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 billion, but all will be paid by stockholders. Bank CEOs and managers pay no fines and face no prison.
There has been no reform — zilch, nada — of the credit-rating agencies. They are right back rating securities from issuers who pay them for their ratings.
If you still can’t trust the credit-rating on a bond, and if Wall Street’s 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 ‘democracy’?
Kaufman tries to get the American public interested in overcoming the U.S. Government’s 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’s corrupt at the very top) cannot even possibly be a democratic government.
However, America’s aristocracy are even more corrupt than Wall Street itself is, and they control Wall Street, behind the scenes. And their ‘news’media 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’ intentions and Constitution. Maybe all that remains of those Founders’ intentions today is that Britain’s aristocracy no longer rules America — but America’s aristocracy now does, instead. And, this isn’t much, if any, of an improvement.
Although the U.S. aristocracy — America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires — are the principals, and Wall Street are only their financial representatives (rather than the aristocracy itself), 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) 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’t represent only the aristocracy, but instead represented the American public). However, liberals blamed Wall Street (the financial agents of America’s aristocracy). And, nobody blamed the aristocracy itself.
America’s 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’t only — and all of them did — 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. 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 ‘news’media as sages and ‘philanthropists’, instead of as the nation’s most-successful organized gangsters.
U.S. President Barack Obama himself protected the top Wall Street people, but, because he was a liberal — i.e., a conservative who is hypocritical enough to damn conservatism in public; or, in other words, a conservative who misrepresents what he is — he publicly condemned, in vague terms, “the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis”, even while he had his Administration prosecuted none of them, and even while he assured Wall Street’s top people privately “I’m protecting you.” Obama had told the Wall Street bigs, near the start of his regime, on 27 March 2009, in private, inside the White House: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. … I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. … I’m going to shield you.” And that’s what he did. To him, the public were just “pitchforks,” 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’s eyes. To them, the public are merely a mob. And, on 20 September 2016, Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America’s Future, headlined “Banks Used Low Wages, Job Insecurity To Force Employees To Commit Fraud”; 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 — even above where Obama had promised “I’m protecting you,” which was directed instead only to the Wall Street bigs, and not to the billionaires they served. And even those people mainly weren’t 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 — he just kept suckering the liberals, the Democratic Party of the U.S. aristocracy’s voters.
The aristocracy’s ‘news’media 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 “Strategically Important Financial Institutions” — not in medium and small-sized ones, not in merely community banks, but in the giant banks and insurers.
These mega-investors were the controlling interests in America’s international corporations. They consequently controlled U.S. Government politics and political fundraising.
Cheated investors, and illegally foreclosed home-owners, were nominally protected in the laws, but even the federal Government’s own studies of actual results showed that almost all of these people, the real direct victims, were simply being ignored — even while Wall Street and its mega-investors got bailed-out by taxpayers.
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’t be prosecuted, not even if an honest person were elected to the White House and were to become supported by an honest Congress. “Equal Justice Under Law” — this certainly isn’t that, nor anything close to it. In fact, America has the world’s 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 “democracy”? But it’s not only a dictatorship; it is an imperial one: Obama himself said many times, such as on 28 May 2014, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation,” which means that every other nation was “dispensable” to him; and, any foreign aristocracy — and any democracy (if such any longer exists) — will therefore be either a vassal-nation, or else “the enemy,” and thus be destroyed, at the sole discretion of America’s (and its allied) aristocracies.
For example, to George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein was “the enemy” and Iraq was “dispensable” (to use Obama’s term); and, to Obama, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych, were “enemies,” and those nations also were “dispensable.” During earlier eras, Mohammed Mosaddegh, and Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende, were “enemies,” whose governments were, in their own times, “dispensable,” 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’s national sovereignty — 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.) Trump seems to think that Iran and North Korea are especially “dispensable” (again, using Obama’s term). Trump came to power promising opposition against the U.S. aristocracy; but, instead, he’s on the attack against Obama’s least-bad policies, while trying to out-do Obama’s 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 ‘bipartisanship’ that U.S. voters say they want. But the polls don’t show that America’s electorate actually want the type of ‘bipartisanship’ 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 “imperialistic,” to employ the Continental term for it); and, though the public don’t 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’t know this.
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 ‘news’media, this uniform neoconservatism that’s being reflected by the almost simultaneous publication in the Establishment’s own Foreign Affairs (from the Council on Foreign Relations), and from the British Guardian that’s now controlled by George Soros and U.S. and-affiliated international corporations, and also from the U.S. military-industrial complex’s bipartisan neoconservative propaganda-organ The Atlantic, and also from the neoconservative Vox online ‘news’-site. In all of these ‘news’media, almost on the very same day, are being published articles by, and interviews of, Ms. Emma Sky, a thoroughly undistinguished and undistinguishable neoconservative “intellectual” (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’s (the U.S. torture-meister’s) right-hand political advisor in Iraq, with the title of “Governorate Co-ordinator of Kirkuk for the Coalition Provisional Authority, 2003-2004”, and, then, ultimately, as “advisor to the Commanding General of US Forces in Iraq from 2007-2010,” before becoming widely published in the U.S. empire’s various ‘news’media, 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, ‘compassionately’ 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’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, after which the U.S. CIA engineered a coup overthrowing him, grabbing Iran’s oil, and establishing in Iran the Pahlavi Shah’s 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 — of anything. But, apparently, readers find their misrepresentations to be tolerable; so, at least her propaganda isn’t 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: “What right do you have to be invading and occupying our land?”
No one can understand the reality on the basis of the West’s honored ‘historians’ and ‘journalists’, because they’re propagandists for the imperial system, which used to be British but now is American. The neoconservative New York Times 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 ‘news’-site, of the neoconservative Emma Sky’s book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq. He presented Iran as being America’s enemy-in-chief, and presented especially “Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the section of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for covert and overt operations in Lebanon, Syria and, above all, Iraq” as being America’s enemy; and he wrote that:
the betrayal of the Sunnis by the Baghdad government the Americans left behind has been crucial to recruiting by the self-proclaimed 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’s fighters and flunkies.
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.
Even Hillary Clinton wasn’t enough of a neocon to suit him; but Emma Sky was.
Neoconservatives support Israel, and support the Saud family who rule as absolute dictators over — they own — Saudi Arabia. And, both Israel and the Saud family have labelled Iran as an “existential threat” 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 — yet again, to control it, like during 1953-1979. The three aristocracies — the Sauds, America’s aristocracy, and Israel’s aristocracy — 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, “Understanding the Power-Contest Between Aristocracies”. That article opened, “At the core of global power stands the conflict between the Sauds and their Sunni clergy, versus the Iranians and their Shiite clergy. One can’t 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.”
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 — 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 — 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 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 — as propaganda. Why do people pay good money to read or hear propaganda?
—————
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.