Category Archives: USA

Democracy Struggles To Recover From Betrayal

Democracy Struggles To Recover From Betrayal

Paul Craig Roberts March 20, 2016

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It is like Margaret Mead said, “a small number of committed people can change the world.”

With much help from the failures of neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative foreign policy, we are changing the world.

Look at Bernie Sanders’ inroads on the corrupt Clintons’ control of the Democratic Party. Look at how easily Donald Trump defeated the Republican establishment’s candidates. Some Americans are catching on, shedding their unawareness. I am not confident that Sanders or Trump could bring change. In The Deep State (2016), Mike Lofgren concludes that powerful private interest groups, such as the military/security complex and the financial sector, have hijacked democracy. Still, voters’ interest in Sanders and Trump, despite the beating they receive in the media, is a positive sign. Voters are supporting them not so much for their positions on issues as for the fact that neither are part of the Washington establishment. Many voters now understand that the political establishment represents the One Percent, not them.

A New Russia has appeared on the scene and demonstrated to the entire world its power to checkmate the hegemonic ambition of the crazed neoconservatives who have controlled the US government since Bill Clinton. The world now understands that the leadership for peace comes from Russia not from warmonger Washington.

Washington’s vassals in Europe are in disarray, with the Northern European EU members plundering the Southern EU members, with all of Europe overrun with refugees fleeing Washington’s hoax “war against terrorism.” Europeans are beginning to realize that the establishment political parties that they have blindly supported since World War 2 are nothing but agents of Washington, who serve Washington and not Europeans. Merkel, Cameron, Hollande are puppets of Washington, not leaders of the German, British, and French people.

The Chinese government is finally beginning to realize that the neoliberal American economic policies that it has so slavishly been copying have led it into economic difficulties. Perhaps China will now cease to follow America into oblivion.

The Russians have learned that being part of the Western system subjects them to economic sanctions and makes it easy for Washington to interfere in Russian internal affairs. The Russians are beginning to show that their desire for their independence is greater than their desire to be accepted by a corrupt, immoral, decadent, and failing West.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders speak to Americans’ loss of economic opportunity and financial independence. Today the 99 Percent are slaves to their debt burdens and lack of productive employment, while those who deceived them into these burdens and lowly-paid employment in domestic services are reveling in multi-million dollar annual paychecks.

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and financial regulators are corrupted by the private financial interests that control them. The US government serves only the One Percent. Despite this obvious fact, many Democratic Party voters—-traditionally the less well off, union members, and American blacks—-are turning out for Hillary Clinton, a tried and proven representative of the One Percent. The Clintons have been enriched to the amount of $153 million by the ruling One Percent who own the Clintons lock, stock, and barrel. Yet the dispossessed vote for Hillary. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-speeches/

Clearly, many American voters, as Thomas Frank made clear in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, still have no clue as to their own interests and vote to elect their worst enemies.

Many Americans are still trapped in The Matrix and kept there by the propaganda that masquerades in the US as “news.”

Consider the possible implications if Americans were to enable Hillary Clinton to become President. Trump has said that he would work things out with Vladimir Putin, but Hillary has declared the President of Russia to be “the new Hitler.” How can Hillary work anything out with “the new Hitler”? She cannot.

It is a great irony that the American lower class, traditionally served by the Democratic Party, could put in the White House not only a person who only represents the super-rich but also a person who cannot escape confict with Russia, a country with possibly the most capable military force on the planet.

The psychopathic Washington neoconservatives who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime, misintepret Vladimir Putin’s peaceful diplomacy as a sign of Russian weakness. The neocons say: “See Putin is weak. He is pulling out of Syria.” But what Putin says is different. Putin says: “We have created the conditions for peace in Syria.” If Washington abuses these conditions, “Russia can, in several hours, build up its forces in Syria to a size capable of dealing with an escalating situation and use the entire range of means at its disposal.”

Putin adds: “We hope the parties involved would show common sense.”
From a position of strength, Putin has rolled the dice. Is there common sense in the West? I fail to see any. I see arrogance, hubris, idiocy, immorality, inhumanity, complete and total stupidity. These are the characteristics of Western governments. They amount to a deranged criminal enterprise organized against humanity.

In the awards of medals to those Russians who served against ISIS, Putin stated: “Our uncompromising attitude to terrorism remains unchanged.” If we take this statement broadly, it means not merely Muslim jihadists but the terrorism of the West—-the destruction of seven or more countries by the US and its vassals in the 21st century, the long-term sanctions against Iran, Russia, and a number of other countries whose governments do not comply with Washington’s dictates. Putin has told Washington and Washington’s European puppets, Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, that he has had enough of them. They must reform themselves, become honorable governments committed to the welfare of humanity, and abandon self-serving policies of plunder.

Considering the total failure of the United States to subdue after 15 years a few thousand lightly armed Taliban, the American people need to understand that the US military, corrupted by privatizations to enhance former vice president Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton and by over-cost weapons systems that serve the profits of the armaments industries and not the military competence of the fighting force, has lost its edge in weapons superiority. The latest over-cost American fighter jet, for example, according to the Air Force’s own conclusions cannot match the old figher it is intended to replace, whereas the lastest Russian fighter is said to have the capability to electronically shut down American control systems, track simultaneously 24 enemy fighters and lock on 10 simultanteously for unavoidable destruction. Members of the US military command have expressed concern over the high quality of Russian weapon systems.

Everyone needs to understand that the establishments of the two American political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are less interested in winning the election than in continuing to control the party. Trump and Sanders are hated by the party establishments, because Trump and Sanders are not members of the establishment. Control over the party by the party establishment is so important that we have many members of the Republican establishment declaring that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, they will vote for the Democrat. This has happened before. It was Republicans who denied the presidency to Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

The United States is a failing society. Citizens’ hopes are being snuffed out. There are few good jobs or enough jobs of any kind, as the collapse of the labor force participation rate confirms. People are drowning in debts that they have no prospect of ever paying off. Young adults cannot form independent households. The oligarchy that rules and controls the country has committed America to massively expensive wars and privacy invasions for the purpose of establishing a hegemony that enriches elite private interests.

The corrupt and unrepentant financial sector, having survived its mortgage-backed security fiasco without prosecution or correction has repeated its previous folly with a new weapon of potential financial mass destrution. Speculators have bought up distressed properties and rented them. The rental streams are bundled into financial instruments, as were the mortgage payments previously, and sold to investors. Is a renter more committed and better able to pay than a person with a mortgage?

Jobs offshoring and financialization have drained the US economy of the ability to grow. The ladders of upward mobility have been dismantled, and the service of debt curtails consumer demand for goods and services. The wage saving from offshoring jobs raises corporate profits and brings executive bonuses and capital gains to the One Percent. Financialization diverts consumer purchasing power into the service of debt. The result is stagnation and decline.

Foreign policy based on threats and coercion means constant conflict. The US has been in constant conflict since the Clinton regime overthrew the government in Serbia. Constant conflict is expensive, and Americans have had these expensive costs imposed on them simultaneously with the costs of jobs offshoring and financialization.

It was 20 months ago that Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was destroyed over Ukraine. Despite the inability of the investigation to come to a conclusion, from the first moment Western propaganda has blamed the loss of 298 lives on Russia. Three days after the airliner’s destruction, US Secretary of State John Kerry set in stone the blame on Russia with his claim that “we saw the take-off [of the Buk missile]. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this airplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ever-curiouser-mh-17-case/5514946

If the US has all the evidence, why hasn’t the US government released it? Obviously, there is no such evidence. Why would Washington fail to release evidence that proved Russian responsibility? Kerry’s evidence no more exists than the alleged evidence the US government claims to have from numerous security cameras that a passenger airliner hit the Pentagon on 9/11. If the government had such evidence why has the government refused to release it for almost 15 years? If the government produced this evidence, it would be a death blow to the 9/11 Truth movement. The evidence no more exists than the alleged evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, that Assad used chemical weapons, that Russia invaded Ukraine.

The terms of the last three US presidents have been used to squander trillions of dollars on pointless wars and construction of a domestic police state on the basis of a non-existant “terrorist threat.” This alleged threat has been reinforced with false flag events and a fake history spun from lies repeateded endlessly by government and its presstitutes.

In 1994 Christopher Lasch wrote in The Revolt of the Elites: “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy.” As Lasch said, the greed of the elites for money and power have undermined the constitutional basis of the United States. The elites have used their power to betray democracy. Will the American people succeed in clawing back their democracy?

2016 Words for 2016: On New Year’s Eve Our Future Hope is Imperial

The Romans…the bandits of the whole world…their greed is excited by an enemy’s wealth, their lust for power by his poverty…robbery, butchery, rape…they create devastation and call it peace.

Words attributed by Tacitus to the British leader Calcagus, after his defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Mons Graupius in AD 84

Introduction: The Last Twenty-Five Years

Many were deluded by the collapse of Communism twenty-five years ago, indeed so blinded that they could not see the ensuing and still impending chaos caused by the hubristic attempt of the USA to rule the world. Their Western vanity flattered, the deluded actually still believe in the myth of American Imperialism, ‘the New World Order’, that ‘liberal-democratic’ secularism has triumphed over all other ideologies and faiths. They actually believe that history has ended, that the global future is with the Imperialism of Washington and its absurd materialist ideology – ‘The West is Best over the Rest’. They have failed to revise their views and still now actually believe that there is no alternative to their primitive, spiteful, soul-destroying and world-destroying fantasy.

In reality, the anti-Christian Zionist elite which bankrupted Communism, through its ability to indebt and so enslave to bankers the peoples that it oppresses, failed many years ago. Its New World Order has become the New World Disorder, in North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe. As Russian aeroplanes and Chinese troops enter Syria, it is already dead. Although that Imperialist elite still governs the US and its bloc of vassal-states, it is utterly discredited. It is not only utterly immoral through its Mammonism, but its global power-grab has visibly ended in catastrophe. Instead of peace and prosperity, it has brought to the world unspeakable wars and misery, exploitation and environmental destruction, chaos and spiritual poverty, as well as uprooting hundreds of millions of families from their ancestral homes worldwide. And this devastation they do indeed call peace. The Imperialist elite has brought not life but death, with the apocalyptic threat of Armageddon in the background.

However, there are those who have not been deluded by the toys and baubles, bread and circuses, of globalist Consumerism and have not given up the struggle to find an alternative. They have sought a way out – though often by violent reaction to Western genocide some of them have also made the most appalling errors. For example, by reaction to global Western Imperialism, fanatical Islamists have turned to the horrors and abominations of terrorism. Nobody in their right mind admires or follows such Satanized individuals. They do not understand that further destruction is no response to destruction, that only construction is positive. Others, also by reaction to the selfsame globalism, have turned to narrow and provincial nationalism, failing to realize that in a globalized world, no small or even large nation can stand alone against the powers that be. United we stand, divided we fall.

Such is the fate of those in European countries who want to reclaim their sovereignty, resisting and abandoning the death-giving embrace of the Imperialist EU beast. For example, there are now strong nationalist political movements in the UK, France, Greece, Hungary, Poland and in many other countries on other continents, as in India and China. In Europe they do not understand that standing alone they will be crushed by the EU tyranny, behind which stands its parent, the Washington elite. In India and China they do not understand that, despite their size, they are still provincial, lacking global reach. However, if the ‘liberal-democratic’ myth of the West can be rejected as the failure that it is, together with the horrors of Islamist terrorism and the provinciality of narrow nationalism, even if that nationalism is on a sub-continental scale like the Hindu or the Chinese, what hope then is left?

The Alternative

Clearly, any hope that is left can only be something that is not immoral like Western Imperialism, that is not violent like Islamism, and that is not provincial like European nationalism, anti-Christian Hinduism or Chinese Communism. We would suggest that what is left can be summed up not by the word ‘Imperialism’, but by its opposite, the word ‘Imperial’. This may seem mystifying, since for many the two words mean the same thing and in any case ‘all empires are destined to fail’. History indeed tends to confirm the latter statement: the Persian, the Egyptian, the Macedonian, the pagan Roman, the ‘Holy Roman’, the Ottoman, the French, the British, the Soviet and many another Empire all rose and then fell.

However, the fact is that all who were not part of such passing Empires had to become their vassals or allies and were obliged to accept their policies. Such is the case today with the EU Fourth Reich (Reich = Empire), which crushes national sovereignty and obliges its members to do whatever its Imperialist US designers order it to do. Today’s ‘democracies’ in Western Europe are so weak that they must obey their Imperialist masters in Berlin and Washington. In the same way Hitler’s Third Reich smashed all the European ‘democracies’ and only another Empire, the Soviet, was able to overcome it, in the same way as only the Russian Empire had been able to overcome Hitler’s predecessor, Napoleon’s Empire.

In other words, only a powerful Empire can withstand another powerful Empire. We can see this today; no European ‘democracy’ has been able to withstand the Globalist Empire of Washington, they have all fallen to it one by one. Today, for instance, once Orthodox Christian but now apostatic Greece has allowed homosexual ‘marriage’, just as Montenegro is being forced by violence to join NATO and the occupied Ukraine is being tempted by its temporary government into the vulgar consumerism and profoundly ungay ‘gay’ parades of American Imperialism. Other countries, like India and China, merely resist that Imperialism in nationalistic words, but in fact imitate it from inside.

In fact, only one country, and one which does indeed have an Imperial, that is, multinational, profile resists and refuses to become a US vassal, and that is the Russian Federation, one eighth of the world. It alone has been strong enough to rebuff without either fanaticism or provincial nationalism. Western Imperialist meddling, which destroys national traditions and identities, local cultures and family life, provoking chaotic conflicts and bloody wars with its attempted imposition of the global MacWorld ‘culture’ of the ‘New World Order’ or ‘New World War’. It has done this on the basis of Christianity. Only that Christianity, restored as a Christian Empire, based in Russia, can resist – on condition, however, that its Imperial Empire does not fall into Imperialism, as it tended to do before the Revolution. Let us explain.

The globalist ‘New World Order’ is not democratic at all, that is a myth. It is in fact the dictatorship of an oligarchic elite, artificially divided into two parts, so providing the myth of democratic choice. It runs political parties, industries, banks, the media, the whole Establishment, and threatens those who counter it. Founded on the genocide of millions of Native Americans, the abhorrent slave trade in millions of Native Africans, a genocidal civil war, the bloodshed of two World Wars and the countless local wars of the twentieth century, it is trying to control the world. It subjugates peoples and countries by military aggression, colour revolutions, juntas and propaganda lies, ‘banana republicanizing’ by using local mafia networks to support itself and living off the resulting chaos. This is Imperialist – not Imperial.

For the mark of Imperialism, colonial or neo-colonial, is the suppression of local cultures and the genocide of peoples who resist the monoculture that it imposes. However, the one Empire that has lasted by far the longest has been Imperial, that is multinational and indeed multi-religious, accepting diversity. Quite different from the pagan Roman Empire, this is the Christian Roman Empire. Founded in the early fourth century in New Rome, it continued until it was interrupted by decadent Greek nationalism in 1453, then soon after restored in the Third Rome until it was interrupted by decadent Russian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Its restoration is now under way. It has survived interruptions precisely because, despite deviations in periods of decadence, it has not been based on Imperialism, but has been Imperial, that is, it has been founded on the Christian revelation of the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity.

Conclusion: The Next Twenty-Five Years?

Only in the framework of the Imperial and Trinitarian concept can sovereignty and ethnic differences be combined and the identity of diverse peoples be protected from corrosive, centralizing Imperialist globalism, terrorism and provincial nationalism. Such globalism was precisely the error of the neo-Khazar Bolshevik Empire, which lasted scarcely three generations because it was based on genocide as it imposed a single centralized model on Central Asians, Eastern Europeans, Baltic peoples, Finns and Ukrainians alike. The question of the restoration of the Russian Empire is vital to preserving the national identities of a hundred and more peoples, not least that of Little Russians. The alternative is that they all become second-class citizens, cannon fodder and pawns in the game of chaos of American Imperialism, as we can see is happening to Ukrainians, Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, Mexicans and many other peoples worldwide.

The fact is that the Russian Federation is today the only country in the world which is defending Christian values. And this despite, or rather because of, the fact that twenty-five years ago it lived under the oppression of an imported atheist regime which was responsible for the multi-millioned martyrdom of Christians, by far the greatest known to history, and despite the fact that it is still suffering from the dreadful though now dying hangover of that atheism. This miracle has always been ignored by the Western world. Why? Because that world is in fact by ideology anti-Christian, having violently quit the Church 1,000 years ago. That is why all surviving remnants of authentic Christianity among the non-deluded peoples of the Western world look to the Russian Orthodox Church with hope. That is also why Russia is hated by the Trostskist post-modernist ideology of the Western liberal-neocon elite and is slandered by its closely-controlled media. For them ugliness has become beauty, noise has become music, discord has become harmony and lies have become truth.

An Imperialist Empire, in words first uttered by the Victorian Imperialist Palmerston, has ‘no permanent friends, only permanent interests’. However, an Imperial Empire does have friends, for it is a symphony of peoples, cultures and beliefs; but it needs an Emperor and that is what is lacking in the still post-Soviet Russian Federation today. Why? Firstly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique focus of belief and so channel his subjects, elite and people alike, into the service of the Empire. Secondly, because only an Emperor can control and limit the oligarchs or aristocrats and stop them becoming too powerful and so tyrannizing and exploiting the people. And thirdly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique commander-in-chief in the event of war.

As to who will become the Emperor of the restored Christian Empire that alone can restrain growing evil worldwide, we do not know. Only Providence can reveal him after repentance of the whole people. What we know is that only an Emperor, in the name of his repentant Orthodox people, can prove the Imperial truth that ‘Right is Might’ and disprove the Imperialist lie that ‘Might is Right’. The peoples of the Russian Federation, like all other peoples all over the world, have a choice to make: to subject themselves to barbaric Imperialism and accept the same fate as Yugoslavs, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, or else to unite and repent. If so, then we can await with hope the Emperor who will restore and defend Imperial Christianity, authentic Christianity, soaring like the double-headed eagle above East and West alike. And that is why, unlike unfaithful, compromised, Establishment Halfodox, all faithful Orthodox, wherever we live scattered across the face of the earth, are Imperial.

America Is Being Destroyed By Problems That Are Unaddressed

By Paul Craig Roberts

One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.

The fresh Amerian machine gun and barbed wire fodder weakened the German position, and an armistance was agreed. The Germans were promised no territorial losses and no reparations if they laid down their arms, which they did only to be betrayed at Versailles. The injustice and stupidity of the Versailles Treaty produced the German hyperinflation, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Hitler.

Hitler’s demands that Germany be put back together from the pieces handed out to France, Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, comprising 13 percent of Germany’s European territory and one-tenth of her population, and a repeat of French and British stupidity that had sired the Great War finished off the remnants of European civilization in World War II.

The United States benefitted greatly from this death. The economy of the United States was left untouched by both world wars, but economies elsewhere were destroyed. This left Washington and the New York banks the arbiters of the world economy. The US dollar replaced British sterling as the world reserve currency and became the foundation of US domination in the second half of the 20th century, a domination limited in its reach only by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet collapse in 1991 removed this constraint from Washington. The result was a burst of American arrogance and hubris that wiped away in over-reach the leadership power that had been handed to the United States. Since the Clinton regime, Washington’s wars have eroded American leadership and replaced stability in the Middle East and North Africa with chaos.

Washington moved in the wrong direction both in the economic and political arenas. In place of diplomacy, Washington used threats and coercion. “Do as you are told or we will bomb you into the stone age,” as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told President Musharraf of Pakistan. Not content to bully weak countries, Washington threatens powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran with economic sanctions and military actions.

Consequently, much of the non-Western world is abandoning the US dollar as world currency, and a number of countries are organizing a payments system, World Bank, and IMF of their own. Some NATO members are rethinking their membership in an organization that Washington is herding into conflict with Russia.

China’s unexpectedly rapid rise to power owes much to the greed of American capitalism. Pushed by Wall Street and the lure of “performance bonuses,” US corporate executives brought a halt to rising US living standards by sending high productivity, high value-added jobs abroad where comparable work is paid less. With the jobs went the technology and business knowhow. American capability was given to China. Apple Computer, for example, has not only offshored the jobs but also outsourced its production. Apple does not own the Chinese factories that produce its products.

The savings in US labor costs became corporate profits, executive renumeration, and shareholder capital gains. One consequence was the worsening of the US income distribution and the concentration of income and wealth in few hands. A middle class democracy was transformed into an oligarchy. As former President Jimmy Carter recently said, the US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy.

In exchange for short-term profits and in order to avoid Wall Street threats of takeovers, capitalists gave away the American economy. As manufacturing and tradeable professional skill jobs flowed out of America, real family incomes ceased to grow and declined. The US labor force participation rate fell even as economic recovery was proclaimed. Job gains were limited to lowly paid domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses, and bartenders, and part-time jobs replaced full-time jobs. Young people entering the work force find it increasingly difficult to establish an independent existence, with 50 percent of 25-year old Americans living at home with parents.

In an economy driven by consumer and investment spending, the absence of growth in real consumer income means an economy without economic growth. Led by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve in the first years of the 21st century substituted a growth in consumer debt for the missing growth in consumer income in order to keep the economy moving. This could only be a short-term palliative, because the growth of consumer debt is limited by the growth of consumer income.

Another serious mistake was the repeal of financial regulation that had made capitalism functional. The New York Banks were behind this egregious error, and they used their bought-and-paid-for Texas US Senator, whom they rewarded with a 7-figure salary and bank vice chairmanship to open the floodgates to amazing debt leverage and financial fraud with the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall destroyed the separation of commercial from investment banking. One result was the concentration of banking. Five mega-banks now dominate the American financial scene. Another result was the power that the mega-banks gained over the government of the United States. Today the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve serve only the interests of the mega-banks.

In the United States savers have had no interest on their savings in eight years. Those who saved for their retirement in order to make paltry Social Security benefits liveable have had to draw down their capital, leaving less inheritance for hard-pressed sons, grandsons, daughters and granddaughters.

Washington’s financial policy is forcing families to gradually extinguish themselves. This is “freedom and democracy “ America today.

Among the capitalist themselves and their shills among the libertarian ideologues, who are correct about the abuse of government power but less concerned with the abuse of private power, the capitalist greed that is destroying families and the economy is regarded as the road to progress. By distrusting government regulators of private misbehavior, libertarians provided the cover for the repeal of the financial regulation that made American capitalism functional. Today dysfunctional capitalism rules, thanks to greed and libertarian ideology.

With the demise of the American middle class, which becomes more obvious each day as another ladder of upward mobility is dismantled, the United States becomes a bipolar country consisting of the rich and the poor. The most obvious conclusion is that the failure of American political leadership means instability, leading to a conflict between the haves—the one percent—and the dispossessed—the 99 percent.

The failure of leadership in the United States is not limited to the political arena but is across the board. The time horizon operating in American institutions is very short term. Just as US manufacturers have harmed US demand for their products by moving abroad American jobs and the consumer income associated with the jobs, university administrations are destroying universities. As much as 75 percent of university budgets is devoted to administration. There is a proliferation of provosts, assistant provosts, deans, assistant deans, and czars for every designated infraction of political correctness.

Tenure-track jobs, the bedrock of academic freedom, are disappearing as university administrators turn to adjuncts to teach courses for a few thousand dollars. The decline in tenure-track jobs heralds a decline in enrollments in Ph.D. programs. University enrollments overall are likely to decline. The university experience is eroding at the same time that the financial return to a university education is eroding. Increasingly students graduate into an employment environment that does not produce sufficient income to service their student loans or to form independent households.

Increasingly university research is funded by the Defense Department and by commercial interests and serves those interests. Universities are losing their role as sources of societal critics and reformers. Truth itself is becoming commercialized.

The banking system, which formerly financed business, is increasingly focused on converting as much of the economy as possible into leveraged debt instruments. Even consumer spending is reduced with high credit card interest rate charges. Indebtedness is rising faster than the real production in the economy.

Historically, capitalism was justified on the grounds that it guaranteed the efficient use of society’s resources. Profits were a sign that resources were being used to maximize social welfare, and losses were a sign of inefficient resource use, which was corrected by the firm going out of business. This is no longer the case when the economic policy of a counry serves to protect financial institutions that are “too big to fail” and when profits reflect the relocation abroad of US GDP as a result of jobs offshoring. Clearly, American capitalism no longer serves society, and the worsening distribution of income and wealth prove it.

None of these serious problems will be addressed by the presidential candidates, and no party’s platform will consist of a rescue plan for America. Unbridled greed, short-term in nature, will continue to drive America into the ground.

Ex-Czech President Klaus: EU Exists Because It Is in US’ Interest

http://russia-insider.com/en/why-dont-you-ask-merkel-or-gauck/ri11815?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=b1afd287a0-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-b1afd287a0-183204397&ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=b1afd287a0&mc_eid=5c8d1856f4

The Curious Council

The Inter-Orthodox Council, with a token number of bishops from each of the fourteen Local Churches and supposed to take place in May 2016 to discuss administrative issues, is looking increasingly troubled. First, there is the schism between the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Then there were rumours after contacts with top US officials that the US State Department was trying to set the agenda, specifically regarding homosexuality. Then there was news from the Russian Orthodox Church that delegates from several Local Churches, notably the Russian, the Romanian (the second biggest) and the Georgian, had failed to agree on the contents of several points in the seemingly US-determined agenda.

Hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church then expressed popular concern that the Council was taking place at all. After all Constantinople had not long before sent schismatic representatives of the Ukrainian Church in Canada (the fraction under Constantinople) to Kiev for reasons which the Ukrainian Church naturally found sinister. After this came the news that the elderly Patriarch Bartholomew had erected a statue to himself and that he would never recognize the Carpatho-Russian Metr Rostislav as the representative of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Then came the Patriarch’s visit to Bulgaria when he insulted the Bulgarian people and a diplomatic incident followed and the Bulgarian Prime Minister refused to meet the Patriarch. Some even asked if Patriarch Bartholomew’s behaviour was designed to sabotage his own Council.

After this the Synod in Constantinople sacked the hierarch appointed only two years before for the modernist Paris Jurisdiction, Archbishop Job. Next came the shooting down by Turkey – some say at US instigation – of a Russian aeroplane. The result of this is that the Russian delegation felt unable to attend the next preparatory meeting in Istanbul for the future Council. Indeed, the question was asked if the Council could even take place in Istanbul, as had been proposed. Some have suggested, as we suggested in our booklet, ‘The World Council of Orthodoxy’ in May 2007, that any future Council take place at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, where alone a politically free Council could take place.

Next came the Pope’s welcome for the Council – in effect compromising it, making it appear just to be a cheap copy of the Vatican’s disastrously divisive and US-Protestant-style Second Council of 50 years ago. Then came the Pope’s greeting to Patriarch Bartholomew on the Catholic St Andrew’s Day, looking forward to the day when Catholics, without repentance, would be in full communion with Constantinople. Then came the news that a joint commission of the Russian and Bulgarian Churches had agreed that there were no objections to the canonization of the much revered Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), the archbishop in Sofia of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia who was the hero of the Moscow Council of 1948, which denounced ecumenism.

Now news has come that Archbishop Jerome of Athens, the head of the Church of Greece, will not attend the next preparatory meeting in Istanbul. There is speculation that this is connected with the  claims of Patriarch Bartholomew to Greek territory. And also the news that Rome and Constantinople are celebrating (!) the 50th anniversary of the highly controversial (and some would say meaningless) lifting of the 1054 anathemas between Rome and Constantinople does not help. As Patriarch Alexis I of Moscow pointed out at the time this event has no importance whatsoever for the mass of the Orthodox Church as a whole, since it is an event that concerns only the Local Church of Constantinople and Roman Catholicism. Even so the event was rejected at the time and is still today rejected by the devout and politically free of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

It can be concluded without hesitation that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is looking increasingly isolated from the mainstream of the Orthodox Church and its Council project, at least in its old form, is looking increasingly in doubt. As has been said throughout Christian history: man proposes, but God disposes.

On Mr Trump et al

In the UK only last week Parliament decided to bomb IS in Syria. It seemed very strange when only two years ago, it was considering bombing the enemy of the IS, the Syrian Army. How you can change sides in just two years is something of a mystery. However, an even greater mystery is why you should bomb in a foreign country thousands of miles away without asking the permission of its government. Had President Assad requested British help, it would look very different. It seems that the UK Establishment is so arrogant that it thinks that it has the right to bomb other countries regardless of what the local government wishes. For example, the Syrian government does not vote on whether to bomb criminal groups in the UK. Apart from a murderous fanatic in east London, probably no-one is very alarmed by any of this token bombing, however. This is because the tiny number of air strikes by the tiny number of British aeroplanes from the tiny Royal Air Force will make very little difference at all.

In the US, Mr Trump, a Republican candidate for the Presidency has suggested that all Muslims should be banned from the USA. Of course this may simply be an attack on President Obama, whom a majority of Republicans believe to be a Muslim. It is true that at present, whether in the Middle East, or in Paris, or in California or in London, fanatics who are Muslims are murdering the innocent. It is also true that, like Judaism, Islam is inherently an Old Testament religion with an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, ethos, an ethos that encourages violence and revenge, that it has not known the Christian reality of love and forgiveness that flow from the Resurrection. On the other hand, it is also true that there are plenty of so-called Christians who are no less Old Testament in their mentality and have as little idea of love, forgiveness and the Resurrection as the average Muslim. Mr Trump may well be one of them.

Any reader of the history of how Charlemagne slaughtered the Saxons will confirm the Old Testament mentality of many so-called Christians. Any reader of the history of the Crusades will confirm this. Any reader of the history of how the Catholic conquistadors and the Protestant cowboys massacred Native Americans will confirm this. Any reader of the history of how Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and created artificial client states like the Lebanon, Syria, the Jordan and Iraq, thus guaranteeing civil wars, will confirm this. And any reader of the history of how the Western Powers have over the last 25 years massacred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria will confirm this. Sad to say, for many tens of millions of Muslims the only terrorists in the world are the Western Powers which massacre in the Muslim world and bring the Western weapons of mass destruction to their bloodied lands. Mr Trump’s concept shows the sort of xenophobic arrogance and insular ignorance that is familiar in the UK only through its most crass and discredited tabloid newspapers.

At the present time the world is on fire. Madness has seized the world. It is as though new words from the Book of Revelation are being read every month. Hundreds are being massacred every day, in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Mali and in Nigeria, and many others are drowning in desperate escape bids across the Mediterranean. What is required to avert an even more terrible and widespread war than those already taking place in North Africa and the Middle East is water, not oil.

Who is Speaking in New York?

‘Do not take the path that we took. We tried it and it is the path that leads to destruction’.

Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and all the Russias,
speaking to the West and referring to atheism

On Thurs 24 September the reputed BBC Newsnight programme called President Putin – ‘the Leader of the Free World’. This was an astonishing turnaround given the usual caricatures, stereotypes and character assassinations vomited forth by the Establishment-run BBC towards the political leader of the Christian world. Somehow these words must have escaped the tight State censorship system that binds the BBC. Having said that, the statement was wrong. Why? In order to answer this question, we must take a look at some history over the last 100 years or so.

First of all, this statement was made by a BBC journalist in the context of the disastrous US policy of deliberately creating chaos in the Middle East. This has notably been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and throughout all the countries where the CIA-orchestrated ‘Arab Spring’ took place. The fact that this divide and rule policy has resulted in two trillion dollars of US debt, hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of mainly Muslim refugees, of whom 10,000 a day (3.65 million per year at that rate) are now entering the EU, is beginning to dawn even on the Western media. The refugees pass as swiftly as possible through the EU-created employment desert and poverty of Greece and Eastern Europe and head for Germany and Scandinavia. With the threat of the collapse of the Western-installed oligarch regime in the bankrupt Ukraine and millions more refugees, the message is getting through even to Western politicians that something must be done by someone who, unlike them, is competent.

Fresh from the Russian diplomatic triumph in Iran, President Putin is now doing in Syria what the West should have done from the start – supporting the lesser evil against the greater evil, supporting President Assad against IS. Having completely lost control of the Middle East through its anarchic and murderous meddling, the West is lost. By backing savage terrorists and fanatics against popular Arab leaders like Assad, Khadafy and Hussein, once all feted by the West itself, it is now left to Russia, backed by Non-Western countries all over the world, to clean up the mess. The West has always backed traitors and murderers, imagining them to be its friends, and so lost its real, if critical, friends. Thus, in the same way it has supported President Poroshenko against President Putin, creating its own nightmares.

This was exactly the case with the Western-organized Russian Revolution. At the beginning of 1917, mainly through the poisonous British ambassador Buchanan, the West launched a coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg through treacherous Russian aristocrats and generals. This coup d’etat, overthrowing the legitimate government, just as the West overthrew the legitimate Yanukovich government in the Ukraine last year, was fanatically and blindly welcomed by Lloyd George and the French and US leaders of the time. By deposing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed in 1917, the West thought that it could prevent the rise of Russia, poised to conquer Vienna and Berlin and so control European destinies, and set up a puppet government there. Instead, the tiny minority of incompetent pro-Western buffoons within seven months lost control, ran away to Paris, and the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, took over.

The same is happening today throughout the Middle East and in the Ukraine, where extremists, whether from IS or from the Right Sector, are poised to take over from feeble Western puppets. The West has created IS, which already controls large parts of Iraq and Syria and is ready to take over derelict Afghanistan, where bankrupt UK governments wasted 450 British lives and £35 billion in trying to support its puppets. In the Ukraine the hope is that the Ukrainian people will rise up against the Poroshenko/Waltzman mafia and its CIA henchmen, freeing themselves from US-armed Right Sector Fascist terrorists. In some areas of the Ukraine they have already found freedom against Western-imposed tyranny; it remains to be seen whether the junta will survive another winter.

The West has understood nothing. The Russians have understood everything. Why? Because Russia went through 75 years of atheism and its ideology of death and saw through its destructive myths, whereas the West has consistently refused to heed the Russian experience and has now imposed atheism. This can be clearly seen in the CIA-organized Pussy Riot obscenity in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Some previously unknown sick young women were paid to blaspheme standing by the holy of holies in a Cathedral rebuilt by the donations of the Russian people. It was rebuilt on the site of the Cathedral which had been built to commemorate the people’s victory over the Western invader and blasphemer Napoleon and had then been blown up by the Bolsheviks, who had come to power through Western meddling in the name of Western, Marxist ideology.

The hysterical young women of Pussy Riot were in Russian eyes simply latter-day, Western-sponsored Bolsheviks, beloved by Western liberals and pro-Fascist Senator McCain alike. Such an anti-Christian provocation, paid for and feted by the West, shows that the modern West is in fact anti-Christian. The spirit of Bolshevik atheism is alive and well in the new Satanic, Western hatred of Christ and of mankind, in the cult of egoism and careerism, in the cult of the ‘human right’ or ‘freedom’ to blaspheme in the Cathedral of Christ or in Charlie Hebdo, in homosexual ‘marriage’, in the persecution of all who disagree with atheism, in suicidal abortion and euthanasia on demand and in the totalitarian, terroristic tyranny of political ‘correctness’. In its atheism the new West has adopted the civilization of death that the Bolsheviks once espoused.

However, today’s Russia is returning to its Christian roots and values, which are the values of St Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor. These values are not nationalistic, for ‘Russia’ is not simply a nation, but it is a spiritual concept, a state of mind, in the same way as the Christian Empire of St Constantine was not some mere nationalistic project, but a multinational reality. Indeed, when the Empire degenerated into a nationalistic project on two occasions, in Germanized Old Rome and in Hellenized Constantinople, it collapsed. After the collapse of the Second Christian Empire in 1453, undermined first by barbarian Western ‘crusaders’, then by Muslim fanatics and then by internal pro-Catholic traitors, the Christian Empire was transferred to Russia for its third and final incarnation. Overthrown in 1917 by ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’, both external and internal, the Empire is now reviving.

Today’s Russia is amazed by the Bolshevikization of political ‘correctness’ of the contemporary West and by the Islamization in its ever-larger ghettoes. This is what happens, they say in Russia, when you lose your roots – as we nearly did under atheist Communism. Has the West learned nothing from our experience of 75 years of Marxist atheism and the Cold War? In 2007 I spoke to a deputy of the Russian State Duma on this very question and he answered me: ‘No, the West has learned nothing because the West is too proud to take lessons from others, so it will have to undergo its own atheist persecutions before it can understand. Just as a child who refuses to obey its parent who tells him not to put his finger in the fire, and learns the hard way, so too will it be with the West’. Russia underwent the culture of death, but has come back to life; now the West is undergoing the culture of death and refusing life, refusing to learn from Russia’s experience.

Today, the USA and its vassal nations in NATO is ringing the Christian Empire with ships, planes, tanks, weapons, including nuclear weapons of mass destruction, troops and military exercises only a few hundred metres from Russian borders. Russia is protecting itself as the last bulwark of Christ and mounting defensive military exercises in return. Icons of the Mother of God are weeping in the Crimea as the Kiev puppet regime tries to starve the free Crimean population into surrendering to its tyranny. However, the flag of the double-headed eagle is flying over the Eastern Ukraine, liberated by its population who have risen against the oppressors. Today, Western-created, sponsored and financed terrorists in Syria have to face Russian arms. The West presents Russia as its enemy. This is hypocrisy. The West has only one enemy: itself.

However, I have still not directly answered the question as to why the BBC journalists are wrong to call President Putin ‘the Leader of the Free World’. They are wrong because he only represents the constant truths of Russian Foreign Policy, Eternal Russia, the Eternal Christian Empire. The reader of any survey of the foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas II (1) will know that what is now being done in today’s Russia is merely continuity with the past. 1917 merely put off the inevitable, the worldwide spread of Christian values by the Christian Empire which the Russian Federation is now becoming once more. True, the Christian Empire was interrupted by the Soviet period, especially under Leninism and Trotskyism and especially until 1941. Then the West, this time in its Nazi Barbarossa format, though much inspired by the Kaiser’s Prussian format, once more invaded Russia, thus ironically ensuring not the destruction of Russia, but its inevitable revival.

In 1917 the anti-Christian West did not stop but only delayed the development of the Christian Empire. The more sensitive, politically free and spiritually awakened in the rest of the Orthodox world, in the Local Churches of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, of Serbia, Georgia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus and on Mt Athos and elsewhere, have also known it for a very long time. In the monasteries and parishes of the Church Outside Russia, renewed in recent years both by a new emigration from the Russian Lands and by Western people who have seen through the lies and joined the Russian Church, we too have known it for a very long time also. We who in the Russian emigration, scattered across the face of the world, prayed and waited for decades for this moment of revival, rejoice. The historic injustice of 1917 and its Western-orchestrated coup d’etat is slowly being righted – even within our lifetimes.

Who is the Leader of the Free World? Who supported the Boers and the Tibetans, the Thais and the Ethiopians, the Mongols and the Moroccans, the Christians of Syria and Palestine? Who would have had peace in the Jerusalem instead of riots of Zionists and Muslims on the Temple Mount? Who was welcomed as the ‘White Tsar’ by Muslims and Buddhists alike? ‘While he was alive, millions of Arabs lived in peace and security. When the news reached the Middle Esat that they had killed the Tsar in Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine, mass suicides began. Arabs even then considered that with the death of Tsar Nicholas human history was at an end and that life on earth had lost all meaning’. (2). Who is the Leader of the Free World who speaks before over 100 world leaders at the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations through his representative Vladimir Putin? It is the peace-loving Tsar Nicholas II, who founded the predecessor of the UN in the Hague in the century before last. Of the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, we, like V.V. Putin, are merely servants and it is he who speaks at the UN through our voices.

Notes:

1. For example:

The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II, by S. S. Oldenburg, several editions. (In English: The Last Tsar: Nicholas II, his reign and his Russia, S. S. Oldenburg, translated by Leonid I. Mihalap and Patrick J. Rollins)

The Last Grand Duchess: Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, by Ian Vorres, 1964. (Translated into Russian in 1996)

The Foreign Policy of Tsar Nicholas II by P. V. Multatuli, Moscow 2012 (in Russian)

2. Vernye (The Faithful, on those who did not Betray the Imperial Martyrs), by O. V. Chernova, Moscow, 2010, p. 30 (in Russian)

Crisis in Greek Orthodoxy: Crisis in Greece

The Argentinian Bishop of Rome has suggested that that his organization and the Orthodox Church ‘reform’ the date of Easter and select a fixed date for the feast of feasts, presumably some time in April. For 40 years and more travel agents and other business interests have been asking for precisely this. In Istanbul the nominally Orthodox Phanar has answered the Pope’s demand, declaring that, ‘in recent years, especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain, unfortunately, certain forces in certain national Churches have spoken against the idea of a reform’. This of course is simply code for Russophobia, as written in Washington, but it also says that the apostasy of the Phanariot bureaucrats is now complete. Only the Orthodox are preventing from abandoning the Faith altogether.

It is amazing that within a hundred years the Phanar has gone from Orthodoxy to utter spiritual irrelevance. It seems only honest now that the few dozen bureaucrats with their token beards who run the Phanar on money provided by the US State Department should join Roman Catholicism with a special Uniat status. That would leave the Orthodox clergy and people of the Patriarchate of Constantinople free to practise their Faith without having to blush. To continue in any other form is simply breathtakingly dishonest. Ever since the Anglicans paid £100,000 (worth tens of millions in today’s money) for Metr Meletios (Metaksakis) to become Patriarch of Constantinople ninety years ago, we have grown used to such apostasy in the Phanar, with certain pauses, such as that under Patriarch Maximos (deposed by the CIA in 1948). But this statement plumbs new depths.

All of this happens against the background of the US-fomented rebellion in EEU (Eurasian Economic Union) Armenia (their next target after Syria, Libya, the Ukraine and the Yemen) and the crisis in Greece. Greece, a country which was a British puppet until 1948 and then an American one, with the CIA installing the banana republic Fascist colonels’ regime until 1974, and then handing it over to the present EU colonial regime under Berlin, is facing a choice between the EU under US-controlled and CIA-hacked Berlin and the EEU under Moscow. In a word, it faces continued slavery or freedom.

The EU is highly annoyed. Having imposed the euro almost without any democratic referenda anywhere (especially not in Germany, where a vast majority would have rejected it), the new Greek government, unlike the EU-imposed bandits who ran the country before, is now giving its people a choice. The choice between continuing to be a holiday resort for swaggering German and drunken British tourists and becoming a free country with dignity, seems obvious. However, the latter choice will mean less wealth. It is, in other words, a spiritual question:

Do you want to sell your soul for a mess of pottage, or do you want to be a humble part of the resurrected multinational Christian Orthodox Empire with an Emperor in Moscow, a spiritual leader for the other EU-enslaved Balkan countries?

Do you wish to be proud and enslaved flag-waving nationalists, flattered for this by the hypocritical USA which in fact despises your culture as mere folklore, continuing to be humiliated and intimidated as a vassal state of the successors of the Nazi Party in Berlin, or do you wish to become free men and women again?

Do you wish to continue to be part of the feudal empire of the unHoly unRoman Emperor in the White House in Washington, or do you wish to get your souls back from the devil you sold them to all those years ago?

It is your choice.

The Fall of the American Empire

All empires have risen and fallen, whether in Persia, Egypt, India, China, Japan, South and Central America, Africa or Europe. They rise when they have a creative power to give to the world and they fall when they stop giving and become negative and destructive. This explains why some last long, but others fall very quickly. History confirms this; thus the Western Roman Empire, for all its pagan cruelty, lasted for centuries because it had a civilization and a culture, not just great walls and roads, towns and cities, but poetry and art, sculpture and painting. Why did it fall? Because it became decadent (a word that means falling, but in a moral sense), in other words, because it lost its way, lost its civilizing force for good.

European Empires, like the French and the British, lasted, arguably, for some six generations. But they too fell. The British Empire justified itself for a time by bringing the Word of God to a great many peoples; but it fell because its very elite came to reject that selfsame Word of God and instead lived for greed. The Eastern Roman Empire, heir to Old Rome, also fell, though after over a millennium, in 1453. Why? Because it became prey to Greek nationalism and alienated peoples of other languages and cultures around it, limiting the Gospel on which it was based, to a narrow ethnic understanding. So that Empire was transferred to Russia. However, the Russian Empire also fell after some 300 years. Why? Because its elite stopped believing in its underlying principles and betrayed them and also betrayed their Emperor.

Today the world is dominated by the American Empire. Sixty years ago or so many thought very highly of it. It seemed to be philanthropic, a model. Sacks of rice, marked ‘A gift from the USA’ saved thousands of lives. America was the dream because it held to the Good Book, to Biblical and family values, to common human ideals and was enormously generous. Today its flag is spat upon and burned around the world. Opinion polls declare that most of the world’s people see the USA as the greatest threat to world peace. Its President – an African-Asian-European, whose religion is unknown, if he is any at all – has appointed a commissar to impose sodomy on the whole world. Resistance means that the sacks of rice will be stopped; though there are those who have already stopped taking the sacks of rice because they say that they are genetically poisoned.

When did it all go wrong? When did it become pagan? The popular American singer, Don McLean, said that ‘the American pie’ all went wrong ‘the day the music died’, in 1959. Others point to the Kennedy assassination, others point to the Vietnam War; others point to the massive debts that began when President Reagan and his neocon backers decided to win the Cold War by bankrupting his own country; others would go back much further in time. We do not know when it all went wrong, we only know that it has all gone wrong; that, after scarcely three generations since 1945 we are witnessing the fall of the American Empire which is ending in the same unprincipled moral and pagan decadence as Rome. It has lost faith in the underpinning Good Book and chosen Mammon instead of God.

Some empires lasted only for a short time. Thus, that of Alexander the Great ended swiftly because his empire soon became a force for destruction, an end to civilization, a military obsession. Napoleon’s empire lasted scarcely for a generation; his military obsession that killed two million Europeans and saw him stabling his horses in the Cathedrals of Holy Russia also soon came to an end. He had nothing to give except atheism and bloodshed. In other words, empires last only for as long as they are carriers of a great, ennobling and inspiring idea, and the civilization and culture based on that idea. And they always end in atheistic cynicism and black despair (called ‘post-modern irony’) at the loss of that idea and that end is always in spiritual and moral bankruptcy. Let America tremble and be warned. There are many good, ordinary Americans; if they can defeat the Satanic powers that have seized the high places in their country, they can still redeem their land and so help save the world.