{"id":335059,"date":"2017-11-15T03:53:19","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T02:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=335059"},"modified":"2017-11-15T03:53:19","modified_gmt":"2017-11-15T02:53:19","slug":"u-s-aristocracy-deceive-u-s-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/u-s-aristocracy-deceive-u-s-public\/","title":{"rendered":"How the U.S. Aristocracy Deceive the U.S. Public"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The progressive former Democratic U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman wrote at Forbes<\/i>, on 22 July 2014<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

Another year has passed with no one from a Wall Street bank going to jail for the criminal behavior everyone knows helped cause the financial crisis. Fines against Wall Street banks are reaching $100 billion, but all will be paid by stockholders. Bank CEOs and managers pay no fines and face no prison.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

There has been no reform \u2014 zilch, nada \u2014 of the credit-rating agencies. They are right back rating securities from issuers who pay them for their ratings.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

If you still can\u2019t trust the credit-rating on a bond, and if Wall Street\u2019s bigs still stand immune from the law even after the 2008 crash they had played a huge role to cause, then in what way can the U.S. Government itself be called a \u2018democracy\u2019?<\/span><\/p>\n

Kaufman tries to get the American public interested in overcoming the U.S. Government\u2019s profound top-level corruption, but few U.S. politicians join with him on that, because only few American voters understand that a corrupt government (especially one that\u2019s corrupt at the very top) cannot even possibly<\/i> be a democratic government.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, America\u2019s aristocracy are even more corrupt than Wall Street itself is, and they control Wall Street, behind the scenes. And their \u2018news\u2019media are under strict control to portray America as being still a democratic country that somehow lives up to its anti-aristocratic and anti-imperialistic Founders\u2019 intentions and Constitution. Maybe all that remains of those Founders\u2019 intentions today is that Britain\u2019s aristocracy no longer rules America \u2014 but America\u2019s aristocracy now does, instead. And, this isn\u2019t much, if any, of an improvement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the U.S. aristocracy \u2014 America\u2019s billionaires and centi-millionaires \u2014 are the principals, and Wall Street are only their financial representatives (rather than the aristocracy itself)<\/i>, Wall Street was blamed by liberals for the 2008 economic crash; and, of course, Wall Street did do lots of dirty work deceiving outside investors and many home buyers and others in order to extract from the public (including those much smaller investors)<\/span><\/a> the hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. aristocracy and its big-finance agents drew in pay and bonuses and other ways, from these economic extractions. But the aristocrats themselves emerged unscathed, even in their reputations, and were mainly financially enriched by the scams, which had been set-up by Wall Street in order to enrich the investment-insiders (the aristocrats themselves) at the expense of investment-outsiders, and of the public-at-large. Conservatives blamed the Government for the crash (as if the Government didn\u2019t represent only the aristocracy<\/span><\/a>, but instead represented the American public). However, liberals blamed Wall Street (the financial agents of America\u2019s aristocracy). And, nobody<\/i> blamed the aristocracy itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

America\u2019s entire political system, the liberal and the conservative politicians and press, thus hid, from the public, the role that the principals, the aristocrats themselves, had played, demanding these crimes from and by their agents. In other words: the top people who had caused the 2008 crash, didn\u2019t only \u2014 and all of them did \u2014 avoid prison entirely, but the worst that some of them suffered, was only that the financial firms that some of them had headed, became hit by wrist-slap fines, and that some of their lower-level employees who had actually executed or carried out the scams are being prosecuted and might someday be fined or even sent to prison<\/span><\/a>. But neither the aristocrats nor their financial agents who run Wall Street were punished, either by the law, nor by their personal reputations. They still are treated in their \u2018news\u2019media as sages and \u2018philanthropists\u2019, instead of as the nation\u2019s most-successful organized gangsters. <\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. President Barack Obama himself protected the top Wall Street people, but, because he was a liberal \u2014 i.e., a conservative who is hypocritical enough to damn conservatism in public; or, in other words, a conservative who misrepresents what he is \u2014 he publicly condemned, in vague terms, \u201cthe abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis\u201d<\/span><\/a>, even while he had his Administration prosecuted none of them<\/span><\/a>, and even while he assured Wall Street\u2019s top people privately \u201cI\u2019m protecting you.\u201d Obama had told the Wall Street bigs, near the start of his regime, on 27 March 2009, in private, inside the White House: \u201cMy administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. \u2026 I\u2019m not out there to go after you. I\u2019m protecting you.\u00a0\u2026 I\u2019m going to shield you.\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u00a0And that\u2019s what he did. To him, the public were just \u201cpitchforks,\u201d like the KKK bigots who had chased Blacks with pitchforks and lynched them during the early 20th Century were. The heads of Wall Street firms that were being bailed-out by U.S. taxpayers were persecuted victims of the public, in that U.S. President\u2019s eyes. To them, the public are merely a mob. And, on 20 September 2016, Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America\u2019s Future, headlined \u201cBanks Used Low Wages, Job Insecurity To Force\u00a0Employees To Commit Fraud\u201d<\/span><\/a>; so, there was no way that the employees could keep their jobs except to do the crimes that they were being virtually forced by their bosses to do. The criminality was actually at the very top \u2014 even above where Obama had promised \u201cI\u2019m protecting you,\u201d which was directed instead only to the Wall Street bigs, and not to the billionaires they served. And even those people mainly weren\u2019t billionaires at all; they were mainly just top financial agents for the billionaires, grasping to join the aristocracy. Obama, like they, represented the billionaires, though as a politician; and, so, he talked publicly against some of these agents, basically against Republican ones, in order to keep the votes of Democrats \u2014 he just kept suckering the liberals, the Democratic Party of the U.S. aristocracy\u2019s voters.<\/span><\/p>\n

The aristocracy\u2019s \u2018news\u2019media present the storyline that the billionaires and centi-millionaires were merely among the many victims of the scams that had produced the 2008 crash; but there is a problem with that storyline: the Government bailed-out those giant investors, because those were overwhelmingly the investors in \u201cStrategically Important Financial Institutions\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u2014 not in medium and small-sized ones, not in merely community banks, but in the giant banks and insurers. <\/span><\/p>\n

These mega-investors were the controlling interests in America\u2019s international corporations. They consequently controlled U.S. Government politics and political fundraising. <\/span><\/p>\n

Cheated investors, and illegally foreclosed home-owners, were nominally protected in the laws, but even the federal Government\u2019s own studies of actual results showed that almost all of these people, the real direct victims, were simply being ignored \u2014 even while Wall Street and its mega-investors got bailed-out by taxpayers<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The entire system, both private and public, was thus controlled by the aristocracy; and, so, even now a decade after the crash, the responsible aristocrats remain at the very top, both financially and in terms of prestige, and the statutes-of-limitations on possible prosecutions of decisions they had made which had actually produced the crash, have expired, so that these individuals can\u2019t be prosecuted, not even if an honest person were elected to the White House and were to become supported by an honest Congress. \u201cEqual Justice Under Law\u201d \u2014 this certainly isn\u2019t that, nor anything close to it. In fact, America has the world\u2019s highest percentage of its population in prison of any country, but aristocrats never end up there unless the aristocrat is a drug-kingpin, and even those are rarely prosecuted, even though their underlings are. And, how can such a nation as this, be called a \u201cdemocracy\u201d? But it\u2019s not only<\/i> a dictatorship<\/span><\/a>; it is an imperial<\/i> one: Obama himself said many times, such as on 28 May 2014<\/span><\/a>, \u201cThe United States is and remains the one indispensable nation,\u201d which means that every other<\/i> nation was \u201cdispensable\u201d to him; and, any foreign aristocracy \u2014 and any democracy (if such any longer exists) \u2014 will therefore be either a vassal-nation, or else \u201cthe enemy,\u201d and thus be destroyed, at the sole discretion of America\u2019s (and its allied) aristocracies. <\/span><\/p>\n

For example, to George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein was \u201cthe enemy\u201d and Iraq was \u201cdispensable\u201d (to use Obama\u2019s term); and, to Obama, Muammar Gaddafi<\/span><\/a> and Bashar al-Assad<\/span><\/a>, and Viktor Yanukovych<\/span><\/a>, were \u201cenemies,\u201d and those nations also were \u201cdispensable.\u201d During earlier eras, Mohammed Mosaddegh<\/span><\/a>, and Jacobo Arbenz<\/span><\/a>, and Salvador Allende<\/span><\/a>, were \u201cenemies,\u201d whose governments were, in their own times, \u201cdispensable,\u201d and so the U.S. aristocracy replaced them by U.S.-Government-selected tyrants. (Assad, however, was able to stay in power, not only because he had the support of the majority of Syrians, but because Russia decided to protect Syria\u2019s national sovereignty \u2014 to make its firm stand, there, not allow that ally, too, to fall by means of an American invasion, as Ukraine had fallen by means of an American coup in 2014<\/span><\/a>.) Trump seems to think that Iran and North Korea are especially \u201cdispensable\u201d (again, using Obama\u2019s term). Trump came to power promising opposition against the U.S. aristocracy; but, instead, he\u2019s on the attack against Obama\u2019s least-bad policies, while trying to out-do Obama\u2019s worst policies (such as by his cancelling the Iran deal, and by his trying to destroy Obamacare and the Paris Climate Agreement). If Obama turned out to be a Democratic George W. Bush, then perhaps Trump will turn out to be a Republican Barack Obama, and this will be the \u2018bipartisanship\u2019 that U.S. voters say<\/i> they want. But the polls don\u2019t show that America\u2019s electorate actually<\/i> want the type of \u2018bipartisanship\u2019 that the U.S. aristocracy are delivering, via the nonstop neoconservatism of Bush, and then of Obama, and then (perhaps too) of Trump. The aristocracy are neoconservative (or \u201cimperialistic,\u201d to employ the Continental term for it); and, though the public don\u2019t even know what that means, bipartisan neoconservatism always brings on yet more invasions and wars, which lower the welfare of the public, even while the welfare of the aristocrats goes up from it. The public just don\u2019t know this.<\/span><\/p>\n

A good example, recently, of how the U.S. aristocracy deceive the U.S. public, to accept such a barbaric Government (a neoconservative regime) is the uniform neoconservatism of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, and of their respective \u2018news\u2019media, this uniform neoconservatism that\u2019s being reflected by the almost simultaneous publication in the Establishment\u2019s own Foreign Affairs<\/i><\/span><\/a> (from the Council on Foreign Relations), and from the British Guardian<\/i><\/span><\/a> that\u2019s now controlled by George Soros and U.S. and-affiliated international corporations, and also from the U.S. military-industrial complex\u2019s bipartisan neoconservative propaganda-organ The Atlantic<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and also from the neoconservative Vox online \u2018news\u2019-site<\/span><\/a>. In all of these \u2018news\u2019media, almost on the very same day, are being published articles by, and interviews of, Ms. Emma Sky, a thoroughly undistinguished and undistinguishable neoconservative \u201cintellectual\u201d (CFR, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Officer of the British Empire, etc.), who, with no demonstrated outstanding abilities, but only with the hypocrisy and callousness that aristocrats tend to seek out in those whom they select to execute their dirty-work, graduated from an elite college and then (without needing to obtain any higher academic or other degree, and with no record of personal achievement at anything) went virtually straight into advising governments and serving as the U.S. invading and occupying General David Petraeus<\/span><\/a>\u2019s (the U.S. torture-meister<\/span><\/a>\u2019s) right-hand political advisor in Iraq, with the title of \u201cGovernorate Co-ordinator of Kirkuk for the Coalition Provisional Authority, 2003-2004\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and, then, ultimately, as \u201cadvisor to the Commanding General of US Forces in Iraq from 2007-2010,\u201d before becoming widely published in the U.S. empire\u2019s various \u2018news\u2019media, with not only these hypocritical articles from her that were linked-to at those four publications, but also books, all of them being standard discreet neoconservative fare, \u2018compassionately\u2019 gung-ho on the U.S. empire, and especially rabid against Iran, because Iranians in 1953 had voted for Mohammed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister, who promptly passed a land-reform act, and nationalized the UK aristocracy\u2019s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, after which the U.S. CIA engineered a coup overthrowing him, grabbing Iran\u2019s oil, and establishing in Iran the Pahlavi Shah\u2019s brutal dictatorship with torture-chambers, which dictatorship Ms. Sky evidently wants restored in some form to Iran, perhaps as punishment to the Iranian people, for having stood up against the American invaders and occupiers, in 1953. Such people are PR agents, not really journalists or historians \u2014 of anything. But, apparently, readers find their misrepresentations to be tolerable; so, at least her propaganda isn\u2019t amateurish. If only readers would just ask themselves the type of question that the victims of these invasions might likely ask, then the true character of such writers would become horrendously and immediately clear: \u201cWhat right do you have to be invading and occupying our land?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

No one can understand the reality on the basis of the West\u2019s honored \u2018historians\u2019 and \u2018journalists\u2019, because they\u2019re propagandists for the imperial system, which used to be British but now is American. The neoconservative New York Times<\/i> Sunday Book Review section published, on 12 July 2015, a review from the neoconservative Christopher Dickey, the Foreign Editor of the neoconservative The Daily Beast \u2018news\u2019-site, of the neoconservative Emma Sky\u2019s book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq<\/i>. He presented Iran as being America\u2019s enemy-in-chief, and presented especially \u201cQassim Suleimani, the head of Iran\u2019s Quds Force, the section of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for covert and overt operations in Lebanon, Syria and, above all, Iraq\u201d as being America\u2019s enemy; and he wrote<\/span><\/a> that:<\/span><\/p>\n

the betrayal of the Sunnis by the Baghdad government the Americans left behind has been crucial to recruiting by the self-\u00adproclaimed caliphate. Many of those who had helped crush Al Qaeda in Iraq eight years ago have concluded that no one except ISIS will protect them from Suleimani\u2019s fighters and flunkies.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

To counter Iran in Iraq and prevent the alienation that created ISIS would have required a better ambassador than Hill and a more attentive State Department than the one run by Hillary Clinton. It would have required, perhaps, a thousand Emma Skys. But there was only one of those. And it would have meant many more years of enormous involvement on the ground, but the American people had no taste for that.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Even Hillary Clinton wasn\u2019t enough of a neocon to suit him; but Emma Sky was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Neoconservatives support Israel, and support the Saud family who rule as absolute dictators over \u2014 they own \u2014 Saudi Arabia. And, both Israel and the Saud family have labelled Iran as an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to themselves, without ever providing any reasonable evidence to indicate it to be that, neither against the Saud family nor against a non-apartheid Israel (though some Iranian leaders have indeed damned the existing apartheid Israel). The U.S. aristocracy are in bed with both the Saud family and the Israeli Government, to conquer Iran \u2014 yet again, to control it, like during 1953-1979. The three aristocracies \u2014 the Sauds, America\u2019s aristocracy, and Israel\u2019s aristocracy \u2014 are perpetrating a Long War against not only Iran, which is the leading Shia-majority nation, but also against Shia Muslims in all countries. One cannot understand U.S. foreign relations without, as I titled this matter in a previous article, \u201cUnderstanding the Power-Contest Between Aristocracies\u201d<\/span><\/a>. That article opened, \u201cAt the core of global power stands the conflict between the Sauds and their Sunni clergy, versus the Iranians and their Shiite clergy. One can\u2019t understand U.S.-Russian relations, nor much else of what is happening in the world, without knowing the relevant historical background; and the origins and nature of the Sunni war against Shia are arguably the most essential part of that.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

This is more important to the U.S. aristocracy than is anything that concerns the welfare of the American public. And, in order to understand why we invaded Iraq in 2003, and Syria subsequently \u2014 not to mention invaded Libya in 2011, which was run by the Sunni moderate, Muammar Gaddafi, who wanted good relations with both Iran and Russia \u2014 one must understand the U.S.-Israeli-Saudi obsession to reconquer Iran, and to wage wars against Shia everywhere. The U.S., and Western publics, are in the thrall of\u00a0 <\/span>these three aristocracies; and writers such as Emma Sky and Christopher Dickey are propagandists for those masters. Only in this light do their writings actually make sense \u2014 as propaganda. Why do people pay good money to read or hear propaganda? <\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org The progressive former Democratic U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman wrote at Forbes, on 22 July 2014: Another year has passed with no one from a Wall Street bank going to jail for the criminal behavior everyone knows helped cause the financial crisis. Fines against Wall Street banks are reaching $100 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":217099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[905,115,30,941,32,96,3604,38,4203,1235],"class_list":{"0":"post-335059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"tag-aristocracy","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-billionaires","12":"tag-cia","13":"tag-cover-up","14":"tag-donald-trump","15":"tag-iraq","16":"tag-oligarchy","17":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}