Eric Zuesse - search results
The Secret Logistics of America’s Global Deep State
Who Was Secretly Behind America’s Invading and Occupying Syria?
Americans’ Self-Contradictory Views of Socialized Healthcare
When America’s Press Contradicts America’s President
How George W. Bush Corrupted America’s ‘News’-Reporting
Only Republicans Don’t Want a Third Major Political Party in America, Finds Gallup.
How the U.N. Joined America’s War Against Syria
Is psychopathy needed to reach the top in America?
How Donald Trump Desecrates America’s Founders
America is today’s Nazi Germany.
Why America Is a Dictatorship
How Corrupt America’s Dictators Are
America’s ‘Boots-On-The-Ground’ Fighters in Syria are Al Qaeda and Kurds
The Discarded Wisdom of America’s Founders
America’s Militarized Economy
Yemen: Fake ‘News’ That’s Mixed Into America’s Mainstream News — And Why
This is the real, Americanized, nazi, Ukraine
America’s Billionaires Battle Each Other for Political Control Over Europe
America’s Allies Against Russia & Iran
The Saudi and American Way
America Bombs, Europe Gets the Refugees. That’s Evil.
America is one-dollar-one-vote, not really one-person-one vote.
The Dictatorship Over America: How It Functions
The Diseased, Lying, Condition, of America’s ‘News’Media
America’s Public Are Foie-Gras Ducks
America’s Genocide in Yemen Starts Tuesday
How the people who control America manufacture our consent to their rule
America’s Big-Brother ‘News’ Media
How can America’s evangelical Christians who favor Trump justify themselves?
Why America’s Torture-Chief Now Runs the CIA
How can America’s evangelical Christians who favor Trump justify themselves?
America Spends About Half of World’s Military Expenditures
Russia’s v. America’s Records on Democracy, and on Whistleblowers’ Safety
Might Trump Ask Israel to Fund America’s Invasion-Occupation of Syria?
Poll Shows Americans Support the Invasion of Syria
Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds
U.S. and its press lie Americans into invasions routinely.
Americans Trust ‘Our’ Intelligence Agencies. Should We?
How the Military Controls America
Why America’s major news-media must change their thinking
Russian interview with Putin (and others) discusses geopolitics, nationhood, and America
An American: “Why I Don’t Trust My Government, At All”
America’s News Media Foment Hate
Russiagate-Trump Gets Solved by Giant of American Investigative Journalism
How Much America’s Gov’t. Has Paid for Its Invasions of Iraq & Afghanistan
The War in America’s ‘Democratic’ Party
Russiagate, Trump, and an American Police-State?
America’s Deceitful Secret Support of Al Qaeda
Gallup: Americans Distrust News Media — Especially Online
How to Sell Invasions to Americans
Polls Increasingly Confirming that America Is a Dictatorship
Americans Are Only Now Beginning to Learn that We Live in a Dictatorship
POLL: By 2-to-1, Americans Oppose Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem
America’s Electoral Choices: Liberal Fascism versus Conservative Fascism
Some Recent Reasons to Distrust American-Allied ‘News’Media
America’s Trump, w. 37% Favorable Rating, Seeks Overthrow of Iran’s Rouhani, w. 62% Favorable...
Does Russia Produce ‘Fake News’? Or Does America? Or Both?
Americans Need a Public Debate Now, For and Against Replacing Trump by Pence
Studies Show Republicans Don’t Understand What Produces Wealth in America
How America’s Corrupt Government Wastes Its Taxpayers’ Money
American President Trump v. Iranian President Rouhani, at the U.N.
Gallup: 71% of Americans are “Dissatisfied with the way the nation is governed”
Is it really true that America’s richest 1% are ‘overwhelmingly Jewish’?
What America’s Aristocracy Want
Should Mike Pence Become America’s President?
OECD: Americans Are World’s Fattest People
America Declares Economic War Against Europe
Obama Economic Recovery Was America’s Weakest
America’s Invasion of Syria
The Destructiveness of America’s Alliances
The Economic Motive for America’s Current Wars
American Samizdat
Gallup Finds Stunning Decline in Americans’ Respect for U.S. Government
Why Americans Distrust the Press More Than They Distrust Trump
America’s Top Scientists Confirm: U.S. Goal Now Is to Conquer Russia
Bigoted Americans Far More Supportive of War Against Syria
America’s Rapacious Aristocracy and WW3
POLL: Americans Support Military-Industrial Complex Above All Else
Americans Start to See Through Obama CIA (Etc.) Lies Against Russia
Situation with Russia proves America is an oligarchy
U.S. Government Is Secretly Allied with America’s Enemies
German Economist & Politician: “Stop Copying America’s Decline! Leave NATO!”
America’s Psychopathic Establishment
Three Big Lies that Pervade America’s ‘News’ Media
America’s Aristocracy Facing Resistance from American Public Regarding Russia
America’s Oligarchs Support Clinton Almost Unanimously
America’s Recent Achievements in the Middle East
How America’s Press Are Covering the Trump Campaign
American Samizdat — Publication Forbidden in U.S.
America’s One-Party Government
America Trashes NATO Founding Act
How Corrupt America Is
Gallup: Americans’ Trust of Elections Has Plunged
America’s & NATO’s Outrageous Behavior, Greatest Threat that Exists
Gallup: Americans Want Socialized Healthcare
America’s Biggest of All Big Lies
The American Dictatorship
America Now Preparing for World War III
Another Way ‘Democracy’ Is Rigged in America
America’s Laughable ‘News’ Media
Gallup Poll Shows Americans Prefer Terrorist Nations Over Iran. Why?
How Bamboozled the American Public Are About Syria
How Corruption Cripples America’s Military
An American Big Lie About ‘Terrorism’
America’s Arab Allies Debate Need for Genocide Against ‘Infidels’
America’s Subservience to the Saud Family
How America’s Corrupt Press Are Destroying the Country
America’s Now-Aggressive War Against Russia
America’s Vampire Aristocracy
Historic New Harpers Article Exposes Who Controls America
Inequality in America, the Fish that Rots from the Head
Gallup Finds Americans Are Ideological Suckers About Healthcare
America’s Awesome Corruption – Especially in the Military
America’s Great Lie. Europe’s Great Shame. Russia’s Great Case.
Ban Ki-Moon Condemns the American Stand on Syria, Endorses Putin’s
AP/GfK Poll: Americans Want Gov’t. Shutdown Unless Federal Spending Is Cut
Gallup: 60% of Americans Want a New Political Party. But, Why?
America’s News Is Heavily Censored
How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed the West
OPINION: Why Every American Should Vote for Bernie Sanders
America’s U.N. Ambassador Continues Standing Up for Nazis
The Top 1% of America’s Top 1%
European Citizens Much Better Informed About Obama’s Trade Deals than Americans
OPINION: Is Israel America’s Friend? Or America’s Enemy?
Here’s How Your Senators Voted, in the Key Senate Vote to End American Democracy
How America’s ‘News’ Media Killed America’s Democracy: TPP & TTIP
Non-Religious Population Is Soaring in America
What America’s Media Get Very Wrong About ‘Socialism’ — And About Senator Sanders
How America’s Aristocracy Extends Its Global Control
Gallup: Americans Say Gov’t. Must Protect Environment More; Republicans Say ‘No!’
Even America’s ‘Media Watchdogs’ Hide U.S.’s Ukrainian Nazification & Ethnic Cleansing
America’s Global Dominance (Since WW II) Has Just Ended
The American Government’s Biggest Lie Now Is About Ukraine
Gallup: Americans’ Fear of Russia Soars
New Video Evidence of America’s Coup in Ukraine — and What It Means
U.S. Congress Now Virtually 100% All-In on Ukraine’s War Against Russia; Americans Are at...
The Biggest Scandal in America Is Its Controlled Press
What America’s Democratic Party Must Do in Order to Deserve to Win
List of the World’s Richest Countries; America’s Special Role in It
How America Changed from Being the World’s Leading Democratic Nation under FDR, to Being...
Gallup: 58% of Americans Want a Third Party. Maybe Senator Sanders?
Polls Show Mutual Hostility Soars Between Russians and Americans
America’s Nazi Allies in Israel and Ukraine
America Is Guilty if Americans Don’t Prosecute Obama
Washington Murders Countries, the US Constitution, and the Presstitute Media Makes Americans Complicit
Washington Murders Countries, the US Constitution, and the Presstitute Media Makes Americans Complicit Paul Craig Roberts Having Murdered Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and the US Constitution, Washington is now Murdering Ukraine. Thanks to Op-Ed News contributor Eric Zuesse, I can…
The post Washington Murders Countries, the US Constitution, and the Presstitute Media Makes Americans Complicit — Paul Craig Roberts appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org.
Why America Hates and Despises Victims
Our Handiwork. Hidden from Us, by America’s “News” Media (which have the audacity to...
The U.S. Elite Run a Ukrainian Genocide While American Public Are Ignorant of It
America Seems to Be Losing Ukraine’s War
Pew Poll: America Is Becoming a Nation of Political Enemies
America Cleanses Southeastern Ukraine of Ethnic Russians
Illegal NSA Surveillance of Americans: Secret Authorizations Granted by Bush and Obama
America on MLK’s Birthday: World Leader of Triple Evils — Racism, Militarism and Extreme...
Sleepwalking Into World War Three? Why The Independent Media Is Vital
Yet it is Washington that accuses Moscow of invading Ukraine, of having had a hand in the downing of a commercial airliner and of ‘invading’ Ukraine based on no evidence at all – trial by media courtesy of Washington’s PR machine. As a result of this Russian ‘aggression’, Washington slapped sanctions on Moscow.
The mainstream corporate media in the West parrots the accusations against Moscow as fact, despite Washington having cooked up evidence or invented baseless pretexts. As with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and other ‘interventions’ that have left a trail of death and devastation in their wake, the Western corporate media’s role is to act as cheerleader for official policies and US-led wars of terror.
The reality is that the US has around 800 military bases in over 100 countries and military personnel in almost 150 countries. US spending on its military dwarfs what the rest of the world spends together. It outspends China by a ratio of 6:1.
What does the corporate media say about this? That the US is a ‘force for good’ and constitutes the ‘world’s policeman’ - not a calculating empire underpinned by militarism.
By the 1980s, Washington’s wars, death squads and covert operations were responsible for six million deaths in the ‘developing’ world. An updated figure suggests that figure is closer to ten million.
Breaking previous agreements made with Russia/the USSR, over the past two decades the US and NATO has moved into Eastern Europe and continues to encircle Russia and install missile systems aimed at it. It has also surrounded Iran with military bases. It is destabilising Pakistan and ‘intervening’ in countries across Africa to weaken Chinese trade and investment links and influence. It intends to eventually militarily ‘pivot’ towards Asia to encircle China.
William Blum has presented a long list of Washington’s crimes across the planet since 1945 in terms of its numerous bombings of countries, assassinations of elected leaders and destabilisations. No other country comes close to matching the scale of such criminality. Under the smokescreen of exporting ‘freedom and democracy’, the US has deemed it necessary to ignore international laws and carry out atrocities to further its geo-political interests across the globe.
Writing on AlterNet.org, Nicolas JS Davies says of William Blum’s book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II: if you're looking for historical context for what you are reading or watching on TV about the coup in Ukraine, ‘Killing Hope’ will provide it.
Davies argues that the title has never been more apt as we watch the hopes of people from all regions of Ukraine being sacrificed on the same altar as those of people in Iran (1953); Guatemala(1954); Thailand (1957); Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971 & 1980); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic (1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 & 2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003); Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967); Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia (1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975); Pakistan (1977); Grenada (1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso (1987); Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda (1996);and Libya (2011).
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is a recipe for more of the same. The ultimate goal, based on the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine, is to prevent any rival emerging to challenge Washington’s global hegemony and to secure dominance over the entire planet. Washington’s game plan for Russia is to destroy is as a functioning state or to permanently weaken it so it submits to US hegemony. While the mainstream media in the West set out to revive the Cold War mentality and demonise Russia, Washington believes it can actually win a nuclear conflict with Russia. It no longer regards nuclear weapons as a last resort but part of a conventional theatre of war and is willing to use them for pre-emptive strikes.
Washington is accusing Russia of violating Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, while the US has its military, mercenary and intelligence personnel inside Ukraine. It is moreover putting troops in Poland, engaging in ‘war games’ close to Russia and has pushed through a ‘Russian anti-aggression’ act that portrays Russia as an aggressor in order to give Ukraine de facto membership of NATO and thus full military support, advice and assistance.
Washington presses ahead regardless as Russia begins to undermine dollar hegemony by trading oil and gas and goods in rubles and other currencies. And history shows that whenever a country threatens the dollar, the US does not idly stand by.
Unfortunately, most members of the Western public believe the lies being fed to them. This results from the corporate media amounting to little more than an extension of Washington’s propaganda arm. The PNAC, under the pretext of some bogus ‘war on terror’, is partly built on gullible, easily led public opinion, which is fanned by emotive outbursts from politicians and the media. We have a Pavlov’s dog public and media, which respond on cue to the moralistic bleating of politicians who rely on the public’s ignorance to facilitate war and conflict.
Former US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst has spoken about the merits of the Kiev coup and the installation of an illegitimate government in Ukraine. Last year, he called the violent removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected government as enhancing democracy. Herbst displayed all of the arrogance associated with the ideology of US ‘exceptionalism’. He also displayed complete contempt for the public by spouting falsehoods and misleading claims about events taking place in Ukraine.
"We are now faced with a Russian leader bent not on joining the international rules-based system which keeps the peace between nations, but on subverting it… We are in familiar territory for anyone over the age of about 50, with Russia's aggressive behaviour a stark reminder it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security... Russia's aggressive behaviour a stark reminder it has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security."
In a speech that could have come straight from the pen of some war mongering US neocon, the US’s toy monkey Hammond beats on cue the drum that signals Britain’s willingness to fall in line and verbally attack Putin for not acquiescing to US global hegemonic aims.
This Year’s Subsidy to Wall Street is Equal to the Amount of This Year’s...
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Since we’ve bailed out the 10 largest banks $83 billion this year alone, should they give it back to us by paying into the U.S. Treasury the amount of this year’s sequester? After all, it’s the same amount.
On February 20th, Bloomberg News editors headlined, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” and issued the first-ever thorough and current analysis of the taxpayer-subsidy to the Wall Street mega-banks. They found that this subsidy is $83 billion this year, but they made no note of the fact that this amount is only $2 billion less than this year’s sequester cuts are estimated to be, so that all that would need to be done, in order to avoid those cuts, would be to have those mega-banks that we bail out every year forego their subsidy from taxpayers, for just one year. Unfortunately, this would be easier said than done.
That $83 billion subsidy this year is, according to Bloomberg’s, also approximately the amount of profits that those banks are “earning” this year. So, if the mega-banks wouldn’t refund it out of what we gave them last year, then they could just refund it by paying to us – who, after all, bailed out their stockholders enormously in 2009 – the “profits” that they made this year.
The editors at Bloomberg News (hardly a bunch of populists) calculated this $83 billion figure based upon their analysis of the figures in a sadly ignored but rigorous study that had been done by IMF economists, a study that had been issued months back, in May 2012, and which was titled “Quantifying Structural Subsidy Values for Systemically Important Financial Institutions.” As Bloomberg’s editors summarized the reason for this ongoing federal subsidy: “The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail,” due to the special Government backing for too-big-to-fail (TBTF) institutions.
The taxpayer-funded annual subsidy to these TBTF banks has never before been calculated as to its actual annual dollar-value, but this rigorous IMF study finally provided the means for doing that. Bloomberg’s summarizes: “What if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?”
“The top five banks – JP Morgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits.”
This $83 billion, in other words, is the current value of the annual subsidy received by America’s 10 mega-banks, from our Government’s special treatment of them as “Systemically Important Financial Institutions” (i.e., fully guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers, irrespective of the normal $250,000-per-account limit in savings and checking accounts), or TBTF institutions, which the other 7,053 (out of the total 7,063 FDIC-insured) banks are not – other banks can fail without destroying the U.S. economy. In a certain sense, these are the banks where the super-rich can enjoy FDIC protection without that $250,000-per-account limit, and can even gamble under the protection of that comforting umbrella.
The Dallas Federal Reserve has issued a superb study showing that even at the peak of the crash, when the highest percentage of loans were in arrears, which had occurred around January 2010, only around 3% of loans were in arrears at banks that had “less than $1 billion” in assets, whereas banks that had “over $250 billion” (and only 12 banks are in that august category) were experiencing around 12% of loans in arrears. The following chart on page 7 of the Dallas Fed’s study showed that the 2008 crash was virtually entirely a Wall Street (or mega-bank) phenomenon:
The big-ten banks are the ones that benefited from that $83 billion handout this year, and, as was noted, they did so because they are TBTF. Because these banks (basically the top line there) are TBTF, their top executives can have them engage in, essentially, high-risk gambling (such as “no-doc” or “liars” loans) with the vast sums that are under their command, since the people who buy stock in these banks know in advance that if these high-risk bets fail, then U.S. taxpayers (we) will eat their losses. Consequently, the only incentive for CEOs of these banks is to increase their bank’s size even more, so as to increase their bonuses even bigger, since these executives don’t really need to worry about risk (except as a PR issue, perhaps, but they hire PR people – including politicians – to deal with that).
When Wall Street got bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Reserve (and with Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac serving as a conduit between them and Wall Street), this left very little remaining for the Government to spend on the rest of the economy, such as infrastructure and education (the kinds of things that we supposedly pay taxes for), which might be why the recovery has been so slow, from the 2008 crash that was caused by Wall Street’s federally-insured gambling with the trillions that they control of everybody else’s money. If so, then this sequester is a result of Wall Street’s failed bets: instead of cutting back on the subsidy to Wall Street, the politicians in Washington have chosen to cut back on government services to the public. Politicians like Barack Obama and his team, and the George W. Bush team before them, and all of the supporters of TBTF in Congress, made the basic choice to subsidize the mega-banks instead of the needy or the deserving, and this is also why the “Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened” under Obama. It really is a plutocracy; that’s precisely the way today’s USA is functioning – no doubt about it.
There were other possible ways of dealing with the 2008 crash than to continue to throw trillions of dollars at Wall Street, but that is what “our” Government did, and continues to do, because, essentially, this is what the super-rich pay them to do.
Bloomberg’s $83 billion/year finding here is so vast that it suggests that the U.S. is a crony-capitalism, hardly an authentic capitalism. The “cronies” are these giant Wall Street firms and their “counterparties” (namely, each other, plus Fannie & Freddie and the government officials and lobbyists, who all serve Wall Street), and also the stockholders and bondholders in these huge financial institutions: the mega-banks that would otherwise be “cleaned out” but for the TBTF backing they receive from U.S. taxpayers. We’re getting reamed by Wall Street and K Street, and this is the first estimate of the actual circumference of that reaming. The Dallas Fed’s study says that this reaming must stop, and that, despite what the Federal Reserve itself says, the mega-banks must be broken up. The easiest way to do that might be for Congress to pass a law that prohibits the largest ten banks from participating in the FDIC. That would transform the entire financial system, but Wall Street would hate it because it would yank their honey-pot.
Because Wall Street’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his roughly $20 billion fortune by serving the mega-banks, this editorial from Bloomberg News constituted remarkable news, in and of itself.
One other study of “Valuation in Systemic Risk at U.S. Banks During 1974-2010” found that the taxpayer-subsidy was $300 billion in 2008 but supposedly near zero after 2009. Matt Levine linked to that study on 7 May 2012 under the optimistic headline “Markets Are Telling Us That Too Big To Fail Is All Better.” The editors at Bloomberg ignored that study. The financial expert Yves Smith, when I called to her attention that that study, which she had relied upon, zeroed-out the megabanks’ systemic risk after 2009, wrote in reply, “I didn’t realize they were doing this using bank equity volatility as the proxy. He did not make clear how he was going to do about it in the talk. Methodologically, that’s crap.” So, Bloomberg’s editors have issued the only reliable study that has ever been done on the size of this important subsidy.
Bloomberg’s editors were courageous to do this, and they are already getting flak for having done it. On February 24th, they issued a follow-up, “Remember That $83 Billion Bank Subsidy? We Weren’t Kidding,” and explained in more detail how they had calculated this $83 billion sum. They explained why the $83 billion estimate was far likelier an underestimate than an overestimate.
Anyway, this subsidy is a major problem, probably at least as big as the sequester, which it might have helped to cause.
On February 28th, Yves Smith posted at her “Naked Capitalism” website, “Occupy the SEC, Frustrated With Regulatory Defiance of Volcker Rule Implementation Requirements, Sues Fed, SEC, CFTC, FDIC and Treasury,” and she linked to a new legal filing in the Eastern District of New York “over the failure of the relevant financial regulators to issue a Final Rulemaking as stipulated in Dodd Frank.” She summarized what the evidence clearly showed: “Not only are the[y] out of compliance [with the Dodd-Frank Act’s Volcker Rule provision for these regulators to draft rules restricting the mega-banks from gambling with investors’ money], they [the regulatory agencies over the mega-banks] appear to have no intent of finalizing the Volcker Rule.” She went on to say: “Much of the public still fails to understand the degree to which the ruling classes no longer represent their interests. Oh, they may resent the banks, and they may also hate Congress, but most people deeply need to believe they live in a system that is fair and where business and political leaders (some if not all) still deserve respect and admiration.”
Comment by Washington’s Blog: President Obama says that sequestration is the GOP’s fault. But Bob Woodward and YouTube reveal that Obama supported sequestration from day one.
