Quantum of Suffering: Economic Hitmen Target Main Street

You should know something about me, and the people I work with. 

We deal with the left and the right, dictators or liberators. If the current president had been more agreeable, I wouldn't be talking to you.

So if you decide not to sign, you'll wake up with your balls in your mouth, and your willing replacement standing over you. 

If you doubt that, then shoot me, take the money, and have a good night's sleep.

Dominic Greene, political acquisitions specialist for the secretive Quantum criminal oligarchy, explains to Gen. Medrano -- the organization's new pet Bolivian dictator -- how the world really works, as seen in the film Quantum of Solace.

If we were to suture a toupee -- preferably in a procedure not involving anesthetic -- to the scalp of Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs commissar would strongly resemble Dominic Greene, the reptilian villain of the most recent James Bond film, Quantum of Solace.

Blankfein already resembles Greene in ways that transcend mere aesthetics. The same can be said regarding the fictional Quantum criminal syndicate and the corrupt real-life oligarchy to which Blankfein belongs.

Although it was hampered with an undercooked script and an editing style that makes the action sequences all but impossible to follow (think of what Michael Bay would do in the editing bay following a two-day Red Bull jag), Quantum of Solace is the only Bond film to feature an entirely believable villain, and a surprisingly credible Evil Plot.

Dominic Greene is a composite of several real-life oligarchs. In addition to his resemblance to Blankfein, Greene -- an ersatz conservationist who plunders countries and overthrows governments behind a facade of environmental philanthropy -- also somewhat resembles Maurice Strong and George Soros.

Quantum itself is a tenebrous, Bilderberg-like Power Elite fraternity seeking control over the global economy. To that end, the group finances terrorism and revolution (which played a significant role in the previous -- and much superior -- Bond film, Casino Royale) with utter indifference to the ideology of its allies. It is the objective -- the consolidation of power -- that matters, rather than the doctrine used to recruit and motivate the cannon fodder.

At least one of the four people responsible for the Quantum of Solace screenplay appears to be at least superficially familiar with the writings of Carroll Quigley and C. Wright Mills.

A steer, not a bull: Gen. Medrano (Joaquin Cosio).

Dominic Greene's little lecture to Quantum's Bolivian rent-a-thug, General Medrano, brings to mind the following observation by Quigley:

"There does exist an international Anglophile network which operates in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists and frequently does so."

In the film, Greene and Quantum have recruited General Medrano to overthrow the leftist government of Bolivia. All the cabal seeks in return is a large tract of barren desert.

When the CIA starts sniffing around the scheme, Greene buys them off with a side deal: He promises Washington an oil concession if the Company permits the coup to proceed.

By infiltrating a Quantum teleconference, Bond learns of a plot to control "one of the world's most precious resources." In Bolivia he discovers that Greene -- working under the cover of his "Greene Planet" land acquisition corporation -- is planning to monopolize Bolivia's water supply.

Medrano initially balks when told to sign an agreement giving Quantum control over the country's water utility (which would double the price Bolivians were paying for the service), but he grudgingly scribbles his signature when he's reminded how easily he could be replaced.

In addition to the writings of Quigley and Mills, John Perkins' 2005 memoir-expose Confessions of an Economic Hit Man appears to have inspired at least some aspects of the Quantum of Solace storyline.

According to Perkins, the organs of international finance, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, engage in what is essentially a global loan-sharking scheme.
As an economic forecaster covertly recruited by U.S. intelligence in the 1960s, Perkins was dispatched to various countries — including Indonesia and Panama — as an "economic hit man," or EHM. His role was to help induce national leaders to take out huge World Bank loans to fund mammoth infrastructure programs.

Perkins claims that he was was just one EHM among thousands plying the same trade worldwide. If an EHM is successful, writes Perkins, "the [World Bank] loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources…. Of course, the debtor still owes us money — and another country is added to our global empire."

Vulcan's Forge: Civic symbol of Birmingham, Ala.

Economic Hit Men aren’t the only weapons in the Power Elite's arsenal. Perkins also refers to "Jackals," who are sent to deal with the most refractory foreign leaders by fomenting revolutions, or staging assassinations. 

"When the Jackals fail," Perkins continues, "young Americans are sent in to kill and die."

These depredations aren't confined to the Third World, at least as that designation is conventionally understood. 


During the early years of the 21st Century, just before the Federal Reserve's most recent debt bubble collapsed, the EHMs preyed on municipal and county governments across the United States. 

Among their victims are the residents of Jefferson County, Alabama, which has been bankrupted and ruined as the result of a plot eerily similar in some ways to the one depicted in Quantum of Solace.

In 1996, Birmingham was forced to sign a federal consent decree requiring it to reconstruct its municipal sewer system. The initial estimated cost was roughly $250 million. However, that initial cost estimate was like a tiny grain of sand lodged inside the mantle of an oyster.  The Jefferson County political establishment quickly turned that grain of sand into an immense pearl of civic corruption, inflating the cost of the project to $3 billion. 

Sharp-dressed sellout: Larry Langford, JP Morgan's whore.

When the County Commission sought lenders to refinance its sewer bonds, JP Morgan dispatched a low-grade EHM named Charles E. LeCroy. In 2002, Larry P. Langford, a man with a troubled financial background and a weakness for expensive clothes, was appointed president of the Jefferson County Commission -- and LeCroy had his General Medrano. 

LeCroy compromised Langford with the clinical precision of a practiced seducer. Plying him with expensive clothes, jewelry, and cash payouts, LeCroy induced Langford to sign off on a series of esoteric "synthetic debt swaps" that eventually inflated the county's debt -- for rebuilding a sewer system, remember -- to $5.4 billion. 

The mechanics of these instruments are deliberately convoluted; the agreements were cluttered with recondite language designed to obstruct understanding, and conceal trip-wires and trap-doors. 

"I needed somebody to tell me what all that stuff was," Langford would testify in a June 2008 deposition. "And even when they told me, I still don't understand 99 percent of it."


Seeking an "independent" adviser to vet JP Morgan's proposals, Langford turned to William Blount, who ran the local investment firm of Blount Parrish & Company. It's entirely possible that Langford honestly didn't know -- at first -- that Blount had also been compromised by Quantum -- er, make that JP Morgan. In fact, Blount's $300,000 side-deal with LeCroy was roughly double the size of Langford's price tag. 


In Quantum of Solace, Bond discovers that Greene and his cohorts had managed to buy off dozens of officials in both the U.S. and British governments with promises of lucrative oil concessions. As Mr. White, a bagman for Quantum who had been introduced in Casino Royale, tells Bond: "The first thing you need to know about us is that we have people everywhere" -- including supposed allies in key positions within U.S. and British intelligence.

As mentioned earlier, Dominic Greene was able to get the CIA to butt out of Bolivia in exchange for a bogus oil deal. It cost LeCroy, JP Morgan's EHM in Birmingham, $3 million to persuade Goldman Sachs to avert its gaze from the opportunities for plunder in Jefferson County.


When queried by a comrade at JP Morgan, LeCroy explained that the money was the price of Goldman "not messing with us. It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal." 


As the irreplaceable Matt Taibbi pointed out in his definitive journalistic autopsy of Jefferson County, just about everybody in the Banking Cartel sought a piece of the action: Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blunt in their scramble to do business with the county. 

In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 `arranger's fee.' At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners." 


Dozens of local businessmen and political officials -- including Langford, who was elected Birmingham Mayor in 2007,  and Blount -- have been convicted on charges of bribery and other forms of corruption. LeCroy was eventually convicted and sent to prison for three months -- yes, three months -- for his role in a similar criminal enterprise in Philadelphia.


Some of those responsible for pillaging Jefferson County are behind bars, but nothing they will experience will compare to the suffering they have left in their wake. 

A chilling scene near the end of Quantum of Solace shows Indian peasants looking on in frustration and alarm as their local water pumps suddenly run dry in (temporary) consummation of Greene's plan. More than a few residents of Jefferson County have lived through very similar privations.


County residents now pay an estimated $750 a year for municipal services, more than twice the national average. Sewer costs are now 300 percent higher than they were when the reconstruction project began in 1996. These ruinous increases reflect the fact that those sentenced to live in Jefferson County are being taxed to pay the service on the debts created by JP Morgan's Economic Hit Man and his seraglio of civic servants. 

Birmingham resident Dora Bonner, a woman in her 70s who lives on a Social Security check and shares her home with four grandchildren, was among those forced to choose between paying a $250 water bill or keeping the furnace running in wintertime.  "I couldn't afford the water, so they shut it off," Bonner told Bloomberg News. 

Jefferson County residents draw nearer to bankruptcy every time they shower or flush the toilet. JP Morgan, the architects of this misery, received $25 billion in TARP bailout money and unspecified tens of billions more from indirect subsidies. Last year it dished out more than $11 billion in management bonuses. 


After the Economic Hit Men have done their work, John Perkins informs us, those who employ them send in first the jackals, then the troops. The destruction of Alabama's most populous county suggests that, at least where domestic operations are concerned, Quantum's real-life counterparts might simply skip the second stage and go directly to martial law. 

First Hit Men, then Jackals, then troops.

Last fall, a "kind of civil legal civil war broke out" in Jefferson County "when three county agencies -- the sheriff's department, an indigent-care hospital and the tax-assessor's office -- sued the county commission to stop ... budget cuts on the grounds that they posed a danger to public safety," reported Bloomberg News last October. 


Maintaining that budget cuts would make it impossible to provide law enforcement coverage for Jefferson County, Sheriff Mike Hale suggested that it would be necessary to call in the National Guard to serve as a police force. In fact, as AlterNet's Mike Ames observes, martial law is "a logical progression in the ongoing billionaire plunder of America."


In March 2009, following a shooting rampage in which 27-year-old Samson, Alabama resident Michael McClendon murdered ten people before killing himself, troops from Fort Rucker "were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets," reported Ames. "This was a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, every freedom-loving American's worst nightmare." 

A subsequent investigation by the Army confirmed that it was illegal to dispatch soldiers to patrol the streets and man roadblocks, but no effort was made to identify, let alone punish, those responsible. As Ames points out, the damage done in Alabama by Wall Street's Economic Hit Men was hardly confined to Jefferson County: Pilgrim's Pride, one of the state's largest private employers, was seduced into leveraging itself into bankruptcy. 


"Now you can see why Alabamans are loading up on so many weapons," concludes Ames. For the same reason, it's not surprising that some statewide political campaigns in Alabama this year have an insurrectionary tone -- not that this is necessarily a bad thing, of course. The problem, predictably enough, is that the understandable rage and frustration are likely to be skillfully misdirected in the service of the same people who have all but reduced the state to Third World status. 


Those of us who don't live in Alabama need not feel left out, since -- as Quantum's Mr. White might put it -- Wall Street's taxpayer-subsidized oligarchy has people everywhere. Their fingerprints will most likely be found wherever a municipal or county government is suffocating in debt and wringing whatever revenue it can from tax victims who have nothing left to give.


Yes, I know: Quantum of Solace is a silly movie, full of implausible action gags and dodgy dialogue. And yet....

Video Extra: Your Moment of Wish Fulfillment

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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Plague of Punitive Populism

"Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."

-- Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath


In Virginia, police officers raid a baptismal party for two small boys. Without cause or provocation they assault the grandfather who owns the home, tasering him three times while children and other guests look on in horror.



When the pregnant daughter-in-law of the victim intervenes, she, too, is forced to perform the "electron dance." The grandfather is charged with disorderly conduct and public intoxication, despite the fact that Virginia state statutes specify that such offenses cannot be committed on one's own property.


The woman who came to the aid of the first victim was charged with "assaulting an officer," since her brave effort to protect the grandfather from a criminal assault involved placing her unhallowed hands on the sanctified personage of a "law enforcement officer." Such presumption simply cannot be tolerated.



A few weeks earlier in Webster, Texas, a pastor is tasered after a member of his congregation was pulled over by police in the church parking lot. Once "backup" arrives -- the boldness of police, like that of feral wolves and droopy-drawered gang-bangers, is a function of operating in packs -- the officers charge the church sanctuary, assaulting Pastor Jose Moran and pepper-spraying the worshipers who objected to the treatment of their pastor. Once again, the victim, rather than the assailants, finds himself charged with assault.


Pastor Jose Elias Moran recovers in a Texas hospital after being attacked by a Taser-wielding state bureaucrat.




In Alabama, police pepper-spray and then taser a deaf, mentally handicapped adult man who couldn't hear their orders to leave the bathroom of a discount store.


Once the confusion was cleared up, they arrested him anyway on various charges, including -- no extra points for guessing correctly -- "assaulting" the officers who attacked him. The police department issues a statement claiming that the attack with chemical and electro-shock weapons was justified because the confused man-child (a term I use with sympathy, not in derision) was "armed" with an umbrella.

Victim of police abuse Antonio Love (left, with his mother).



In Boise, Idaho, police swarm, gang-tackle, and handcuff a man involved in a domestic dispute.


When he complains about impending suffocation -- a very acute threat, since many victims of lethal police violence die from positional asphyxiation -- he is subjected to a Taser strike in his rectum by a still-unidentified officer who threatens to strike the victim's genitals next. Subsequently one of the assailant's superiors attempts to destroy the evidence by erasing an audio taped record of the event.



In Wisconsin Dells, two callow patrolmen -- Officer Beavis and Officer Butt-Head -- stumble upon a couple of off-duty National Guardsmen and decide to have some fun. The police accuse the victims of urinating in public and then demand that they lick from the ground a substance they are told is human urine. When a third police officer materializes, the victims speak of filing a complaint.


This prompts the threat of a bogus burglary charge and the promise that "nobody will believe you" if they actually file a protest. As it happens, the complaint is believed -- most likely because it was made by two Iraq war veterans, rather than common citizens.



These are mere snapshots of the commonplace sadism that increasingly typifies contemporary American law enforcement. But this really isn't so surprising for a country in which a bare majority, according to a recent global survey, opposes state torture.


That survey found that Americans are much likelier to support government-inflicted torture than citizens of Communist China, and marginally more indulgent of the practice than the residents of Muslim Indonesia and Muslim/socialist Egypt. Support for torture is also more widespread among Americans than among Iranians.



One might think that support for torture would be restrained by the influence of America's church-going population. One would think that those Americans who worship the Man of Sorrows who was tortured to death by the occupation forces of a pagan imperial state would be among the most insistent opponents of the vile and indefensible practice.


Again, one would think this would be the case.


One would be entirely wrong, since exactly the opposite is true: A survey taken earlier this year documented that a majority (54 percent) of people who attend church at least once a week support torture.



Perhaps the most arresting discovery was that more than sixty percent of white, evangelical Protestants condone the practice. Torture advocates of this theological persuasion profess a "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ. That relationship must be, at best, a distant and superficial one.


As the United States sinks into what will be a long and dreadful depression, and partisan politics takes on the character of a literal bloodsport, speculation is rampant about a possible civil war (which would not be the same thing as peaceful secession, which may prove to be the only sensible way to address our economic and political afflictions). If such a conflict were to come, it might actually start within the church-going segment of the population, pitting nominally Christian statists against those who believe in what the Epistle of James called the "perfect law of liberty."


In dealing with the prospect of an internecine conflict among believers, it's instructive to recall the events described in the 12th chapter of the Old Testament Book of Judges, in which the Gileadites and Ephramites were at war.


After the Gileadites routed their opponents in one battle, they devised a clever method of winnowing out concealed Ephramites from their midst. As it turns out, the Ephraimites for some reason couldn't pronounce the word "shibboleth" correctly, rendering that term "sibbolet." Accordingly, each man who approached a critical checkpoint was required to say "shibboleth," with instant death being the penalty for tens of thousands who uttered malapropisms.


While I have no desire to put anyone to the sword, I suggest that liberty-minded Americans, whether or not they subscribe to the Christian faith, can learn much about themselves and those around them through what we could call the "Tom Joad Test."


I'm not a fan of Steinbeck's incurably wrong-headed economic views or his idiosyncratic collectivist politics in general, although I must admit a sneaking respect for anybody who attracts the hostile interest of the FBI solely on the strength of his published writings.



His creation Tom Joad isn't among my favorite fictional characters. But there is substantial merit in Joad's pledge to sympathize with those who are victims of Power.



Early in The Grapes of Wrath, Joad -- recently paroled after serving four years in prison for killing a man who stabbed him in a fight -- becomes re-acquainted with Jim Casy, a fallen Oklahoma Pentecostal preacher who has embraced a populist version of Emerson's "oversoul" concept: "Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of."



Thus was planted the seed that would sprout into Joad's famous soliloquy, which included the pledge that "Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."



So here, stated briefly, is the question that serves as the shibboleth/sibbolet dividing line in the "Tom Joad Test":


When you see a cop -- or, more likely, several of them -- beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?


If it's the former, you're an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.


If it's the latter, you're an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.


It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn't invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject's default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.


Do you assume that the state is entitled to the benefit of the doubt whenever its agents inflict violence on somebody, or do you believe that the individual -- any individual -- is innocent of wrongdoing until his guilt has been proven?


This could be considered a reverse application of Lenin's famous political formula, kto kogo? -- broadly translated as "Who does what to whom?" Lenin and his followers sought and acquired the power to be the "Who" in that formula, which meant that millions of those consigned to the "whom" category were imprisoned and slaughtered.


Ironically, many law-and-order conservatives come uncomfortably close to Lenin's view of the state when they reflexively take the side of agents of state coercion -- the "who" in the typical encounter between police officer and citizen. The American view of rights, however, is overwhelmingly weighted on behalf of the latter, even when the "who" is a winsome and well-dressed policeman, and the "whom" is a scruffy and unappealing individual.


One of the easiest and least intrusive ways to conduct the Tom Joad Test is to observe an individual's reaction to the typical installment of the TV series COPS, which -- in any of its iterations -- is a kind of authoritarian pornography for the badge-licker population.


Several months ago, I took my family to a large and very nice Chinese buffet in Boise. Since the Grigg family is almost at brigade strength, we were ushered into the conference room, where we could have a long table all to ourselves. Unfortunately, the room was equipped with a television set, most likely because some secret Reversal of Freedom law dictates the presence of an infernal device of that kind in every room of a certain size. Even worse, a COPS marathon was underway.


As I grazed on sauteed bok choy and exquisitely seasoned bean sprouts (delicious vegetarian items being a specialty of this particular restaurant), my appetite began to depart as the screen conveyed an endless repetition of the familiar storyline: Police spy pathetic, socially marginalized individual; police harass said pathetic individual, who had done nothing to harm anyone else; police find some excuse to arrest said individual, often throwing him to the ground and humiliating him in the process.


Despite the delicious fare in front of me, my mood turned sour and ominous mutterings began emanating from me like premonitory tremors anticipating an eruption. Similar outrage radiated from the faces of other nearby patrons.


Near the beginning of the third consecutive installment of COPS, we were treated to the unedifying sight of a police officer approaching a woman on a sidewalk and demanding that she show identification. She had done nothing to provoke the interest of the officer, and wasn't inclined to comply with that unwarranted demand.


The officer replied in predictable fashion, beginning the familiar procedure of jacking her arm behind her to slap the cuffs on her wrists. To her considerable credit, the woman shrugged off that assault and put up a more than respectable fight, despite being roughly 50-75 lbs. smaller than her assailant.


Eventually, the cop -- who had created this altercation ex nihilo -- ended it by grabbing the small-boned woman in a headlock and slamming her face-first into the sidewalk.


That sight wrenched gasps from several people sitting at other tables. My reaction was characteristically measured and sedate.


"You malignant BASTARD!" I exclaimed in a voice that was probably heard in Winnemucca.


Shooting a quick glance around, I noticed several food-laden forks suspended in mid-transit from well-stocked plate to gaping mouth, and numerous sets of eyes distended in shocked disbelief. I suggested to my wife, the lovely and brilliant Korrin, that we should leave. She didn't resist the suggestion.


The success of COPS and its imitators, like the survey results dealing with torture, illustrates that there is a wide, deep, and resilient strain of punitive populism in American culture. I suspect that there is a smaller, but growing, sub-population of people who instinctively take the side of the person on the receiving end of the nightstick.


In light of the fact that nightsticks and various other implements of coercion will play an increasingly prominent role as the economic implosion accelerates, we'd better find each other, and radically increase our ranks -- and do this as quickly as humanly possible.

On a related note...

In the comments section of a recent essay, mention was made of the little-appreciated role played by the Marquis de Sade as a founder of the modern collectivist movement. Over at another blog I've recently posted an essay dealing with that subject; for those who are interested, please take a look and leave a comment or two.

Be sure to tune in to Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Economic Show Trials Begin

The inverted pyramid of corporate socialism: The wealthiest are subsidized, through inflation, by those who can least afford it.



Could it be that our ruling elite has effectively transcended hypocrisy? As the aphorism informs us, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; it is the product of a person's capacity for decent shame, the fig-leaf garment concealing one's naked corruption.


Shame being a vital precursor to hypocrisy, those who rule us -- not only the politicians, but the banksters and image-molders as well -- can't be accused of hypocrisy. This would be a bit like criticizing the fashion sense of somebody who's color-blind. This doesn't mean, however, that they should be allowed an indulgence for the evil that they do.


Last week, during a brief digression in the ongoing efforts to socialize the losses suffered by the super-rich kleptocrats at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Congress conducted an authentic Orwellian hate-fest directed at "super-rich" people who had earned their money through legitimate enterprise.


The Fannie/Freddie nomenklatura built huge profits through the government-subsidized generation and "securitization" of bad mortgages and criminally corrupt bookkeeping. Last week's hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations focused on people who had made large sums of money through honest, productive commercial activity -- and then tried to preserve their honest earnings for their posterity by protecting it in bank accounts in Liechtenstein.


Congress and the ruling elite it serves are eagerly stealing everything in sight, through taxes, subsidies, and inflation. But as last week's Senate hearings-cum-show trial illustrate, they are tuning up the machinery of mass hatred in anticipation of scapegoating authentic capitalists for the ongoing economic collapse.


The fault, we will be told, lies not with our corrupt and incurably profligate government, or the incorrigible official counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve, or the government-subsidized corporatist interests who are their clients -- but rather those who greedily insist on keeping what they earn instead of paying their "fair share" in the name of the "common good."


The calculation here is that a hate campaign of that sort can keep the public from noticing how the phrase "common good" always seems to refer to policies that confer benefits on one particular elite. And it's quite likely that members of that elite have their own numbered accounts in places like Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Which is probably another reason they're so eager to go after well-heeled people who aren't part of their club.


As I have noted before, Liechtenstein, unlike the United States, is a relatively free country. It is presided over with a gentle hand by Prince Hans-Adam II, rather than being ruled by a degenerate fascist oligarchy like the one entrenched in Washington. Hans-Adam II is on record saying that a top tax rate higher than 6% is "tyrannical." This puts him well ahead of any other political leader I can think of in pursuing the truth, which is that taxation is always and everywhere nothing but officially sanctioned theft.


As would be the case in any civilized country, Liechtenstein's banking secrecy laws were designed to protect the assets of depositors from the scrutiny of predators serving the ruling class. Many foreign depositors have, in accordance with the sound and commendable laws of that estimable alpine country, set up foundations to protect their earnings from rapacious tax-gatherers in their own afflicted nations.


Weasel at large: Heinrich Kieber, convicted of fraud in Liechtenstein, esteemed informant for the tax gestapo of various governments. He is what I call an "SOS" -- someone who should be Slapped On Sight (I only use a closed fist on a real man).


Unfortunately, a squalid little creature named Heinrich Kieber who had been a clerk at Liechtenstein's LGT Group, pilfered several CDs worth of data regarding foreign depositors from the United States and Europe. Driven by a variant of the invidious impulses that sixty years ago would have led him to rat out those who protected Jews from the Gestapo, Kieber -- as viscous as he is vicious -- oozed into the offices of Germany's BND intelligence service and sold his stolen information for $7.3 million stolen at gunpoint from German taxpayers.

Kieber conducted similar transactions with ruling criminals in London, Paris, Rome, and Washington. His information This led to last week's hearings, chaired by the loathsome Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), who -- in the interests of "bipartisanship" -- gave a prominent co-starring role to the even more repulsive Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota). Kieber himself, who has been taken into the "witness protection program," testified by way of a videotaped statement from a secret location.


The target of Comrade Levin's show trial was the reported $1.5 trillion cached by wealthy Americans in offshore accounts, including those in Liechtenstein, Switzerland's UBS, and elsewhere. Those banks, Levin complained, had employed "tricks" that made it "impossible for the Internal Revenue Service to follow the money, bring tax cheats to justice, and bring back into the US treasury the tens of billions of dollars owed to Uncle Sam."


Well, sure: The banks that sought to protect the assets of Jews during WWII employed the same methods to protect the assets of honorable people from the contemporary tax gestapo, who are the true moral heirs of the Nazi officials who sought to seize the assets of persecuted Jews. Impeding the efforts of criminals to steal wealth is not a "crime," and it's interesting that Levin didn't use that word to describe the "tricks" he protested.

And, if I can be permitted a brief digression, Levin's statement that the money should be brought "back to the US treasury" in order to pay "the tens of billions of dollars owed to Uncle Sam" is a Marxist lie sandwiched between two crusty slices of chutzpah.


For the purposes of this discussion, we'll refer to the fraudulent fiat currency issued by the Fed as "money."


Any quantity of "money" honestly earned does not belong to the Treasury; it belongs to the individual or enterprise that earned it, until he or they decide to spend it for some purpose. Accordingly, that money cannot go "back" to the Treasury, although it can be diverted there to be wasted on corrupt government undertakings of various kinds.


Furthermore, taxes are not "owed" to the federal government; they are seized by the federal government. One "owes" money to another party from whom he has received goods or services pursuant to a legitimate contract. "Contracts" imposed through duress (such as extortion pay-offs) are illegitimate. Those of us who pay taxes do so not because a legitimate contract exists between us and the Regime that extracts our wealth; we do so because of a desire to stay out of prison, or to avoid violent death at the hands of the State's hired killers.


Levin is a nearly ideal representative of the parasite class. His mind, or what passes for it, is entirely hostage to collectivist assumptions. Just as a dog cannot discern colors, Levin can't see anything amiss in extending official protection to a foreign criminal (Kieber was convicted of fraud in Liechtenstein) so he can testify against those who have done no injury to persons or property, or in treating foreign bank officers as if they were under Washington's jurisdiction by demanding that they testify before his committee.


All of this is being done, Levin insists, to bring "tax cheats to justice." Leaving aside, for the nonce, the fact that the word "justice" when uttered by the likes of Levin is like the word "love" in the mouth of a whore, the cruel fact is that tax avoidance is impossible for anyone who conducts business using the Federal Reserve's fraudulent scrip.


This brings us to one history-making admission offered last week by Fed Commissar Ben Bernanke beneath the avuncular but relentless cross-examination of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) during Bernanke's recent congressional testimony.

Actually, this illustration is deceptive regarding the innate value of the Federal Reserve Note: The paper grade used in creating that bogus currency is ill-suited to such use.



“Inflation is a tax," Rep. Paul observed during his colloquy with Bernanke. "And if the Federal Reserve, and you as chairman, have this authority to increase the money supply arbitrarily, you’re probably the biggest taxer in the country."


"I couldn't agree with you more that inflation is a tax," admitted Bernanke, quickly seeking to evade responsibility by saying that "inflation currently is too high." The criminal syndicate over which Bernanke presides imposes taxation without representation or accountability.


Furthermore, it exports that inflation world-wide, thanks to the fact that the instrument of debt the Fed calls the "dollar" is the world's reserve currency. This means that nearly everyone who uses the dollar to conduct business is paying the tax called inflation. This is a unique form of withholding, in that the Fed steals an increment of value from each dollar before it ends up in the hands or accounts of private actors in the economy.


Pity poor Emmett Neverend: Once a rational and respected academic, he lost his wits when he finally came to understand the moral implications of the Regime's financial system.


Where a government exercises the power to tax through inflation, no other taxes are "necessary," including the income tax. Furthermore, where governments tax through inflation, no tax evasion is possible, as long as people conduct business in that adulterated currency.


The redoubtable G. Edward Griffin points out that former Fed Chairman Beardsley Ruml admitted that, because of the Fed's ability to tax via inflation, "Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete" -- the title of an essay Ruml published in the January 1946 issue of American Affairs. As Ruml wrote,"given control of a central banking system and an incontrovertible currency [that is, a fiat currency not backed by gold], a sovereign national government is finally free of money worries and need no longer levy taxes for the purpose of providing itself with revenue. All taxation, therefore, should be regarded from the point of view of social and economic consequences."(Emphasis added.)


Thus, where Washington is concerned, taxation exists purely for the purpose of social manipulation through vulgar redistribution of wealth, not to pay the operating costs of government. And as carried out by the IRS, taxation is an instrument of intimidation and terror used to compel social conformity.


By keeping their money in dollars, or any currency "pegged" to the dollar, so-called "tax cheats" aren't evading taxes. They, like the rest of us, are being taxed through the Fed's relentless inflation. Their only hope to evade being taxed by the Fed would be to take the advice offered by Jim Rogers last fall: Get out of dollar-denominated assets entirely.


There are only two ways to acquire wealth: It can be earned through mutually beneficial voluntary action, or it can be stolen through force and fraud. Any effort to acquire wealth that involves any degree of force or fraud is theft.


Senator Levin and his comrades, who are preparing to bail out the politically favored thieves running Fannie and Freddie, spent many taxpayer-funded hours last week dilating upon the supposed iniquity of those "super-rich" Americans who seek to protect what they earn from people whose professional lives are nothing but one prolonged exercise in theft.


It would avail nothing to point out such hypocrisy to Levin and his ilk; they can no more feel honest shame than a chimpanzee can compose a cantata.


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Dum spiro, pugno!

Of Course He's a Fascist

A little man in search of a balcony: Mike Huckabee, practitioner of pseudo-Christian statism.

The gang at Fox & Friends was happily engaged in their familiar morning routine – applying a glaze of insipid cheerfulness to their network's authoritarian partisanship – when one of them made the mistake of asking Rep. Ron Paul about a campaign ad produced by a rival presidential aspirant, Mike Huckabee.

If the object of that odd query was to solicit a trite soundbite it was the wrong question to ask, and the wrong person of whom to ask it, given Dr. Paul's unflinching candor. Rather than indulging in the expected morning show banter, Dr. Paul offered this assessment of the Huckabee ad, in which the former Arkansas Governor, bathed in beatific light and flattered by the camera's soft focus, appears to have a cross floating over his shoulder:

"It reminds me of what Sinclair Lewis once said. He says, 'when fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.' Now I don't know whether that's a fair assessment or not, but you wonder about using a cross, like he is the only Christian or implying that subtly. So, I don't think I would ever use anything like that."

By vowing never to use “anything like that” Dr. Paul was not foreswearing the use of Christian imagery in his campaign materials. He was effectively promising never to depict himself as the embodiment of Christian virtues and as God's anointed vessel of political redemption. That's a conceit that Huckabee embraced when he publicly attributed his recent political good fortune to the power of the One who miraculously multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the hungry multitudes.

But it was Dr. Paul's boldness in using the “F-word” that caused his hosts at Fox & Friends to suffer a brief fit of the vapors. It's not as if the inhabitants of the Fox News Universe are unfamiliar with the term; it's just that they have been programmed to assume that it can only be used in a purely historical context unless it follows the prefix “Islamo-.” The morning show pixies were pixilated that Dr. Paul would apply that term to a fellow Republican, even – or perhaps especially – one as deserving as Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee's "cross" wasn't the first artfully staged GOP photo-op.

Let there be no mistake: Huckabee, like every other major Republican presidential candidate save Dr. Paul, is unambiguously a fascist. He is an ardent supporter of the welfare/warfare/homeland security state and all of its works and pomps. His objective is to expand, not to diminish, the power of the State.

And Huckabee has displayed a perfectly abhorrent enthusiasm for State-sanctioned bloodshed: It was Huckabee who insisted that although the Iraq war was misbegotten, the “honor” of the government requires that the killing continue for the indefinite future. Just this morning (December 19), Huckabee expressed the view that Washington has used “underwhelming” force in Iraq, when victory requires overkill. And in reacting to a recent ad from the polyurethane candidate Mitt Romney, Huckabee boasted that he had signed sixteen death warrants as the Arkansas chief executive, "more than any other governor in my state's history."

That last fact offers a telling contrast between Dr. Paul (who was an obstetrician) and Rev. Huckabee. Dr. Paul's campaign literature highlights his role in bringing thousands of new lives into the world; Huckabee takes conspicuous pride in presiding over the execution of more than a dozen people. Even those who support the death penalty (a position I can't understand, given the corruption and viciousness of the Regime that rules us) should agree that trading on the death of human beings, even those who “deserved” it, for political advantage is entirely depraved.*

Here's the difference: Unlike other politicians, when Ron Paul admires a baby, he's not looking on the child as merely a future taxpayer or coffin-stuffer.

Celebrating the State's power over life and death is a familiar fascist theme, but not one exclusive to fascism. The same is true of the cynical co-mingling of politics and religion. To understand why Republican statists like Huckabee deserve the description “fascist” it's useful to review the analysis offered by John T. Flynn in his 1944 book As We Go Marching.

As a critic of the New Deal and one-time leader of the America First movement, Flynn was effectively blacklisted from the prestige press on the orders of FDR. Such obscurity was both frustrating and liberating, since a consummated threat no longer has the power to paralyze its target. Freed from worrying about the consequences of tactless truth-telling (for there is none so free as someone with nothing to lose), Flynn used As We Go Marching to dissect and document the kindred relationship between German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and the American equivalent that had its origins in the New Deal and was brought to malignant maturity during the war.

While stinting not at all in his loathing for Hitler and Mussolini, Flynn quite properly pointed out that “good fascists” like FDR and his clique represented a far more immediate threat to American liberty. As if specifically foretelling Mike Huckabee, Flynn also predicted that the future would bring those devoted to “the impossible task of purging fascism of its ugly features, cleaning it up, offering us a polite, religious, democratic fascism.” (Emphasis added.)

Flynn's brief description of fascism was a dictatorial political system “in which the government assumes responsibility for creating adequate purchasing power through the instrumentality of national debt and in which militarism is adopted as a great economic project for creating work as well as a great romantic project in the service of the imperialist state.”

What Flynn describes here was known – until the phrase became an embarrassment – as “National Greatness Conservatism.”

Flynn went on to list eight defining “devices” of the fascist system, however labeled and in whatever country it has taken root:

* “A government whose powers are unrestrained” -- what, if any, are the limits on government power currently recognized by Republicans?

* "A leader who is a dictator, absolute in power but responsible to the party which is a preferred elite";

*An economy in which property is privately owned, but politically controlled;

* The all-encompassing influence of “great government bureaus which have the power to make regulations or directives with the force of law”;

* The “socialization of investment” through “comprehensive integration of government and finances” -- a characteristic that has become quite salient during the era of Bush the Lesser;

*The creation of “streams of purchasing power by federal government borrowing and spending as a permanent institution” -- once again, a process that has thrived under the reign of "Borrow-and-Bomb" Bush;

*Militarism as an all-pervasive cultural attitude, and the military as a pillar of the industrial economy;

*Imperialism as the organizing principle of national life, whether overtly embraced or tacitly understood, with the population constantly presented “with some national crusade or adventure on the heroic model touching deeply the springs of chauvinistic pride, interest, and feeling.”

"Where these elements are found," concluded Flynn, "there is fascism, by whatever name the system is called.”

Apropos of Flynn's final point – the central role of “heroic” national crusades in a fascist political system -- it's worth noting that Huckabee recently told the New York Times that (in the paper's paraphrase) “the next president of the United States will have to lead Western civilization in a worldwide conflict with radical Islam.”

Huckabee, like Romney and Giuliani, doesn't see the president's role as one of seeking to mitigate conflicts, but rather that of maximizing them. He believes in subordinating the rights and interests of the individual to the power of the State and the ambitions of the political class; he assumes that the lives and property of Americans (not to mention those foreigners who would be on the receiving end of his belligerent piety) would be his to dispose of in whatever grandiose ventures “God” lays on his heart.

Were he a genuinely Christian statesman, Huckabee would recognize that our government for decades has eagerly courted Ruin, and Ruin is about to grant the government's entreaties. He would understand, and tell the truth about, the economic consequences of Washington's imperial foreign policy, and demand immediate and dramatic changes to it.

Changes will come, as the value of our currency evaporates and foreign coalitions take shape to rein in Washington's arrogant adventurism. It would be more desirable, of course, for change to come on terms favorable to individual freedom and national independence, but this would require a measure of humility foreign to the make-up of those who embrace pseudo-Christian statism.

The version of “Christian” statecraft that has prevailed under Bush II, and that would be taken up by Huckabee, has no use for truth and justice: It is preoccupied entirely with power – the power to conduct aggressive war; to order and carry out torture and indefinite detention; to bend the law to the whim of the Chief Executive; to confer material blessings on the powerful and privileged through government redistribution, both vulgar (as in the Iraqi "reconstruction" effort) and subtle (through monetary inflation).

This is what is hiding in the shadow of Huckabee's cross. And that's why only an authentic Christian statesman had the wisdom to perceive it, and the boldness to call it by its proper name.

__________________

*As to the question of who “deserves” death, remember that “all the souls that were were forfeit once, and He that might the vantage best have took found out the remedy....” Or, as Clint Eastwood's character William Munny in Unforgiven put it, after being told by a youth that a man Munny had killed “had it coming”: “We all have it coming, kid.”

Dum spiro, pugno!