 mega-watt power project with Moscow’s assistance, has bought Russian helicopters and defense equipment and has held joint military exercises with Kremlin.
All three countries have been steadfast US allies since the times of the Cold War, or rather, to put it bluntly, the political establishments of these countries have acted as virtual proxies of Washington in the region and had played an important role in the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991.
In order to understand the significance of relationship between Washington and Ankara, which is a NATO member, bear in mind that the United States has been conducting air strikes against targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there, whose safety became a matter of real concern during the failed July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration; when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.
Similarly, in order to grasp the nature of principal-agent relationship between the United States on the one hand and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the other, keep in mind that Washington used Gulf’s petro-dollars and Islamabad’s intelligence agencies to nurture jihadists against the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.
It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the former Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of the Geneva Accords and consequent withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the United States withdrew its support to the Afghan jihadists.
Similarly, the United States lent its support to the militants during the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, but after achieving the policy objectives of toppling the Arab nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and weakening the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the United States relinquished its blanket support to the militants and eventually declared a war against a faction of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, when the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and dared to occupy Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014.
The United States regional allies in the Middle East, however, are not as subtle and experienced in Machiavellian geopolitics. Under the misconception that alliances and enmities in international politics are permanent, the Middle Eastern autocrats keep on pursuing the same belligerent policy indefinitely as laid down by the hawks in Washington for a brief period of time in order to achieve certain strategic objectives.
For example: the security establishment of Pakistan kept pursuing the policy of training and arming the Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists throughout the eighties and nineties and right up to September 2001, even after the United States withdrew its support to the jihadists’ cause in Afghanistan during the nineties after the collapse of its erstwhile archrival, the Soviet Union.
Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Turkey has made the same mistake of lending indiscriminate support to the Syrian militants even after the United States partial reversal of policy in Syria and the declaration of war against the Islamic State in August 2014 in order to placate the international public opinion when the graphic images and videos of Islamic State’s brutality surfaced on the social media.
Keeping up appearances in order to maintain the façade of justice and morality is indispensable in international politics and the Western powers strictly abide by this code of conduct. Their medieval client states in the Middle East, however, are not as experienced and they often keep on pursuing the same militarist policies of training and arming the militants against their regional rivals, which are untenable in the long run in a world where pacifism has generally been accepted as one of the fundamental axioms of the modern worldview.
Regarding the recent cooperation between Moscow and Ankara in the Syrian civil war, although the proximate cause of this détente seems to be the attempted coup plot against the Erdogan administration in July last year by the supporters of the US-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, but this surprising development also sheds light on the deeper divisions between the United States and Turkey over their respective Syria policy.
After the United States reversal of “regime change” policy in Syria in August 2014 when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 and threatened the capital of another steadfast American ally, Masoud Barzani’s Erbil in the oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan, Washington has made the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq.
Bear in mind that the conflict in Syria and Iraq is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arabs, the Shi’a Arabs and the Sunni Kurds. Although after the declaration of war against a faction of Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, Washington has also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, but the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of Iran.
Therefore, Washington was left with no other choice than to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists transgressed its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which are on the verge of liberating the Islamic State’s de facto capital, Raqqa, and are currently battling the jihadist group in a small pocket of the city between the stadium and a hospital, are nothing more than the Kurdish militias with a symbolic presence of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook.
As far as the regional parties to the Syrian civil war are concerned, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the rest of the Gulf Arab States may not have serious reservations against this close cooperation between the United States and the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, because the Gulf Arab States tend to look at the regional conflicts from the lens of the Iranian Shi’a threat.
Turkey, on the other hand, has been more wary of the separatist Kurdish tendencies in its southeast than the Iranian Shi’a threat, and particularly now after the Kurds have held a referendum for independence in Iraq despite the international pressure against such an ill-advised move.
Finally, any radical departure from the longstanding policy of providing unequivocal support to Washington’s policy in the region by the political establishment of Turkey since the times of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is highly unlikely. But after this perfidy by Washington of lending its support to the Kurds against the Turkish proxies in Syria, it is quite plausible that the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Turkey might try to strike a balance in its relations with the Cold War-era rivals.
* * *
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled a single-payer healthcare plan called “Medicare for All.”
Sanders titled his approach for nationalizing one-sixth of the American economy as “Medicare for All” in order to offer a template for his vision of the U.S. healthcare system.
Unfortunately, using Medicare as the template for the nation’s healthcare system is a little like using the production model for the Lada, the “people’s car” of the former Soviet Union, as the blue-print for the U.S. auto industry.
The “Medicare for All” proposal would transition millions of Americans to a Medicare-style system over the course of four short years, all the while promising to expand benefits, eliminate deductibles, and cut costs. If that sounds too good to be true, it is.
The assumption that Medicare can be a long-term, sustainable model capable of absorbing quadruple the number of current enrollees is flawed from the start.
Medicare covers approximately 57 million Americans and is projected to cost nearly $700 billion this year. Revenue for the Medicare trust fund is generated via beneficiary premiums, which Sanders wants to eliminate, and general tax revenue, which he wants to increase. According to the 2016 Medicare Trustees Report, the Medicare trust fund faces a “substantial financial shortfall.” In fact, the report forecasts that within 12 years the trust fund will be depleted unless further legislation is enacted. Sanders’s proposal would place a significant burden on an already financially shaky system.
Another aspect of Medicare on which the senator’s plan relies is its provider-fee structure. Medicare reimbursement is significantly lower than the reasonable and customary fees routinely charged by those providing care. Providers make up the difference by shifting costs to non-Medicare patients. By moving all Americans to “Medicare for All,” Sanders’s plan would artificially set provider fees well below market levels. Payments below the cost of doing business would likely result in fewer providers as physicians and hospitals are forced out of business and fewer new providers enter the market. Providers that remain would essentially become government employees. From a patient perspective this would mean longer wait times, less control over healthcare decisions, and lower quality of care. Think of it as the disruption caused by Obamacare but on steroids.
Lastly, the senator’s plan makes the case that eliminating the private healthcare insurance industry and utilizing a Medicare model would mean lower administrative costs resulting in substantial savings. While proponents for single-payer healthcare cite a lower percentage spent on administrative costs, the calculation of these percentages is skewed by significantly higher beneficiary spending. On a per-capita basis, however, Medicare administrative costs are nearly equal to private insurance. This despite a greater number of private insurance providers, variability in their administrative efficiency, and higher marketing and promotion costs.
The good news in Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan is that it has no chance of passing.
The bad news: It now partially fills the vacuum created by a collapsing Obamacare and the absence of market-based reform alternatives.
As a healthcare option now or in the future, “Medicare for All” would be good for none.
Very often bad and failed ideas do not die, they simply reappear during periods of supposed social and political crisis in slightly different intellectual garb, and offer “solutions” that would merely help to bring about some of the very types of crises for which they once again claim to have the answers. Socialism in its various “progressive” mutations represents one of the leading ones in our time.
The latest manifestation of this appeared on August 24, 2017 in theNew Republic online in an article by John B. Judis on, “The Socialism America Needs Now.”He is heartened by the wide appeal, especially among younger voters, that Bernie Sanders received during the 2016 presidential contest. He thinks that this may herald a rebirth and a renewed possibility for a socialist alternative to the current American political and economic system.
Having traveled over the decades from the 1970s to the present from being a radical, revolutionary socialist to a more “moderate” one today, Mr. Judis admits that the Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries is now long passé. The embarrassing experience of “socialism-in-practice” in the form Lenin and Stalin created in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in China will not fly anymore.
From Soviet Central Planning to “Liberal Socialism”
Central planning seemed not to work too well, and the “communist” variation on the socialist theme also had a tendency to be “authoritarian” with some drawbacks for human life and liberty. (He tactfully avoids mentioning that Marxist-inspired regimes in the twentieth century murdered well over a 100 million people — with some estimates suggesting the number might have been closer to 150 million or more in the name of building the “bright, beautiful socialist future.” See my article, “The Human Cost of Socialism in Power”.)
He turns his mind and ideal to the “democratic socialist” parties and regimes in Western Europe in the post-World War II era, or as Mr. Judis prefers to call it, following John Maynard Keynes, “liberal socialism.” What makes this form of socialism “liberal”? It is belief that there can be a “socialism with a human face.” In other words, a form of “economic” socialism that leaves in place democratic politics with a respect for a broad range of personal and civil liberties.
We have heard this all so many times before. While Mr. Judis wishes to suggest that there is no real or definitive definition of “socialism” (any more than there are of “liberalism” or “democracy”), the fact is that throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, virtually all socialists condemned and called for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, and in its place some form of socialist central planning directed by government in the name of “the people.”
Mr. Judis actually more or less admits this, and that the only great debate among socialists and communists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was over how the socialist utopia would be brought about – through violent revolution or through the democratic ballot box. The Russian Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin insisted that only revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” could bring “the workers” to power and assure their permanent triumph over the exploitive capitalist class. The German democratic socialists opted for democratic means to power and rejected the dictatorship of Lenin and later Stalin.
But it is nonetheless the case that well into the post-World War II period this was a dispute over political means and not ideological ends, which remained for both branches of the socialist movement the abolition of capitalism and the imposition of socialist central planning. Communists wanted to bring about this transformation of society in one fell swoop through violent means and imposed dictatorship. The German Social Democrats and the “Fabian” socialists in Great Britain proposed democratic means, with socialism coming more gradually and through incremental extensions of government control and planning over more and more parts of society. But for both, the end result would be the same: centralized government direction of economic affairs and social change.
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and 1970s, more and more “democratic” socialists in Western Europe grudgingly accepted the fact that comprehensive socialist central planning was a failure as practiced in the Moscow-dominated Soviet bloc countries; and it brought little of the prosperity that government planning promised to provide as an escape from poverty in the “third world” countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Plus, the tyranny and brutality of Soviet-style socialism made it ethically difficult to defend. So the democratic socialists turned to the interventionist-welfare state to achieve their “social justice” ends without nationalizing all the means of production or centrally planning all economic activity in society. (See my article, “Barack Obama and the Meaning of Socialism”.)
In Search of Socialist Utopias Elsewhere
But those communist regimes were not so repulsive that many, if not most, of these democratic socialists in the West would not continue to still give moral indulgence and wishful hopes that, maybe, somehow, Marxian socialism would still finally work and fulfill its promise in, first, Mao’s China, then in Castro’s Cuba, or Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, or in the Sandinista’s Nicaragua, or . . . The collectivist dream and delusion springs eternal. Plus, after all, even a rude, crude and rough Marxist regime isn’t the United States – please, please almost anything other than capitalist America!
Even today, the enlightened “progressive” can take a tour of Castro’s Cuba with the leftist magazine, The Nation. Don’t miss out! This November 2017 you can go with The Nation and, their advertisement promises, “learn about the Cuban Revolution from experts at some of its most pivotal locations, including the Moncada Barracks, the site of the first armed assault by Fidel Castro and his band of rebels on July 26, 1953.” The progressive political pilgrim to the collectivist promised land will be spending his or her “days meeting with prominent Cuban professors, government officials,” including “urban planners” and “health care workers.” Don’t miss on your chance to visit one of the remaining socialist “utopias” before global capitalism succeeds in taking it away.
No doubt, these “social justice” tourists will not be taken to La Cabana prison, where Che Guevara was assigned by Castro the role of state prosecutor against “enemies of the people,” following Fidel’s triumphant entrance into Havana and seizure of power in January 1959. In the role as unrestrained judge and jury, Che arbitrarily sent hundreds to their death, sometimes literally by his own hand.
Nor are they likely to have quoted to them Che’s words that, “My ideological training means that I am one of those people who believe that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.” And that “I can’t be the friend of anyone who doesn’t share by ideas.” Or that Che was the one who in 1960 instituted communist Cuba’s system of forced labor camps. This would not fit in with the heroic face of Che on the t-shirts that, no doubt, some of these “progressive” travelers to utopia would be wearing. After all, Fidel and Che did it all for “the people,” and, well, they did have “good intentions.”
Of course, while such political pilgrims are pleased to visit these places and bask in the moral satisfaction that the few remaining communist regimes in the world are still trying to make that “better world,” even if with the heavy hand of dictatorship, censorship of art, music and political views, the imprisonment of political opponents, and torture and execution of “enemies of the people” (all of which they still mostly turn a blind eye), they prefer to live in their own Western countries and dream the “liberal socialist” dream, as clearly Mr. Judis is doing.
Liberal Socialism as the Regulatory and Redistributive State
What, precisely, is this democratic or “liberal” socialism to which Mr. Judis hopes a younger generation of Americans will turn in the years ahead? It turns out to be the same “utopia” of the interventionist-welfare state that Western countries have been following since the end of the Second World War, though, admittedly, to different degrees in different places around the world.
Mr. Judis wants the government to intensively and pervasively regulate, command, restrict and direct various aspects of the private enterprises in society, while assuring that American society can still take advantage of the self-interested incentives and innovations that can improve the material conditions of life. But the direction, form and extent to which private enterprisers shall be allowed to do those productive and innovative things with their businesses will be confined to and constrained within those avenues that serve the “higher” and “non-market” values and purposes of “society.”
Matching the regulatory and interventionist state must be the redistributive welfare state. The excessive and unnecessary income and wealth of the businessmen and private sector investors of America must be taxed, and heavily, to assure greater material egalitarianism, and to fund all the social services and government-provided safety nets, which “would bring immeasurable benefit to ordinary Americans. A good watchword is economic security – something that is very lacking to all except the wealthiest Americans.”
At this point, it might be wondered what, then, marks off Mr. Judis’ “liberal socialism” from the already existing modern American “liberal” interventionist-welfare state? It turns out that it is all a matter of intentions and the intended recipients. In Mr. Judis’ view, mainstream modern American liberals have lost their way; they too frequently sleep with the enemy (think Bill and Hillary Clinton) in the form of excessively collaborating with businessmen and bankers to the latter’s benefit; American liberals and progressives have stopped sufficiently emphasizing “economic justice” for middle America with their increasingly primary focus on “identity politics.”
Liberal Socialism and Democratic Politics Without Romance
Also, unlike the communists and many radical socialists and some progressives, Mr. Judis calls for moving towards his notion of a better socialist future through a more active participation in the Democratic Party. The task is to nudge and shove mainstream modern American liberals in the Democratic Party further to the socialist left, which in many of their hearts these people already know is right. And to use the Democratic Party as the vehicle to propagandize and persuade more in society that socialism is good and just and the best for them.
In other words, Mr. Judis calls for using the methods of the earlier German Democratic Socialists and the British Fabians, only do so in a way that does not seem to be as threatening or undermining of all the institutions of existing society as those earlier groups often did with their call for the total abolition of capitalism.
Mr. Judis’ “liberal socialism” is really just the existing interventionist-welfare state placed – “democratically” – in the “right” elected hands, so those manning and managing the machinery of government will do what he wants political authority to do, rather than what it is currently being done by Republicans and the current Democratic Party establishments.
A way for Mr. Judis to more easily defend his desire and ideal is to suggest that the existing political-economic system in America today is a free market, “neo-liberal” capitalism, rather than what the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto once more accurately labeled it: “bourgeois socialism.” That is, a system of government regulation, redistribution, favors and privileges that benefits many in the private enterprise sectors of society rather than a more “proletarian socialism” that simply would take from “the rich” to give to “the workers” and “the poor.”
What is sometimes called “crony capitalism” is just Pareto’s “bourgeois socialism.” Pareto also understood, in the 1890s, with amazing clarity one of the insights of modern Public Choice theory, that “participatory democracy” of the community as a whole is a theoretical and practical illusion in an complex society. Politics in an unrestrained democracy always becomes a contest among special interest groups capable of gaining concentrated benefits from State intervention and redistribution at the diffused expense of the rest of the society.
In democratic societies it takes the form of coalitions of special interest groups who succeed in offering campaign contributions and votes to politicians desiring elected political office, who then fulfill their campaign promises to those groups once in the actual halls of political power. In totalitarian societies such as in the former Soviet Union, it took the form of hierarchical position within the Communist Party and within the central planning bureaucracy, including the state enterprise managers, who had the decision-making power over access to and use of the socialized means of production; thus, the communist “classless society” had one of the most intricate social webs of power, privilege, favoritism and plunder ever seen in human society.
This “politics without romance,” to use Nobel Laureate, James M. Buchanan’s phase, shows why the notion of “the people” owning, controlling, regulating and overseeing the collective direction of an economy is pure illusion and deception concerning the reality of how and why political power works the way it does.
What Mr. Judis and, far too many who share his views about capitalism and some form of socialism – “liberal” or otherwise – fail to understand is that any and all forms of planning, regulation and political redistribution in fact takes power and decision-making out of the hands of the people about whom they express their concerns.
Real Participatory Liberation under Free Market Liberalism
It is the open, competitive market economy that, precisely, gives each and every individual wide latitude and liberty over his own personal affairs. It is the market that enables each of us to make his own choices concerning the profession, occupation or productive calling to pursue. It is the market that enables each and everyone of us to have the freedom to make our own choices to earn an income and spend that income as we consider best in terms of the values, beliefs, purposes and desires that we think may bring meaning and happiness to our individual lives.
It is the free society of individual liberty and voluntary association that provides truly participatory opportunities to form organizations, clubs, and groupings of almost any type to further the goals and ends outside of the narrower arena of market transactions to better our lives materially, socially, culturally and spiritually. (See my article, “Individual Liberty and Civil Society”.)
At this point, no doubt, Mr. Judis would reasonably ask, but what about those who are unable to provide for themselves, due to personal tragedy, unfortunate circumstances, or simply bad luck? Is this not the reason why enlightened and decent societies had to move “left-ward” to establish and financially provide for those unable to personally meet the essentials of everyday life and to have opportunities to fulfill their potentials as a human being? Is not the welfare state of “liberal socialism” the inescapable necessity of having a humane society?
The classical liberal responds that these very concerns can be far better and more successfully solved and served through the voluntary institutions and associations of civil society than to turn such tasks over to the government. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the modern welfare state, all such “social problems” were handled with wide and positive affect by charities, philanthropies and for-profit organizations in places such as Great Britain and the United States. That their workings and successes are virtually unknown to most people in modern society shows the extent to which their history and social nobility has gone down a memory hole of collectivist misinterpretation and misunderstanding of what a society of liberty did and could provide. (See my article, “A World Without the Welfare State”.)
Furthermore, the transfer of such welfare responsibility to the government reduces each and every recipient to a ward of the State. It is politicians and bureaucrats who decide the education your children will receive in government schools; they are the ones who determine the retirement possibilities you will have; the healthcare to which you will have access and its type; the wages and work conditions under which you may be allowed to employed or unemployed, and the forms and types of associations you may enter into and the activities and membership you permitted.
The “liberal socialism” about which Mr. Judis dreams is not the path to liberation but a continuing servitude and obedience to the those with political power and who have the arrogance and presumption to imagine that they know better how people are to earn a living, care for their own lives and that of their families, and associate with other members of society better than those individuals deciding all of these matters for themselves. (See my article, “Democratic Socialism Means Loss of Liberty”.)
One would have thought that after more than seven decades of the interventionist-welfare state as the political left’s “liberal socialist” alternative to Marxian socialist central planning, it would be realized that it is just another constraining and corrupt manifestation of the unworkability of any collectivist system of control and command.
Mr. Judis’ program for a socialist America also shows the intellectual bankruptcy of those on “the left.” The revolutionary transformation of society, for which they yearn, ends up being nothing more than the existing interventionist-welfare state, just with the desire that people who agree with Mr. Judis should be at the helm of political power rather than those with whom he disagrees.
