Murray Dobbin - October 22, 2008

Was the federal election just a bad dream? After five weeks of fear and loathing, disappointment and disbelief, Canadians woke up to election results that were hardly different than when the election started. Most of the commentary since has been about numbers and pro-Harper media spin. The man who is claiming a new “enhanced” mandate actually received 168,737 fewer votes than last time but garnered an additional 19 seats. The turnout, at 59 per cent, was the lowest in our history, which means that the Harper Conservatives will govern the country with the support of fewer than 23 per cent of the eligible voters. Democracy in Canada has seldom seemed so corrupted or so unrepresentative.

For many of the 62 per cent who voted against Harper and his unhidden agenda, there has been an outpouring of demands for a coalition government of the Liberals, NDP and Bloc to form a minority government as soon as they can conceivably bring down the Harper government.

The movement for proportional representation suddenly has thousands of new recruits and supporters as Fair Vote Canada’s website is being flooded with visitors and its petition has been sent out through hundreds of individual e-mail lists.

Those of us on the left can be enraged by Harper’s win, but we should not be surprised. The political right has been working for this result for some 20 years with a campaign deliberately aimed at lowering Canadians’ expectations of what is possible from government, and hence elections. The campaign to give democracy a cold shower actually started with the 1975 publication of a book called The Crisis of Democracy. Put out by the Trilateral Commission, the most powerful elite group in the world at the time, it concluded that there was an “excess of democracy.” The authors lamented that the public now questioned “the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception — all of which are in some measure inescapable attributes of the process of government.” A governable democracy, the American co-author Samuel P. Huntington wrote, requires a large degree of “apathy and non-involvement.” That they now have it is no accident.

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From August Review

North American Group

Richard L. Armitage, President, Armitage International LLC, Washington, DC; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State

James L. Balsillie, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Research in Motion, Ltd., Waterloo, ON

Alan R. Batkin, Vice Chairman, Eton Park Capital Management, New York, NY

Nani Beccalli-Falco, President and Chief Executive Officer, GE International, Brussels, Belgium

*C. Fred Bergsten, Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC; former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs

Catherine Bertini, Professor of Public Administration, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY; Senior Fellow, Agricultural Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; former Under Secretary-General for Management, United Nations; former Executive Director, UN World Food Program.

Robert D. Blackwill, President, BGR International, Washington, DC; former Deputy Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Planning; former Ambassador to India

Adm. Dennis C. Blair, U.S. Navy (retired), John M. Shalikashvili Chair in National Security Studies, National Bureau of Asian Research; Omar Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership, Army War College and Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; former Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Command

Herminio Blanco Mendoza, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Soluciones Estratégicas, Mexico City, NL; former Mexican Secretary of Commerce and Industrial Development

David G. Bradley, Chairman, Atlantic Media Company, Washington, DC

Lael Brainard, Vice President and Founding Director, Global Economy and Development Center, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC

Harold Brown, Counselor and Trustee, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC; former General Partner, Warburg Pincus & Company, New York, NY; former U.S. Secretary of Defense

*Zbigniew Brzezinski, Counselor and Trustee, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC; Robert Osgood Professor of American Foreign Affairs, Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; former U.S. Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs

[...]

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F. William Engdahl - September 30, 2008

The unexpected rejection by the US Congress of the Bush Administration financial rescue plan, TARP on September 29 has opened up the spectre for the first time of a 1931-style domino wave of worldwide bank failures. That is already underway across the US banking spectrum with the failure, nationalization or forced liquidation in the past two weeks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of the giant Washington Mutual mortgage lender, of the nation’s fourth largest deposit bank, Wachovia. That was on top of a wave of smaller bank failures that began with IndyMac in the spring. For some it is appealing and more simple to grasp the magnitude of these titanic events in the US-centered financial world by assuming it is all part of a pre-planned grand conspiracy by the Money Masters, what in the 1920s in the USA was termed the Money Trust, to control the entire financial world.

As the details of the present crisis reveal, there are huge ideological fault lines making for chaos and a potential meltdown of the Laissez Faire financial system. That present system, which was built on the back of Wall Street financial and banking deregulation since 1987 when Alan Greenspan, a devout follower and close friend of radical individualist Ayn Rand, became Wall Street’s man at the Federal Reserve for almost 19 years, is over now with the failure of the Henry Paulson $700 billion bailout scheme. Governments worldwide now face no alternative but to begin the painful process of putting the financial genie back in the bottle and re-regulating an out-of-control financial system. The failure of the UK Government and the US Government to address that fundamental issue is behind the present crisis of confidence.

A brief look at history

The Great Depression in Germany in 1931 began with a seemingly minor event—the collapse of a bank in Vienna, Creditanstalt, that May. For readers interested in more on the remarkable parallels between that crisis and that of today, I recommend the treatment in my earlier volume, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

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The North American Union: The Hijacking of America Patrick Wood

Charles Scaliger -Friday, 19 September 2008 15:04

Respected newsman and consummate insider, Fareed Zakaria paints a rosy picture of unabated globalism and global governance and tells why America’s crises are overblown.

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, 292 pages, hardcover.

If the American news media favors Cassandras, naysayers, and pessimists, then Fareed Zakaria, editor and columnist for Newsweek magazine and irrepressible optimist, is something of an anomaly. But the Indian-born Zakaria, who sits on the boards of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, two of America’s most elite and elitist organizations that typically operate at cross-purposes to the interests of ordinary Americans, is also an insider’s insider. From his vantage point at the pinnacle of the American establishment, this non-practicing Muslim from Bombay enjoys the privileged perspective of the select few who engineer the world we live in behind the scenes.

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By Patrick Briley
September 16, 2008

NewsWithViews.com

Zbigniew Brzezinski is Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor. Brzezenski was the national security advisor for President Carter from 1977 to 1981. In 1988 he endorsed HW Bush for President and was Co-Chair of the HW Bush national security advisory task force. From 1987 to 1989 he also served on the HW Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright was a student of Brzezenski.. GW Bush Secretary of State, Condi Rice (also a former national security advisor), who studied under Albright’s father, shares many of the same world government views with Brzezinski and Albright.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is an advocate of socialist world government, a goal he has promoted as a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and as a speaker at former Soviet Premier and Communist Mikhail Gorbachev’s first World Forum. Brzezinski is an architect of creating regions of global governance from independent nations to achieve world government. At the World Forum Brzezenski described the global regions that are now being put into place under Condi Rice: Israel and the Palestinians (now MEFTA, Middle East Free Trade Association), Iran as part of a Central Asian region, and China as part of a Far Eastern region. As a member of CSIS Brzezinski has guided their efforts to publish the North American Integration Monitor (2002) that calls for the loss of US sovereignty to a North American Union (NAU) as one of the regional global government blocks.

The proposals for global taxes by Obama have come with the recommendations of Zbigniew Brzezinski to pay for globalization and world government. Obama has proposed a global poverty tax in a US Senate bill. The Climate Change Control Bill strongly supported by Obama calls for an international governing regime to monitor and regulate carbon dioxide and “carbon footprints” from discovery, to production, to consumption at a cost of $50 trillion globally and at a cost of $8 trillion for US taxpayers, all to be paid for by a global tax, whose monies will be used to establish a world government body.

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Patrick Wood - September 10, 2008

There’s going to be no end of controversy over the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

On September 9, 2008, CNBC’s popular financial show “Squawk Box Europe” interviewed Jim Rogers (CEO of Rogers Holding) on his view of the government takeover of Fannie and Freddie:

“You can see that this is welfare for the rich. This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters… This is outrageous. Who are these people who are taking our money and doing this and ruining America?”

Who, indeed!

On March 21, 2008, The August Review wrote,

“As the global financial crisis unfolds, one thing is certain: The major investment and commercial banks who have wrecked our economy and financial system are now successfully sucking unlimited amounts of money from the people’s Treasury to bail themselves out.”

The August Review has demonstrated repeatedly that the net effect of the New International Economic Order (term coined by the Trilateral Commission in 1973) was to devise new and more effective ways to divert money from the public sector into certain private hands.

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