TARPLEY.net

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
February 6, 2010

For her Jan. 29 speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, Mrs. Clinton was evidently wearing that stylish new French perfume from the House of Sarkozy called Chantage – meaning blackmail. Mrs. Clinton gloats because she thinks she has the Chinese leadership in a bind. As she stated, she knows that China increasingly depends on oil from the Gulf. She demanded that China vote for crippling sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council this month, while Sarkozy — the craziest of all western leaders against Iran — controls the presidency of that body. For China, approving crippling sanctions against Iran means in all probability the loss of 10% to 12% of its oil imports, the aborting of some $80 billion in development projects by Beijing in Iran, the sacrifice of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil which the Chinese have locked in via futures contracts, and, above all, a farewell to the best chance of getting a secure overland oil pipeline far away from the US-UK fleets — the pipeline from Iran via Pakistan into China.
If the Chinese fail to captitulate on this point, Mrs. Clinton darkly hinted, the US would no longer restrain the Israelis, who might then launch their long-threatened air attack on Iran, which the US has emphatically vetoed over the past two years. At that point, the Iranians would try to interdict Gulf maritime traffic and close the strait of Hormuz, meaning that about a third of China’s oil could be cut off. (The other 20% comes from Saudi Arabia.)
The US-UK elite is in a state of collective hysteria about the growth of Chinese economic power. China is now the largest exporter in the world, and officially about to become the second largest economy, passing Japan to challenge the US.
The US is way behind China in fast rail, and will soon fall behind in modern nuclear energy production. China is clearly aiming to put astronauts on the moon, but the Obama-Orszag NASA budget makes clear that the US is going nowhere when it comes to manned space flight. If US elites really want to keep pace, they should put aside their feckless attempts to contain China by subversion, economic warfare, and fomenting conflicts in the Guif and on the India-China border. Match the Chinese programs in nuclear reactors, fast rail, and manned space flight, or prepare for the status of has-been.
But for right now, the Iran attack scenario, which had been pushed to the back burner by the US National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 — which stated that there was no Iranian nuclear weapons program — is once again operational, this time as a means at striking at China’s oil supply.

Tarpley talks with Priya Sridhar of Russia Today about the growing US-China confrontation.

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
February 2, 2010

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 28, 2010

J. D. Salinger

Today the Internet abounds with appreciations and essays on the life and work of a celebrated literary recluse J. D. Salinger, who just passed away in New Hampshire. There is one important aspect of Salinger’s work which most literary critics appear to have missed. Salinger attended northeastern prep schools during the 1930s, and wrote about his experiences, most notably in a short story which he submitted to the New Yorker in 1941. I thought of Salinger in 1991 when I was writing The Unauthorized Biography of George H. W. Bush. It occurred to me that some of the disjointed and cynical monologues delivered by the elder Bush in public sounded very much like the voice of Salinger’s antihero, Holden Caulfield. The following passage from my 1992 Bush biography sums up the case that a character based on the elder Bush actually appears in The Catcher in the Rye.

The leading feature of this … is Bush’s total lack of rigor; his personal idiom is incapable of expressing causality or precision. Already the subject-object relations are blurred, antecedents are a realm of anything goes, and verbal action has dwindled to insignificance. Underneath the avid and enthusiastic persona is a mind that is petulant, bored, and blase about everything that does not touch the interests of the ego. The result is an impression of overwhelming, undifferentiated banality. One is reminded of a narrative voice like the following:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.”

The speaker here, Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, inhabited the world that also belonged to George Bush — the world of the northeast prep schools of the 1940s. Apart from the obvious parallels between George and Holden, there is the interesting question of whether Bush might have a closer relation to this literary personage. In the course of the errant Holden Caulfield’s time in New York City, he takes a girlfriend to a matinee theatre performance; during the intermission the girlfriend, named Sally, spots “some jerk she knew on the other side of the lobby. Some guy in one of those very dark grey flannel suits and one of those checkered vests. Strictly Ivy League. Big deal.” Holden recounts the later conversation between Sally and her friend:

“You should’ve seen him when old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of a phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody’s question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady’s foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me. Then he and Sally started talking about a lot of people they both knew. It was the phoniest conversation you ever heard in your life.”

“The worst part was, the jerk had one of those very phony, Ivy League voices, one of those very tired, snobby voices. He sounded just like a girl. He didn’t hesitate to horn in on my date, the bastard. I even thought for a minute that he was going to get in the goddamn cab with us when the show was over, because he walked about two blocks with us, but he said he had to meet a bunch of phonies for cocktails, he said. I could see them all sitting around in some bar, with their goddamn checkered vests, criticizing shows and books and women in those tired, snobby voices. They kill me, those guys.”

Who was Sally’s friend? “His name was George something – I don’t even remember- and he went to Andover. Big, big deal.” Who was the “phony Andover bastard” who so exasperated Holden Caulfield? Can this be a very early cameo appearance of George Herbert Walker Bush? J.D. Salinger is not known for giving interviews, but George Bush, Big Man on the Andover campus, would have been a figure of some note under the clock in the Biltmore during the early 1940’s, which seems to be the epoch in which this episode is set.

For the full text, see:
http://tarpley.net/online-books/george-bush-the-unauthorized-biography/chapter-25-thyroid-storm/

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 25, 2010

My dear Senator,

I am writing to urge you to vote against the confirmation of Ben Bernanke for a second term as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Bernanke has failed in his responsibilities both as a banking regulator and in his administration of Federal Reserve lending. Bernanke presided over the final phase of the $1.5 quadrillion financial derivatives bubble which is the central cause of the present world economic depression. He was the principal advocate for the reckless and irresponsible policy of bailing out bankrupt money center institutions, allowing them to live on as zombie banks at astronomical taxpayer, but with no corresponding benefit whatsoever for the economic life of the broader society. Bernanke is responsible for the super-toxic alphabet soup of Federal Reserve lending facilities like the TAF, the TALF, and so forth. These betrayals of the public trust have offered 0% credit to predatory institutions including Wall Street banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, money market funds, and other financial institutions. Bernanke has thus used public resources to subsidize financial speculation in all of its most destructive forums, while doing almost nothing to provide cheap credit for production that would benefit factories, farms, mines, building construction, small business, exports, scientific research, energy production, and infrastructure building. Economic activity in all of these fields is now dying for lack of credit, which is being denied by the very institutions Bernanke is trying to save. Everything that Bernanke has done is diametrically opposed to the rational credit policy needed to fight an economic depression.

Bernanke must therefore be rejected. Instead, the Senate should support a new Fed chairman with the qualifications necessary to preside over the nationalization of this illegal, unconstitutional, and failed institution. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 must be repealed. The future of the Fed is as a bureau of the United States Treasury responsible for providing cheap federal lending as a public utility for productive activity in the form of tangible physical commodity output, not speculation and financial services. In the future, the size of the money supply, short-term interest rates, and the approved categories of lending must be taken out of the hands of unelected and unaccountable cliques of predatory bankers, and deliberated in the full glare of publicity by the House, the Senate, and the president, as the United States Constitution actually requires. Because of Bernanke’s pattern of subservience to Wall Street interests, it is clear that he cannot be the official suited to to carry out this historic transition. Worse, reports concerning telephone calls made by Treasury Secretary Geithner in September 2008 suggest that Bernanke may also be a party to illegal operations by the Fed in regard to the bailout of AIG and its derivatives counterparties at that time. It is unthinkable that the Senate would approve Bernanke unless and until these grave suspicions have been cleared up.

Today’s newspapers suggest that Bernanke, even if he should be rejected by the Senate this week, would still attempt to stay in power as a member of the Board of Governors through 2020, exerting his power through his colleagues presently on the board. This would amount to nothing less than a bankers’ insurrection. In this eventuality, the Congress must swiftly impeach Bernanke and remove him from office immediately.

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 22, 2010

In the aftermath of the Massachusetts Senate vote last Tuesday, we now have a concrete fighting chance to block the reappointment of Wall Street puppet Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by preventing his Senate confirmation next week. This afternoon, Bernanke’s support was eroding hour by hour. The defections from the Bernanke camp feature Democratic senators who are up for reelection this coming November. They have read the tea leaves from Massachusetts, and they know the pitchforks are out, so their response is a mad rush to acquire economic populist and anti-Wall Street cover. The obvious way to do this is to turn against Bernanke and defeat him in the upcoming confirmation vote. Leading the charge late today were Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, both endangered Democrats. GOP Senator Corker of Tennessee is now waffling about whether or not he will support Bernanke. The pressure is building on self-styled Democratic economic populists like Sherrod Brown of Ohio to prove that they are worth something. What will Senator-elect Scott Brown do? If he votes for Bernanke, he will have betrayed his voters in less than a week, and will not survive his own re-election campaign in 3 years. Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, succumbing to overwhelming pressure from the Obama White House, announced late this afternoon that he will fall on his sword for Helicopter Ben, but this self-destructive pledge may not survive a weekend in Nevada, where the economic populist pitchforks are as finely honed as anywhere. It is therefore time for all responsible citizens and all persons of good will to mobilize in the days ahead to secure the defeat of Bernanke. Such an event would symbolize the turn of the tide against Wall Street in the struggle to decide who will pay for the current depression — the people or the bankers and hedge fund hyenas.

We stress that this is a battle which can be won. Two senators, Bunning of Kentucky and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have placed holds on the Bernanke nomination. This means that a supermajority of 60 votes will be required to bring Helicopter Ben’s nomination to the Senate floor. As of now, no one can know whether these votes will be forthcoming. Republicans have little reason to favor Bernanke over their own careers. The Obama White House, despite its most recent efforts to re-create a populist persona for the chief executive, is foolishly supporting Bernanke — a move which undermines all other economic populist posturing Obama might engage in. Individual Democrats, especially those facing the hour of truth in November, know very well how much Bernanke and his Federal Reserve elitists are hated by Americans. For the moment, this game is therefore out of control and highly vulnerable to the application of mass-based political pressure. If Bernanke can be defeated, the Wall Street-Federal Reserve lockstep will be momentarily broken, and the path to auditing the Fed and, more importantly, nationalizing it as a bureau of the Treasury will be wide open. Continue reading Mobilize Now to Oust Bernanke as Fed Chair

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 19, 2010

Washington DC, January 19, 2010 — Today’s stunning defeat of the colorless hack Martha Coakley by the Republican challenger in Massachusetts must be interpreted as crucial proof that the American electorate is hungry for populism in the midst of a worsening world economic depression. The kind of populism Massachusetts voters really wanted was New Deal economic populism in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, meaning concrete measures to break the power of Wall Street and deliver economic benefits to the broad middle class and working people generally. This was the kind of economic populism which was nowhere in sight. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, and Barney Frank is a party of Wall Street shills and puppets. Since no economic populists were in sight, Massachusetts voters settled for second best in the form of cultural populism as represented by the Republican Scott Brown, whose main claim to fame was that he drove a truck with 200,000 miles on it. That is the demagogic essence of cultural populism, the only kind of populism of which Republicans and reactionaries in general are capable. Cultural populism is what Rush Limbaugh sells on the radio every day, mocking the elitist cultural pretensions of politically correct Democrats. Cultural populism is the stock in trade of Sarah Palin, who uses it to try to make Tea Party supporters forget her warm support for the Bush-Paulson $700 billion bailout of Wall Street in October 2008, when Palin was running for vice president. Coakley, by contrast, was a prim elitist who showed her contempt for Joe Sixpack by going on a two-week vacation in the middle of her alleged Senate campaign. Continue reading The Massachusetts Senate Race: A Populist Protest Vote Against Wall Street Puppets

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 18, 2010

Washington, January 18, 2010 — In an interview with Dina Gusovsky of Russia Today, Webster Tarpley pointed out that the escalating clash between Google and the People’s Republic of China comes in the context of rapidly deteriorating relations between the two countries on a broad front. Google is part of a cartel of Internet companies which notoriously works closely with the US intelligence community for political purposes, including the subversion and overthrow of foreign governments. We need only recall the central role of Twitter in the CIA’s attempted coup d’état in Iran last summer. Political manipulation by means of the Internet is an indispensable part of the CIA’s recipe for color revolutions, velvet revolutions, people power coups, and postmodern coups. When the Internet is introduced into previously authoritarian countries, it is often possible to dupe, manipulate, and stampede large numbers of enthusiastic young people who are not politically sophisticated. The results are often disastrous. In Georgia, a color revolution installed into power the madman Sakaashvili, who has already started one war. Yushenko, the beneficiary of the Orange Revolution of 2004, has just been massively repudiated by voters after a catastrophic presidency. The hangover of disillusionment surrounding Obama is related to the fact that he took power in something of the same way. The Chinese government therefore feels that there are valid reasons to prevent Western intelligence agencies from massively pumping black propaganda into China using the Internet. This is in any case a purely domestic Chinese issue, and Americans in particular ought to focus on putting their own house in order before starting to give lectures to the rest of the world. Continue reading Google Attacks China as Washington-Beijing Hostility Deepens

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 17, 2010

Just over five days or 120 hours after a major earthquake hit the area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it is increasingly clear that the US approach to organizing the delivery of emergency assistance and supplies is so ineffective that the general directing the distribution of emergency aid needs to be fired without further delay. The catastrophic blunder involved is the decision by the US military in the person of Gen. Ken Keen to insist on routing all external aid through a single substandard, inadequate, and partially destroyed landing field, the Toussaint L‘Ouverture airport. This airport has a single runway, and room to park only about half a dozen medium to long range aircraft. The result is that once six aircraft are parked in the unloading area, all incoming traffic must be waved off until one of the six planes has taken off again, as a colonel on the ground explained in a press conference broadcast on C-SPAN radio here this afternoon. The control tower, radar, and other facilities have been destroyed by the earthquake. Even once cargo has been offloaded, it has been tending to build up at the airport because the streets and roads leading from the airport towards the main population concentrations are blocked by collapsed buildings and other debris. The result is an agonizing slowness in delivering vital supplies upon which the immediate survival of up to 3 million Haitians now depends.

The Single Airport as Bottleneck

This single airport approach fulfills the textbook definitions of a logistical bottleneck and logistical nightmare. It was a fatal mistake to ever decide to make this single runway the only supply line for the stricken populations around the Haitian capital. The officer who is said to be running the US logistical effort on the ground is Lieutenant General P.K. “Ken” Keen, second in command of the US Southern Command. Interviewed today by Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday, General Keen stated: “ Well, we had a very good day yesterday, Brit. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne division who have only arrived within the last day or two delivered over 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 rations.” General Keane was referring to Saturday, January 16, three days and 96 hours after the earthquake. This statement is comparable to the recent remark of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to the effect that, although an airplane had almost been blown up aloft, “The system worked.” General Keen, like Secretary Napolitano, appears incapable of recognizing defeat and failure when they are staring him in the face, and human lives have already been lost as a result of his incompetence. Gen. Keen is well on his way to becoming the new Brownie of the Haitian crisis, surpassing in ineptitude the infamous Bush FEMA director who received the accolade of “heckuva job, Brownie” at the height of the 2005 debacle. Continue reading To Save Haiti, Fire Gen. “Brownie” Keen, Start Air Drops, Cancel the Debt, and Kick Out The IMF

Birgitta Jónsdóttir
www.tarpley.net
January 6, 2010

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is the leader of The Movement

[Note: Birgitta Jónsdóttir is the leader of The Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague, with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a courageous leader in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic well-being and future of her country.]

January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders. The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make, and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum. Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government, after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote on December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy and dishonesty on the part of the government. Every day throughout the debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local media or wikileaks. Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country, spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer, a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers. The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland’s citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best economic interests of their nation.

Let’s also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000 under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the banks.

Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news, saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring us further down!

The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.

Love and rage from Iceland
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament

Documentation: I append links to the files about Icesave that were leaked to wikileaks, and which show how the EU member states blackmailed Iceland into the same corner the government helped push into by accepting the Icesave bill. This file also contains letters between the main financial adviser to the Iceland Finance Minister and Mark Flanagan of the IMF:

copy of http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf

Webster G. Tarpley
www.tarpley.net
January 5, 2010

Washington DC , January 5, 2010 — Obama’s speech this afternoon was an incongruous performance. On the one hand, he angrily detailed a catastrophic breakdown in US intelligence procedures leading to the near-massacre of hundreds of airline passengers in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. On the other hand, there was no purge of the corrupt, complicit, and incompetent officials who had made this incident possible. No firings were announced. No heads rolled. The rogue network or invisible government of treasonous and subversive moles inside the US government which is behind the Detroit incident, and so many other incidents, remained untouched once again.

Wolffe on MSNBC: “Cock-Up Or Conspiracy?”

The expectation that Obama might actually do something to combat the rogue network across US government institutions which inflicts terrorism on the American people and the world had been raised the night before in an interview by Washington journalist Richard Wolffe on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC Countdown program. Wolffe, citing high-level White House officials, had reported that there was an investigation into whether the security lapses leading to the Detroit Christmas incident had been intentional and deliberate, and thus the products of conscious sabotage. Wolffe had stated: “It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda.The question there is again, cock up or conspiracy. Was there a reason these agencies were at war with each other that prevented that intelligence from being shared?” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34694889) The goal, summarized Olbermann, was either a “turf war” or else the desire “to make somebody [Obama] look bad.” In reality, the goals involve a domestic police state and foreign geopolitical adventures. Continue reading Obama Flubs His First Bay Of Pigs Moment As Terror Moles Escape Purge