<![CDATA[Deep Politics Forum - Political, Governmental, and Economic Systems and Strategies]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/ Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:01:39 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Descent Into Madness]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16454 Thu, 18 Sep 2025 03:00:34 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16454
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]]> <![CDATA[How Fascists Rewrite The Past To Control The Future]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16414 Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:07:49 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16414 ]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Jews and Nazis]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16283 Fri, 25 Mar 2022 20:35:35 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16283 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis



Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New
York Times as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article
about the controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Back in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print publication,
lacking the large color photographs of rap stars and long stories about dieting techniques that
fill so much of today’s news coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder edge in its Middle
East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir’s predecessor Menacham Begin had allowed his
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into invading Lebanon and besieging Beirut, and the
subsequent massacre of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee
camps had outraged the world and angered America’s government. This eventually led to
Begin’s resignation, with Shamir, his Foreign Minister, taking his place.
Prior to his surprising 1977 election victory, Begin had spent decades in the political wilderness
as an unacceptable right-winger, and Shamir had an even more extreme background, with the
American mainstream media freely reporting his long involvement in all sorts of high-profile
assassinations and terrorist attacks during the 1940s, painting him as a very bad man indeed.
Given Shamir’s notorious activities, few revelations would have shocked me, but this one did.
Apparently, during the late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction had become great
admirers of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they had
made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940 and 1941,
hoping to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate, and undertake a campaign of
attacks and espionage against the local British forces, then share in the political booty after
Hitler’s inevitable triumph.
Now the Times clearly viewed Shamir in a very negative light, but it seemed extremely unlikely
to me that they would have published such a remarkable story without being absolutely sure of
their facts. Among other things, there were long excerpts from the official letters sent to
Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and France that5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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he was opposing, and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would have no
future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to establish under his auspices in
Palestine.
As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the
time, and given the small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of
those efforts. But the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State having spent his
early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in one’s
mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era which I had always accepted.
Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seems to have had only a relatively
minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that any
American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during
the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting political
scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or most other
western nations. But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press,
especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis
took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then later served
a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel apparently
regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most American
Jews.

Around that same time, a second intriguing example of this quite
different Israeli perspective towards the Nazis also came to my
attention. In 1983, Amoz Oz, often described as Israel’s greatest
novelist, had published In the Land of Israel to glowing reviews. This
book was a collection of lengthy interviews with various
representative figures in Israeli society, both moderate and extreme,
as well as some coverage of the Palestinians who also lived among
them.
Of these ideological profiles, one of the shortest but most widely
discussed was that of an especially hard-line political figure,
unnamed but almost universally believed to be Ariel Sharon, a
conclusion certainly supported by the personal details and physical
description provided. Near the very beginning, that figure mentioned that people of his
ideological ilk had recently been denounced as “Judeo-Nazis” by a prominent liberal Israeli
academic, but rather than reject that label, he fully welcomed it. So the subject generally
became known in public discussions as the “Judeo-Nazi.”
That he described himself in such terms was hardly an exaggeration, since he rather gleefully
advocated the slaughter of millions of Israel’s enemies, and the vast expansion of Israeli
territory by conquest of neighboring lands and expulsion of their populations, along with the
free use of nuclear weapons if they or anyone else too strongly resisted such efforts. In his bold
opinion, the Israelis and Jews in general were just too soft and meek, and needed to regain5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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their place in the world by once again becoming a conquering people, probably hated but
definitely feared. To him, the large recent massacre of Palestinian women and children at Sabra
and Shatila was of no consequence whatsoever, and the most unfortunate aspect of the incident
was that the killers had been Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies rather than Israeli soldiers
themselves.
Now rhetorical excess is quite common among politicians and a shroud of pledged anonymity
will obviously loosen many tongues. But can anyone imagine an American or other Western
public figure talking in such terms, let alone someone who moves in higher political circles?
These days, Donald Trump sometimes Tweets out a crude misspelled insult at 2am, and the
American media is aghast in horror. But given that his administration leaks like a sieve, if he
routinely boasted to his confidants about possibly slaughtering millions, we surely would have
heard about it. For that matter, there seems not the slightest evidence that the original German
Nazis ever spoke in such ways privately, let alone while a journalist was carefully taking notes.
But the “Judeo-Nazis” of Israel are another story.
As near as I can recall, the last even slightly prominent figure in American public life who
declared himself a “Nazi” was George Lincoln Rockwell during the 1960s, and he was much
more of a political performance artist than an actual political leader. Even as marginalized a
figure as David Duke has always hotly denied such an accusation. But apparently politics in
Israel is played by different rules.
In any event, Sharon’s purported utterances seem to have had little negative impact upon his
subsequent political career, and after spending some time in the political wilderness after the
Lebanon disaster, he eventually served five years as Prime Minister during 2001-2006,
although by that later date his views were regularly denounced as too soft and compromising
due to the steady rightward drift of the Israeli political spectrum.

Over the years I’ve occasionally made half-hearted attempts to locate
the Times article about Shamir that had long stuck in my memory,
but have had no success, either because it was removed from the
Times archives or more likely because my mediocre search skills
proved inadequate. But I’m almost certain that the piece had been
prompted by the 1983 publication of Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators[1] by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist of the Trotskyite
persuasion and Jewish origins. I only very recently discovered that
book, which really tells an extremely interesting story.
Brenner, born in 1937, has spent his entire life as an unreconstructed
hard-core leftist, with his enthusiasms ranging from Marxist
revolution to the Black Panthers, and he is obviously a captive of his
views and his ideology. At times, this background impairs the flow of his text, and the periodic
allusions to “proletarian,” “bourgeoisie,” and “capitalist classes” sometimes grow a little
wearisome, as does his unthinking acceptance of all the shared beliefs common to his political
circle. But surely only someone with that sort of fervent ideological commitment would have5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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been willing to devote so much time and effort to investigating that controversial subject and
ignoring the endless denunciations that resulted, which even included physical assaults by
Zionist partisans.
In any event, his documentation seems completely airtight, and some
years after the original appearance of his book, he published a
companion volume entitled 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration
with the Nazis, which simply provides English translations of all the
raw evidence behind his analytical framework, allowing interested
parties to read the material and draw their own conclusions.
Among other things, Brenner provides considerable evidence that the
larger and somewhat more mainstream right-wing Zionist faction
later led by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was almost
invariably regarded as a Fascist movement during the 1930s, even
apart from its warm admiration for Mussolini’s Italian regime. This
was hardly such a dark secret in that period given that its main
Palestine newspaper carried a regular column by a top ideological leader entitled “Diary of a
Fascist.” During one of the major international Zionist conferences, factional leader Vladimir
Zabotinsky entered the hall with his brown-shirted followers in full military formation, leading
the chair to ban the wearing of uniforms in order to avoid a riot, and his faction was soon
defeated politically and eventually expelled from the Zionist umbrella organization. This major
setback was largely due to the widespread hostility the group had aroused after two of its
members were arrested by British police for the recent assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, one
of the highest-ranking Zionist officials based in Palestine.
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism,
and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in
1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival[2], a year after the two men
had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been
killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion,
the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly
continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the
British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator,
though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman[3] and
British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin[4], and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill[5]
apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist
car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets,[6] all long before any
Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics[7]; and Begin’s larger and more
“moderate” Zionist faction did much the same. Given that background, it was hardly surprising
that Shamir later served as director of assassinations at the Israeli Mossad during 1955-1965,
so if the Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy[8], he was very likely involved.
5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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The cover of the 2014 paperback edition of Brenner’s
book displays the commemorative medal struck by
Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance, with a Star-
of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the
obverse. But oddly enough, this symbolic medallion
actually had absolutely no connection with the
unsuccessful attempts by Shamir’s small faction to
arrange a Nazi military alliance during World War II.
Although the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor organization, the far
larger and more influential mainstream Zionist movement of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-
Gurion was something else entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had
formed an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an obvious
commonality of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population
as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East
seemed as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar
objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required
both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.
After Hitler had been named Chancellor in 1933,
outraged Jews worldwide had quickly launched an
economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its
knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running
the banner headline “Judea Declares War on
Germany.” Jewish political and economic influence,
then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths of the Great Depression,
impoverished Germany needed to export or die, so a large scale boycott in major German
markets posed a potentially serious threat. But this exact situation provided Zionist groups
with an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that trade embargo,
and they demanded favorable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods
to Palestine, together with accompanying German Jews. Once word of this major Ha’avara or
“Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist Convention, many Jews and
Zionists were outraged, and it led to various splits and controversies. But the economic deal
was too good to resist, and it went forward and quickly grew.
The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate.
According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over
60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide
impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial
support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggests that without Hitler’s financial
backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died
during that difficult period.
Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across references to
the Ha’avara Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters mentioning the
issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war, statues would surely have been
built to him throughout Israel and he would today be recognized by Jews everywhere as the5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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heroic Gentile leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a national homeland for
the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of bitter exile.
This sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as totally absurd as it might
sound to our present-day ears. We must recognize that our historical understanding of reality is
shaped by the media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars and their
allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid confusing the public. It is undeniably
true that in his 1924 book Mein Kampf, Hitler had written all sorts of hostile and nasty things
about Jews, especially those who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, but when I
read the book back in high school, I was a little surprised to discover that these anti-Jewish
sentiments hardly seemed central to his text. Furthermore, just a couple of years earlier, a
vastly more prominent public figure such as British Minister Winston Churchill had published
sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty[9], focusing on the monstrous crimes being committed
by Bolshevik Jews. In Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears, I was surprised to discover that the
author of the famous Balfour Declaration, the foundation of the Zionist project, was apparently
also quite hostile to Jews, with an element of his motivation probably being his desire to
exclude them from Britain.
Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political
organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being
legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local
Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and
Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German
publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street
corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper
political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would
fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.
In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish
settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing
Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part-series in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff,
the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to
Palestine.” In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued
that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and
only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile. Based on
available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have reached a
somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.
During that era extremely harsh sentiments regarding Diaspora Jewry were sometimes found
in rather surprising quarters. After the controversy surrounding Shamir’s Nazi ties erupted into
the headlines, Brenner’s material became the grist for an important article by Edward
Mortimer, the longtime Middle East expert at the august Times of London, and the 2014
edition of the book includes some choice extracts from Mortimer’s February 11, 1984 Times
piece:5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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Who told a Berlin audience in March 1912 that “each country can absorb only a
limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany
already has too many Jews”?
No, not Adolf Hitler but Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist
Organization and later still the first president of the state of Israel.
And where might you find the following assertion, originally composed in 1917 but
republished as late as 1936: “The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human
being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and
throws off the harness of social obligation, knows no order nor discipline”?
Not in Der Sturmer but in the organ of the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer
Hatzair.
As the above quoted statement reveals, Zionism itself encouraged and exploited
self-hatred in the Diaspora. It started from the assumption that anti-Semitism was
inevitable and even in a sense justified so long as Jews were outside the land of
Israel.
It is true that only an extreme lunatic fringe of Zionism went so far as to offer to
join the war on Germany’s side in 1941, in the hope of establishing “the historical
Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the
German Reich.” Unfortunately this was the group which the present Prime Minister
of Israel chose to join.
The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in
the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s
founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological
movements was not really so totally surprising.
However, uncomfortable truths do remain uncomfortable. Mortimer had spent nineteen years
at the Times, the last dozen of them as the foreign specialist and leader-writer on Middle
Eastern affairs. But the year after he wrote that article including those controversial quotations,
his career at that newspaper ended[10], leading to an unusual gap in his employment history,
and that development may or may not be purely coincidental.
Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably ranks as one of
the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli
agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens,
Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and
apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration
with top Zionist leaders.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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Brenner is a captive of his ideology and his beliefs, accepting without question the historical
narrative with which he was raised. He seems to find nothing so strange about Eichmann being
a philo-Semitic partner of the Jewish Zionists during the late 1930s and then suddenly being
transformed into a mass-murderer of the European Jews in the early 1940s, willingly
committing the monstrous crimes for which the Israelis later justly put him to death.
This is certainly possible, but I really wonder. A more cynical observer might find it a very odd
coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the Israelis made such an effort to track down and
kill had been their closest former political ally and collaborator. After Germany’s defeat,
Eichmann had fled to Argentina and lived there quietly for a number of years until his name
resurfaced in a celebrated mid-1950s controversy surrounding one of his leading Zionist
partners, then living in Israel as a respected government official, who was denounced as a Nazi
collaborator, eventually ruled innocent after a celebrated trial, but later assassinated by former
members of Shamir’s faction.
Following that controversy in Israel, Eichmann supposedly gave a long personal interview to a
Dutch Nazi journalist, and although it wasn’t published at the time, perhaps word of its
existence may have gotten into circulation. The new state of Israel was just a few years old at
that time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately dependent upon the
goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi
alliance was a deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely
disastrous consequences.
According to the version of the interview later published as a two-part story in Life Magazine,
Eichmann’s statements seemingly did not touch on the deadly topic of the 1930s Nazi-Zionist
partnership. But surely Israeli leaders must have been terrified that they might not be so lucky
the next time, so we may speculate that Eichmann’s elimination suddenly became a top
national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960. Presumably, harsh means
were employed to persuade him not to reveal any of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his
Jerusalem trial, and one might wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass
booth was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to stray from the
agreed upon script. All of this analysis is totally speculative, but Eichmann’s role as a central
figure in the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.

Just as we might imagine, America’s overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry was hardly
eager to serve as a public conduit for Brenner’s shocking revelations of a close Nazi-Zionist
economic partnership, and he mentions that his book agent uniformly received rejections from
each firm he approached, based on a wide variety of different excuses. However, he finally
managed to locate an extremely obscure publisher in Britain willing to take on the project, and
his book was released in 1983, initially receiving no reviews other than a couple of harsh and
perfunctory denunciations, though Soviet Izvestia took some interest in his findings until they
discovered that he was a hated Trotskyite.
His big break came when Shamir suddenly became Israel’s Prime Minister, and he brought his
evidence of former Nazi ties to the English-language Palestinian press, which put it into general5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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circulation. Various British Marxists, including the notorious “Red Ken” Livingstone of London,
organized a speaking tour for him, and when a group of right-wing Zionist militants attacked
one of the events and inflicted injuries, the story of the brawl caught the attention of the
mainstream newspapers. Soon afterward the discussion of Brenner’s astonishing discoveries
appeared in the Times of London and entered the international media. Presumably, the New
York Times article that had originally caught my eye ran sometime during this period.
Public relations professionals are quite skilled at minimizing the impact of damaging
revelations, and pro-Israel organizations have no shortage of such individuals. Just before the
1983 release of his remarkable book, Brenner suddenly discovered that a young pro-Zionist
author named Edwin Black was furiously working on a similar project, apparently backed by
sufficient financial resources that he was employing an army of fifty researchers to allow him to
complete his project in record time.
Since the entire embarrassing subject of a Nazi-Zionist partnership had been kept away from
the public eye for almost five decades, this timing surely seems more than merely coincidental.
Presumably word of Brenner’s numerous unsuccessful efforts at securing a mainstream
publisher during 1982 had gotten around, as had as his eventual success in locating a tiny one
in Britain. Having failed to prevent publication of such explosive material, pro-Israel groups
quietly decided that their next best option was trying to seize control of the topic themselves,
allowing disclosure of those parts of the story that could not be concealed but excluding items
of greatest danger, while portraying the sordid history in the best possible light.
Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement, may have arrived a year later
than Brenner’s but was clearly backed by vastly greater publicity and
resources. It was released by Macmillan, a leading publisher, ran
nearly twice the length of Brenner’s short book, and carried powerful
endorsements by leading figures from the firmament of Jewish
activism, including the Simon Weisenthal Center, the Israel
Holocaust Memorial, and the American Jewish Archives. As a
consequence, it received long if not necessarily favorable reviews in
influential publications such as The New Republic and Commentary.
In all fairness, I should mention that in the Foreword to his book,
Black claims that his research efforts had been totally discouraged by
nearly everyone he approached, and as a consequence, he had been
working on the project with solitary intensity for many years. This implies the near-
simultaneous release of the two books was purely due to chance. But such a picture is hardly
consistent with his glowing testimonials from so many prominent Jewish leaders, and
personally I find Brenner’s claim that Black was assisted by fifty researchers far more
convincing.
Since both Black and Brenner were describing the same basic reality and relying upon many of
the same documents, in most respects the stories they tell are generally similar. But Black
carefully excludes any mention of offers of Zionist military cooperation with the Nazis, let alone
the repeated attempts by Shamir’s Zionist faction to officially join the Axis Powers after the war
had broken out, as well as numerous other details of a particularly embarrassing nature.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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Assuming Black’s book was published for the reasons I suggested, I think that the strategy of
the pro-Israel groups largely succeeded, with his version of the history seeming to have quickly
supplanted Brenner’s except perhaps in strongly leftist or anti-Zionist circles. Googling each
combination of the title and author, Black’s book gets eight times as many hits, and his Amazon
sales ranks and numbers of reviews are also larger by roughly that same factor. Most notably,
neither the Wikipedia articles on “The Transfer Agreement”[11] and “The Ha’avara
Agreement”[12] contain any mention of Brenner’s research whatsoever, even though his book
was published earlier, was far broader, and only he provided the underlying documentary
evidence. As a personal example of the current situation, I was quite unaware of the entire
Ha’avara history until just a few years ago when I encountered some website comments
mentioning Black’s book, leading me to purchase and read it. But even then, Brenner’s far more
wide-ranging and explosive volume remained totally unknown to me until very recently.

Once World War II began, this Nazi-Zionist partnership quickly lapsed for obvious reasons.
Germany was now at war with the British Empire, and financial transfers to British-run
Palestine were no longer possible. Furthermore, the Arab Palestinians had grown quite hostile
to the Jewish immigrants whom they rightfully feared might eventually displace them, and
once the Germans were forced to choose between maintaining their relationship with a
relatively small Zionist movement or winning the political sympathy of a vast sea of Middle
Eastern Arabs and Muslims, their decision was a natural one. The Zionists faced a similar
choice, and especially once wartime propaganda began so heavily blackening the German and
Italian governments, their long previous partnership was not something they wanted widely
known.
However, at exactly this same moment a somewhat different and equally long-forgotten
connection between Jews and Nazi Germany suddenly moved to the fore.
Like most people everywhere, the average German, whether Jewish or Gentile, was probably
not all that political, and although Zionism had for years been accorded a privileged place in
German society, it is not entirely clear how many ordinary German Jews paid much attention
to it. The tens of thousands who emigrated to Palestine during that period were probably
motivated as much by economic pressures as by ideological commitment. But wartime changed
matters in other ways.
This was even more true for the German government. The outbreak
of a world war against a powerful coalition of the British and French
empires, later augmented by both Soviet Russia and the United
States, imposed the sorts of enormous pressures that could often
overcome ideological scruples. A few years ago, I discovered a
fascinating 2002 book by Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,
a scholarly treatment of exactly what the title implies. The quality of
this controversial historical analysis is indicated by the glowing
jacket-blurbs from numerous academic experts and an extremely
favorable treatment by an eminent scholar in The American
Historical Review.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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Obviously, Nazi ideology was overwhelmingly centered upon race and
considered racial purity a crucial factor in national cohesion.
Individuals possessing substantial non-German ancestry were
regarded with considerable suspicion, and this concern was greatly
amplified if that admixture was Jewish. But in a military struggle
against an opposing coalition possessing many times Germany’s
population and industrial resources, such ideological factors might be
overcome by practical considerations, and Rigg persuasively argues
that some 150,000 half-Jews or quarter-Jews served in the armed
forces of the Third Reich, a percentage probably not much different
than their share of the general military-age population.
Germany’s long-integrated and assimilated Jewish population had
always been disproportionately urban, affluent, and well-educated. As a consequence it is not
entirely surprising that a large proportion of these part-Jewish soldiers who served Hitler were
actually combat officers rather than merely rank-and-file conscripts, and they included at least
15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, and another dozen quarter-Jews holding those same high
ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s
powerful second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the
Luftwaffe. Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated
claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.
Admittedly, the racially-elite SS itself generally had far stricter ancestry standards, with even a
trace of non-Aryan parentage normally seen as disqualifying an individual from membership.
But even here, the situation was sometimes complicated, since there were widespread rumors
that Reinhard Heydrich, the second-ranking figure in that very powerful organization, actually
had considerable Jewish ancestry. Rigg investigates that claim without coming to any clear
conclusions, though he does seem to think that the circumstantial evidence involved may have
been used by other high-ranking Nazi figures as a point of leverage or blackmail against
Heydrich, who stood as one of the most important figures in the Third Reich.
As a further irony, most of these individuals traced their Jewish ancestry through their father
rather than their mother, so although they were not Jewish according to rabbinical law, their
family names often reflected their partly Semitic origins, though in many cases Nazi authorities
attempted to studiously overlook this glaringly obvious situation. As an extreme example noted
by an academic reviewer of the book, a half-Jew bearing the distinctly non-Aryan name of
Werner Goldberg actually had his photograph prominently featured in a 1939 Nazi propaganda
newspaper, with the caption describing him as the “The Ideal German Soldier.”
The author conducted more than 400 personal interviews of the surviving part-Jews and their
relatives, and these painted a very mixed picture of the difficulties they had encountered under
the Nazi regime, which varied enormously depending upon particular circumstances and the
personalities of those in authority over them. One important source of complaint was that
because of their status, part-Jews were often denied the military honors or promotions they
had rightfully earned. However, under especially favorable conditions, they might also be
legally reclassified as being of “German Blood,” which officially eliminated any taint on their
status.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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Even official policy seems to have been quite contradictory and vacillating. For example, when
the civilian humiliations sometimes inflicted upon the fully Jewish parents of serving half-Jews
were brought to Hitler’s attention, he regarded that situation as intolerable, declaring that
either such parents must be fully protected against such indignities or all the half-Jews must be
discharged, and eventually in April 1940 he issued a decree requiring the latter. However, this
order was largely ignored by many commanders, or implemented through a honor-system that
almost amounted to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” so a considerable fraction of half-Jews remained in
the military if they so wished. And then in July 1941, Hitler somewhat reversed himself, issuing
a new decree that allowed “worthy” half-Jews who had been discharged to return to the
military as officers, while also announcing that after the war, all quarter-Jews would be
reclassified as fully “German Blood” Aryan citizens.
It has been said that after questions were raised about the Jewish ancestry of some of his
subordinates, Goring once angrily responded “I will decide who is a Jew!” and that attitude
seems to reasonably capture some of the complexity and subjective nature of the social
situation.
Interestingly enough, many of part-Jews interviewed by Rigg recalled that prior to Hitler’s rise
to power, the intermarriage of their parents had often provoked much greater hostility from the
Jewish rather than the Gentile side of their families, suggesting that even in heavily-assimilated
Germany, the traditional Jewish tendency toward ethnic exclusivity had still remained a
powerful factor in that community.
Although the part-Jews in German military service were certainly subject to various forms of
mistreatment and discrimination, perhaps we should compare this against the analogous
situation in our own military in those same years with regard to America’s Japanese or black
minorities. During that era, racial intermarriage was legally prohibited across a large portion of
the US, so the mixed-race population of those groups was either almost non-existent or very
different in origin. But when Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave their wartime
concentration camps and enlist in the military, they were entirely restricted to segregated all-
Japanese units, but with the officers generally being white. Meanwhile, blacks were almost
entirely barred from combat service, though they sometimes served in strictly-segregated
support roles. The notion that an American with any appreciable trace of African, Japanese, or
for that matter Chinese ancestry might serve as a general or even an officer in the U.S. military
and thereby exercise command authority over white American troops would have been almost
unthinkable. The contrast with the practice in Hitler’s own military is quite different than what
Americans might naively assume.

This paradox is not nearly as surprising as one might assume. The non-economic divisions in
European societies had almost always been along lines of religion, language, and culture rather
than racial ancestry, and the social tradition of more than a millennium could not easily be
swept away by merely a half-dozen years of National Socialist ideology. During all those earlier
centuries, a sincerely-baptized Jew, whether in Germany or elsewhere, was usually considered
just as good a Christian as any other. For example, Tomas de Torquemada, the most fearsome
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Even wider racial differences were hardly considered of crucial importance. Some of the
greatest heroes of particular national cultures, such as Russia’s Alexander Pushkin and France’s
Alexandre Dumas, had been individuals with significant black African ancestry, and this was
certainly not considered any sort of disqualifying characteristic.
By contrast, American society from its inception had always been sharply divided by race, with
other differences generally constituting far smaller impediments to intermarriage and
amalgamation. I’ve seen widespread claims that when the Third Reich devised its 1935
Nuremberg Laws restricting marriage and other social arrangements between Aryans, non-
Aryans, and part-Aryans, its experts drew upon some of America’s long legal experience in
similar matters, and this seems quite plausible. Under that new Nazi statute, pre-existing
mixed-marriages received some legal protection, but henceforth Jews and half-Jews could only
marry each other, while quarter-Jews could only marry regular Aryans. The obvious intent was
to absorb that latter group into mainstream German society, while isolating the more heavily-
Jewish population.
Ironically enough, Israel today is one of very few countries with a similar sort of strictly
racially-based criteria for citizenship status and other privileges, with the Jewish-only
immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing[13], and marriages between Jews and
non-Jews legally prohibited. A few years ago, the world media also carried the remarkable
story[14] of a Palestinian Arab sentenced to prison for rape because he had consensual sexual
relations with a Jewish woman by passing himself off as a fellow Jew.
Since Orthodox Judaism is strictly matrilineal and controls Israeli law, even Jews of other
branches can experience unexpected difficulties due to conflicts between personal ethnic
identity and official legal status. The vast majority of the wealthier and more influential Jewish
families worldwide do not follow Orthodox religious traditions, and over the generations, they
have often taken Gentile wives. However, even if the latter had converted to Judaism, their
conversions are considered invalid by the Orthodox Rabbinate, and none of their resulting
descendants are considered Jewish. So if some members of these families later develop a deep
commitment to their Jewish heritage and immigrate to Israel, they are sometimes outraged to
discover that they are officially classified as “goyim” under Orthodox law and legally prohibited
from marrying Jews. These major political controversies periodically erupt and sometimes
reach the international medi[15]a.
Now it seems to me that any American official who proposed racial DNA tests to decide upon
the admission or exclusion of prospective immigrants would have a very difficult time
remaining in office, with the Jewish-activists of organizations like the ADL probably leading the
attack. And the same would surely be true for any prosecutor or judge who sent non-whites to
prison for the crime of “passing” as whites and thereby managing to seduce women from that
latter group. A similar fate would befall advocates of such policies in Britain, France, or most
other Western nations, with the local ADL-type organization certainly playing an important
role. Yet in Israel, such existing laws merely occasion a little temporary embarrassment when
they are covered in the international media, and then invariably remain in place after the
commotion has died down and been forgotten. These sorts of issues are considered of little
more importance than were the past wartime Nazi ties of the Israeli prime minister throughout
most of the 1980s.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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But perhaps the solution to this puzzling difference in public reaction lies in an old joke. A
leftist wit once claimed that the reason America has never had a military coup is that it is the
only country in the world that lacks an American embassy to organize such activities. And
unlike the U.S., Britain, France, and many other predominately-white countries, Israel has no
domestic Jewish-activist organization filling the powerful role of the ADL.

Over the last few years, many outside observers have noted a seemingly very odd political
situation in Ukraine. That unfortunate country possesses powerful militant groups, whose
public symbols, stated ideology, and political ancestry all unmistakably mark them as Neo-
Nazis. Yet those violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled[16] by a
Jewish Oligarch[17] who holds dual Israeli citizenship. Furthermore, that peculiar alliance had
been mid-wifed and blessed by some of America’s leading Jewish Neocon figures, such as
Victoria Nuland, who have successfully used their media influence to keep such explosive facts
away from the American public.
At first glance, a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis[18] seems
as grotesque and bizarre a misalliance as one could imagine, but after recently reading
Brenner’s fascinating book, my perspective quickly shifted. Indeed, the main difference
between then and now is that during the 1930s, Zionist factions represented a very insignificant
junior partner to a powerful Third Reich, while these days it is the Nazis who occupy the role of
eager suppliants to the formidable power of International Zionism, which now so heavily
dominates the American political system and through it, much of the world.
Related Reading:
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators[19] by Lenni Brenner
Mein Kampf[20] by Adolf Hitler
American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism[21]
American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion[22]
American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?[23]
Source References
[1] Zionism in the Age of the Dictators =>
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/do.../index.htm
[2] had arranged the assassination of his factional rival =>
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-...4_1_prime-
minister-yitzhak-shamir-stern-gang-british-police
[3] American President Harry Truman =>
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archi...truman-in-
1947-truman-was-sent-bombs-book.html
[4] British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin =>
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1430766...-5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 15/16
Bevin.html
[5] their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill =>
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340...69,00.html
[6] pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent
civilian targets, => https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-hamas-and-the-
irgun-how-dare-i-compare-the-two-1.5378098
[7] ever thought of using similar tactics => https://www.haaretz.com/1.5023536
[8] Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...i-who-did-
it/
[9] published sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty =>
http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html
[10] his career at that newspaper ended =>
https://web.archive.org/web/200706101927...//www.una-
uk.org/28%20Nov_Mortimer%20Bio.pdf
[11] “The Transfer Agreement” =>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transfer_Agreement
[12] “The Ha’avara Agreement” => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
[13] the Jewish-only immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing =>
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politi...-law-says-
genetic-test-valid-for-determining-Jewish-status-in-some-cases-506584
[14] the remarkable story => https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/21/arab-
guilty-rape-consensual-sex-jew
[15] sometimes reach the international medi =>
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/world...odox-jews-
conversions-israel.html
[16] violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled =>
https://www.newsweek.com/evidence-war-cr...ukrainian-
nationalist-volunteers-grows-269604
[17] a Jewish Oligarch => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi
[18] a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis =>
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/righ...op-arming-
neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-1.62487275/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 16/16
[19] Zionism in the Age of the Dictators =>
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/do.../index.htm
[20] Mein Kampf => http://www.unz.com/book/adolf_hitler__mein-kampf/
[21] American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...ntury-ago/
[22] American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...-religion/
[23] American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It? =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...i-who-did-
it/]]> American Pravda: Jews and Nazis



Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New
York Times as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article
about the controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Back in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print publication,
lacking the large color photographs of rap stars and long stories about dieting techniques that
fill so much of today’s news coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder edge in its Middle
East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir’s predecessor Menacham Begin had allowed his
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into invading Lebanon and besieging Beirut, and the
subsequent massacre of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee
camps had outraged the world and angered America’s government. This eventually led to
Begin’s resignation, with Shamir, his Foreign Minister, taking his place.
Prior to his surprising 1977 election victory, Begin had spent decades in the political wilderness
as an unacceptable right-winger, and Shamir had an even more extreme background, with the
American mainstream media freely reporting his long involvement in all sorts of high-profile
assassinations and terrorist attacks during the 1940s, painting him as a very bad man indeed.
Given Shamir’s notorious activities, few revelations would have shocked me, but this one did.
Apparently, during the late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction had become great
admirers of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they had
made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940 and 1941,
hoping to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate, and undertake a campaign of
attacks and espionage against the local British forces, then share in the political booty after
Hitler’s inevitable triumph.
Now the Times clearly viewed Shamir in a very negative light, but it seemed extremely unlikely
to me that they would have published such a remarkable story without being absolutely sure of
their facts. Among other things, there were long excerpts from the official letters sent to
Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and France that5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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he was opposing, and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would have no
future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to establish under his auspices in
Palestine.
As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the
time, and given the small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of
those efforts. But the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State having spent his
early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in one’s
mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era which I had always accepted.
Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seems to have had only a relatively
minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that any
American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during
the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting political
scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or most other
western nations. But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press,
especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis
took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then later served
a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel apparently
regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most American
Jews.

Around that same time, a second intriguing example of this quite
different Israeli perspective towards the Nazis also came to my
attention. In 1983, Amoz Oz, often described as Israel’s greatest
novelist, had published In the Land of Israel to glowing reviews. This
book was a collection of lengthy interviews with various
representative figures in Israeli society, both moderate and extreme,
as well as some coverage of the Palestinians who also lived among
them.
Of these ideological profiles, one of the shortest but most widely
discussed was that of an especially hard-line political figure,
unnamed but almost universally believed to be Ariel Sharon, a
conclusion certainly supported by the personal details and physical
description provided. Near the very beginning, that figure mentioned that people of his
ideological ilk had recently been denounced as “Judeo-Nazis” by a prominent liberal Israeli
academic, but rather than reject that label, he fully welcomed it. So the subject generally
became known in public discussions as the “Judeo-Nazi.”
That he described himself in such terms was hardly an exaggeration, since he rather gleefully
advocated the slaughter of millions of Israel’s enemies, and the vast expansion of Israeli
territory by conquest of neighboring lands and expulsion of their populations, along with the
free use of nuclear weapons if they or anyone else too strongly resisted such efforts. In his bold
opinion, the Israelis and Jews in general were just too soft and meek, and needed to regain5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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their place in the world by once again becoming a conquering people, probably hated but
definitely feared. To him, the large recent massacre of Palestinian women and children at Sabra
and Shatila was of no consequence whatsoever, and the most unfortunate aspect of the incident
was that the killers had been Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies rather than Israeli soldiers
themselves.
Now rhetorical excess is quite common among politicians and a shroud of pledged anonymity
will obviously loosen many tongues. But can anyone imagine an American or other Western
public figure talking in such terms, let alone someone who moves in higher political circles?
These days, Donald Trump sometimes Tweets out a crude misspelled insult at 2am, and the
American media is aghast in horror. But given that his administration leaks like a sieve, if he
routinely boasted to his confidants about possibly slaughtering millions, we surely would have
heard about it. For that matter, there seems not the slightest evidence that the original German
Nazis ever spoke in such ways privately, let alone while a journalist was carefully taking notes.
But the “Judeo-Nazis” of Israel are another story.
As near as I can recall, the last even slightly prominent figure in American public life who
declared himself a “Nazi” was George Lincoln Rockwell during the 1960s, and he was much
more of a political performance artist than an actual political leader. Even as marginalized a
figure as David Duke has always hotly denied such an accusation. But apparently politics in
Israel is played by different rules.
In any event, Sharon’s purported utterances seem to have had little negative impact upon his
subsequent political career, and after spending some time in the political wilderness after the
Lebanon disaster, he eventually served five years as Prime Minister during 2001-2006,
although by that later date his views were regularly denounced as too soft and compromising
due to the steady rightward drift of the Israeli political spectrum.

Over the years I’ve occasionally made half-hearted attempts to locate
the Times article about Shamir that had long stuck in my memory,
but have had no success, either because it was removed from the
Times archives or more likely because my mediocre search skills
proved inadequate. But I’m almost certain that the piece had been
prompted by the 1983 publication of Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators[1] by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist of the Trotskyite
persuasion and Jewish origins. I only very recently discovered that
book, which really tells an extremely interesting story.
Brenner, born in 1937, has spent his entire life as an unreconstructed
hard-core leftist, with his enthusiasms ranging from Marxist
revolution to the Black Panthers, and he is obviously a captive of his
views and his ideology. At times, this background impairs the flow of his text, and the periodic
allusions to “proletarian,” “bourgeoisie,” and “capitalist classes” sometimes grow a little
wearisome, as does his unthinking acceptance of all the shared beliefs common to his political
circle. But surely only someone with that sort of fervent ideological commitment would have5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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been willing to devote so much time and effort to investigating that controversial subject and
ignoring the endless denunciations that resulted, which even included physical assaults by
Zionist partisans.
In any event, his documentation seems completely airtight, and some
years after the original appearance of his book, he published a
companion volume entitled 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration
with the Nazis, which simply provides English translations of all the
raw evidence behind his analytical framework, allowing interested
parties to read the material and draw their own conclusions.
Among other things, Brenner provides considerable evidence that the
larger and somewhat more mainstream right-wing Zionist faction
later led by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was almost
invariably regarded as a Fascist movement during the 1930s, even
apart from its warm admiration for Mussolini’s Italian regime. This
was hardly such a dark secret in that period given that its main
Palestine newspaper carried a regular column by a top ideological leader entitled “Diary of a
Fascist.” During one of the major international Zionist conferences, factional leader Vladimir
Zabotinsky entered the hall with his brown-shirted followers in full military formation, leading
the chair to ban the wearing of uniforms in order to avoid a riot, and his faction was soon
defeated politically and eventually expelled from the Zionist umbrella organization. This major
setback was largely due to the widespread hostility the group had aroused after two of its
members were arrested by British police for the recent assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, one
of the highest-ranking Zionist officials based in Palestine.
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism,
and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in
1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival[2], a year after the two men
had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been
killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion,
the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly
continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the
British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator,
though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman[3] and
British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin[4], and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill[5]
apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist
car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets,[6] all long before any
Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics[7]; and Begin’s larger and more
“moderate” Zionist faction did much the same. Given that background, it was hardly surprising
that Shamir later served as director of assassinations at the Israeli Mossad during 1955-1965,
so if the Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy[8], he was very likely involved.
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The cover of the 2014 paperback edition of Brenner’s
book displays the commemorative medal struck by
Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance, with a Star-
of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the
obverse. But oddly enough, this symbolic medallion
actually had absolutely no connection with the
unsuccessful attempts by Shamir’s small faction to
arrange a Nazi military alliance during World War II.
Although the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor organization, the far
larger and more influential mainstream Zionist movement of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-
Gurion was something else entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had
formed an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an obvious
commonality of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population
as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East
seemed as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar
objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required
both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.
After Hitler had been named Chancellor in 1933,
outraged Jews worldwide had quickly launched an
economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its
knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running
the banner headline “Judea Declares War on
Germany.” Jewish political and economic influence,
then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths of the Great Depression,
impoverished Germany needed to export or die, so a large scale boycott in major German
markets posed a potentially serious threat. But this exact situation provided Zionist groups
with an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that trade embargo,
and they demanded favorable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods
to Palestine, together with accompanying German Jews. Once word of this major Ha’avara or
“Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist Convention, many Jews and
Zionists were outraged, and it led to various splits and controversies. But the economic deal
was too good to resist, and it went forward and quickly grew.
The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate.
According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over
60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide
impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial
support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggests that without Hitler’s financial
backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died
during that difficult period.
Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across references to
the Ha’avara Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters mentioning the
issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war, statues would surely have been
built to him throughout Israel and he would today be recognized by Jews everywhere as the5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
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heroic Gentile leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a national homeland for
the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of bitter exile.
This sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as totally absurd as it might
sound to our present-day ears. We must recognize that our historical understanding of reality is
shaped by the media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars and their
allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid confusing the public. It is undeniably
true that in his 1924 book Mein Kampf, Hitler had written all sorts of hostile and nasty things
about Jews, especially those who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, but when I
read the book back in high school, I was a little surprised to discover that these anti-Jewish
sentiments hardly seemed central to his text. Furthermore, just a couple of years earlier, a
vastly more prominent public figure such as British Minister Winston Churchill had published
sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty[9], focusing on the monstrous crimes being committed
by Bolshevik Jews. In Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears, I was surprised to discover that the
author of the famous Balfour Declaration, the foundation of the Zionist project, was apparently
also quite hostile to Jews, with an element of his motivation probably being his desire to
exclude them from Britain.
Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political
organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being
legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local
Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and
Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German
publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street
corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper
political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would
fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.
In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish
settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing
Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part-series in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff,
the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to
Palestine.” In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued
that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and
only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile. Based on
available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have reached a
somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.
During that era extremely harsh sentiments regarding Diaspora Jewry were sometimes found
in rather surprising quarters. After the controversy surrounding Shamir’s Nazi ties erupted into
the headlines, Brenner’s material became the grist for an important article by Edward
Mortimer, the longtime Middle East expert at the august Times of London, and the 2014
edition of the book includes some choice extracts from Mortimer’s February 11, 1984 Times
piece:5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 7/16
Who told a Berlin audience in March 1912 that “each country can absorb only a
limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany
already has too many Jews”?
No, not Adolf Hitler but Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist
Organization and later still the first president of the state of Israel.
And where might you find the following assertion, originally composed in 1917 but
republished as late as 1936: “The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human
being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and
throws off the harness of social obligation, knows no order nor discipline”?
Not in Der Sturmer but in the organ of the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer
Hatzair.
As the above quoted statement reveals, Zionism itself encouraged and exploited
self-hatred in the Diaspora. It started from the assumption that anti-Semitism was
inevitable and even in a sense justified so long as Jews were outside the land of
Israel.
It is true that only an extreme lunatic fringe of Zionism went so far as to offer to
join the war on Germany’s side in 1941, in the hope of establishing “the historical
Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the
German Reich.” Unfortunately this was the group which the present Prime Minister
of Israel chose to join.
The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in
the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s
founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological
movements was not really so totally surprising.
However, uncomfortable truths do remain uncomfortable. Mortimer had spent nineteen years
at the Times, the last dozen of them as the foreign specialist and leader-writer on Middle
Eastern affairs. But the year after he wrote that article including those controversial quotations,
his career at that newspaper ended[10], leading to an unusual gap in his employment history,
and that development may or may not be purely coincidental.
Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably ranks as one of
the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli
agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens,
Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and
apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration
with top Zionist leaders.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 8/16
Brenner is a captive of his ideology and his beliefs, accepting without question the historical
narrative with which he was raised. He seems to find nothing so strange about Eichmann being
a philo-Semitic partner of the Jewish Zionists during the late 1930s and then suddenly being
transformed into a mass-murderer of the European Jews in the early 1940s, willingly
committing the monstrous crimes for which the Israelis later justly put him to death.
This is certainly possible, but I really wonder. A more cynical observer might find it a very odd
coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the Israelis made such an effort to track down and
kill had been their closest former political ally and collaborator. After Germany’s defeat,
Eichmann had fled to Argentina and lived there quietly for a number of years until his name
resurfaced in a celebrated mid-1950s controversy surrounding one of his leading Zionist
partners, then living in Israel as a respected government official, who was denounced as a Nazi
collaborator, eventually ruled innocent after a celebrated trial, but later assassinated by former
members of Shamir’s faction.
Following that controversy in Israel, Eichmann supposedly gave a long personal interview to a
Dutch Nazi journalist, and although it wasn’t published at the time, perhaps word of its
existence may have gotten into circulation. The new state of Israel was just a few years old at
that time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately dependent upon the
goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi
alliance was a deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely
disastrous consequences.
According to the version of the interview later published as a two-part story in Life Magazine,
Eichmann’s statements seemingly did not touch on the deadly topic of the 1930s Nazi-Zionist
partnership. But surely Israeli leaders must have been terrified that they might not be so lucky
the next time, so we may speculate that Eichmann’s elimination suddenly became a top
national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960. Presumably, harsh means
were employed to persuade him not to reveal any of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his
Jerusalem trial, and one might wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass
booth was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to stray from the
agreed upon script. All of this analysis is totally speculative, but Eichmann’s role as a central
figure in the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.

Just as we might imagine, America’s overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry was hardly
eager to serve as a public conduit for Brenner’s shocking revelations of a close Nazi-Zionist
economic partnership, and he mentions that his book agent uniformly received rejections from
each firm he approached, based on a wide variety of different excuses. However, he finally
managed to locate an extremely obscure publisher in Britain willing to take on the project, and
his book was released in 1983, initially receiving no reviews other than a couple of harsh and
perfunctory denunciations, though Soviet Izvestia took some interest in his findings until they
discovered that he was a hated Trotskyite.
His big break came when Shamir suddenly became Israel’s Prime Minister, and he brought his
evidence of former Nazi ties to the English-language Palestinian press, which put it into general5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 9/16
circulation. Various British Marxists, including the notorious “Red Ken” Livingstone of London,
organized a speaking tour for him, and when a group of right-wing Zionist militants attacked
one of the events and inflicted injuries, the story of the brawl caught the attention of the
mainstream newspapers. Soon afterward the discussion of Brenner’s astonishing discoveries
appeared in the Times of London and entered the international media. Presumably, the New
York Times article that had originally caught my eye ran sometime during this period.
Public relations professionals are quite skilled at minimizing the impact of damaging
revelations, and pro-Israel organizations have no shortage of such individuals. Just before the
1983 release of his remarkable book, Brenner suddenly discovered that a young pro-Zionist
author named Edwin Black was furiously working on a similar project, apparently backed by
sufficient financial resources that he was employing an army of fifty researchers to allow him to
complete his project in record time.
Since the entire embarrassing subject of a Nazi-Zionist partnership had been kept away from
the public eye for almost five decades, this timing surely seems more than merely coincidental.
Presumably word of Brenner’s numerous unsuccessful efforts at securing a mainstream
publisher during 1982 had gotten around, as had as his eventual success in locating a tiny one
in Britain. Having failed to prevent publication of such explosive material, pro-Israel groups
quietly decided that their next best option was trying to seize control of the topic themselves,
allowing disclosure of those parts of the story that could not be concealed but excluding items
of greatest danger, while portraying the sordid history in the best possible light.
Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement, may have arrived a year later
than Brenner’s but was clearly backed by vastly greater publicity and
resources. It was released by Macmillan, a leading publisher, ran
nearly twice the length of Brenner’s short book, and carried powerful
endorsements by leading figures from the firmament of Jewish
activism, including the Simon Weisenthal Center, the Israel
Holocaust Memorial, and the American Jewish Archives. As a
consequence, it received long if not necessarily favorable reviews in
influential publications such as The New Republic and Commentary.
In all fairness, I should mention that in the Foreword to his book,
Black claims that his research efforts had been totally discouraged by
nearly everyone he approached, and as a consequence, he had been
working on the project with solitary intensity for many years. This implies the near-
simultaneous release of the two books was purely due to chance. But such a picture is hardly
consistent with his glowing testimonials from so many prominent Jewish leaders, and
personally I find Brenner’s claim that Black was assisted by fifty researchers far more
convincing.
Since both Black and Brenner were describing the same basic reality and relying upon many of
the same documents, in most respects the stories they tell are generally similar. But Black
carefully excludes any mention of offers of Zionist military cooperation with the Nazis, let alone
the repeated attempts by Shamir’s Zionist faction to officially join the Axis Powers after the war
had broken out, as well as numerous other details of a particularly embarrassing nature.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 10/16
Assuming Black’s book was published for the reasons I suggested, I think that the strategy of
the pro-Israel groups largely succeeded, with his version of the history seeming to have quickly
supplanted Brenner’s except perhaps in strongly leftist or anti-Zionist circles. Googling each
combination of the title and author, Black’s book gets eight times as many hits, and his Amazon
sales ranks and numbers of reviews are also larger by roughly that same factor. Most notably,
neither the Wikipedia articles on “The Transfer Agreement”[11] and “The Ha’avara
Agreement”[12] contain any mention of Brenner’s research whatsoever, even though his book
was published earlier, was far broader, and only he provided the underlying documentary
evidence. As a personal example of the current situation, I was quite unaware of the entire
Ha’avara history until just a few years ago when I encountered some website comments
mentioning Black’s book, leading me to purchase and read it. But even then, Brenner’s far more
wide-ranging and explosive volume remained totally unknown to me until very recently.

Once World War II began, this Nazi-Zionist partnership quickly lapsed for obvious reasons.
Germany was now at war with the British Empire, and financial transfers to British-run
Palestine were no longer possible. Furthermore, the Arab Palestinians had grown quite hostile
to the Jewish immigrants whom they rightfully feared might eventually displace them, and
once the Germans were forced to choose between maintaining their relationship with a
relatively small Zionist movement or winning the political sympathy of a vast sea of Middle
Eastern Arabs and Muslims, their decision was a natural one. The Zionists faced a similar
choice, and especially once wartime propaganda began so heavily blackening the German and
Italian governments, their long previous partnership was not something they wanted widely
known.
However, at exactly this same moment a somewhat different and equally long-forgotten
connection between Jews and Nazi Germany suddenly moved to the fore.
Like most people everywhere, the average German, whether Jewish or Gentile, was probably
not all that political, and although Zionism had for years been accorded a privileged place in
German society, it is not entirely clear how many ordinary German Jews paid much attention
to it. The tens of thousands who emigrated to Palestine during that period were probably
motivated as much by economic pressures as by ideological commitment. But wartime changed
matters in other ways.
This was even more true for the German government. The outbreak
of a world war against a powerful coalition of the British and French
empires, later augmented by both Soviet Russia and the United
States, imposed the sorts of enormous pressures that could often
overcome ideological scruples. A few years ago, I discovered a
fascinating 2002 book by Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,
a scholarly treatment of exactly what the title implies. The quality of
this controversial historical analysis is indicated by the glowing
jacket-blurbs from numerous academic experts and an extremely
favorable treatment by an eminent scholar in The American
Historical Review.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 11/16
Obviously, Nazi ideology was overwhelmingly centered upon race and
considered racial purity a crucial factor in national cohesion.
Individuals possessing substantial non-German ancestry were
regarded with considerable suspicion, and this concern was greatly
amplified if that admixture was Jewish. But in a military struggle
against an opposing coalition possessing many times Germany’s
population and industrial resources, such ideological factors might be
overcome by practical considerations, and Rigg persuasively argues
that some 150,000 half-Jews or quarter-Jews served in the armed
forces of the Third Reich, a percentage probably not much different
than their share of the general military-age population.
Germany’s long-integrated and assimilated Jewish population had
always been disproportionately urban, affluent, and well-educated. As a consequence it is not
entirely surprising that a large proportion of these part-Jewish soldiers who served Hitler were
actually combat officers rather than merely rank-and-file conscripts, and they included at least
15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, and another dozen quarter-Jews holding those same high
ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s
powerful second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the
Luftwaffe. Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated
claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.
Admittedly, the racially-elite SS itself generally had far stricter ancestry standards, with even a
trace of non-Aryan parentage normally seen as disqualifying an individual from membership.
But even here, the situation was sometimes complicated, since there were widespread rumors
that Reinhard Heydrich, the second-ranking figure in that very powerful organization, actually
had considerable Jewish ancestry. Rigg investigates that claim without coming to any clear
conclusions, though he does seem to think that the circumstantial evidence involved may have
been used by other high-ranking Nazi figures as a point of leverage or blackmail against
Heydrich, who stood as one of the most important figures in the Third Reich.
As a further irony, most of these individuals traced their Jewish ancestry through their father
rather than their mother, so although they were not Jewish according to rabbinical law, their
family names often reflected their partly Semitic origins, though in many cases Nazi authorities
attempted to studiously overlook this glaringly obvious situation. As an extreme example noted
by an academic reviewer of the book, a half-Jew bearing the distinctly non-Aryan name of
Werner Goldberg actually had his photograph prominently featured in a 1939 Nazi propaganda
newspaper, with the caption describing him as the “The Ideal German Soldier.”
The author conducted more than 400 personal interviews of the surviving part-Jews and their
relatives, and these painted a very mixed picture of the difficulties they had encountered under
the Nazi regime, which varied enormously depending upon particular circumstances and the
personalities of those in authority over them. One important source of complaint was that
because of their status, part-Jews were often denied the military honors or promotions they
had rightfully earned. However, under especially favorable conditions, they might also be
legally reclassified as being of “German Blood,” which officially eliminated any taint on their
status.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 12/16
Even official policy seems to have been quite contradictory and vacillating. For example, when
the civilian humiliations sometimes inflicted upon the fully Jewish parents of serving half-Jews
were brought to Hitler’s attention, he regarded that situation as intolerable, declaring that
either such parents must be fully protected against such indignities or all the half-Jews must be
discharged, and eventually in April 1940 he issued a decree requiring the latter. However, this
order was largely ignored by many commanders, or implemented through a honor-system that
almost amounted to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” so a considerable fraction of half-Jews remained in
the military if they so wished. And then in July 1941, Hitler somewhat reversed himself, issuing
a new decree that allowed “worthy” half-Jews who had been discharged to return to the
military as officers, while also announcing that after the war, all quarter-Jews would be
reclassified as fully “German Blood” Aryan citizens.
It has been said that after questions were raised about the Jewish ancestry of some of his
subordinates, Goring once angrily responded “I will decide who is a Jew!” and that attitude
seems to reasonably capture some of the complexity and subjective nature of the social
situation.
Interestingly enough, many of part-Jews interviewed by Rigg recalled that prior to Hitler’s rise
to power, the intermarriage of their parents had often provoked much greater hostility from the
Jewish rather than the Gentile side of their families, suggesting that even in heavily-assimilated
Germany, the traditional Jewish tendency toward ethnic exclusivity had still remained a
powerful factor in that community.
Although the part-Jews in German military service were certainly subject to various forms of
mistreatment and discrimination, perhaps we should compare this against the analogous
situation in our own military in those same years with regard to America’s Japanese or black
minorities. During that era, racial intermarriage was legally prohibited across a large portion of
the US, so the mixed-race population of those groups was either almost non-existent or very
different in origin. But when Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave their wartime
concentration camps and enlist in the military, they were entirely restricted to segregated all-
Japanese units, but with the officers generally being white. Meanwhile, blacks were almost
entirely barred from combat service, though they sometimes served in strictly-segregated
support roles. The notion that an American with any appreciable trace of African, Japanese, or
for that matter Chinese ancestry might serve as a general or even an officer in the U.S. military
and thereby exercise command authority over white American troops would have been almost
unthinkable. The contrast with the practice in Hitler’s own military is quite different than what
Americans might naively assume.

This paradox is not nearly as surprising as one might assume. The non-economic divisions in
European societies had almost always been along lines of religion, language, and culture rather
than racial ancestry, and the social tradition of more than a millennium could not easily be
swept away by merely a half-dozen years of National Socialist ideology. During all those earlier
centuries, a sincerely-baptized Jew, whether in Germany or elsewhere, was usually considered
just as good a Christian as any other. For example, Tomas de Torquemada, the most fearsome
figure of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition, actually came from a family of Jewish converts.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 13/16
Even wider racial differences were hardly considered of crucial importance. Some of the
greatest heroes of particular national cultures, such as Russia’s Alexander Pushkin and France’s
Alexandre Dumas, had been individuals with significant black African ancestry, and this was
certainly not considered any sort of disqualifying characteristic.
By contrast, American society from its inception had always been sharply divided by race, with
other differences generally constituting far smaller impediments to intermarriage and
amalgamation. I’ve seen widespread claims that when the Third Reich devised its 1935
Nuremberg Laws restricting marriage and other social arrangements between Aryans, non-
Aryans, and part-Aryans, its experts drew upon some of America’s long legal experience in
similar matters, and this seems quite plausible. Under that new Nazi statute, pre-existing
mixed-marriages received some legal protection, but henceforth Jews and half-Jews could only
marry each other, while quarter-Jews could only marry regular Aryans. The obvious intent was
to absorb that latter group into mainstream German society, while isolating the more heavily-
Jewish population.
Ironically enough, Israel today is one of very few countries with a similar sort of strictly
racially-based criteria for citizenship status and other privileges, with the Jewish-only
immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing[13], and marriages between Jews and
non-Jews legally prohibited. A few years ago, the world media also carried the remarkable
story[14] of a Palestinian Arab sentenced to prison for rape because he had consensual sexual
relations with a Jewish woman by passing himself off as a fellow Jew.
Since Orthodox Judaism is strictly matrilineal and controls Israeli law, even Jews of other
branches can experience unexpected difficulties due to conflicts between personal ethnic
identity and official legal status. The vast majority of the wealthier and more influential Jewish
families worldwide do not follow Orthodox religious traditions, and over the generations, they
have often taken Gentile wives. However, even if the latter had converted to Judaism, their
conversions are considered invalid by the Orthodox Rabbinate, and none of their resulting
descendants are considered Jewish. So if some members of these families later develop a deep
commitment to their Jewish heritage and immigrate to Israel, they are sometimes outraged to
discover that they are officially classified as “goyim” under Orthodox law and legally prohibited
from marrying Jews. These major political controversies periodically erupt and sometimes
reach the international medi[15]a.
Now it seems to me that any American official who proposed racial DNA tests to decide upon
the admission or exclusion of prospective immigrants would have a very difficult time
remaining in office, with the Jewish-activists of organizations like the ADL probably leading the
attack. And the same would surely be true for any prosecutor or judge who sent non-whites to
prison for the crime of “passing” as whites and thereby managing to seduce women from that
latter group. A similar fate would befall advocates of such policies in Britain, France, or most
other Western nations, with the local ADL-type organization certainly playing an important
role. Yet in Israel, such existing laws merely occasion a little temporary embarrassment when
they are covered in the international media, and then invariably remain in place after the
commotion has died down and been forgotten. These sorts of issues are considered of little
more importance than were the past wartime Nazi ties of the Israeli prime minister throughout
most of the 1980s.5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 14/16
But perhaps the solution to this puzzling difference in public reaction lies in an old joke. A
leftist wit once claimed that the reason America has never had a military coup is that it is the
only country in the world that lacks an American embassy to organize such activities. And
unlike the U.S., Britain, France, and many other predominately-white countries, Israel has no
domestic Jewish-activist organization filling the powerful role of the ADL.

Over the last few years, many outside observers have noted a seemingly very odd political
situation in Ukraine. That unfortunate country possesses powerful militant groups, whose
public symbols, stated ideology, and political ancestry all unmistakably mark them as Neo-
Nazis. Yet those violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled[16] by a
Jewish Oligarch[17] who holds dual Israeli citizenship. Furthermore, that peculiar alliance had
been mid-wifed and blessed by some of America’s leading Jewish Neocon figures, such as
Victoria Nuland, who have successfully used their media influence to keep such explosive facts
away from the American public.
At first glance, a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis[18] seems
as grotesque and bizarre a misalliance as one could imagine, but after recently reading
Brenner’s fascinating book, my perspective quickly shifted. Indeed, the main difference
between then and now is that during the 1930s, Zionist factions represented a very insignificant
junior partner to a powerful Third Reich, while these days it is the Nazis who occupy the role of
eager suppliants to the formidable power of International Zionism, which now so heavily
dominates the American political system and through it, much of the world.
Related Reading:
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators[19] by Lenni Brenner
Mein Kampf[20] by Adolf Hitler
American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism[21]
American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion[22]
American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?[23]
Source References
[1] Zionism in the Age of the Dictators =>
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/do.../index.htm
[2] had arranged the assassination of his factional rival =>
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-...4_1_prime-
minister-yitzhak-shamir-stern-gang-british-police
[3] American President Harry Truman =>
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archi...truman-in-
1947-truman-was-sent-bombs-book.html
[4] British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin =>
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1430766...-5/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 15/16
Bevin.html
[5] their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill =>
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340...69,00.html
[6] pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent
civilian targets, => https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-hamas-and-the-
irgun-how-dare-i-compare-the-two-1.5378098
[7] ever thought of using similar tactics => https://www.haaretz.com/1.5023536
[8] Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...i-who-did-
it/
[9] published sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty =>
http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html
[10] his career at that newspaper ended =>
https://web.archive.org/web/200706101927...//www.una-
uk.org/28%20Nov_Mortimer%20Bio.pdf
[11] “The Transfer Agreement” =>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transfer_Agreement
[12] “The Ha’avara Agreement” => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
[13] the Jewish-only immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing =>
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politi...-law-says-
genetic-test-valid-for-determining-Jewish-status-in-some-cases-506584
[14] the remarkable story => https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/21/arab-
guilty-rape-consensual-sex-jew
[15] sometimes reach the international medi =>
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/world...odox-jews-
conversions-israel.html
[16] violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled =>
https://www.newsweek.com/evidence-war-cr...ukrainian-
nationalist-volunteers-grows-269604
[17] a Jewish Oligarch => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi
[18] a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis =>
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/righ...op-arming-
neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-1.62487275/26/2019 American Pravda: Jews and Nazis, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review
www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/?display=footnoted 16/16
[19] Zionism in the Age of the Dictators =>
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/do.../index.htm
[20] Mein Kampf => http://www.unz.com/book/adolf_hitler__mein-kampf/
[21] American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...ntury-ago/
[22] American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...-religion/
[23] American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It? =>
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-...i-who-did-
it/]]> <![CDATA[Plan to Mask Medical Experimentation on Minorities as “Racial Justice”]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16222 Tue, 01 Dec 2020 01:03:55 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16222 Whitney Webb series Part 1

Under the guise of combatting “structural racism,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has laid out a strategy for ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged to be vaccinated first, all “as a matter of justice.” However, other claims made by the Center contradict these social justice talking points and point to other motives entirely.

With the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate set to receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US government in a matter of days, its distribution and allocation is set to begin “[color=var(--cs-color-primary)]within 24 hours” of that vaccine’s imminent approval.[/color]

The allocation strategy of COVID-19 vaccines within the US is set to dramatically differ from previous national vaccination programs. One key difference is that the vaccine effort itself, known as Operation Warp Speed, is [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]being almost completely managed by the US military, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA), as opposed to civilian health agencies, which are significantly less involved than previous national vaccination efforts and have even been barred from attending some Warp Speed meetings. In addition, for the first time since 2001, law enforcement officers and DHS officials are set to not be prioritized for early vaccination.[/color]


Another key difference is the plan to utilize a phased approach that targets “populations of focus” identified in advance by different government organizations, including the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Characteristics of those “populations of focus,” also referred to as “critical populations” in official documentation, will then be identified by the secretive, Palantir-developed software tool known as “Tiberius” to guide Operation Warp Speed’s vaccine distribution efforts. Tiberius will provide Palantir access to sensitive health and demographic data of Americans, which the company [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]will use to “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.”[/color]


This report is the first of a three-part series unmasking the racist components of the Pentagon-run project to both develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. It explores the COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategy first outlined by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and subsequent government allocation strategies that were informed by Johns Hopkins.


The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities but in such a way as to make those minorities feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs” when receiving an experimental vaccine that those documents admit is likely cause “certain adverse effects…more frequently in certain population subgroups.” Research has shown that those “subgroups” most at risk for adverse effects are these same minorities.


The documents also acknowledge that information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups. It even frames this clearly disproportionate focus on racial minorities as related to national concerns over “police brutality,” claiming that giving minorities the experimental vaccine first is necessary to combat “structural racism” and ensure “fairness and justice” in the healthcare system and society at large.


Part 2 of this series will discuss how Palantir, a company currently helping DHS and law enforcement violently target African Americans and Latinos, will be in charge of allocating “tailored” COVID-19 vaccines to those same minorities as well as Palantir’s origins and its executives’ views on race. Part 3 will explore the direct ties between a COVID-19 vaccine front-runner and the Eugenics Society, which was re-named the Galton Institute in 1989.


The Planners

The Trump administration been criticized for its rush to develop and deploy a COVID-19 vaccine and particularly for installing Monclef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive with ongoing conflicts of interest, as chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the Pentagon-run program to produce and distribute the vaccine. Yet, if and when a Biden administration takes power, Operation Warp Speed is set to proceed with little, if any, modification.


The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) director Tom Inglesby, who will [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]serve on the Biden Health and Human Services (HHS) [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]transition team, has praised Slaoui, telling [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Stat News[/color] that the longer someone like him can remain in charge of the nation’s COVID-19 vaccine effort, “the better it is for the country.”[/color][/color]


Inglesby, who led discussions at the CHS’s [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Event 201 exercise in October 2019 and who was one of the primary authors of the controversial Johns Hopkins [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Dark Winter exercise in 2001, is emblematic of the US government’s and the mainstream media’s general reliance on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (of which CHS is part) for pandemic-related matters. Slaoui [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]regularly[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]appears[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]on[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]network[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]TV[/color] as a COVID-19 oracle and has been [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]called[/color] “one of the nation’s go-to experts on the spread of the coronavirus.” Readers may note that the Johns Hopkins “coronavirus tracker” has been used by virtually [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]every[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]mainstream[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]news[/color] source since the beginning of COVID-19 reporting. This relationship is expected to continue, if not intensify, in a Biden administration.[/color][/color]


Both [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Kathleen Hicks, the lead on Biden’s Department of Defense (DOD) transition team, and [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Alexander Bick, on Biden’s National Security Council transition team, are scholars at Johns Hopkins Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, reflecting the university’s broader influence on a future Biden administration. Yet, the most significant way the Biden transition intersects with Johns Hopkins is through the CHS.[/color][/color]

Originally called the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, the CHS is a think tank within Johns Hopkins that regularly gives recommendations to both the US government and the World Health Organization and, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]emerged as a [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]voice [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]of [/color][color=var(--cs-color-primary)]authority[/color] on all matters COVID-19 in the US. The center’s founding director was D. A. Henderson, best known for his role in the WHO-sponsored smallpox vaccination campaign. Henderson also held several government positions, including serving as associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under George H. W. Bush. He was also the longtime dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.[/color][/color]

more later or go to the link

]]> Whitney Webb series Part 1

Under the guise of combatting “structural racism,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has laid out a strategy for ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged to be vaccinated first, all “as a matter of justice.” However, other claims made by the Center contradict these social justice talking points and point to other motives entirely.

With the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate set to receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US government in a matter of days, its distribution and allocation is set to begin “[color=var(--cs-color-primary)]within 24 hours” of that vaccine’s imminent approval.[/color]

The allocation strategy of COVID-19 vaccines within the US is set to dramatically differ from previous national vaccination programs. One key difference is that the vaccine effort itself, known as Operation Warp Speed, is [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]being almost completely managed by the US military, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA), as opposed to civilian health agencies, which are significantly less involved than previous national vaccination efforts and have even been barred from attending some Warp Speed meetings. In addition, for the first time since 2001, law enforcement officers and DHS officials are set to not be prioritized for early vaccination.[/color]


Another key difference is the plan to utilize a phased approach that targets “populations of focus” identified in advance by different government organizations, including the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Characteristics of those “populations of focus,” also referred to as “critical populations” in official documentation, will then be identified by the secretive, Palantir-developed software tool known as “Tiberius” to guide Operation Warp Speed’s vaccine distribution efforts. Tiberius will provide Palantir access to sensitive health and demographic data of Americans, which the company [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]will use to “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.”[/color]


This report is the first of a three-part series unmasking the racist components of the Pentagon-run project to both develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. It explores the COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategy first outlined by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and subsequent government allocation strategies that were informed by Johns Hopkins.


The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities but in such a way as to make those minorities feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs” when receiving an experimental vaccine that those documents admit is likely cause “certain adverse effects…more frequently in certain population subgroups.” Research has shown that those “subgroups” most at risk for adverse effects are these same minorities.


The documents also acknowledge that information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups. It even frames this clearly disproportionate focus on racial minorities as related to national concerns over “police brutality,” claiming that giving minorities the experimental vaccine first is necessary to combat “structural racism” and ensure “fairness and justice” in the healthcare system and society at large.


Part 2 of this series will discuss how Palantir, a company currently helping DHS and law enforcement violently target African Americans and Latinos, will be in charge of allocating “tailored” COVID-19 vaccines to those same minorities as well as Palantir’s origins and its executives’ views on race. Part 3 will explore the direct ties between a COVID-19 vaccine front-runner and the Eugenics Society, which was re-named the Galton Institute in 1989.


The Planners

The Trump administration been criticized for its rush to develop and deploy a COVID-19 vaccine and particularly for installing Monclef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive with ongoing conflicts of interest, as chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the Pentagon-run program to produce and distribute the vaccine. Yet, if and when a Biden administration takes power, Operation Warp Speed is set to proceed with little, if any, modification.


The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) director Tom Inglesby, who will [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]serve on the Biden Health and Human Services (HHS) [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]transition team, has praised Slaoui, telling [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Stat News[/color] that the longer someone like him can remain in charge of the nation’s COVID-19 vaccine effort, “the better it is for the country.”[/color][/color]


Inglesby, who led discussions at the CHS’s [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Event 201 exercise in October 2019 and who was one of the primary authors of the controversial Johns Hopkins [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Dark Winter exercise in 2001, is emblematic of the US government’s and the mainstream media’s general reliance on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (of which CHS is part) for pandemic-related matters. Slaoui [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]regularly[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]appears[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]on[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]network[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]TV[/color] as a COVID-19 oracle and has been [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]called[/color] “one of the nation’s go-to experts on the spread of the coronavirus.” Readers may note that the Johns Hopkins “coronavirus tracker” has been used by virtually [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]every[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]mainstream[/color] [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]news[/color] source since the beginning of COVID-19 reporting. This relationship is expected to continue, if not intensify, in a Biden administration.[/color][/color]


Both [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Kathleen Hicks, the lead on Biden’s Department of Defense (DOD) transition team, and [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]Alexander Bick, on Biden’s National Security Council transition team, are scholars at Johns Hopkins Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, reflecting the university’s broader influence on a future Biden administration. Yet, the most significant way the Biden transition intersects with Johns Hopkins is through the CHS.[/color][/color]

Originally called the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, the CHS is a think tank within Johns Hopkins that regularly gives recommendations to both the US government and the World Health Organization and, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]emerged as a [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]voice [color=var(--cs-color-primary)]of [/color][color=var(--cs-color-primary)]authority[/color] on all matters COVID-19 in the US. The center’s founding director was D. A. Henderson, best known for his role in the WHO-sponsored smallpox vaccination campaign. Henderson also held several government positions, including serving as associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under George H. W. Bush. He was also the longtime dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.[/color][/color]

more later or go to the link

]]> <![CDATA[Biometric Health Passports]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16221 Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:35:35 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16221 ]]> ]]> <![CDATA[COVID-19 and The Great Reset]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16211 Sun, 02 Aug 2020 06:00:00 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16211
.png   fourth-industrial-revolution-map.png (Size: 138 KB / Downloads: 2) ]]>
.png   fourth-industrial-revolution-map.png (Size: 138 KB / Downloads: 2) ]]> <![CDATA[In order to survive, humanity must end capitalism!]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16196 Sun, 26 Apr 2020 11:57:11 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16196

Speaking Heresy – Lee Camp, Consortium News
But let’s cut to the chase — and I’m sorry if the next statement upsets you — but in order to stop climate change and create a sustainable world, it requires the end of capitalism. I know I’m not “allowed” to say that. Saying such a thing would be heresy on one of the corporate media dog-and-pony bullshit infotainment hours. If I spoke that unholy fact on CNN or Fox News or CBS or NPR, a tranquilizer dart would immediately hit me in the neck, and they’d cut to a commercial while my lifeless body was dragged off.
But let’s take our intellectual honesty out for a spin, shall we? As Guardian columnist George Monbiot said, “Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction… firstly, that it generates and relies upon perpetual growth.”
Endless growth on a planet with finite resources. Such a thing is physically impossible, no more scientifically feasible than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touching his toes. The reason we’re now in the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression is because capitalism requires nonstop growth, much like cancer. Also, like cancer, it grows until it murders the host body. And during this pandemic shutdown, it’s not getting the growth it screams out for. During this brief respite, many parts of capitalism are benign.
The second problem is “…the idea that our right to own natural wealth equates to the amount of money that we’ve got in the bank or we can borrow. So, you can take as much natural wealth away from other people as you like.”
You can buy all the land, water, and air you want — even as others die from starvation or thirst. It means that no matter what environmentalists do to try to mitigate climate change, the richest corporations in the world can easily undo it by buying and polluting ever more. It also means the biggest sociopaths in the room (the world?) have the most impact.
“The third characteristic is the one that really ensures that people go along with capitalism, the idea that everyone can pursue — and can expect to find — private luxury.”

But of course, that’s impossible. If everyone lived the way the top 1 percent live, then the planet would collapse quickly, and in fact it’s crumbling anyway, right now, because of the resources used and the refuse discarded by a small percentage of humanity. …Sure, I admit I like to keep my private jet air-conditioned to a nice 58 degrees F on the hottest days of summer and stocked full of rare endangered fish filets. Not for me – for my five dogs who are bathed in only the freshest spring water shipped in from Alaska. BUT, I recycle the filet packaging. So, I think I do my part.
The cold truth is 90 percent of humanity will never enjoy anywhere near the soft luscious luxury that envelopes the richest among us. In fact, the World Bank says that nearly half of the world lives on less than $5.50 a day. (Not enough for even one fresh Alaskan salmon filet for your dog.)
As our planet disintegrates under the weight of consumption and greed, most people are trapped in extreme poverty. And that’s how the system of capitalism is designed. No mistake. No whoopsy. No boo-boo. It’s by design. Slightly altering capitalism will not change this reality, just as tilting a gun in a different direction does not make it a pony.
If we take away the false promises of capitalism and just say to people, “Private luxury is only for a few humans. You will never have it and won’t even have the chance at getting it” – if we admit that – then the entire justification for capitalism evaporates.
I’m not saying I have all the answers, but the pandemic shutdown has shown us the problem. It has revealed what the world looks like without as much pollution, without the chaos and roar of mostly meaningless “work” performed by the exploited, using materials stolen from the abused, for the benefit of the pampered and oblivious.

Another world is possible, and we’ve just gotten a glimpse of it.]]>

Speaking Heresy – Lee Camp, Consortium News
But let’s cut to the chase — and I’m sorry if the next statement upsets you — but in order to stop climate change and create a sustainable world, it requires the end of capitalism. I know I’m not “allowed” to say that. Saying such a thing would be heresy on one of the corporate media dog-and-pony bullshit infotainment hours. If I spoke that unholy fact on CNN or Fox News or CBS or NPR, a tranquilizer dart would immediately hit me in the neck, and they’d cut to a commercial while my lifeless body was dragged off.
But let’s take our intellectual honesty out for a spin, shall we? As Guardian columnist George Monbiot said, “Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction… firstly, that it generates and relies upon perpetual growth.”
Endless growth on a planet with finite resources. Such a thing is physically impossible, no more scientifically feasible than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touching his toes. The reason we’re now in the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression is because capitalism requires nonstop growth, much like cancer. Also, like cancer, it grows until it murders the host body. And during this pandemic shutdown, it’s not getting the growth it screams out for. During this brief respite, many parts of capitalism are benign.
The second problem is “…the idea that our right to own natural wealth equates to the amount of money that we’ve got in the bank or we can borrow. So, you can take as much natural wealth away from other people as you like.”
You can buy all the land, water, and air you want — even as others die from starvation or thirst. It means that no matter what environmentalists do to try to mitigate climate change, the richest corporations in the world can easily undo it by buying and polluting ever more. It also means the biggest sociopaths in the room (the world?) have the most impact.
“The third characteristic is the one that really ensures that people go along with capitalism, the idea that everyone can pursue — and can expect to find — private luxury.”

But of course, that’s impossible. If everyone lived the way the top 1 percent live, then the planet would collapse quickly, and in fact it’s crumbling anyway, right now, because of the resources used and the refuse discarded by a small percentage of humanity. …Sure, I admit I like to keep my private jet air-conditioned to a nice 58 degrees F on the hottest days of summer and stocked full of rare endangered fish filets. Not for me – for my five dogs who are bathed in only the freshest spring water shipped in from Alaska. BUT, I recycle the filet packaging. So, I think I do my part.
The cold truth is 90 percent of humanity will never enjoy anywhere near the soft luscious luxury that envelopes the richest among us. In fact, the World Bank says that nearly half of the world lives on less than $5.50 a day. (Not enough for even one fresh Alaskan salmon filet for your dog.)
As our planet disintegrates under the weight of consumption and greed, most people are trapped in extreme poverty. And that’s how the system of capitalism is designed. No mistake. No whoopsy. No boo-boo. It’s by design. Slightly altering capitalism will not change this reality, just as tilting a gun in a different direction does not make it a pony.
If we take away the false promises of capitalism and just say to people, “Private luxury is only for a few humans. You will never have it and won’t even have the chance at getting it” – if we admit that – then the entire justification for capitalism evaporates.
I’m not saying I have all the answers, but the pandemic shutdown has shown us the problem. It has revealed what the world looks like without as much pollution, without the chaos and roar of mostly meaningless “work” performed by the exploited, using materials stolen from the abused, for the benefit of the pampered and oblivious.

Another world is possible, and we’ve just gotten a glimpse of it.]]> <![CDATA[The Rise of Neo-Feudalism in USA]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16193 Mon, 20 Apr 2020 04:17:16 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16193 Illustrations by Robert Meganck
The Rise of Neo-Feudalism
The private capture of entire legal systems by corporate America goes far beyond neoliberalism. It evokes the private fiefdoms of the Middle Ages.
by Robert Kuttner, Katherine V. Stone
April 8, 2020








The history of the modern democratic state can be understood as a story of shifting authority and lawmaking, first from private potentates to sovereign monarchs, and then to publicly accountable democracies. Today, this centuries-long democratizing trend is rapidly being reversed. Western democracies are not simply embracing neoliberalism in the sense of deregulating the economy. Elites are pursuing something aptly described as a new form of feudalism, in which entire realms of public law, public property, due process, and citizen rights revert to unaccountable control by private business.
The system of finance, once supervised by bank regulatory agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been delegated to private realms of law. The financial collapse of 2008 is best understood as the seizure, corruption, and abuse of entire domains of regulation and jurisprudence. Laws to protect workers and consumers, reflecting 70 years of struggle to expand rights, are now erased by compulsory arbitration regimes. Trade law permits similar private tribunals to overturn or sidestep public regulation. Tech platform monopolies have created a proprietary regime where they can crush competitors and invade consumer privacy by means of onerous terms, often buried in online “terms of service” provisions. The unity of common scientific inquiry has been balkanized by confidentiality agreements and abuses of patents, as scientific knowledge comes to be “owned” by private entities. Companies like Monsanto, manipulating intellectual property and trade law, prevent farmers from following the ancient practice of keeping seeds for the next planting season. This is not deregulation or neoliberalism. It is legally sanctioned private jurisprudence—neo-feudalism.
The Brief Era of the Democratic Commons
For part of the 20th century, the democratic state served as a counterweight to the concentrated power that flowed to concentrated wealth in a capitalist economy. Laws helped workers offset the power of employers, protected small investors from the schemes of bankers and brokers, gave some countervailing power to tenants against landlords, and added consumer safeguards to constrain abuses of manufacturers and retailers. All of this has been thrown into reverse—not just by the more visible forms of deregulation, but by the creation of entirely private realms of property and law.
It is easy to miss what has been occurring, because the age-old elements of private law, such as contracts and torts, have long coexisted with public law and regulation. Contention between public law and private power is a very old story. What is new and alarming is the displacement of entire areas of public law by private commercial interests and the resurrection of abusive forms of private law.
Not only did the 20th-century state expand democratic public law. Acting through the courts, the state intervened to police private contracts and protect weaker parties from abuse by the powerful. Twentieth-century courts moved away from the formalist contract law of the late 19th century, which was characterized by rigid contract interpretation and deference to the principle of caveat emptor. In its place, 20th-century judicial interpretation and enforcement of contracts emphasized fairness between the parties. Using such doctrines as unconscionability, duress, and impracticability, courts in the 20th century refused to enforce contracts between parties with vastly unequal resources, knowledge, or bargaining power when they found agreements to be oppressive, coercive, grossly one-sided, misleading, or blatantly unfair.
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For example, courts refused to enforce loans to consumers with excessive interest rates; consumer contracts that disclaimed standard warranties; employment contracts with broad covenants not to compete; contracts between mining companies and farmers to sell family homesteads for a pittance; and leases with draconian liquidated-damage clauses for minor tenant infractions. Moreover, the courts scrutinized the process of contract formation for real, as opposed to fictitious, consent. In a similar vein, the Uniform Commercial Code, drafted by legal-realist scholar Karl Llewellyn in 1952 and subsequently adopted in all 50 states, expanded the doctrine of good faith in commercial contracting and adopted “commercial reasonableness” as the standard for interpreting contractual ambiguities.
The trend in contract law took a U-turn in the 1980s, as the law and economics movement began to permeate the judiciary. The new “efficiency” theory of contract law held that all contracts should be enforced, notwithstanding either deception or vast power inequalities between the parties. Thus the capture of public law and the reversion to one-sided private law reinforced each other, creating vast pools of proprietary power.
The extreme privatization of jurisprudence overlaps the privatization of public services, but it is more sinister. When a public service such as a voucher school, a park, a highway, or an entire town (such as Disney’s town of Celebration) is privatized, it alters the cost, quality, and distribution of the service, and also reduces public accountability. Voucher schools are able to manipulate admissions, avoid costly special-needs kids, and have their own legal and disciplinary procedures, which are supervised only very loosely by the state, if at all. Public prisons, already replete with abhorrent conditions, have become much worse as private, for-profit entities, with even less opportunity for redress.
Quote:For part of the 20th century, the democratic state served as a counterweight to the concentrated power that owed to concentrated wealth in a capitalist economy. That role has been reversed as private potentates have captured the state.
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[Image: NeoFeud_Court.jpg?cb=9fc25e8d2e081672634...7b1c&w=640]

The carving up of public law and property into proprietary domains is the new tragedy of the commons. The environmental tragedy, at least in principle, is amenable to public regulation that applies to all players. In the new tragedy, public regulation is precluded because law has been sundered from the democratic commons, in a manner that evokes the original tragedy of the commons—the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries—in which lands that had been cultivated by the peasantry since time immemorial were carved up into commercial properties by local lords, with the blessing and legal protection of the Crown.
In some respects, the new feudalism is even more lopsided than the original, in that historic feudalism had some forms of reciprocal obligation between lord, vassal, and serf; between king and aristocrat; Church and Crown; and between apprentice, tradesman, and master. For all of its absolutism, feudalism had aspects of what J.K. Galbraith, describing capitalism at the apex of the mixed economy, was to call “countervailing power.” Neo-feudalism is a one-way seizure of private power and law by elites.
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From Feudalism to Democracy—and Back
The historic movement from feudalism to the modern state and then to political democracy began in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Feudal lords had massive landholdings wherein their word was law. They maintained their own military forces, and operated feudal courts to resolve disputes. These quasi-states had understandings (and sometimes clashes) with monarchies and with the Church. Feudal lords had plenary authority over their domains, although they themselves were subject to the higher authority of the monarch and the Church. During the heyday of feudalism, most contract questions, property disputes, criminal matters, domestic relations, inheritance, and other matters affecting ordinary folks were handled in the local courts. In principle, serfs had some customary rights, but masters ruled.
The feudal system arose in response to the anarchy and vacuum of sovereignty left in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the ebb and flow of invaders from the east, north, and south—Huns, Goths, Arabs, Norsemen, and others. Some monarchies were potent, others weak; but as long as a feudal lord was a faithful vassal of the king, he was sovereign in his own realm. For nearly a thousand years, there was a four-way contention for power among kings, feudal lords, the Church, and the rising imperatives of commerce, with the monarchy gradually gaining sovereignty.
In the late Middle Ages, commerce among different principalities was governed by a transnational body of customary commercial law known as the lex mercatoria. Commercial disputes were resolved by private tribunals created by the commercial community according to the norms of the merchant community itself. The results were recognized by monarchies. This system made it possible for a product to pass from country to country with the property rights of the owner recognized by other merchants and sovereigns. The slave trade was part of this commercial system, and it could only function thanks to this symbiosis between traders and kings, in which ownership rights to a chattel were recognized by monarchies.
By the end of the 18th century, these struggles for primacy had been largely resolved in favor of the state. This came to be known by scholars as the Westphalian system, after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War by giving the king the right to dictate the religion of his subjects. Nation-states gained more and more authority over realms previously governed by feudal lords, including the power to define and protect property rights, maintain a military and judicial system, and regulate commerce, labor, the professions, finance, trade, and domestic relations. The state gained a monopoly on the legal use of force. A post-feudal aristocracy still existed, but the monarch became increasingly sovereign. Yet the bias in favor of economic elites persisted.
There followed another century of struggle to make the state democratic. Despite the democratizing trends, some feudal remnants remained well into the modern era. For example, until the early 20th century, under the English doctrine of primogeniture and the device of the entail, property owners were required to keep their estates intact and leave them to a single heir. In the U.S., supposedly “born free” of feudal heritage, many feudal doctrines from the common law of England were nonetheless incorporated into Britain’s North American colonies. In the U.S. as well as Britain, the doctrine of coverture effectively made wives the property of husbands. In much of the West, there were still property requirements for the franchise, left over from the aristocratic era.
Throughout the 19th century, employers in the U.S. retained quasi-feudal rights over their workers through the operation of two common-law doctrines—the “entire contract” doctrine, which provided that workers who left an employer mid-contract had no right to be paid for any work they had performed, and the tort of enticement, which enabled employers to prevent their workers from departing their establishment to work for someone else. However, with the rise of commercial principles in the late 19th century, some individualistic approaches emerged. For example, the at-will rule that emerged in the 1880s gave individual laborers the right to quit their employment with impunity—and gave employers the right to fire workers for any reason, or for no reason. And, in the area of industrial accidents, no matter how egregious an employer’s negligence, courts reasoned that the worker had freely contracted to accept the risk and therefore had no recourse. Thus, in the case of labor law as well as other areas of commercial law, both the feudal remnants and the evolving modern market system favored the property owner.
IN THE UNITED STATES, the democratization of the modern state was realized in the economic realm only in the 20th century, as new citizen and worker protections were enacted by Congress and upheld by courts. In the 20th century, government acted to balance the commercial interests of emerging companies and industries against a broader public interest. Railroads, radio, television, electric utilities, civil aviation, telephones—all sectors with actual or potential monopoly abuses—were subject to public law after many had attempted to install regimes of private law relying on coercive market power. Railroads, which had operated like feudal baronies, dictating terms of commerce for shippers and destroying rivals, became subjected to public rate-making. In the telephone industry, the dominant Bell System had sought to make and enforce rules to crush or capture potential competitors, but it came to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. So did the emerging radio industry, dominated by one company, RCA, which had sought to rule the airwaves. In all of these cases, the democratic state intervened both to supplant areas of private law with public regulation and to assure that systems of private law had some balance and accountability that would protect the economically weak from the economically strong.
The law became more procedurally transparent as well as more substantively egalitarian. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) created an orderly and transparent process for regulatory agencies to make rules and to ensure greater citizen participation in the rule-making process. The APA also imposed restrictions on ex parte contracts between the regulated entities and the regulators, and prohibited conflicts of interest in many other respects. Thus, the gains for democracy were both procedural and substantive.
The high watermark of the democratized legal and policy regime was the 1960s and 1970s, when numerous consumer and environmental laws were enacted, unions represented almost one worker in three, and courts defended citizen rights.
Beginning in the 1980s, power shifted again. Entire domains were handed back to private entities that were empowered to exercise quasi-state functions and create their own proprietary systems of law.
These developments have been described in mainstream policy discourse as “deregulation” and “privatization,” but those terms are misleading. The term “deregulation” suggests a reversion to a pre-existing system of nonregulation, a realm in which state authority is absent. But this is a fantasy. There is no pre-legal, law-free realm. There is always regulation, albeit sometimes invisible and private, and hence unaccountable.
Similarly, the term “privatization” is misleading. The term suggests a neutral transfer of governmental functions to the private domain for the sake of efficiency. But privatization invariably has distributional as well as civic consequences, since it changes the structure of costs and benefits and obscures public accountability. Privatized water and highway systems raise costs to users. Public parks are generally free; privatized ones charge. The privatized entity can avoid public obligations such as due process, transparency, and nondiscrimination requirements.
Outsourcing of public functions, which gained ground beginning in the 1980s, brought with it outsourcing of jurisprudence. Private prisons turn a quintessentially public function—incarceration for criminal actions—into a profit-making venture with minimal public accountability. In private “voucher schools” (financed by public funds), a private entity makes the rules. Gated residential communities, such as Disney’s Celebration, are privately controlled municipalities that make and enforce their own laws. Private mercenary armies, such as Blackwater (now rebranded as Academi), are hired by the Pentagon so that their “soldiers” will be less accountable for what might otherwise be war crimes. Eminent domain, the inherent public prerogative to claim private property for a public purpose, has been commandeered by private developers. And courts—the ultimate embodiment of law in a democracy—have been privatized by the vast expansion of compulsory arbitration.
Neo-Feudalism and the Financial Collapse of 2008 
Under the system of financial regulation created in the New Deal, commercial banks were strictly supervised under one regulatory regime, while the issuance and sale of securities were tightly governed under another. In exchange for federal deposit insurance and/or membership in the Federal Reserve System, commercial banks had to abide by reserve requirements, conflict-of-interest strictures, and regular supervisory examinations. Their ability to merge or open branches was limited. The interest they could pay on deposits was regulated. They were not permitted to turn loans into securities. This regulatory regime was designed to ensure both safety and soundness of the system as a whole, as well as protection of investors, savers, and borrowers.
From the New Deal to the 1980s, investment bankers, retail stockbrokers, and issuers of stock were governed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded stocks were subject to extensive disclosures and prohibitions against insider trading and other abuses such as over-leveraging, self-dealing, and deceptive marketing and pricing, which had led to the Great Crash of 1929. There were no derivatives, no private equity, no complex securitization, no pyramid schemes, no off–balance sheet assets, and above all no opaque system of private law. The system was simple enough for supervisors to comprehend and thus to regulate.
In a parallel process of public invention and regulation, the New Deal created and governed a new system of mortgage finance. A new home loan bank system backstopped the (mostly nonprofit) savings and loan sector. The government invented the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage. A new agency, the FHA, insured these mortgages so that ordinary people could acquire homes with low down payments. Yet another public agency, FNMA, used Treasury bond financing to purchase mortgages and replenish the capacity of banks and thrift institutions to make more loans. Still another new agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, helped refinance mortgages for borrowers at risk of foreclosure. The entire system was closely supervised and scandal-free.
Quote:Franklin Roosevelt’s original alphabet soup of new public agencies has mutated into a toxic stew of self-regulatory and self-interested organizations run by and for regulated industries. It is one giant conflict of interest.
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The important point is that this entire post-Depression architecture of financial structure and regulation was publicly created and subject to public scrutiny. It existed for the benefit of the broad citizenry, not for the profit of industry insiders. Even transactions and contracts that were ostensibly private, such as the sale of stocks and bonds, were subject to public rules. This system worked well. Not only did it protect ordinary investors, savers, mortgagors, and the economy as a whole; the financial part of the economy supplied plenty of capital to the real economy during the long postwar boom.
As the distribution of political power shifted in the 1970s and 1980s, the financial industry began reprivatizing systems of law and finance. They invented new strategies of financial speculation to which regulators gave their blessing. Leverage buyout artists began acquiring entire companies using almost none of their own money, with the target company’s stock as collateral. In the new, pro-market environment, regulators concluded that this was legal.
The LBO business mutated into private equity, in which trillions of dollars of transactions were outside the system of securities regulation on the premise that these were not public offerings of shares. What had been a very small loophole in the structure of New Deal securities law metastasized into a largely unregulated multitrillion-dollar industry. Complex layers of derivatives securities were invented, in which immense and largely hidden multiples of leverage were possible. When some regulators expressed an interest in taking a closer look, a Congress newly beholden to the financial industry acted in 2000 to expressly prohibit regulation of derivatives, either as insurance, securities, or as gambling.
In the same period, public agencies delegated regulation to regulated industries via more than a dozen industry-controlled entities known as self-regulatory organizations (SROS). The original self-regulatory organization was the New York Stock Exchange, created in 1792. Prior to the New Deal, the Stock Exchange functioned as a private club, and its failure to enforce transparent and fair dealing had vast consequences for the public well-being when markets periodically crashed. 
From the inception of securities regulation in 1933, there was bitter contention over how much enforcement would be the direct province of the new sec and how much would be delegated to the privately operated stock exchange. It is a testament to the residual power of capital that even at the nadir of its disgrace, the New York Stock Exchange won many of these initial skirmishes, setting an unfortunate pattern to be exploited once FDR was gone. Against the wishes of the sec’s original architects, the stock exchange was permitted to supervise many of its own activities with the sec relegated to watchdog, supervising at one remove. In 1939, the sec allowed the first explicitly recognized SRO, the National Association of Securities Dealers, to govern the system of over-the-counter (off-exchange) stock trades. This was just the beginning of a vast reversion.
After Wall Street invented financial derivatives in the 1980s, the whole field of derivatives creation and trading came to be governed by rules established by the industry trade association, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). At its simplest level, a financial derivative is analogous to an insurance policy against a bond or other security failing to pay back interest or principal. But ISDA, not a government agency, gets to decide how derivatives work and under what circumstances that obligation must be paid. This is neo-feudalism, par excellence. The democratic state plays no role whatever, except to bless the privatized realm of law.
In the area of accounting standards, the sec expressly delegated monitoring and enforcement to the industry trade association, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). When self-regulation failed and accounting frauds led to the Enron scandal and kindred abuses, Congress restored some direct regulatory standards via the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. However, that same legislation created a new body, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), that enabled industry self-regulation to persist in a different form. PCAOB was created as a dot-org, not a government entity. Its president is paid over $670,000 a year. It is dominated by the Big Four accounting firms. The sec delegated a great deal of regulatory enforcement to it, as well as to another industry private association, FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (which used to go under its original and more accurate name, the National Association of Securities Dealers). By definition, the self-interest of securities dealers is not identical to that of the investing public.
SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, is a lobbying and trade association. But with the approval of the government, SIFMA also sets the regulatory standards for repos (overnight loans) and money-market and securities lending transactions through its “master templates.” There are similar industry groups that “regulate” the terms of municipal bond underwriting and sales (the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board); the terms for creation and trading of futures (the National Futures Association); as well as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).
All of these industry self-regulatory bodies have their own systems of jurisprudence, far less transparent or committed to the public interest than the direct public regulation of the New Deal schema. Roosevelt’s original alphabet soup of new public agencies has mutated into a toxic stew of self-regulatory and self-interested organizations. It is one giant conflict of interest.
Private Jurisprudence and the Mortgage Collapse 
The subprime collapse of the early 2000s was the direct result of the invention of new toxic financial products and private systems of law. Loan originators created new categories of mortgages in which the borrowers’ rates would explode after a few years, and marketed them aggressively to unsuspecting homebuyers who could not afford them. Deceptive mortgage products such as “pick-a-pay” had low nominal interest rates, while the true interest costs were added to the principal. Others had low teaser rates that rose dramatically after a few years. The mortgages in turn were sold to investment bankers who packaged them into securities that, through the alchemy of private credit rating agencies, were given triple-A ratings.
When investment bankers devised pyramids of asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, they needed complex private legal and financing systems. The government basically got out of the way and let the bankers run the show and write the rules as private contracts, even though a variety of existing laws and principles of sound banking were violated. The credit rating agencies that rewarded the securities based on exploding mortgages with triple-A ratings were essentially unregulated.
Quote:Compulsory arbitration moves consumer and employment disputes from the courts to a rigged process of private systems of adjudication, depriving workers and consumers of statutory rights that they achieved in the 1960s and ’70s.
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In order to make the system of high-volume mortgage securitization work, the financiers had to devise an end run around a property-recording system that has been in place in America since before the Revolution. The banks invented a private database that tracked transfers of title to the property, called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS). MERS was basically a shell company, wholly owned by major banks, designed to enable the securitization industry to evade recording fees incurred when banks transferred mortgages multiple times.
Rather than using the traditional system of transferring and recording property and mortgage liens with the local recorders of deeds, the MERS system listed itself as the mortgagee of record. Banks could make unlimited transactions inside MERS; the recorder of deeds would only know about the original sale.
At the height of the housing bubble, most of the existing mortgages in the United States listed MERS as the mortgagee. But this mass tax evasion scheme was susceptible to widespread database errors that proved disastrous when the whole subprime system blew up. MERS would either try to claim standing over mortgages it had no financial interest in, or would make an after-the-fact assignment to a trustee, which violated the rules governing securitization. MERS designated thousands of low-level mortgage industry workers “vice presidents” of the company, and they would sign the unlawful transfers of mortgage in MERS’s name.
This phony paper was used as evidence in several million foreclosure cases. Many families lost their homes based on fraudulent documents from a shell company that was at best a legal fiction. A handful of judges threw out foreclosure proceedings on the premise that the deed had been fraudulently recorded by a shell system or there was no record of the loan in the first place, but most foreclosures stood. The industry’s creation of a proprietary fiefdom of law—a private property records system created with no public debate or legislative approval—was richly rewarded. MERS still exists.
The Invasion of Arbitration 
Another emblematic case of neo-feudalism is the use of compulsory arbitration to move consumer and employment disputes from the public courts to a rigged process of private systems of adjudication. This privatization of justice deprives workers and consumers of the benefits of many of the statutory rights that they achieved in the 1960s and ’70s. It is the result of new, radical judicial interpretations of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA).
The FAA was enacted in 1925 at the behest of the business community, which wanted to bolster trade associations by giving them the ability to compel their members to submit disputes to arbitration rather than to the courts. But since the 1980s, the Supreme Court has ruled that the statute could be used by corporations to require arbitration in virtually all settings. Companies began inserting arbitration clauses in their employment and consumer contracts. By the 2000s, large corporations made arbitration mandatory for most employment discrimination disputes, federal and state wage and hour disputes, disputes over alleged violations of state employment protective laws, consumer breach of warranty claims, allegations of consumer fraud, and most other cases involving workers and consumers.
With the approval of the courts, corporations now require arbitration for allegations of lethal negligence by nursing homes, allegations of identity theft, instances of sexual assault of students by teachers in private schools, claims of antitrust conspiracies by large corporations against small businesses, and efforts by on-demand workers to obtain fair working conditions. The corporation picks the arbitrator and defines the rules of the proceedings. It can insist on limited discovery and impose confidentiality gags so that plaintiffs with similar cases cannot share evidence or information about the outcome of their cases. It can also exclude certain types of evidence in advance, and limit the types of remedies a successful claimant can recover. It is common to also impose fee-sharing so that an employee or a consumer has to pay a significant sum just to have their case heard.
In a recent trend, some employers require the losing party to pay all of the cost of an arbitration—typically several thousands or tens of thousands of dollars—as well as the winning party’s attorney fees. These clauses are designed to discourage workers and consumers from asserting claims altogether. When disputes go to arbitration and an award is issued, the losing party has virtually no right to appeal.
Moreover, arbitration proceedings lack the due process protections we expect of courts. An arbitration hearing has no transparency—there is almost never a transcript of the proceeding; there is often no written opinion; and there is seldom a public record that reveals the names of the parties, the nature of the dispute, or the outcome. Hence large corporations, who as repeat players have amassed experience with many different arbitrators and seen many similar cases, have a substantial advantage.
Arbitration has seriously undermined workers’ and consumers’ rights to use class actions. With class action suits, individuals with common claims—such as Walmart workers who were denied legally mandated overtime payments—are able to consolidate their claims, obtain a lawyer, and get into court. In the 1990s and early 2000s, employment-related class actions proliferated; some corporations were forced to pay multimillion-dollar awards.
But in 2011, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to arbitration provisions that ban the use of class actions, either in court or in an arbitration proceeding. The case involved tens of thousands of consumers, each of whom had been cheated out of approximately $30 by AT&T. Without the vehicle of the class action, such a large number of small-value claims would never be pursued in any tribunal, giving corporations a license to cheat customers with impunity. Today, the vast majority of arbitration clauses written by corporations include a class action ban.
Private Arbitration Regimes in Trade Law 
Since the 1980s, major trade agreements have included a device known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement. This first came about in the case of trade deals between European multinational corporations and former colonies with weak or corrupt systems of law. The U.S. government copied this formula in bilateral trade deals to protect U.S. investors from expropriation. Before they risked their money, American investors wanted some assurance that in the event of disputes, a relatively impartial tribunal would be the judge. Thus were born investor-state panels that could supersede local law. This made a certain amount of sense in the case of trading partners with underdeveloped systems of law. But beginning with the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 (NAFTA), investor-state panels were empowered to override federal and state courts in cases of disputes between private corporations and government regulations in advanced democracies, in this case the U.S. and Canada, as well as Mexico.
Under NAFTA, a U.S. corporation with operations in Canada or Mexico can bring suit before a special NAFTA panel alleging that a labor or environmental or financial regulation violates the trade agreement because it operates as an indirect barrier to trade. Not only does the investor-state provision of NAFTA allow for end runs around national and state courts; the review panels have none of the strictures against conflicts of interest or the discovery provisions of regular courts. Under NAFTA, arbitration panels have required governments to pay corporations about $500 billion in damages because national or state health, safety, labor, financial, or environmental laws supposedly infringed on trade freedoms.
Some critics of NAFTA were surprised and heartened when the investor-state dispute resolution provision of NAFTA was revised in the renegotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement of 2020. But industry did not resist all that strenuously because the investor-state provision lives on in the 2019 EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which expressly permits corporate end runs around law to special investor-state panels. So a U.S. corporation with operations in Canada or Europe can use ceta to bring a complaint before such a panel. Investor-state options also survive in dozens of other bilateral trade deals to which the U.S. is a party. A variation of the process of corporate end run around national law is possible under the World Trade Organization’s rules.
Silicon Valley as a Giant Fiefdom 
One of the startling trends of recent decades has been the success of the giant tech monopolies at creating their own proprietary systems of law and insulating themselves from public regulation. While citizens are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by constitutional constraints on government surveillance, the tech giants know far more about us, often with our “consent,” than the government does. The giant tech industry has fought off efforts to regulate its use of personal data. Instead, companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon have invented their own jurisprudence, hidden in obscure terms of service, to govern the consent of users to the commercial use of personal data.
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The tech monopolies have also succeeded in creating a proprietary legal regime to govern their relationship with their actual or potential commercial competitors, and they have stacked the deck in favor of the house. Amazon, for example, has agreements with 2.5 million third-party sellers, who use its site to market their products. These agreements are devised by Amazon for its own advantage, often at cost to outside vendors who are both users of Amazon’s platform and rivals who compete with Amazon’s own offerings. By playing the role of both platform provider and competitor, Amazon is able to engage in strategic pricing and marketing, courtesy of its superior access to consumer buying data. Sellers must also pay a basic subscription fee, referral charges, and additional fees if Amazon provides fulfillment and delivery. And of course, Amazon requires all of its independent sellers to sign the now-familiar arbitration clause, requiring submission of disputes to an arbitrator selected by Amazon. Most of this ought to be illegal, but it isn’t.
Instead of being the creation of Amazon’s private law, fair ground rules should be set by some neutral regulatory agency. Critics have suggested a variety of reforms to limit the market power of giant tech monopolies and the resulting abuses. These include the application of common carrier principles, privacy rules, and the enforcement of antitrust laws. Under common carrier principles, Amazon would either be a platform or a vendor, but not both. But so far, the large platform companies have succeeded in fending off these reforms by means of a combination of raw political power and a sly appeal to libertarian values.
Private Law in the Drug Industry
Like Big Tech, the pharmaceutical industry is a fortress of privatized law—despite the fact that most drug breakthroughs are ultimately financed by you, the American taxpayer, either through NIH grants or through elevated health insurance premiums. The big drug companies have succeeded in manipulating patent law to their advantage, to the point where independent innovators who have new ideas that would lower consumer prices are often silenced by industry lawsuits and confidentiality agreements. The industry has also succeeded in jacking up prices of drugs long in the public domain by devising “new” variants that add little value, obtaining monopoly protection for these “improvements” from the patent office, and then strong-arming medical systems into using the more expensive substitute. The industry also keeps well-established and cheap drugs artificially scarce and expensive by driving out generic producers or merging and carving up markets so that even many drugs that are off-patent have only one producer.
How is all this possible? In the absence of countervailing public regulation, the industry simply makes up its own private law, using its market power to increase profits and insulate itself from either competition or government supervision. It is a law unto itself. The more powerful the industry is, the more allies it has in Congress to make sure that the FDA stays narcotized under Democrats and Republicans alike.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY today is under assault on multiple fronts. The autocratic incursions of the Trump administration are only the most urgent and immediate. But the private capture of public regulatory law is more long-term and more insidious. If we are to get our democracy back, once we oust Trump we need to begin to reclaim public law from neo-feudalism.
The ultra-libertarian Friedrich Hayek warned that too much state intervention would deprive the citizenry of cherished rights and liberties. With unintended irony, he titled his treatise The Road to Serfdom. Hayek had it backwards. Today’s road to serfdom is corporate.]]> Illustrations by Robert Meganck
The Rise of Neo-Feudalism
The private capture of entire legal systems by corporate America goes far beyond neoliberalism. It evokes the private fiefdoms of the Middle Ages.
by Robert Kuttner, Katherine V. Stone
April 8, 2020








The history of the modern democratic state can be understood as a story of shifting authority and lawmaking, first from private potentates to sovereign monarchs, and then to publicly accountable democracies. Today, this centuries-long democratizing trend is rapidly being reversed. Western democracies are not simply embracing neoliberalism in the sense of deregulating the economy. Elites are pursuing something aptly described as a new form of feudalism, in which entire realms of public law, public property, due process, and citizen rights revert to unaccountable control by private business.
The system of finance, once supervised by bank regulatory agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been delegated to private realms of law. The financial collapse of 2008 is best understood as the seizure, corruption, and abuse of entire domains of regulation and jurisprudence. Laws to protect workers and consumers, reflecting 70 years of struggle to expand rights, are now erased by compulsory arbitration regimes. Trade law permits similar private tribunals to overturn or sidestep public regulation. Tech platform monopolies have created a proprietary regime where they can crush competitors and invade consumer privacy by means of onerous terms, often buried in online “terms of service” provisions. The unity of common scientific inquiry has been balkanized by confidentiality agreements and abuses of patents, as scientific knowledge comes to be “owned” by private entities. Companies like Monsanto, manipulating intellectual property and trade law, prevent farmers from following the ancient practice of keeping seeds for the next planting season. This is not deregulation or neoliberalism. It is legally sanctioned private jurisprudence—neo-feudalism.
The Brief Era of the Democratic Commons
For part of the 20th century, the democratic state served as a counterweight to the concentrated power that flowed to concentrated wealth in a capitalist economy. Laws helped workers offset the power of employers, protected small investors from the schemes of bankers and brokers, gave some countervailing power to tenants against landlords, and added consumer safeguards to constrain abuses of manufacturers and retailers. All of this has been thrown into reverse—not just by the more visible forms of deregulation, but by the creation of entirely private realms of property and law.
It is easy to miss what has been occurring, because the age-old elements of private law, such as contracts and torts, have long coexisted with public law and regulation. Contention between public law and private power is a very old story. What is new and alarming is the displacement of entire areas of public law by private commercial interests and the resurrection of abusive forms of private law.
Not only did the 20th-century state expand democratic public law. Acting through the courts, the state intervened to police private contracts and protect weaker parties from abuse by the powerful. Twentieth-century courts moved away from the formalist contract law of the late 19th century, which was characterized by rigid contract interpretation and deference to the principle of caveat emptor. In its place, 20th-century judicial interpretation and enforcement of contracts emphasized fairness between the parties. Using such doctrines as unconscionability, duress, and impracticability, courts in the 20th century refused to enforce contracts between parties with vastly unequal resources, knowledge, or bargaining power when they found agreements to be oppressive, coercive, grossly one-sided, misleading, or blatantly unfair.
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For example, courts refused to enforce loans to consumers with excessive interest rates; consumer contracts that disclaimed standard warranties; employment contracts with broad covenants not to compete; contracts between mining companies and farmers to sell family homesteads for a pittance; and leases with draconian liquidated-damage clauses for minor tenant infractions. Moreover, the courts scrutinized the process of contract formation for real, as opposed to fictitious, consent. In a similar vein, the Uniform Commercial Code, drafted by legal-realist scholar Karl Llewellyn in 1952 and subsequently adopted in all 50 states, expanded the doctrine of good faith in commercial contracting and adopted “commercial reasonableness” as the standard for interpreting contractual ambiguities.
The trend in contract law took a U-turn in the 1980s, as the law and economics movement began to permeate the judiciary. The new “efficiency” theory of contract law held that all contracts should be enforced, notwithstanding either deception or vast power inequalities between the parties. Thus the capture of public law and the reversion to one-sided private law reinforced each other, creating vast pools of proprietary power.
The extreme privatization of jurisprudence overlaps the privatization of public services, but it is more sinister. When a public service such as a voucher school, a park, a highway, or an entire town (such as Disney’s town of Celebration) is privatized, it alters the cost, quality, and distribution of the service, and also reduces public accountability. Voucher schools are able to manipulate admissions, avoid costly special-needs kids, and have their own legal and disciplinary procedures, which are supervised only very loosely by the state, if at all. Public prisons, already replete with abhorrent conditions, have become much worse as private, for-profit entities, with even less opportunity for redress.
Quote:For part of the 20th century, the democratic state served as a counterweight to the concentrated power that owed to concentrated wealth in a capitalist economy. That role has been reversed as private potentates have captured the state.
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The carving up of public law and property into proprietary domains is the new tragedy of the commons. The environmental tragedy, at least in principle, is amenable to public regulation that applies to all players. In the new tragedy, public regulation is precluded because law has been sundered from the democratic commons, in a manner that evokes the original tragedy of the commons—the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries—in which lands that had been cultivated by the peasantry since time immemorial were carved up into commercial properties by local lords, with the blessing and legal protection of the Crown.
In some respects, the new feudalism is even more lopsided than the original, in that historic feudalism had some forms of reciprocal obligation between lord, vassal, and serf; between king and aristocrat; Church and Crown; and between apprentice, tradesman, and master. For all of its absolutism, feudalism had aspects of what J.K. Galbraith, describing capitalism at the apex of the mixed economy, was to call “countervailing power.” Neo-feudalism is a one-way seizure of private power and law by elites.
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From Feudalism to Democracy—and Back
The historic movement from feudalism to the modern state and then to political democracy began in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Feudal lords had massive landholdings wherein their word was law. They maintained their own military forces, and operated feudal courts to resolve disputes. These quasi-states had understandings (and sometimes clashes) with monarchies and with the Church. Feudal lords had plenary authority over their domains, although they themselves were subject to the higher authority of the monarch and the Church. During the heyday of feudalism, most contract questions, property disputes, criminal matters, domestic relations, inheritance, and other matters affecting ordinary folks were handled in the local courts. In principle, serfs had some customary rights, but masters ruled.
The feudal system arose in response to the anarchy and vacuum of sovereignty left in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the ebb and flow of invaders from the east, north, and south—Huns, Goths, Arabs, Norsemen, and others. Some monarchies were potent, others weak; but as long as a feudal lord was a faithful vassal of the king, he was sovereign in his own realm. For nearly a thousand years, there was a four-way contention for power among kings, feudal lords, the Church, and the rising imperatives of commerce, with the monarchy gradually gaining sovereignty.
In the late Middle Ages, commerce among different principalities was governed by a transnational body of customary commercial law known as the lex mercatoria. Commercial disputes were resolved by private tribunals created by the commercial community according to the norms of the merchant community itself. The results were recognized by monarchies. This system made it possible for a product to pass from country to country with the property rights of the owner recognized by other merchants and sovereigns. The slave trade was part of this commercial system, and it could only function thanks to this symbiosis between traders and kings, in which ownership rights to a chattel were recognized by monarchies.
By the end of the 18th century, these struggles for primacy had been largely resolved in favor of the state. This came to be known by scholars as the Westphalian system, after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War by giving the king the right to dictate the religion of his subjects. Nation-states gained more and more authority over realms previously governed by feudal lords, including the power to define and protect property rights, maintain a military and judicial system, and regulate commerce, labor, the professions, finance, trade, and domestic relations. The state gained a monopoly on the legal use of force. A post-feudal aristocracy still existed, but the monarch became increasingly sovereign. Yet the bias in favor of economic elites persisted.
There followed another century of struggle to make the state democratic. Despite the democratizing trends, some feudal remnants remained well into the modern era. For example, until the early 20th century, under the English doctrine of primogeniture and the device of the entail, property owners were required to keep their estates intact and leave them to a single heir. In the U.S., supposedly “born free” of feudal heritage, many feudal doctrines from the common law of England were nonetheless incorporated into Britain’s North American colonies. In the U.S. as well as Britain, the doctrine of coverture effectively made wives the property of husbands. In much of the West, there were still property requirements for the franchise, left over from the aristocratic era.
Throughout the 19th century, employers in the U.S. retained quasi-feudal rights over their workers through the operation of two common-law doctrines—the “entire contract” doctrine, which provided that workers who left an employer mid-contract had no right to be paid for any work they had performed, and the tort of enticement, which enabled employers to prevent their workers from departing their establishment to work for someone else. However, with the rise of commercial principles in the late 19th century, some individualistic approaches emerged. For example, the at-will rule that emerged in the 1880s gave individual laborers the right to quit their employment with impunity—and gave employers the right to fire workers for any reason, or for no reason. And, in the area of industrial accidents, no matter how egregious an employer’s negligence, courts reasoned that the worker had freely contracted to accept the risk and therefore had no recourse. Thus, in the case of labor law as well as other areas of commercial law, both the feudal remnants and the evolving modern market system favored the property owner.
IN THE UNITED STATES, the democratization of the modern state was realized in the economic realm only in the 20th century, as new citizen and worker protections were enacted by Congress and upheld by courts. In the 20th century, government acted to balance the commercial interests of emerging companies and industries against a broader public interest. Railroads, radio, television, electric utilities, civil aviation, telephones—all sectors with actual or potential monopoly abuses—were subject to public law after many had attempted to install regimes of private law relying on coercive market power. Railroads, which had operated like feudal baronies, dictating terms of commerce for shippers and destroying rivals, became subjected to public rate-making. In the telephone industry, the dominant Bell System had sought to make and enforce rules to crush or capture potential competitors, but it came to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. So did the emerging radio industry, dominated by one company, RCA, which had sought to rule the airwaves. In all of these cases, the democratic state intervened both to supplant areas of private law with public regulation and to assure that systems of private law had some balance and accountability that would protect the economically weak from the economically strong.
The law became more procedurally transparent as well as more substantively egalitarian. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) created an orderly and transparent process for regulatory agencies to make rules and to ensure greater citizen participation in the rule-making process. The APA also imposed restrictions on ex parte contracts between the regulated entities and the regulators, and prohibited conflicts of interest in many other respects. Thus, the gains for democracy were both procedural and substantive.
The high watermark of the democratized legal and policy regime was the 1960s and 1970s, when numerous consumer and environmental laws were enacted, unions represented almost one worker in three, and courts defended citizen rights.
Beginning in the 1980s, power shifted again. Entire domains were handed back to private entities that were empowered to exercise quasi-state functions and create their own proprietary systems of law.
These developments have been described in mainstream policy discourse as “deregulation” and “privatization,” but those terms are misleading. The term “deregulation” suggests a reversion to a pre-existing system of nonregulation, a realm in which state authority is absent. But this is a fantasy. There is no pre-legal, law-free realm. There is always regulation, albeit sometimes invisible and private, and hence unaccountable.
Similarly, the term “privatization” is misleading. The term suggests a neutral transfer of governmental functions to the private domain for the sake of efficiency. But privatization invariably has distributional as well as civic consequences, since it changes the structure of costs and benefits and obscures public accountability. Privatized water and highway systems raise costs to users. Public parks are generally free; privatized ones charge. The privatized entity can avoid public obligations such as due process, transparency, and nondiscrimination requirements.
Outsourcing of public functions, which gained ground beginning in the 1980s, brought with it outsourcing of jurisprudence. Private prisons turn a quintessentially public function—incarceration for criminal actions—into a profit-making venture with minimal public accountability. In private “voucher schools” (financed by public funds), a private entity makes the rules. Gated residential communities, such as Disney’s Celebration, are privately controlled municipalities that make and enforce their own laws. Private mercenary armies, such as Blackwater (now rebranded as Academi), are hired by the Pentagon so that their “soldiers” will be less accountable for what might otherwise be war crimes. Eminent domain, the inherent public prerogative to claim private property for a public purpose, has been commandeered by private developers. And courts—the ultimate embodiment of law in a democracy—have been privatized by the vast expansion of compulsory arbitration.
Neo-Feudalism and the Financial Collapse of 2008 
Under the system of financial regulation created in the New Deal, commercial banks were strictly supervised under one regulatory regime, while the issuance and sale of securities were tightly governed under another. In exchange for federal deposit insurance and/or membership in the Federal Reserve System, commercial banks had to abide by reserve requirements, conflict-of-interest strictures, and regular supervisory examinations. Their ability to merge or open branches was limited. The interest they could pay on deposits was regulated. They were not permitted to turn loans into securities. This regulatory regime was designed to ensure both safety and soundness of the system as a whole, as well as protection of investors, savers, and borrowers.
From the New Deal to the 1980s, investment bankers, retail stockbrokers, and issuers of stock were governed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded stocks were subject to extensive disclosures and prohibitions against insider trading and other abuses such as over-leveraging, self-dealing, and deceptive marketing and pricing, which had led to the Great Crash of 1929. There were no derivatives, no private equity, no complex securitization, no pyramid schemes, no off–balance sheet assets, and above all no opaque system of private law. The system was simple enough for supervisors to comprehend and thus to regulate.
In a parallel process of public invention and regulation, the New Deal created and governed a new system of mortgage finance. A new home loan bank system backstopped the (mostly nonprofit) savings and loan sector. The government invented the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage. A new agency, the FHA, insured these mortgages so that ordinary people could acquire homes with low down payments. Yet another public agency, FNMA, used Treasury bond financing to purchase mortgages and replenish the capacity of banks and thrift institutions to make more loans. Still another new agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, helped refinance mortgages for borrowers at risk of foreclosure. The entire system was closely supervised and scandal-free.
Quote:Franklin Roosevelt’s original alphabet soup of new public agencies has mutated into a toxic stew of self-regulatory and self-interested organizations run by and for regulated industries. It is one giant conflict of interest.
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The important point is that this entire post-Depression architecture of financial structure and regulation was publicly created and subject to public scrutiny. It existed for the benefit of the broad citizenry, not for the profit of industry insiders. Even transactions and contracts that were ostensibly private, such as the sale of stocks and bonds, were subject to public rules. This system worked well. Not only did it protect ordinary investors, savers, mortgagors, and the economy as a whole; the financial part of the economy supplied plenty of capital to the real economy during the long postwar boom.
As the distribution of political power shifted in the 1970s and 1980s, the financial industry began reprivatizing systems of law and finance. They invented new strategies of financial speculation to which regulators gave their blessing. Leverage buyout artists began acquiring entire companies using almost none of their own money, with the target company’s stock as collateral. In the new, pro-market environment, regulators concluded that this was legal.
The LBO business mutated into private equity, in which trillions of dollars of transactions were outside the system of securities regulation on the premise that these were not public offerings of shares. What had been a very small loophole in the structure of New Deal securities law metastasized into a largely unregulated multitrillion-dollar industry. Complex layers of derivatives securities were invented, in which immense and largely hidden multiples of leverage were possible. When some regulators expressed an interest in taking a closer look, a Congress newly beholden to the financial industry acted in 2000 to expressly prohibit regulation of derivatives, either as insurance, securities, or as gambling.
In the same period, public agencies delegated regulation to regulated industries via more than a dozen industry-controlled entities known as self-regulatory organizations (SROS). The original self-regulatory organization was the New York Stock Exchange, created in 1792. Prior to the New Deal, the Stock Exchange functioned as a private club, and its failure to enforce transparent and fair dealing had vast consequences for the public well-being when markets periodically crashed. 
From the inception of securities regulation in 1933, there was bitter contention over how much enforcement would be the direct province of the new sec and how much would be delegated to the privately operated stock exchange. It is a testament to the residual power of capital that even at the nadir of its disgrace, the New York Stock Exchange won many of these initial skirmishes, setting an unfortunate pattern to be exploited once FDR was gone. Against the wishes of the sec’s original architects, the stock exchange was permitted to supervise many of its own activities with the sec relegated to watchdog, supervising at one remove. In 1939, the sec allowed the first explicitly recognized SRO, the National Association of Securities Dealers, to govern the system of over-the-counter (off-exchange) stock trades. This was just the beginning of a vast reversion.
After Wall Street invented financial derivatives in the 1980s, the whole field of derivatives creation and trading came to be governed by rules established by the industry trade association, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). At its simplest level, a financial derivative is analogous to an insurance policy against a bond or other security failing to pay back interest or principal. But ISDA, not a government agency, gets to decide how derivatives work and under what circumstances that obligation must be paid. This is neo-feudalism, par excellence. The democratic state plays no role whatever, except to bless the privatized realm of law.
In the area of accounting standards, the sec expressly delegated monitoring and enforcement to the industry trade association, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). When self-regulation failed and accounting frauds led to the Enron scandal and kindred abuses, Congress restored some direct regulatory standards via the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. However, that same legislation created a new body, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), that enabled industry self-regulation to persist in a different form. PCAOB was created as a dot-org, not a government entity. Its president is paid over $670,000 a year. It is dominated by the Big Four accounting firms. The sec delegated a great deal of regulatory enforcement to it, as well as to another industry private association, FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (which used to go under its original and more accurate name, the National Association of Securities Dealers). By definition, the self-interest of securities dealers is not identical to that of the investing public.
SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, is a lobbying and trade association. But with the approval of the government, SIFMA also sets the regulatory standards for repos (overnight loans) and money-market and securities lending transactions through its “master templates.” There are similar industry groups that “regulate” the terms of municipal bond underwriting and sales (the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board); the terms for creation and trading of futures (the National Futures Association); as well as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).
All of these industry self-regulatory bodies have their own systems of jurisprudence, far less transparent or committed to the public interest than the direct public regulation of the New Deal schema. Roosevelt’s original alphabet soup of new public agencies has mutated into a toxic stew of self-regulatory and self-interested organizations. It is one giant conflict of interest.
Private Jurisprudence and the Mortgage Collapse 
The subprime collapse of the early 2000s was the direct result of the invention of new toxic financial products and private systems of law. Loan originators created new categories of mortgages in which the borrowers’ rates would explode after a few years, and marketed them aggressively to unsuspecting homebuyers who could not afford them. Deceptive mortgage products such as “pick-a-pay” had low nominal interest rates, while the true interest costs were added to the principal. Others had low teaser rates that rose dramatically after a few years. The mortgages in turn were sold to investment bankers who packaged them into securities that, through the alchemy of private credit rating agencies, were given triple-A ratings.
When investment bankers devised pyramids of asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, they needed complex private legal and financing systems. The government basically got out of the way and let the bankers run the show and write the rules as private contracts, even though a variety of existing laws and principles of sound banking were violated. The credit rating agencies that rewarded the securities based on exploding mortgages with triple-A ratings were essentially unregulated.
Quote:Compulsory arbitration moves consumer and employment disputes from the courts to a rigged process of private systems of adjudication, depriving workers and consumers of statutory rights that they achieved in the 1960s and ’70s.
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In order to make the system of high-volume mortgage securitization work, the financiers had to devise an end run around a property-recording system that has been in place in America since before the Revolution. The banks invented a private database that tracked transfers of title to the property, called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS). MERS was basically a shell company, wholly owned by major banks, designed to enable the securitization industry to evade recording fees incurred when banks transferred mortgages multiple times.
Rather than using the traditional system of transferring and recording property and mortgage liens with the local recorders of deeds, the MERS system listed itself as the mortgagee of record. Banks could make unlimited transactions inside MERS; the recorder of deeds would only know about the original sale.
At the height of the housing bubble, most of the existing mortgages in the United States listed MERS as the mortgagee. But this mass tax evasion scheme was susceptible to widespread database errors that proved disastrous when the whole subprime system blew up. MERS would either try to claim standing over mortgages it had no financial interest in, or would make an after-the-fact assignment to a trustee, which violated the rules governing securitization. MERS designated thousands of low-level mortgage industry workers “vice presidents” of the company, and they would sign the unlawful transfers of mortgage in MERS’s name.
This phony paper was used as evidence in several million foreclosure cases. Many families lost their homes based on fraudulent documents from a shell company that was at best a legal fiction. A handful of judges threw out foreclosure proceedings on the premise that the deed had been fraudulently recorded by a shell system or there was no record of the loan in the first place, but most foreclosures stood. The industry’s creation of a proprietary fiefdom of law—a private property records system created with no public debate or legislative approval—was richly rewarded. MERS still exists.
The Invasion of Arbitration 
Another emblematic case of neo-feudalism is the use of compulsory arbitration to move consumer and employment disputes from the public courts to a rigged process of private systems of adjudication. This privatization of justice deprives workers and consumers of the benefits of many of the statutory rights that they achieved in the 1960s and ’70s. It is the result of new, radical judicial interpretations of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA).
The FAA was enacted in 1925 at the behest of the business community, which wanted to bolster trade associations by giving them the ability to compel their members to submit disputes to arbitration rather than to the courts. But since the 1980s, the Supreme Court has ruled that the statute could be used by corporations to require arbitration in virtually all settings. Companies began inserting arbitration clauses in their employment and consumer contracts. By the 2000s, large corporations made arbitration mandatory for most employment discrimination disputes, federal and state wage and hour disputes, disputes over alleged violations of state employment protective laws, consumer breach of warranty claims, allegations of consumer fraud, and most other cases involving workers and consumers.
With the approval of the courts, corporations now require arbitration for allegations of lethal negligence by nursing homes, allegations of identity theft, instances of sexual assault of students by teachers in private schools, claims of antitrust conspiracies by large corporations against small businesses, and efforts by on-demand workers to obtain fair working conditions. The corporation picks the arbitrator and defines the rules of the proceedings. It can insist on limited discovery and impose confidentiality gags so that plaintiffs with similar cases cannot share evidence or information about the outcome of their cases. It can also exclude certain types of evidence in advance, and limit the types of remedies a successful claimant can recover. It is common to also impose fee-sharing so that an employee or a consumer has to pay a significant sum just to have their case heard.
In a recent trend, some employers require the losing party to pay all of the cost of an arbitration—typically several thousands or tens of thousands of dollars—as well as the winning party’s attorney fees. These clauses are designed to discourage workers and consumers from asserting claims altogether. When disputes go to arbitration and an award is issued, the losing party has virtually no right to appeal.
Moreover, arbitration proceedings lack the due process protections we expect of courts. An arbitration hearing has no transparency—there is almost never a transcript of the proceeding; there is often no written opinion; and there is seldom a public record that reveals the names of the parties, the nature of the dispute, or the outcome. Hence large corporations, who as repeat players have amassed experience with many different arbitrators and seen many similar cases, have a substantial advantage.
Arbitration has seriously undermined workers’ and consumers’ rights to use class actions. With class action suits, individuals with common claims—such as Walmart workers who were denied legally mandated overtime payments—are able to consolidate their claims, obtain a lawyer, and get into court. In the 1990s and early 2000s, employment-related class actions proliferated; some corporations were forced to pay multimillion-dollar awards.
But in 2011, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to arbitration provisions that ban the use of class actions, either in court or in an arbitration proceeding. The case involved tens of thousands of consumers, each of whom had been cheated out of approximately $30 by AT&T. Without the vehicle of the class action, such a large number of small-value claims would never be pursued in any tribunal, giving corporations a license to cheat customers with impunity. Today, the vast majority of arbitration clauses written by corporations include a class action ban.
Private Arbitration Regimes in Trade Law 
Since the 1980s, major trade agreements have included a device known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement. This first came about in the case of trade deals between European multinational corporations and former colonies with weak or corrupt systems of law. The U.S. government copied this formula in bilateral trade deals to protect U.S. investors from expropriation. Before they risked their money, American investors wanted some assurance that in the event of disputes, a relatively impartial tribunal would be the judge. Thus were born investor-state panels that could supersede local law. This made a certain amount of sense in the case of trading partners with underdeveloped systems of law. But beginning with the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 (NAFTA), investor-state panels were empowered to override federal and state courts in cases of disputes between private corporations and government regulations in advanced democracies, in this case the U.S. and Canada, as well as Mexico.
Under NAFTA, a U.S. corporation with operations in Canada or Mexico can bring suit before a special NAFTA panel alleging that a labor or environmental or financial regulation violates the trade agreement because it operates as an indirect barrier to trade. Not only does the investor-state provision of NAFTA allow for end runs around national and state courts; the review panels have none of the strictures against conflicts of interest or the discovery provisions of regular courts. Under NAFTA, arbitration panels have required governments to pay corporations about $500 billion in damages because national or state health, safety, labor, financial, or environmental laws supposedly infringed on trade freedoms.
Some critics of NAFTA were surprised and heartened when the investor-state dispute resolution provision of NAFTA was revised in the renegotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement of 2020. But industry did not resist all that strenuously because the investor-state provision lives on in the 2019 EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which expressly permits corporate end runs around law to special investor-state panels. So a U.S. corporation with operations in Canada or Europe can use ceta to bring a complaint before such a panel. Investor-state options also survive in dozens of other bilateral trade deals to which the U.S. is a party. A variation of the process of corporate end run around national law is possible under the World Trade Organization’s rules.
Silicon Valley as a Giant Fiefdom 
One of the startling trends of recent decades has been the success of the giant tech monopolies at creating their own proprietary systems of law and insulating themselves from public regulation. While citizens are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by constitutional constraints on government surveillance, the tech giants know far more about us, often with our “consent,” than the government does. The giant tech industry has fought off efforts to regulate its use of personal data. Instead, companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon have invented their own jurisprudence, hidden in obscure terms of service, to govern the consent of users to the commercial use of personal data.
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The tech monopolies have also succeeded in creating a proprietary legal regime to govern their relationship with their actual or potential commercial competitors, and they have stacked the deck in favor of the house. Amazon, for example, has agreements with 2.5 million third-party sellers, who use its site to market their products. These agreements are devised by Amazon for its own advantage, often at cost to outside vendors who are both users of Amazon’s platform and rivals who compete with Amazon’s own offerings. By playing the role of both platform provider and competitor, Amazon is able to engage in strategic pricing and marketing, courtesy of its superior access to consumer buying data. Sellers must also pay a basic subscription fee, referral charges, and additional fees if Amazon provides fulfillment and delivery. And of course, Amazon requires all of its independent sellers to sign the now-familiar arbitration clause, requiring submission of disputes to an arbitrator selected by Amazon. Most of this ought to be illegal, but it isn’t.
Instead of being the creation of Amazon’s private law, fair ground rules should be set by some neutral regulatory agency. Critics have suggested a variety of reforms to limit the market power of giant tech monopolies and the resulting abuses. These include the application of common carrier principles, privacy rules, and the enforcement of antitrust laws. Under common carrier principles, Amazon would either be a platform or a vendor, but not both. But so far, the large platform companies have succeeded in fending off these reforms by means of a combination of raw political power and a sly appeal to libertarian values.
Private Law in the Drug Industry
Like Big Tech, the pharmaceutical industry is a fortress of privatized law—despite the fact that most drug breakthroughs are ultimately financed by you, the American taxpayer, either through NIH grants or through elevated health insurance premiums. The big drug companies have succeeded in manipulating patent law to their advantage, to the point where independent innovators who have new ideas that would lower consumer prices are often silenced by industry lawsuits and confidentiality agreements. The industry has also succeeded in jacking up prices of drugs long in the public domain by devising “new” variants that add little value, obtaining monopoly protection for these “improvements” from the patent office, and then strong-arming medical systems into using the more expensive substitute. The industry also keeps well-established and cheap drugs artificially scarce and expensive by driving out generic producers or merging and carving up markets so that even many drugs that are off-patent have only one producer.
How is all this possible? In the absence of countervailing public regulation, the industry simply makes up its own private law, using its market power to increase profits and insulate itself from either competition or government supervision. It is a law unto itself. The more powerful the industry is, the more allies it has in Congress to make sure that the FDA stays narcotized under Democrats and Republicans alike.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY today is under assault on multiple fronts. The autocratic incursions of the Trump administration are only the most urgent and immediate. But the private capture of public regulatory law is more long-term and more insidious. If we are to get our democracy back, once we oust Trump we need to begin to reclaim public law from neo-feudalism.
The ultra-libertarian Friedrich Hayek warned that too much state intervention would deprive the citizenry of cherished rights and liberties. With unintended irony, he titled his treatise The Road to Serfdom. Hayek had it backwards. Today’s road to serfdom is corporate.]]> <![CDATA[Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16172 Mon, 10 Feb 2020 16:36:13 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16172
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth now disputed only by a few cryogenically-preserved Gosplan enthusiasts and a fair number of poorly-paid Anglo-Saxon academics. That the capitalist engine achieves growth as well as it does because its relentless competition destroys old structures and methods, thus allowing more efficient structures and methods to rise in their place, is the most famous bit of Schumpeteriana, even better-known than the amorous escapades of the former University of Czernowitz professor. And, finally, that structural change can inflict more disruption on working lives, firms, entire industries and their localities than individuals can absorb, or the connective tissue of friendships, families, clans, elective groupings, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities or even nations can withstand, is another old-hat truth more easily recognised than [i]Gemeinschaft[/i] and [i]Gesellschaft[/i] can be spelled.

What is new-hat about the present situation is only a matter of degree, a mere acceleration in the pace of the structural changes that accompany economic growth, whatever its rate. But that, as it turns out, is quite enough to make all the difference in the world. Structural change, with all its personal upheavals and social disruptions, is now quite rapid even when there is zero growth, becoming that much faster when economies do grow. The engine turns, grinding lives and grinding down established human relationships, even when the car is stopped; and reaches Ferrari-like rpms at the most modest steamroller speeds.
One obvious cause of the increased destructiveness of the capitalist process is the worldwide retreat of public ownership, central planning, administrative direction and regulatory control, with all their rigidities inimical to innovation, structural change, economic growth, individual dislocation and social disruption alike. From Argentina to Zambia, with the entire Communist world in between, state ownership of economic enterprises was once accepted as the guarantor of the public interest: it is now seen as the guarantee of bureaucratic idleness, technical stagnation and outright thievery. Central planning, once honoured as the arithmetic highway to assured prosperity, is now known to be impossible simply because no group of mere humans can predetermine next year’s demand for every one of hundreds of different polymers, not to mention two to three million other items, from tower cranes to toothpicks. Administrative direction, once gloriously successful in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, at least helpful in France, a famous failure in George Brown’s Britain, and ineffective or corrupt, or ineffective and corrupt, almost everywhere else, is now being abandoned (slowly) even in Japan, having been abandoned long ago almost everywhere else.
As for regulatory controls, they do not cease to increase in number, because even if steam locomotives need no longer be prevented by speed limits from causing cows to abort, many rather more recent technical novelties entail regulation, and some positively demand it – for example, to allocate frequencies. Other reasons for regulation are legion, but commercial (e.g. airline) as opposed to health and safety and environmental regulation has definitely retreated, and continues to do so. With that, efficiency increases, once-secure enterprises face the perils of the market, and employees once equally secure no longer are so.
Another partly related and equally obvious cause of accelerated structural change is the much-celebrated unification of the puddles, ponds, lakes and seas of village, provincial, regional and national economies into a single global economic ocean, and thus the increasing exposure of those same puddles, ponds, lakes and seas to the tidal waves of change in the global economic ocean, owing to the removal of import barriers, capital-export prohibitions, investment controls and licensing restrictions on the sale of transnational services; the advent and rapid geographic spread of reliable, cheap and instant telecommunications that ease the formation of new commercial relationships both materially and psychologically; the diminishing significance of transport costs due to the waning material content of commerce, as well as to the cheapening of transport with the improvement of air services, harbours and roads – notably rural roads in Asia and Latin America if not Africa; the diffusion of up-to-date technologies for the production of export goods or components, even within otherwise backward local economies; and the hammering-down of once diverse consumer preferences into uniformity by transnational mass-media imagery and advertising.
The overall effect of ‘globalisation’ is that any production anywhere, can expand enormously, far beyond the limits of the domestic market, insofar as it is competitive – and of course that any production anywhere, and the related employment, can be displaced at any time by cheaper production from someplace else in the world. Life in the global economy is full of exciting surprises – and catastrophic downfalls.
Still another cause of disproportionately rapid structural change is the rather sudden arrival of the long-awaited, very long-delayed, big increases in administrative and clerical efficiency that machines for electronic computation, data storage, reproduction and internal communication were supposed to ensure long ago. Partly because with generational change even senior managers can now themselves work those machines if they want to, thereby allowing them to understand their uses, abuses and non-uses; partly because more junior managers are increasingly compelled to use those machines in place of clerical help and clerical companionship; and partly because computer networks allow managers at the next level up literally to oversee, right on their own screens, the work that their underlings are doing or not doing, thereby giving it the same transparency as assembly-line work, with the same immediate visibility of inefficient procedures, inefficient habits and inefficient employees – for all these reasons the long-awaited, long-delayed increase in the efficiency of office-work has finally arrived, exposing hitherto more secure white-collar workers to the work-place dislocations, mass firings or at least diminishing employment prospects that have long been the lot of blue-collar industrial workers in mature economies.
At the present time, for example, even though the US economy is in full recovery, white-collar job reductions by the thousand are being announced by one famous corporation after another. They call it ‘restructuring’ or, more fancifully, ‘re-engineering the corporation’, and duly decorate the proceedings with the most recently fashionable management-consultant verbiage, those catchy, suggestive yet profoundly shallow slogans coined by the authors of the latest business-book bestsellers, who proclaim them expensively and with evangelical insistence on the corporate lecture circuit, with the result that they are then repeated with great solemnity to audiences of deferential, bewildered employees in corporate briefings, ‘workshops’ and ‘retreats’. But the real economies that Wall Street anticipates by bidding up the shares – thereby hugely rewarding mass-firing top executives who have stock options – come not from the background music of the management-consultant verbiage but rather from the displacement of telephone-answering secretaries by voice-mail systems, the displacement of letter-writing secretaries by computer word-processing and faxboards, the displacement of filing secretaries by electronic memories, and the consequent displacement of clerical supervisors; as well as from the displacement of junior administrators by automated paperflow processing and the consequent displacement of their administrative supervisors; as well as from the displacement of all the middle managers who are no longer needed to supervise the doings and undoings of both clerical and administrative employees. That is why corporations whose sales are increasing are nevertheless not adding white-collar positions; corporations whose sales are level are eliminating some white-collar positions; and corporations in decline are eliminating very many – tens of thousands in the case of the sick giants IBM and GM.
Economists have long deplored the disappointing productivity gains of the administrative superstructure in advanced economies, in spite of the proliferation of office electronics. This was numerically irritating to the fraternity, because the goods-producing sector, whose productivity did keep increasing very nicely, has long been of diminishing significance, so that the productivity lag of administrative activities was lowering the numbers for the economy as a whole. Those particular economists need fret no longer: office-work productivity is finally increasing at a fast pace, allowing employers to rid themselves of employees just as fast.
There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ – the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by more efficient new skills, trades and entire industries – is now apt to span years, often very few years, rather than generations. And that is quite enough to make the colossal difference aforementioned. The same rate of structural change that favours global prosperity, that benefits many nations and regions, and that many other nations and regions can at least cope with, now brutally exceeds the adaptive limits of individuals, families and communities. When the sons and daughters of US steelworkers, British miners or German welders must become software-writers, teachers, lawyers or for that matter shop attendants, because the respective paternal industries offer less and less employment, few of them have reason to complain. But when the same mechanisms of change work so fast that steelworkers, coalminers or welders must themselves abandon lifetime proclivities, self-images and workplace companions to acquire demanding new skills – on penalty of chronic unemployment or unskilled low-wage labour – failure and frustration are the likely results. To be sure, nothing could be more old-hat than to worry about the travails of steelworkers, miners or welders, obsolete leftovers of the hopelessly passé white/male industrial working class. So the big news is the dislocation of white-collar employment as well.
I have no statistics that measure the decline in [i]security[/i] of employment. But statistics do show very clearly the impact of a weakening demand for white-collar labour in the decline of white-collar earnings. Back in the early Eighties, when trade-union officials and incurable proletariophiliacs were bitterly complaining that American workers were being extruded from well-paid industrial employment into minimum-wage ‘hamburger-flipping’ jobs, the lusty defenders of the infallibility of free-market economics silenced them in [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] editorials by pointing to the rapid increase in ‘money-flipping’ jobs in banking, insurance and financial services, as well as in then-booming real-estate offices. That is where the debate ended – prematurely. By the end of 1992 more than 6.8 million Americans were duly employed in the financial sector (banking, insurance, finance and real-estate offices). One might assume, as the [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] certainly presumed, that these people were a well-paid lot: but the average earnings of the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees among them were only $10.14 per hour, as compared to $10.98 for production workers in manufacturing. The 1.1 million clerks, tellers and other rank-and-file employees of banks earned much less than the sector’s average at $8.19 per hour, while 48,500 of their counterparts in stock and commodity brokerages – at the very heart of ‘money-flipping’ – duly earned much more at $13.53 per hour. Still, if any disemployed industrial workers did equip themselves with the obligatory broad red suspenders to seek their fortunes on Wall Street, they would have found the rewards surprisingly modest.
At a time when it was forever being explained that it was silly to worry about the decline of manufacturing jobs in the age of ‘services’, the much larger story is that service employees throughout the US economy are actually paid much less than their counterparts still holding industrial jobs. Moreover the average hourly earnings of service employees have been going down for years in real dollars net of inflation. In the entire retail trade, for example, from department stores to street-corner news-stands, the 17.7 million ‘non-supervisory’ employees earned an average of $6.88 per hour in November 1990. In fact, their hourly average went down from a peak of $6.20 in 1978 to $5.04 in 1990 in constant 1982 dollars. To be sure, the retail trade is full of teenagers still in school who work only on weekends and holidays, and married women who work only part-time. That can be expected to depress earnings, and it does. Besides, many retail employees get commissions that are not reported to the collectors of labour statistics. But neither part-timers with modest demands nor commissions are to be found in transportation and public utilities (including railroads, local bus services, mass transit, trucking, courier services, river barges, airlines, telephone companies etc). Nevertheless, the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees in that entire sector had average hourly earnings of $13.07 in November 1990 – substantially more, $2.09 more as it happens, than their counterparts in manufacturing, but still substantially less than those same employees had earned in the Seventies in real money. In fact their earnings peaked in 1978 at $11.18 per hour in constant 1982 dollars – as opposed to $9.58 at the end of 1990 in those same dollars.
In the varied mass of service employees as a whole, there are predictable highs, e.g. the 135,400 non-supervisors in film-making who earned $18.87 per hour, and the rank-and file employees of computer and data-processing services at $15.29 per hour, who numbered only 87,700 in 1972, but reached the impressive total of 637,700 by the end of 1990. The lows are just as predictable. The 1.3 million in hotel/motel non-supervisory jobs were paid only $7.14 per hour on average – though quite a few also receive tips, no doubt. But nobody tips the 436,900 line employees of detective, armoured-car and security agencies who earned only $6.35 per hour on average. From advertising to zoo-keeping many service jobs paid better than that, of course, but the average earnings of [i]all[/i] non-farm, non-government employees were less, at $10.17 per hour, than those of manufacturing workers at $10.98 – so the brave new service economy obviously pays less than old-fashioned industry. Even that is only half the story, because the higher volatility of services makes those jobs less and less secure. In other words, the relative impoverishment of those working lives is accompanied by even more dislocation.
Even bigger news is the dislocation of managerial lives. That is the latest trend in the always progressive United States – and it is most definitely a structural trend, rather than merely cyclical. Now that the dull-safe ‘satisficing’ corporation (moderate dividends, moderate salaries, steady, slow growth) is almost extinct, top managers as a class earn very much more than before, rank-and-file managers who can keep their jobs earn rather less, and it is very difficult for those managers who are forced out to find any comparable jobs elsewhere. Few are destined to grace the pages of business journals as entrepreneurial wonders, not born but made by unemployment. Some adjust undramatically if painfully, by accepting whatever middle-class jobs they can get, normally with reduced pay. Others are much worse off. The 50-55 year old male, white, college-educated former exemplar of the American Dream, still perhaps living in his lavishly-equipped suburban house, with two or three cars in the driveway, one or two children in $20,000 per annum higher education (tuition, board and lodging – all extras are extra) and an ex-job ‘re-engineered’ out of existence, who now exists on savings, second and third mortgages and scant earnings as a self-described ‘consultant’, has become a familiar figure in the contemporary United States. They still send out résumés by the dozen. They still ‘network’ (i.e. beg for jobs from whomever they know). They still put on their business suits to commute to ‘business’ lunches with the genuine article or to visit employment agencies, but at a time when more than 10 per cent of the Harvard graduates of the class of 1958 are unemployed, lesser souls in the same position have little to hope for.
Just in case the sentimental anecdotage is unpersuasive, or seems absurdly disproportionate as compared to the plight of, say, indebted Indian peasants, there are now statistics that quantify the downward slide of the entire population from which the class of middle managers is drawn. The median earnings of [i]all[/i] males in the 45-54 age bracket with four years of higher education – some two million Americans, all but 150,000 of them white – actually peaked in 1972 at some $55,000 in 1992 dollars; they stagnated through three downward economic cycles until 1989, before sharply declining to $41,898 by 1992. From other evidence we know that those numbers average out two phenomena that are equally unprecedented in the American experience: in that same population, the combined total income of the top 1 per cent of all earners increased sensationally, and the combined total of the bottom 80 per cent declined sharply. Again, that implies in one way or another a more-than-proportionate quantum of dislocation. Needless to say, individual working lives cannot be dislocated without damaging families, elective affiliations and communities – the entire moss of human relations which can only grow over the stones of economic stability. Finally, it is entirely certain that what has already happened in the United States is happening or will happen in every other advanced economy, because all of them are exposed to the same forces.
In this situation, what does the moderate Right – mainstream US Republicans, British Tories and all their counterparts elsewhere – have to offer? Only more free trade and globalisation, more deregulation and structural change, thus more dislocation of lives and social relations. It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. Thus at the present time the core of Republican/Tory beliefs is a perfect non-sequitur. And what does the moderate Left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance, and particularist concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, black lesbians down to the merely poor.
Thus neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.
A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot, and which Zhirinovsky’s bizarre excesses are now occupying in the peculiar conditions of Russia, where personal economic insecurity is the only problem that counts for most people (former professors of Marxism-Leninism residing in Latvia who have simultaneously lost their jobs, professions and nationalities may be rare, but [i]most[/i] Russians still working now face at least the imminent loss of their jobs). And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying if not blocking barriers against globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell [i]Gemeinschaft[/i] and [i]Gesellschaft[/i] to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.]]>
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth now disputed only by a few cryogenically-preserved Gosplan enthusiasts and a fair number of poorly-paid Anglo-Saxon academics. That the capitalist engine achieves growth as well as it does because its relentless competition destroys old structures and methods, thus allowing more efficient structures and methods to rise in their place, is the most famous bit of Schumpeteriana, even better-known than the amorous escapades of the former University of Czernowitz professor. And, finally, that structural change can inflict more disruption on working lives, firms, entire industries and their localities than individuals can absorb, or the connective tissue of friendships, families, clans, elective groupings, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities or even nations can withstand, is another old-hat truth more easily recognised than [i]Gemeinschaft[/i] and [i]Gesellschaft[/i] can be spelled.

What is new-hat about the present situation is only a matter of degree, a mere acceleration in the pace of the structural changes that accompany economic growth, whatever its rate. But that, as it turns out, is quite enough to make all the difference in the world. Structural change, with all its personal upheavals and social disruptions, is now quite rapid even when there is zero growth, becoming that much faster when economies do grow. The engine turns, grinding lives and grinding down established human relationships, even when the car is stopped; and reaches Ferrari-like rpms at the most modest steamroller speeds.
One obvious cause of the increased destructiveness of the capitalist process is the worldwide retreat of public ownership, central planning, administrative direction and regulatory control, with all their rigidities inimical to innovation, structural change, economic growth, individual dislocation and social disruption alike. From Argentina to Zambia, with the entire Communist world in between, state ownership of economic enterprises was once accepted as the guarantor of the public interest: it is now seen as the guarantee of bureaucratic idleness, technical stagnation and outright thievery. Central planning, once honoured as the arithmetic highway to assured prosperity, is now known to be impossible simply because no group of mere humans can predetermine next year’s demand for every one of hundreds of different polymers, not to mention two to three million other items, from tower cranes to toothpicks. Administrative direction, once gloriously successful in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, at least helpful in France, a famous failure in George Brown’s Britain, and ineffective or corrupt, or ineffective and corrupt, almost everywhere else, is now being abandoned (slowly) even in Japan, having been abandoned long ago almost everywhere else.
As for regulatory controls, they do not cease to increase in number, because even if steam locomotives need no longer be prevented by speed limits from causing cows to abort, many rather more recent technical novelties entail regulation, and some positively demand it – for example, to allocate frequencies. Other reasons for regulation are legion, but commercial (e.g. airline) as opposed to health and safety and environmental regulation has definitely retreated, and continues to do so. With that, efficiency increases, once-secure enterprises face the perils of the market, and employees once equally secure no longer are so.
Another partly related and equally obvious cause of accelerated structural change is the much-celebrated unification of the puddles, ponds, lakes and seas of village, provincial, regional and national economies into a single global economic ocean, and thus the increasing exposure of those same puddles, ponds, lakes and seas to the tidal waves of change in the global economic ocean, owing to the removal of import barriers, capital-export prohibitions, investment controls and licensing restrictions on the sale of transnational services; the advent and rapid geographic spread of reliable, cheap and instant telecommunications that ease the formation of new commercial relationships both materially and psychologically; the diminishing significance of transport costs due to the waning material content of commerce, as well as to the cheapening of transport with the improvement of air services, harbours and roads – notably rural roads in Asia and Latin America if not Africa; the diffusion of up-to-date technologies for the production of export goods or components, even within otherwise backward local economies; and the hammering-down of once diverse consumer preferences into uniformity by transnational mass-media imagery and advertising.
The overall effect of ‘globalisation’ is that any production anywhere, can expand enormously, far beyond the limits of the domestic market, insofar as it is competitive – and of course that any production anywhere, and the related employment, can be displaced at any time by cheaper production from someplace else in the world. Life in the global economy is full of exciting surprises – and catastrophic downfalls.
Still another cause of disproportionately rapid structural change is the rather sudden arrival of the long-awaited, very long-delayed, big increases in administrative and clerical efficiency that machines for electronic computation, data storage, reproduction and internal communication were supposed to ensure long ago. Partly because with generational change even senior managers can now themselves work those machines if they want to, thereby allowing them to understand their uses, abuses and non-uses; partly because more junior managers are increasingly compelled to use those machines in place of clerical help and clerical companionship; and partly because computer networks allow managers at the next level up literally to oversee, right on their own screens, the work that their underlings are doing or not doing, thereby giving it the same transparency as assembly-line work, with the same immediate visibility of inefficient procedures, inefficient habits and inefficient employees – for all these reasons the long-awaited, long-delayed increase in the efficiency of office-work has finally arrived, exposing hitherto more secure white-collar workers to the work-place dislocations, mass firings or at least diminishing employment prospects that have long been the lot of blue-collar industrial workers in mature economies.
At the present time, for example, even though the US economy is in full recovery, white-collar job reductions by the thousand are being announced by one famous corporation after another. They call it ‘restructuring’ or, more fancifully, ‘re-engineering the corporation’, and duly decorate the proceedings with the most recently fashionable management-consultant verbiage, those catchy, suggestive yet profoundly shallow slogans coined by the authors of the latest business-book bestsellers, who proclaim them expensively and with evangelical insistence on the corporate lecture circuit, with the result that they are then repeated with great solemnity to audiences of deferential, bewildered employees in corporate briefings, ‘workshops’ and ‘retreats’. But the real economies that Wall Street anticipates by bidding up the shares – thereby hugely rewarding mass-firing top executives who have stock options – come not from the background music of the management-consultant verbiage but rather from the displacement of telephone-answering secretaries by voice-mail systems, the displacement of letter-writing secretaries by computer word-processing and faxboards, the displacement of filing secretaries by electronic memories, and the consequent displacement of clerical supervisors; as well as from the displacement of junior administrators by automated paperflow processing and the consequent displacement of their administrative supervisors; as well as from the displacement of all the middle managers who are no longer needed to supervise the doings and undoings of both clerical and administrative employees. That is why corporations whose sales are increasing are nevertheless not adding white-collar positions; corporations whose sales are level are eliminating some white-collar positions; and corporations in decline are eliminating very many – tens of thousands in the case of the sick giants IBM and GM.
Economists have long deplored the disappointing productivity gains of the administrative superstructure in advanced economies, in spite of the proliferation of office electronics. This was numerically irritating to the fraternity, because the goods-producing sector, whose productivity did keep increasing very nicely, has long been of diminishing significance, so that the productivity lag of administrative activities was lowering the numbers for the economy as a whole. Those particular economists need fret no longer: office-work productivity is finally increasing at a fast pace, allowing employers to rid themselves of employees just as fast.
There may be additional explanations for the acceleration of structural economic change. What counts, however, is the result: Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ – the displacement of old skills, trades and entire industries with their dependent localities, by more efficient new skills, trades and entire industries – is now apt to span years, often very few years, rather than generations. And that is quite enough to make the colossal difference aforementioned. The same rate of structural change that favours global prosperity, that benefits many nations and regions, and that many other nations and regions can at least cope with, now brutally exceeds the adaptive limits of individuals, families and communities. When the sons and daughters of US steelworkers, British miners or German welders must become software-writers, teachers, lawyers or for that matter shop attendants, because the respective paternal industries offer less and less employment, few of them have reason to complain. But when the same mechanisms of change work so fast that steelworkers, coalminers or welders must themselves abandon lifetime proclivities, self-images and workplace companions to acquire demanding new skills – on penalty of chronic unemployment or unskilled low-wage labour – failure and frustration are the likely results. To be sure, nothing could be more old-hat than to worry about the travails of steelworkers, miners or welders, obsolete leftovers of the hopelessly passé white/male industrial working class. So the big news is the dislocation of white-collar employment as well.
I have no statistics that measure the decline in [i]security[/i] of employment. But statistics do show very clearly the impact of a weakening demand for white-collar labour in the decline of white-collar earnings. Back in the early Eighties, when trade-union officials and incurable proletariophiliacs were bitterly complaining that American workers were being extruded from well-paid industrial employment into minimum-wage ‘hamburger-flipping’ jobs, the lusty defenders of the infallibility of free-market economics silenced them in [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] editorials by pointing to the rapid increase in ‘money-flipping’ jobs in banking, insurance and financial services, as well as in then-booming real-estate offices. That is where the debate ended – prematurely. By the end of 1992 more than 6.8 million Americans were duly employed in the financial sector (banking, insurance, finance and real-estate offices). One might assume, as the [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] certainly presumed, that these people were a well-paid lot: but the average earnings of the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees among them were only $10.14 per hour, as compared to $10.98 for production workers in manufacturing. The 1.1 million clerks, tellers and other rank-and-file employees of banks earned much less than the sector’s average at $8.19 per hour, while 48,500 of their counterparts in stock and commodity brokerages – at the very heart of ‘money-flipping’ – duly earned much more at $13.53 per hour. Still, if any disemployed industrial workers did equip themselves with the obligatory broad red suspenders to seek their fortunes on Wall Street, they would have found the rewards surprisingly modest.
At a time when it was forever being explained that it was silly to worry about the decline of manufacturing jobs in the age of ‘services’, the much larger story is that service employees throughout the US economy are actually paid much less than their counterparts still holding industrial jobs. Moreover the average hourly earnings of service employees have been going down for years in real dollars net of inflation. In the entire retail trade, for example, from department stores to street-corner news-stands, the 17.7 million ‘non-supervisory’ employees earned an average of $6.88 per hour in November 1990. In fact, their hourly average went down from a peak of $6.20 in 1978 to $5.04 in 1990 in constant 1982 dollars. To be sure, the retail trade is full of teenagers still in school who work only on weekends and holidays, and married women who work only part-time. That can be expected to depress earnings, and it does. Besides, many retail employees get commissions that are not reported to the collectors of labour statistics. But neither part-timers with modest demands nor commissions are to be found in transportation and public utilities (including railroads, local bus services, mass transit, trucking, courier services, river barges, airlines, telephone companies etc). Nevertheless, the 4.9 million non-supervisory employees in that entire sector had average hourly earnings of $13.07 in November 1990 – substantially more, $2.09 more as it happens, than their counterparts in manufacturing, but still substantially less than those same employees had earned in the Seventies in real money. In fact their earnings peaked in 1978 at $11.18 per hour in constant 1982 dollars – as opposed to $9.58 at the end of 1990 in those same dollars.
In the varied mass of service employees as a whole, there are predictable highs, e.g. the 135,400 non-supervisors in film-making who earned $18.87 per hour, and the rank-and file employees of computer and data-processing services at $15.29 per hour, who numbered only 87,700 in 1972, but reached the impressive total of 637,700 by the end of 1990. The lows are just as predictable. The 1.3 million in hotel/motel non-supervisory jobs were paid only $7.14 per hour on average – though quite a few also receive tips, no doubt. But nobody tips the 436,900 line employees of detective, armoured-car and security agencies who earned only $6.35 per hour on average. From advertising to zoo-keeping many service jobs paid better than that, of course, but the average earnings of [i]all[/i] non-farm, non-government employees were less, at $10.17 per hour, than those of manufacturing workers at $10.98 – so the brave new service economy obviously pays less than old-fashioned industry. Even that is only half the story, because the higher volatility of services makes those jobs less and less secure. In other words, the relative impoverishment of those working lives is accompanied by even more dislocation.
Even bigger news is the dislocation of managerial lives. That is the latest trend in the always progressive United States – and it is most definitely a structural trend, rather than merely cyclical. Now that the dull-safe ‘satisficing’ corporation (moderate dividends, moderate salaries, steady, slow growth) is almost extinct, top managers as a class earn very much more than before, rank-and-file managers who can keep their jobs earn rather less, and it is very difficult for those managers who are forced out to find any comparable jobs elsewhere. Few are destined to grace the pages of business journals as entrepreneurial wonders, not born but made by unemployment. Some adjust undramatically if painfully, by accepting whatever middle-class jobs they can get, normally with reduced pay. Others are much worse off. The 50-55 year old male, white, college-educated former exemplar of the American Dream, still perhaps living in his lavishly-equipped suburban house, with two or three cars in the driveway, one or two children in $20,000 per annum higher education (tuition, board and lodging – all extras are extra) and an ex-job ‘re-engineered’ out of existence, who now exists on savings, second and third mortgages and scant earnings as a self-described ‘consultant’, has become a familiar figure in the contemporary United States. They still send out résumés by the dozen. They still ‘network’ (i.e. beg for jobs from whomever they know). They still put on their business suits to commute to ‘business’ lunches with the genuine article or to visit employment agencies, but at a time when more than 10 per cent of the Harvard graduates of the class of 1958 are unemployed, lesser souls in the same position have little to hope for.
Just in case the sentimental anecdotage is unpersuasive, or seems absurdly disproportionate as compared to the plight of, say, indebted Indian peasants, there are now statistics that quantify the downward slide of the entire population from which the class of middle managers is drawn. The median earnings of [i]all[/i] males in the 45-54 age bracket with four years of higher education – some two million Americans, all but 150,000 of them white – actually peaked in 1972 at some $55,000 in 1992 dollars; they stagnated through three downward economic cycles until 1989, before sharply declining to $41,898 by 1992. From other evidence we know that those numbers average out two phenomena that are equally unprecedented in the American experience: in that same population, the combined total income of the top 1 per cent of all earners increased sensationally, and the combined total of the bottom 80 per cent declined sharply. Again, that implies in one way or another a more-than-proportionate quantum of dislocation. Needless to say, individual working lives cannot be dislocated without damaging families, elective affiliations and communities – the entire moss of human relations which can only grow over the stones of economic stability. Finally, it is entirely certain that what has already happened in the United States is happening or will happen in every other advanced economy, because all of them are exposed to the same forces.
In this situation, what does the moderate Right – mainstream US Republicans, British Tories and all their counterparts elsewhere – have to offer? Only more free trade and globalisation, more deregulation and structural change, thus more dislocation of lives and social relations. It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. Thus at the present time the core of Republican/Tory beliefs is a perfect non-sequitur. And what does the moderate Left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance, and particularist concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, black lesbians down to the merely poor.
Thus neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.
A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot, and which Zhirinovsky’s bizarre excesses are now occupying in the peculiar conditions of Russia, where personal economic insecurity is the only problem that counts for most people (former professors of Marxism-Leninism residing in Latvia who have simultaneously lost their jobs, professions and nationalities may be rare, but [i]most[/i] Russians still working now face at least the imminent loss of their jobs). And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying if not blocking barriers against globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell [i]Gemeinschaft[/i] and [i]Gesellschaft[/i] to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.]]> <![CDATA[Whitney Webb on The Larger Context of the Epstein Case: Completed]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16095 Fri, 26 Jul 2019 21:47:51 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16095
Episode One: Hidden In Plain Sight: the Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case:


Despite his "sweetheart" deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein's arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them. Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein's famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta who arranged Epstein's "sweetheart" deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump's Labor Secretary following Epstein's arrest claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for "intelligence." Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

Claims of Epstein's links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes. In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA's "love traps." If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.In the course of this investigation, MintPress discovered that a handful of figures who were influential in American organized crime during and after Prohibition were directly engaged in sexual blackmail operations that they used for their own, often dark, purposes. In Part I of this exclusive investigation, MintPress will examine how a mob-linked businessman with deep ties to notorious gangster Meyer Lansky developed close ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) while also running a sexual blackmail operation for decades, which later became a covert part of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), himself known throughout Washington for having a habit of drunkenly groping underage teenaged girls. Yet, it would be one of McCarthy's closest aides who would take over the ring in later years, trafficking minors and expanding this sexual blackmail operation at the same time he expanded his own political influence, putting him in close contact with prominent figures including former President Ronald Reagan and a man who would later become president, Donald Trump. As will be revealed in Part II, after this figure's death, the blackmail operation continued under various successors in different cities and there is strong evidence that Jeffrey Epstein became one of them.

Samuel Bronfman and the Mob

The Prohibition Era in the United States is often used as an example of how banning recreational substances not only increases their popularity but also causes a boom in criminal activity. Indeed, it was Prohibition that greatly increased the strength of the American Mafia, as the top crime lords of the day grew rich through the clandestine trade and sale of alcohol in addition to gambling and other activities.It is through the bootlegging trade of the 1920s and the early 1930s that this story begins, as it brought together key figures whose successors and affiliates would eventually create a series of blackmail and sex trafficking rings that would give rise to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, the "Lolita Express" and "Orgy Island."Samuel Bronfman never planned to become a major producer of liquor but true to his family's last name, which means "brandy man" in Yiddish, he eventually began distributing alcohol as an extension of his family's hotel business. During Canada's Prohibition period, which was briefer than and preceded that of its southern neighbor, the Bronfman family business used loopholes to skirt the law and find technically legal ways to sell alcohol in the hotels and stores the family owned. The family relied on its connections with members of the American Mafia to illegally smuggle alcohol from the United States.Soon after Prohibition ended in Canada, it began in the United States and, by the time the flow of illegal alcohol had turned the other way, the Bronfmans whose business ventures were then being led by Sam Bronfman and his brothers were relatively late to an already flourishing bootlegging trade."We were late starters in the two most lucrative markets on the high seas and across the Detroit River. What came out of the border trade in Saskatchewan was insignificant by comparison," Bronfman once told Canadian journalist Terence Robertson, who was then writing a biography of Bronfman. Nonetheless, "this was when we started to make our real money," Bronfman recounted. Robertson's biography on Bronfman was never published, as he died under mysterious circumstances soon after warning his colleagues that he had uncovered unsavory information about the Bronfman family.[Image: bronfman-archival_edited.jpg]
Samuel Bronfman pictured in 1937 with his sons Edgar and Charles

Key to Bronfman's success during American Prohibition were the ties his family had cultivated with organized crime during Canada's Prohibition, ties that led many prominent members of the mob in the United States to favor Bronfman as a business partner. Bronfman liquor was purchased in massive quantities by many crime lords who still live on in American legend, including Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Moe Dalitz, Abner "Longy" Zwillman and Meyer Lansky. Most of Bronfman's mob associates during Prohibition were members of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate, which a 1950s Senate investigative body known as the Kefauver Committee described as a confederation dominated by Italian-American and Jewish-American mobs. During that investigation, some of the biggest names in the American Mafia named Bronfman as a central figure in their bootlegging operations. The widow of notorious American mob boss Meyer Lansky even recounted how Bronfman had thrown lavish dinner parties for her husband. Years later, Samuel Bronfman's children and grandchildren, their family's ties to the criminal underworld intact, would go on to associate closely with Leslie Wexner, allegedly the source of much of Epstein's mysterious wealth, and other mob-linked "philanthropists," and some would even manage their own sexual blackmail operations, including the recently busted blackmail-based "sex cult" NXIVM. The later generations of the Bronfman family, particularly Samuel Bronfman's sons Edgar and Charles, will be discussed in greater detail in Part II of this report.

Lewis Rosenstiel's dark secret

Crucial to Bronfman's Prohibition-era bootlegging operations were two middlemen, one of whom was Lewis "Lew" Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel got his start working at his uncle's distillery in Kentucky before Prohibition. Once the law banning alcohol was in force, Rosenstiel created the Schenley Products Company, which would later become one of the largest liquor companies in North America.Though he was a high school drop-out and not particularly well-connected socially at the time, Rosenstiel happened to have a "chance" meeting with Winston Churchill in 1922 while on vacation in the French Riviera. According to the New York Times, Churchill "advised him [Rosenstiel] to prepare for the return of liquor sales in the United States." Rosenstiel somehow managed to secure the funding of the elite and respected Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers to finance his purchase of shuttered distilleries.Officially, Rosenstiel is said to have built his company and wealth after Prohibition, by following Churchill's advice to prepare for Repeal. However, he was clearly involved in bootlegging operations and was even indicted for bootlegging in 1929, though he evaded conviction. Like Bronfman, Rosenstiel was close to organized crime, particularly members of the mostly Jewish-American and Italian-American mob alliance known as the National Crime Syndicate.Subsequent New York state legislative investigations would allege that Rosenstiel "was part of a consortium' with underworld figures that bought liquor in Canada [from Samuel Bronfman]", whose other members were "Meyer Lansky, the reputed organized crime leader; Joseph Fusco, an associate of late Chicago gangster Al Capone and Joseph Linsey, a Boston man Mr. Kelly [the congressional investigator testifying] identified as a convicted bootlegger." Rosenstiel's relationship with these men, particularly Lansky, would continue long after Prohibition and Samuel Bronfman, for his part, would also maintain his mob ties.In addition to his friends in the mob, Rosenstiel also cultivated close ties with the FBI, developing a close relationship with longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and making Hoover's right-hand man and longtime assistant at the FBI, Louis Nichols, the Vice President of his Schenley empire in 1957.Despite their similar backgrounds as bootlegger barons turned "respectable" businessmen, Bronfman's and Rosenstiel's personalities were drastically different and their relationship was complicated, at best. One example of the dissimilarities between North America's top liquor barons was how they treated their staff. Bronfman was not necessarily known for being a cruel boss, whereas Rosenstiel was known for his erratic and "monstrous" behavior towards employees as well as his unusual practice of bugging his offices in order to hear what employees said about him when he wasn't present.[Image: Rosenstiel-photo_edited.jpg]
Rosenstiel was connected to both the FBI and to organized crime

Such differences between Bronfman and Rosenstiel were also reflected in their personal lives. While Bronfman married only once and was loyal to his wife, Rosenstiel was married five times and was known for his relatively closeted bisexual antics, a part of his life that was well-known to many of his close associates and employees.Though for years there were only hints to this other side of the controversial businessman, details emerged years later during a divorce proceeding brought by Rosenstiel's fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, that would back the claims. Kaufman alleged that Rosenstiel hosted extravagant parties that included "boy prostitutes" that her husband had hired "for the enjoyment" of certain guests, which included important government officials and prominent figures in America's criminal underworld. Kaufman would later make the same claims under oath during the hearing of the New York's State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in the early 1970s.Not only did Rosenstiel organize these parties, but he also made sure that their venues were bugged with microphones that recorded the antics of his high-profile guests. Those audio recordings, Kaufman alleged, were then kept for the purpose of blackmail. Though Kaufman's claims are shocking, her testimony was deemed credible and held in high regard by the former chief counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and committee investigator William Gallinaro and aspects of her testimony were later corroborated by two separate witnesses who were unknown to Kaufman.These "blackmail parties" offer a window into an operation that would later become more sophisticated and grow dramatically in the 1950s under Rosenstiel's "field commander" (a nickname given by Rosenstiel to an individual to be named shortly in this report). Many of the people connected to Rosenstiel's "field commander" during the 70s and 80s have again found their names in the press following the recent arrest of Jeffrey Epstein.

The "Untouchable" Mobster

Bronfman and Rosenstiel became legendary in the North American liquor business, in part due to their fight for supremacy in the industry, which the New York Times described as often erupting "into bitter personal and corporate battles." Despite their dueling in the corporate world, the one thing that united the two businessmen more than anything else was their close connection to American organized crime, particularly renowned mobster Meyer Lansky.Lansky is one of the most notorious gangsters in the history of American organized crime and is notable for being the only famous mobster rising tonotoriety in the 1920s who managed to die an old man and never serve a day in jail. Lansky's long life and ability to avoid prison time was largely the result of his close relationships to powerful businessmen like Bronfman and Rosenstiel (among many others), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as his role in establishing several blackmail and extortion rings that helped him keep the law at arm's length. Indeed, when Lansky was finally charged with a crime in the 1970s, it was the Internal Revenue Service that brought the charges, not the FBI, and he was charged with and acquitted of tax evasion.Lansky was remarkably close to both Bronfman and Rosenstiel. Bronfman regularly threw "lavish dinner parties" in Lansky's honor both during and after Prohibition. These parties were remembered fondly by Lansky's wife, and Lansky in turn did favors for Bronfman, ranging from exclusive protection of his shipments during Prohibition to getting him tickets to coveted "fight of the century" boxing matches. Rosenstiel also threw regular dinner parties honoring Lansky. Susan Kaufman, Rosenstiel's ex-wife, claimed to have taken numerous pictures of her ex-husband and Lansky socializing and partying together, photos that were also seen by Mary Nichols of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition, Lansky, per Kaufman's recollection, was one of the individuals that Rosenstiel sought to protect from legal scrutiny as part of his child prostitution and blackmail ring targeting high-ranking officials, and he was overheard saying that if the government "ever brings pressure against Lansky or any of us, we'll use this [a specific recording taken at one of the parties'] as blackmail." Lansky was known to address Rosenstiel as "Supreme Commander," a title that would later be used to refer to Rosenstiel by another individual deeply connected to the mob and sexual blackmail operations, previously referred to in this report as Rosenstiel's "Field Commander."Lansky also had close ties to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. During World War II, Lansky along with his associate Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel worked with Naval intelligence in what was codenamed "Operation Underworld," an operation the existence of which the government denied for over 40 years.Journalist and noted chronicler of CIA covert activities, Douglas Valentine, noted in his book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World that the government's cooperation with the Mafia during World War II led to its expansion after the war and set the stage for its future collaboration with U.S. intelligence.According to Valentine:
Top government officials were also aware that the government's Faustian pact with the Mafia during World War II had allowed the hoods to insinuate themselves into mainstream America. In return for services rendered during the war, Mafia bosses were protected from prosecution for dozens of unsolved murders. […]The Mafia was a huge problem in 1951 [when the Kefauver Committee was convened], equivalent to terrorism today. But it was also a protected branch of the CIA, which was co-opting criminal organizations around the world and using them in its secret war against the Soviets and Red Chinese. The Mafia had collaborated with Uncle Sam and had emerged from World War II energized and empowered. They controlled cities across the country."
Indeed, not long after its creation, the CIA forged ties with Lansky at the behest of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton. The CIA would laterturn to the Lansky-linked mob in the early 1960s as part of its consistently fruitless quest to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, showing that the CIA maintained its contacts with Lansky-controlled elements of the Mafia long after the initial meeting with Lansky took place.The CIA also had close connections to associates of Lansky, such as Edward Moss, who did public relations work for Lansky and was said to be of "interest" to the CIA by the agency's then-inspector general J.S. Earman. Harry "Happy" Meltzer was also another Lansky associate that was a CIA asset and the CIA asked Meltzer to join an assassination team in December 1960.In addition to the CIA, Lansky was also connected to a foreign intelligence agency through Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and high-ranking official in Israel's Mossad, whose bank the International Credit Bank of Geneva laundered much of Lansky's ill-gotten gains and recycled them into legitimate American businesses.[Image: AP_208352653229_edited.jpg]
Lansky outside the High Court of Israel where he sought permission to emigrate in 1972. Photo | AP

Journalist Ed Reid, author of the Virginia Hill biography The Mistress and the Mafia, wrote that Lansky was attempting to entrap powerful people through sexual blackmail as far back as 1939. Reid contends that Lansky sent Ms. Hill to Mexico, where his West Coast connections had established a drug ring that later involved the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, to seduce numerous "top politicians, army officers, diplomats and police officials."Eventually, Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed "Hoover in some kind of gay situation", according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often claimed, "I fixed that sonofabitch." The photosshowed Hoover engaged in sexual activity with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson. At some point, these photos fell into the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton, who later showed the photos to several other CIA officials, including John Weitz and Gordon Novel. Angleton was in charge of the CIA's relationship with the FBI and Israel's Mossad until he left the agency in 1972 and, as was recently mentioned, he was also in contact with Lansky. Anthony Summers, former BBC journalist and author of Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, has argued that it was not Lansky, but William Donovan, the director of the OSS, who obtained the original photos of Hoover and later shared them with Lansky. Summers also stated that "To [gangster Frank] Costello and Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. The way they found to deal with Hoover, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality." This anecdote shows that Lanksy and the CIA maintained a covert relationship, which included, among other things, the sharing of blackmail material (i.e., "intelligence"). It is also possible that Hoover was ensnared by the mob during one of Rosenstiel's "blackmail parties," at which Hoover sometimes found himself in attendance with prominent figures of the Mafia. Hoover was said to have worn women's clothing at the some of the events and Meyer Lansky's wife later said that her husband had photos of the former FBI director in drag. Furthermore, Hoover is on record showing an unusual concern in the FBI's handling of Rosenstiel's criminal links as early as 1939, the same year that his close associate Lansky was actively orchestrating the sexual blackmail of powerful political figures.The blackmail acquired on Hoover and the mob's possession of the evidence has been cited as a major factor in Hoover's decades-long denial that nationwide networks of organized crime were a serious issue. Hoover asserted that it was a decentralized, local issue and therefore outside of the bureau's jurisdiction. By the time Hoover finally acknowledged the existence of national organized crime networks in 1963, they were so entrenched in the U.S. establishment that they were untouchable.Congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno told Summers in 1993 that Hoover's willful ignorance of organized crime for most of his career as FBI director "allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner."

J. Edgar Hoover: Blackmail Victim?

Most records place the beginning of Hoover's relationship with Rosenstiel in the 1950s, the same decade when Susan Kaufman reported that Hoover was attending Rosenstiel's blackmail parties. Rosenstiel's FBI file, obtained by Anthony Summers, cites the first Rosenstiel meeting as taking place in 1956, though Summers notes that there is evidence that they had met much earlier. After requesting the meeting, Rosenstiel was granted a personal face-to-face with the director in a matter of hours. The FBI file on Rosenstiel also reveals that the liquor baron heavily lobbied Hoover to aid his business interests.During that time, the salacious details of Hoover's sex life were already known to the U.S. intelligence community and to the mob, and Hoover was aware that they knew of his closeted sexuality and penchant for women's clothing. Yet, Hoover apparently seemed to embrace the very type of sexual blackmail operation that had compromised his private life, given that he was seen at many of Rosenstiel's "blackmail parties" in the 1950s and 1960s, including at venues such as Rosenstiel's personal home and later at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. Hoover's penchant for dressing in drag was also described by two witnesses who were not connected to Susan Kaufman.[Image: hoover_hollywood_edited.jpg]
Hoover with Dorothy Lamour on the set of The Greatest Show on Earth in 1951

Soon after their first "official" meeting, the public relationship between the two men quickly flourished, with Hoover even sending Rosenstiel flowers when he fell ill. Summers reported that, in 1957, Rosenstiel was heard telling Hoover during a meeting, "your wish is my command." Their relationship remained close and intimate throughout the 1960s and beyond.Like Rosenstiel, Hoover was well-known for amassing blackmail on friend and foe alike. Hoover's office contained "secret files" on numerous powerful people in Washington and beyond, files he used to gain favors and protect his status as FBI director for as long as he wished. Hoover's own propensity for blackmail suggests that he may have associated with Rosenstiel's sexual blackmail operation more directly, given he already knew he was compromised and his involvement in the operation would have served as a means of procuring the blackmail he coveted for his own purposes. Indeed, if Hoover was merely being blackmailed and extorted by the Lansky-Rosenstiel connected mob, it is unlikely that he would have been so friendly to Rosenstiel, Lansky and the other mobsters at these gatherings and participated in them with such regularity. According to journalist and author Burton Hersh, Hoover was also tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who ran a sexual blackmail operation in New York involving young male prostitutes. That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos of Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.Hoover and Rosenstiel's deep ties would continue to develop over the years, an example of which can be seen in Rosenstiel's hiring of long-time Hoover aide Louis Nichols as the vice president of his Schenley liquor empire and Rosenstiel's donation of over $1 million to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, which Nichols also ran at the time. There is also more than one documented occasion wherein Hoover attempted to use blackmail to protect Rosenstiel and his "field commander," none other than the infamous Roy Cohn, the other key figure in Rosenstiel's sexual blackmail operation involving minors.

The Making of a Monster

Decades after his death, Roy Cohn remains a controversial figure in large part because of his close, personal relationship with current U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet reports on Cohn, both in recent and in past years, often miss the mark in their characterization of the man who became closely associated with the Reagan White House, the CIA, the FBI, organized crime and, incidentally, many of the figures who would later surround Jeffrey Epstein.To understand the true nature of the man, it is essential to examine his rise to power in the early 1950s when, at just 23 years of age, he became a key figure in the high-profile trial of Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and later as the right-hand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). Cohn's dedication to anti-communist activities in the 1950s is allegedly what first endeared him to J. Edgar Hoover, whom he first met in 1952. During that meeting, as described by Hersh in Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America, Hoover expressed admiration for Cohn's aggressive and manipulative tactics and told Cohn to "call me directly" whenever he had information worth sharing. From that point on, Cohn and Hoover "traded favors, effusive compliments, gifts and elaborate private dinners. It quickly became Roy' and Edgar.'" Hersh also describes Hoover as Cohn's soon to be "consigliere." The date and circumstances around Cohn's introduction to Rosenstiel are harder to come by. It is possible that the connection was made through Roy Cohn's father, Albert Cohn, a prominent judge and an influential figure in the New York City Democratic Party apparatus then run by Edward Flynn. It waslater revealed that the Democratic organization dominated by Flynn and based in the Bronx had long-standing connections to organized crime, including associates of Meyer Lansky. Regardless of how or when it began, the relationship between Cohn and Rosenstiel was close and was often likened to that of a father and son. They were said to frequently salute each other in public and remained close until Rosenstiel was near death, at which point Cohn attempted to trick his then-barely conscious and senile "friend" and client into naming him the executor and trustee of the liquor magnate's estate, valued at $75 million (more than $334 million in today's dollars). LIFE magazine reported in 1969 that Cohn and Rosenstiel had for years referred to one another as "Field Commander" and "Supreme Commander," respectively. Media references to these nicknames appear in other articles from the period. Though LIFE and other outlets had interpreted this as merely an anecdote about the nicknames shared in jest between close friends, the fact that notorious crime lord Meyer Lansky also called Rosenstiel "Supreme Commander" and the fact that Cohn and Rosenstiel would later become intimately involved in the same pedophile sex ring suggests that there may have been more to these "nicknames." After all, the mob to which Rosenstiel was connected often used military-themed titles like "soldier" and "lieutenant" to differentiate the rank and importance of its members. Once he had made his connection with Hoover, Cohn's star began to rise even higher in Washington. Hoover's recommendation of Cohn would become the deciding factor in his appointment as Sen. McCarthy's general counsel over Robert Kennedy, a rival and bitter enemy of Cohn's.[Image: AP_5404260142_edited.jpg]
McCarthy covers the mic while having a whispered discussion with Cohn during a 1954 committee hearing. Photo | AP

Though Cohn was ruthless and seemingly untouchable as McCarthy's counsel and helped the senator destroy many careers during both the red and lavender scares, his antics in relation to his work on the committee would eventually lead to his downfall after he attempted to blackmail the Army in return for preferential treatment for committee consultant and Cohn's rumored lover, David Schine.After he was forced to leave McCarthy's side due to the scandal, Cohn returned to New York to live with his mother and practice law. A few years later New York Judge David Peck, a long-time associate of former CIA Director Alan Dulles, orchestrated Cohn's hire to the New York law firm Saxe, Bacon andO'Shea which would later become Saxe, Bacon and Bolan after Tom Bolan, a friend of Cohn's, became a partner in the firm. Upon his hire, Cohn brought the firm a slew of Mafia-linked clients, including high-ranking members of the Gambino crime family, the Genovese crime family and, of course, Lewis Rosenstiel.

What happened in Suite 233?

The connections Roy Cohn built during the 1950s made him a well-known public figure and translated into great political influence that peaked during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet, as Cohn built his public image, he was also developing a dark private life, which would come to be dominated by the same blackmail pedophile racket that appears to have first begun with Lewis Rosenstiel. One of the "blackmail parties" Susan Kaufman attended with her then-husband Lewis Rosenstiel was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn's suite as a "beautiful suite…all done in light blue." She described being introduced to Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover's name was "Mary" in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Cohn for a case well after Kaufman's testimony, also found evidence of the "blue suite" at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after combing through local government documents and information gathered by private detectives. Klotzlater told journalist and author Burton Hersh what he had learned:
Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from blackmail."
Perhaps the most damning confirmation of Cohn's activities in Suite 233 comes from statements made by Cohn himself to former NYPD detective and ex-head of the department's Human-Trafficking and Vice-Related Crimes Division, James Rothstein. Rothstein later told John DeCamp a former Nebraska state senator who investigated a government-connected child sex ring based in Omaha among other investigators, that Cohn had admitted to being part of a sexual blackmail operation targeting politicians with child prostitutes during a sit-down interview with the former detective. [Image: AP_070228023563_edited.jpg]
Flags fly over the main entrance of the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1982. Suzanne Vlamis | AP

Rothstein told DeCamp the following about Cohn:

Cohn's job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn's job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself."

Rothstein later told Paul David Collins, a former journalist turned researcher, that Cohn had also identified this sexual blackmail operation as being part of the anti-communist crusade of the time.The fact that Cohn, per Rothstein's recollection, stated that the child sex blackmail ring was part of the government-sponsored anti-communist crusade suggests that elements of the government, including Hoover's FBI, may have been connected at a much broader level than Hoover's own personal involvement, as the FBI closely coordinated with McCarthy and Cohn for much of the red scare.It is also worth noting that among Hoover's many "secret" blackmail files was a sizeable dossier on Senator McCarthy, the contents of which strongly suggested that the senator himself was interested in underage girls. According to journalist and author David Talbot, Hoover's file on McCarthy was "filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy's habit of drunkenly groping young girls' breasts and buttocks. The stories were so widespread that they became common knowledge' in the capital, according to one FBI chronicler." Talbot, in his book The Devil's Chessboard, also cites Walter Trohan, Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, as having personally witnessed McCarthy's habit of molesting young women. "He just couldn't keep his hands off young girls," Trohan would later say. "Why the Communist opposition didn't plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don't know." Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that those "planting" minors on their political foes were McCarthy's allies and close associates, not his enemies.

The question that necessarily arises from revelations regarding Cohn's activities in Suite 233 is who else was Cohn "protecting" and servicing with underage prostitutes? One of them could very well have been one of Cohn's close friends and clients, Cardinal Francis Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York, who was said to have been present at some of these parties Cohn hosted at the Plaza Hotel. Spellman one of the most powerful figures in the Catholic Church in North America, who was sometimes referred to as "America's Pope" was accused of not only condoning pedophilia in the Catholic church and ordaining known pedophiles including Cardinal Theodore "Uncle Teddy" McCarrick, but also engaging in it himself to such an extent that many New York area priests widely referred to him as "Mary." Furthermore, J. Edgar Hoover was said to have a file detailing the cardinal's sex life, suggesting Spellman's involvement in the ring and pedophile protection racket in which Cohn and Hoover were personally involved.[Image: Spellman-Cohn-Children.jpg]
Cardinal Francis Franny' Spellman. Photo | Museum of the City of New York

People close to Cohn often remarked that he was frequently surrounded by groups of young boys, but seemed to think nothing of it. Similar off-handed comments about Epstein's penchant for minors were made by those close to him prior to his arrest. Controversial Republican political operative and "dirty trickster" Roger Stone who, like Donald Trump, was also a protégé of Cohn said the following about Cohn's sex life during an interview with The New Yorker in 2008:

Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn't discussed. He was interested in power and access." (emphasis added)

Compare this quote from Stone to what Donald Trump, who was also close to Cohn, would later say about Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was also closely associated:

I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it Jeffrey enjoys his social life." (emphasis added)

Though it is unknown how long the sex ring at the Plaza Hotel continued, and whether it continued after Cohn's death from AIDS in 1986, it is worth noting that Donald Trump purchased the Plaza Hotel in 1988. It would later be reported and confirmed by then-attendees that Trump "used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men" and "illegal drugs and young women were passed around and used." Andy Lucchesi, a male model who had helped organize some of these Plaza Hotel parties for Trump, said the following when asked about the age of the women present: "A lot of girls, 14, look 24. That's as juicy as I can get. I never asked how old they were; I just partook. I did partake in activities that would be controversial, too."

The Roy Cohn Machine

Roy Cohn was only at the beginning of his career when he waded his way into the underground sexual blackmail ring apparently led by Lewis Rosenstiel. Indeed, when Cohn first met Hoover, he was only 23 years old. Over the next three decades or so, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at the age of 56, Cohn built a well-oiled machine, largely through his close friendships with some of the country's most influential figures.Among Cohn's friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B'nai B'rith and the World Jewish Congress. Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein's now-infamous "little black book". [Image: get-attachment-2_edited.jpg]
Reagan meets with Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick, and Roy Cohn in the Oval Office in 1983. Photo | Reagan presidential library

While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn's network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard "Dirty Dick" Morris, was Cohn's cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton's former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein.Yet, these were only Cohn's connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere. Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn's most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.

As Part II of this exclusive investigation will reveal, Cohn and Epstein, and the sexual blackmail operations they ran share many things in common, including not only many of the same famous friends and patrons, but also connections to intelligence agencies and consortiums of mob-linked businessmen, the modern-day equivalents of Samuel Bronfman and Lewis Rosenstiel who have since rebranded as "philanthropists."

Part II will also reveal that Cohn's operation was known to have successors, as revealed by a series of scandals in the early 1990s that have since been swept under the rug. The significant amount of overlap between Epstein's and Cohn's covert activities in sexual blackmail and their ties to many of the same powerful individuals and circles of influence strongly suggest that Epstein was one of Cohn's successors.As will be shown in the final installment of this report, Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime, making it a racket truly too big to fail.Feature photo |

A composite image shows from left to right, Lewis Rosenstiel, Jeffrey Epstein, and Roy Cohn. Graphic | Emma FialaWhitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.]]>
Episode One: Hidden In Plain Sight: the Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case:


Despite his "sweetheart" deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein's arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them. Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein's famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta who arranged Epstein's "sweetheart" deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump's Labor Secretary following Epstein's arrest claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for "intelligence." Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

Claims of Epstein's links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes. In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA's "love traps." If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.In the course of this investigation, MintPress discovered that a handful of figures who were influential in American organized crime during and after Prohibition were directly engaged in sexual blackmail operations that they used for their own, often dark, purposes. In Part I of this exclusive investigation, MintPress will examine how a mob-linked businessman with deep ties to notorious gangster Meyer Lansky developed close ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) while also running a sexual blackmail operation for decades, which later became a covert part of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), himself known throughout Washington for having a habit of drunkenly groping underage teenaged girls. Yet, it would be one of McCarthy's closest aides who would take over the ring in later years, trafficking minors and expanding this sexual blackmail operation at the same time he expanded his own political influence, putting him in close contact with prominent figures including former President Ronald Reagan and a man who would later become president, Donald Trump. As will be revealed in Part II, after this figure's death, the blackmail operation continued under various successors in different cities and there is strong evidence that Jeffrey Epstein became one of them.

Samuel Bronfman and the Mob

The Prohibition Era in the United States is often used as an example of how banning recreational substances not only increases their popularity but also causes a boom in criminal activity. Indeed, it was Prohibition that greatly increased the strength of the American Mafia, as the top crime lords of the day grew rich through the clandestine trade and sale of alcohol in addition to gambling and other activities.It is through the bootlegging trade of the 1920s and the early 1930s that this story begins, as it brought together key figures whose successors and affiliates would eventually create a series of blackmail and sex trafficking rings that would give rise to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, the "Lolita Express" and "Orgy Island."Samuel Bronfman never planned to become a major producer of liquor but true to his family's last name, which means "brandy man" in Yiddish, he eventually began distributing alcohol as an extension of his family's hotel business. During Canada's Prohibition period, which was briefer than and preceded that of its southern neighbor, the Bronfman family business used loopholes to skirt the law and find technically legal ways to sell alcohol in the hotels and stores the family owned. The family relied on its connections with members of the American Mafia to illegally smuggle alcohol from the United States.Soon after Prohibition ended in Canada, it began in the United States and, by the time the flow of illegal alcohol had turned the other way, the Bronfmans whose business ventures were then being led by Sam Bronfman and his brothers were relatively late to an already flourishing bootlegging trade."We were late starters in the two most lucrative markets on the high seas and across the Detroit River. What came out of the border trade in Saskatchewan was insignificant by comparison," Bronfman once told Canadian journalist Terence Robertson, who was then writing a biography of Bronfman. Nonetheless, "this was when we started to make our real money," Bronfman recounted. Robertson's biography on Bronfman was never published, as he died under mysterious circumstances soon after warning his colleagues that he had uncovered unsavory information about the Bronfman family.[Image: bronfman-archival_edited.jpg]
Samuel Bronfman pictured in 1937 with his sons Edgar and Charles

Key to Bronfman's success during American Prohibition were the ties his family had cultivated with organized crime during Canada's Prohibition, ties that led many prominent members of the mob in the United States to favor Bronfman as a business partner. Bronfman liquor was purchased in massive quantities by many crime lords who still live on in American legend, including Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Moe Dalitz, Abner "Longy" Zwillman and Meyer Lansky. Most of Bronfman's mob associates during Prohibition were members of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate, which a 1950s Senate investigative body known as the Kefauver Committee described as a confederation dominated by Italian-American and Jewish-American mobs. During that investigation, some of the biggest names in the American Mafia named Bronfman as a central figure in their bootlegging operations. The widow of notorious American mob boss Meyer Lansky even recounted how Bronfman had thrown lavish dinner parties for her husband. Years later, Samuel Bronfman's children and grandchildren, their family's ties to the criminal underworld intact, would go on to associate closely with Leslie Wexner, allegedly the source of much of Epstein's mysterious wealth, and other mob-linked "philanthropists," and some would even manage their own sexual blackmail operations, including the recently busted blackmail-based "sex cult" NXIVM. The later generations of the Bronfman family, particularly Samuel Bronfman's sons Edgar and Charles, will be discussed in greater detail in Part II of this report.

Lewis Rosenstiel's dark secret

Crucial to Bronfman's Prohibition-era bootlegging operations were two middlemen, one of whom was Lewis "Lew" Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel got his start working at his uncle's distillery in Kentucky before Prohibition. Once the law banning alcohol was in force, Rosenstiel created the Schenley Products Company, which would later become one of the largest liquor companies in North America.Though he was a high school drop-out and not particularly well-connected socially at the time, Rosenstiel happened to have a "chance" meeting with Winston Churchill in 1922 while on vacation in the French Riviera. According to the New York Times, Churchill "advised him [Rosenstiel] to prepare for the return of liquor sales in the United States." Rosenstiel somehow managed to secure the funding of the elite and respected Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers to finance his purchase of shuttered distilleries.Officially, Rosenstiel is said to have built his company and wealth after Prohibition, by following Churchill's advice to prepare for Repeal. However, he was clearly involved in bootlegging operations and was even indicted for bootlegging in 1929, though he evaded conviction. Like Bronfman, Rosenstiel was close to organized crime, particularly members of the mostly Jewish-American and Italian-American mob alliance known as the National Crime Syndicate.Subsequent New York state legislative investigations would allege that Rosenstiel "was part of a consortium' with underworld figures that bought liquor in Canada [from Samuel Bronfman]", whose other members were "Meyer Lansky, the reputed organized crime leader; Joseph Fusco, an associate of late Chicago gangster Al Capone and Joseph Linsey, a Boston man Mr. Kelly [the congressional investigator testifying] identified as a convicted bootlegger." Rosenstiel's relationship with these men, particularly Lansky, would continue long after Prohibition and Samuel Bronfman, for his part, would also maintain his mob ties.In addition to his friends in the mob, Rosenstiel also cultivated close ties with the FBI, developing a close relationship with longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and making Hoover's right-hand man and longtime assistant at the FBI, Louis Nichols, the Vice President of his Schenley empire in 1957.Despite their similar backgrounds as bootlegger barons turned "respectable" businessmen, Bronfman's and Rosenstiel's personalities were drastically different and their relationship was complicated, at best. One example of the dissimilarities between North America's top liquor barons was how they treated their staff. Bronfman was not necessarily known for being a cruel boss, whereas Rosenstiel was known for his erratic and "monstrous" behavior towards employees as well as his unusual practice of bugging his offices in order to hear what employees said about him when he wasn't present.[Image: Rosenstiel-photo_edited.jpg]
Rosenstiel was connected to both the FBI and to organized crime

Such differences between Bronfman and Rosenstiel were also reflected in their personal lives. While Bronfman married only once and was loyal to his wife, Rosenstiel was married five times and was known for his relatively closeted bisexual antics, a part of his life that was well-known to many of his close associates and employees.Though for years there were only hints to this other side of the controversial businessman, details emerged years later during a divorce proceeding brought by Rosenstiel's fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, that would back the claims. Kaufman alleged that Rosenstiel hosted extravagant parties that included "boy prostitutes" that her husband had hired "for the enjoyment" of certain guests, which included important government officials and prominent figures in America's criminal underworld. Kaufman would later make the same claims under oath during the hearing of the New York's State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in the early 1970s.Not only did Rosenstiel organize these parties, but he also made sure that their venues were bugged with microphones that recorded the antics of his high-profile guests. Those audio recordings, Kaufman alleged, were then kept for the purpose of blackmail. Though Kaufman's claims are shocking, her testimony was deemed credible and held in high regard by the former chief counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and committee investigator William Gallinaro and aspects of her testimony were later corroborated by two separate witnesses who were unknown to Kaufman.These "blackmail parties" offer a window into an operation that would later become more sophisticated and grow dramatically in the 1950s under Rosenstiel's "field commander" (a nickname given by Rosenstiel to an individual to be named shortly in this report). Many of the people connected to Rosenstiel's "field commander" during the 70s and 80s have again found their names in the press following the recent arrest of Jeffrey Epstein.

The "Untouchable" Mobster

Bronfman and Rosenstiel became legendary in the North American liquor business, in part due to their fight for supremacy in the industry, which the New York Times described as often erupting "into bitter personal and corporate battles." Despite their dueling in the corporate world, the one thing that united the two businessmen more than anything else was their close connection to American organized crime, particularly renowned mobster Meyer Lansky.Lansky is one of the most notorious gangsters in the history of American organized crime and is notable for being the only famous mobster rising tonotoriety in the 1920s who managed to die an old man and never serve a day in jail. Lansky's long life and ability to avoid prison time was largely the result of his close relationships to powerful businessmen like Bronfman and Rosenstiel (among many others), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as his role in establishing several blackmail and extortion rings that helped him keep the law at arm's length. Indeed, when Lansky was finally charged with a crime in the 1970s, it was the Internal Revenue Service that brought the charges, not the FBI, and he was charged with and acquitted of tax evasion.Lansky was remarkably close to both Bronfman and Rosenstiel. Bronfman regularly threw "lavish dinner parties" in Lansky's honor both during and after Prohibition. These parties were remembered fondly by Lansky's wife, and Lansky in turn did favors for Bronfman, ranging from exclusive protection of his shipments during Prohibition to getting him tickets to coveted "fight of the century" boxing matches. Rosenstiel also threw regular dinner parties honoring Lansky. Susan Kaufman, Rosenstiel's ex-wife, claimed to have taken numerous pictures of her ex-husband and Lansky socializing and partying together, photos that were also seen by Mary Nichols of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition, Lansky, per Kaufman's recollection, was one of the individuals that Rosenstiel sought to protect from legal scrutiny as part of his child prostitution and blackmail ring targeting high-ranking officials, and he was overheard saying that if the government "ever brings pressure against Lansky or any of us, we'll use this [a specific recording taken at one of the parties'] as blackmail." Lansky was known to address Rosenstiel as "Supreme Commander," a title that would later be used to refer to Rosenstiel by another individual deeply connected to the mob and sexual blackmail operations, previously referred to in this report as Rosenstiel's "Field Commander."Lansky also had close ties to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. During World War II, Lansky along with his associate Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel worked with Naval intelligence in what was codenamed "Operation Underworld," an operation the existence of which the government denied for over 40 years.Journalist and noted chronicler of CIA covert activities, Douglas Valentine, noted in his book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World that the government's cooperation with the Mafia during World War II led to its expansion after the war and set the stage for its future collaboration with U.S. intelligence.According to Valentine:
Top government officials were also aware that the government's Faustian pact with the Mafia during World War II had allowed the hoods to insinuate themselves into mainstream America. In return for services rendered during the war, Mafia bosses were protected from prosecution for dozens of unsolved murders. […]The Mafia was a huge problem in 1951 [when the Kefauver Committee was convened], equivalent to terrorism today. But it was also a protected branch of the CIA, which was co-opting criminal organizations around the world and using them in its secret war against the Soviets and Red Chinese. The Mafia had collaborated with Uncle Sam and had emerged from World War II energized and empowered. They controlled cities across the country."
Indeed, not long after its creation, the CIA forged ties with Lansky at the behest of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton. The CIA would laterturn to the Lansky-linked mob in the early 1960s as part of its consistently fruitless quest to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, showing that the CIA maintained its contacts with Lansky-controlled elements of the Mafia long after the initial meeting with Lansky took place.The CIA also had close connections to associates of Lansky, such as Edward Moss, who did public relations work for Lansky and was said to be of "interest" to the CIA by the agency's then-inspector general J.S. Earman. Harry "Happy" Meltzer was also another Lansky associate that was a CIA asset and the CIA asked Meltzer to join an assassination team in December 1960.In addition to the CIA, Lansky was also connected to a foreign intelligence agency through Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and high-ranking official in Israel's Mossad, whose bank the International Credit Bank of Geneva laundered much of Lansky's ill-gotten gains and recycled them into legitimate American businesses.[Image: AP_208352653229_edited.jpg]
Lansky outside the High Court of Israel where he sought permission to emigrate in 1972. Photo | AP

Journalist Ed Reid, author of the Virginia Hill biography The Mistress and the Mafia, wrote that Lansky was attempting to entrap powerful people through sexual blackmail as far back as 1939. Reid contends that Lansky sent Ms. Hill to Mexico, where his West Coast connections had established a drug ring that later involved the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, to seduce numerous "top politicians, army officers, diplomats and police officials."Eventually, Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed "Hoover in some kind of gay situation", according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often claimed, "I fixed that sonofabitch." The photosshowed Hoover engaged in sexual activity with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson. At some point, these photos fell into the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton, who later showed the photos to several other CIA officials, including John Weitz and Gordon Novel. Angleton was in charge of the CIA's relationship with the FBI and Israel's Mossad until he left the agency in 1972 and, as was recently mentioned, he was also in contact with Lansky. Anthony Summers, former BBC journalist and author of Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, has argued that it was not Lansky, but William Donovan, the director of the OSS, who obtained the original photos of Hoover and later shared them with Lansky. Summers also stated that "To [gangster Frank] Costello and Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. The way they found to deal with Hoover, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality." This anecdote shows that Lanksy and the CIA maintained a covert relationship, which included, among other things, the sharing of blackmail material (i.e., "intelligence"). It is also possible that Hoover was ensnared by the mob during one of Rosenstiel's "blackmail parties," at which Hoover sometimes found himself in attendance with prominent figures of the Mafia. Hoover was said to have worn women's clothing at the some of the events and Meyer Lansky's wife later said that her husband had photos of the former FBI director in drag. Furthermore, Hoover is on record showing an unusual concern in the FBI's handling of Rosenstiel's criminal links as early as 1939, the same year that his close associate Lansky was actively orchestrating the sexual blackmail of powerful political figures.The blackmail acquired on Hoover and the mob's possession of the evidence has been cited as a major factor in Hoover's decades-long denial that nationwide networks of organized crime were a serious issue. Hoover asserted that it was a decentralized, local issue and therefore outside of the bureau's jurisdiction. By the time Hoover finally acknowledged the existence of national organized crime networks in 1963, they were so entrenched in the U.S. establishment that they were untouchable.Congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno told Summers in 1993 that Hoover's willful ignorance of organized crime for most of his career as FBI director "allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner."

J. Edgar Hoover: Blackmail Victim?

Most records place the beginning of Hoover's relationship with Rosenstiel in the 1950s, the same decade when Susan Kaufman reported that Hoover was attending Rosenstiel's blackmail parties. Rosenstiel's FBI file, obtained by Anthony Summers, cites the first Rosenstiel meeting as taking place in 1956, though Summers notes that there is evidence that they had met much earlier. After requesting the meeting, Rosenstiel was granted a personal face-to-face with the director in a matter of hours. The FBI file on Rosenstiel also reveals that the liquor baron heavily lobbied Hoover to aid his business interests.During that time, the salacious details of Hoover's sex life were already known to the U.S. intelligence community and to the mob, and Hoover was aware that they knew of his closeted sexuality and penchant for women's clothing. Yet, Hoover apparently seemed to embrace the very type of sexual blackmail operation that had compromised his private life, given that he was seen at many of Rosenstiel's "blackmail parties" in the 1950s and 1960s, including at venues such as Rosenstiel's personal home and later at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. Hoover's penchant for dressing in drag was also described by two witnesses who were not connected to Susan Kaufman.[Image: hoover_hollywood_edited.jpg]
Hoover with Dorothy Lamour on the set of The Greatest Show on Earth in 1951

Soon after their first "official" meeting, the public relationship between the two men quickly flourished, with Hoover even sending Rosenstiel flowers when he fell ill. Summers reported that, in 1957, Rosenstiel was heard telling Hoover during a meeting, "your wish is my command." Their relationship remained close and intimate throughout the 1960s and beyond.Like Rosenstiel, Hoover was well-known for amassing blackmail on friend and foe alike. Hoover's office contained "secret files" on numerous powerful people in Washington and beyond, files he used to gain favors and protect his status as FBI director for as long as he wished. Hoover's own propensity for blackmail suggests that he may have associated with Rosenstiel's sexual blackmail operation more directly, given he already knew he was compromised and his involvement in the operation would have served as a means of procuring the blackmail he coveted for his own purposes. Indeed, if Hoover was merely being blackmailed and extorted by the Lansky-Rosenstiel connected mob, it is unlikely that he would have been so friendly to Rosenstiel, Lansky and the other mobsters at these gatherings and participated in them with such regularity. According to journalist and author Burton Hersh, Hoover was also tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who ran a sexual blackmail operation in New York involving young male prostitutes. That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos of Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.Hoover and Rosenstiel's deep ties would continue to develop over the years, an example of which can be seen in Rosenstiel's hiring of long-time Hoover aide Louis Nichols as the vice president of his Schenley liquor empire and Rosenstiel's donation of over $1 million to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, which Nichols also ran at the time. There is also more than one documented occasion wherein Hoover attempted to use blackmail to protect Rosenstiel and his "field commander," none other than the infamous Roy Cohn, the other key figure in Rosenstiel's sexual blackmail operation involving minors.

The Making of a Monster

Decades after his death, Roy Cohn remains a controversial figure in large part because of his close, personal relationship with current U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet reports on Cohn, both in recent and in past years, often miss the mark in their characterization of the man who became closely associated with the Reagan White House, the CIA, the FBI, organized crime and, incidentally, many of the figures who would later surround Jeffrey Epstein.To understand the true nature of the man, it is essential to examine his rise to power in the early 1950s when, at just 23 years of age, he became a key figure in the high-profile trial of Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and later as the right-hand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). Cohn's dedication to anti-communist activities in the 1950s is allegedly what first endeared him to J. Edgar Hoover, whom he first met in 1952. During that meeting, as described by Hersh in Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America, Hoover expressed admiration for Cohn's aggressive and manipulative tactics and told Cohn to "call me directly" whenever he had information worth sharing. From that point on, Cohn and Hoover "traded favors, effusive compliments, gifts and elaborate private dinners. It quickly became Roy' and Edgar.'" Hersh also describes Hoover as Cohn's soon to be "consigliere." The date and circumstances around Cohn's introduction to Rosenstiel are harder to come by. It is possible that the connection was made through Roy Cohn's father, Albert Cohn, a prominent judge and an influential figure in the New York City Democratic Party apparatus then run by Edward Flynn. It waslater revealed that the Democratic organization dominated by Flynn and based in the Bronx had long-standing connections to organized crime, including associates of Meyer Lansky. Regardless of how or when it began, the relationship between Cohn and Rosenstiel was close and was often likened to that of a father and son. They were said to frequently salute each other in public and remained close until Rosenstiel was near death, at which point Cohn attempted to trick his then-barely conscious and senile "friend" and client into naming him the executor and trustee of the liquor magnate's estate, valued at $75 million (more than $334 million in today's dollars). LIFE magazine reported in 1969 that Cohn and Rosenstiel had for years referred to one another as "Field Commander" and "Supreme Commander," respectively. Media references to these nicknames appear in other articles from the period. Though LIFE and other outlets had interpreted this as merely an anecdote about the nicknames shared in jest between close friends, the fact that notorious crime lord Meyer Lansky also called Rosenstiel "Supreme Commander" and the fact that Cohn and Rosenstiel would later become intimately involved in the same pedophile sex ring suggests that there may have been more to these "nicknames." After all, the mob to which Rosenstiel was connected often used military-themed titles like "soldier" and "lieutenant" to differentiate the rank and importance of its members. Once he had made his connection with Hoover, Cohn's star began to rise even higher in Washington. Hoover's recommendation of Cohn would become the deciding factor in his appointment as Sen. McCarthy's general counsel over Robert Kennedy, a rival and bitter enemy of Cohn's.[Image: AP_5404260142_edited.jpg]
McCarthy covers the mic while having a whispered discussion with Cohn during a 1954 committee hearing. Photo | AP

Though Cohn was ruthless and seemingly untouchable as McCarthy's counsel and helped the senator destroy many careers during both the red and lavender scares, his antics in relation to his work on the committee would eventually lead to his downfall after he attempted to blackmail the Army in return for preferential treatment for committee consultant and Cohn's rumored lover, David Schine.After he was forced to leave McCarthy's side due to the scandal, Cohn returned to New York to live with his mother and practice law. A few years later New York Judge David Peck, a long-time associate of former CIA Director Alan Dulles, orchestrated Cohn's hire to the New York law firm Saxe, Bacon andO'Shea which would later become Saxe, Bacon and Bolan after Tom Bolan, a friend of Cohn's, became a partner in the firm. Upon his hire, Cohn brought the firm a slew of Mafia-linked clients, including high-ranking members of the Gambino crime family, the Genovese crime family and, of course, Lewis Rosenstiel.

What happened in Suite 233?

The connections Roy Cohn built during the 1950s made him a well-known public figure and translated into great political influence that peaked during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet, as Cohn built his public image, he was also developing a dark private life, which would come to be dominated by the same blackmail pedophile racket that appears to have first begun with Lewis Rosenstiel. One of the "blackmail parties" Susan Kaufman attended with her then-husband Lewis Rosenstiel was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn's suite as a "beautiful suite…all done in light blue." She described being introduced to Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover's name was "Mary" in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Cohn for a case well after Kaufman's testimony, also found evidence of the "blue suite" at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after combing through local government documents and information gathered by private detectives. Klotzlater told journalist and author Burton Hersh what he had learned:
Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from blackmail."
Perhaps the most damning confirmation of Cohn's activities in Suite 233 comes from statements made by Cohn himself to former NYPD detective and ex-head of the department's Human-Trafficking and Vice-Related Crimes Division, James Rothstein. Rothstein later told John DeCamp a former Nebraska state senator who investigated a government-connected child sex ring based in Omaha among other investigators, that Cohn had admitted to being part of a sexual blackmail operation targeting politicians with child prostitutes during a sit-down interview with the former detective. [Image: AP_070228023563_edited.jpg]
Flags fly over the main entrance of the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1982. Suzanne Vlamis | AP

Rothstein told DeCamp the following about Cohn:

Cohn's job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn's job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself."

Rothstein later told Paul David Collins, a former journalist turned researcher, that Cohn had also identified this sexual blackmail operation as being part of the anti-communist crusade of the time.The fact that Cohn, per Rothstein's recollection, stated that the child sex blackmail ring was part of the government-sponsored anti-communist crusade suggests that elements of the government, including Hoover's FBI, may have been connected at a much broader level than Hoover's own personal involvement, as the FBI closely coordinated with McCarthy and Cohn for much of the red scare.It is also worth noting that among Hoover's many "secret" blackmail files was a sizeable dossier on Senator McCarthy, the contents of which strongly suggested that the senator himself was interested in underage girls. According to journalist and author David Talbot, Hoover's file on McCarthy was "filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy's habit of drunkenly groping young girls' breasts and buttocks. The stories were so widespread that they became common knowledge' in the capital, according to one FBI chronicler." Talbot, in his book The Devil's Chessboard, also cites Walter Trohan, Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, as having personally witnessed McCarthy's habit of molesting young women. "He just couldn't keep his hands off young girls," Trohan would later say. "Why the Communist opposition didn't plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don't know." Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that those "planting" minors on their political foes were McCarthy's allies and close associates, not his enemies.

The question that necessarily arises from revelations regarding Cohn's activities in Suite 233 is who else was Cohn "protecting" and servicing with underage prostitutes? One of them could very well have been one of Cohn's close friends and clients, Cardinal Francis Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York, who was said to have been present at some of these parties Cohn hosted at the Plaza Hotel. Spellman one of the most powerful figures in the Catholic Church in North America, who was sometimes referred to as "America's Pope" was accused of not only condoning pedophilia in the Catholic church and ordaining known pedophiles including Cardinal Theodore "Uncle Teddy" McCarrick, but also engaging in it himself to such an extent that many New York area priests widely referred to him as "Mary." Furthermore, J. Edgar Hoover was said to have a file detailing the cardinal's sex life, suggesting Spellman's involvement in the ring and pedophile protection racket in which Cohn and Hoover were personally involved.[Image: Spellman-Cohn-Children.jpg]
Cardinal Francis Franny' Spellman. Photo | Museum of the City of New York

People close to Cohn often remarked that he was frequently surrounded by groups of young boys, but seemed to think nothing of it. Similar off-handed comments about Epstein's penchant for minors were made by those close to him prior to his arrest. Controversial Republican political operative and "dirty trickster" Roger Stone who, like Donald Trump, was also a protégé of Cohn said the following about Cohn's sex life during an interview with The New Yorker in 2008:

Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn't discussed. He was interested in power and access." (emphasis added)

Compare this quote from Stone to what Donald Trump, who was also close to Cohn, would later say about Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was also closely associated:

I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it Jeffrey enjoys his social life." (emphasis added)

Though it is unknown how long the sex ring at the Plaza Hotel continued, and whether it continued after Cohn's death from AIDS in 1986, it is worth noting that Donald Trump purchased the Plaza Hotel in 1988. It would later be reported and confirmed by then-attendees that Trump "used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men" and "illegal drugs and young women were passed around and used." Andy Lucchesi, a male model who had helped organize some of these Plaza Hotel parties for Trump, said the following when asked about the age of the women present: "A lot of girls, 14, look 24. That's as juicy as I can get. I never asked how old they were; I just partook. I did partake in activities that would be controversial, too."

The Roy Cohn Machine

Roy Cohn was only at the beginning of his career when he waded his way into the underground sexual blackmail ring apparently led by Lewis Rosenstiel. Indeed, when Cohn first met Hoover, he was only 23 years old. Over the next three decades or so, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at the age of 56, Cohn built a well-oiled machine, largely through his close friendships with some of the country's most influential figures.Among Cohn's friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B'nai B'rith and the World Jewish Congress. Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein's now-infamous "little black book". [Image: get-attachment-2_edited.jpg]
Reagan meets with Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick, and Roy Cohn in the Oval Office in 1983. Photo | Reagan presidential library

While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn's network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard "Dirty Dick" Morris, was Cohn's cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton's former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein.Yet, these were only Cohn's connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere. Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn's most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.

As Part II of this exclusive investigation will reveal, Cohn and Epstein, and the sexual blackmail operations they ran share many things in common, including not only many of the same famous friends and patrons, but also connections to intelligence agencies and consortiums of mob-linked businessmen, the modern-day equivalents of Samuel Bronfman and Lewis Rosenstiel who have since rebranded as "philanthropists."

Part II will also reveal that Cohn's operation was known to have successors, as revealed by a series of scandals in the early 1990s that have since been swept under the rug. The significant amount of overlap between Epstein's and Cohn's covert activities in sexual blackmail and their ties to many of the same powerful individuals and circles of influence strongly suggest that Epstein was one of Cohn's successors.As will be shown in the final installment of this report, Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime, making it a racket truly too big to fail.Feature photo |

A composite image shows from left to right, Lewis Rosenstiel, Jeffrey Epstein, and Roy Cohn. Graphic | Emma FialaWhitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.]]> <![CDATA[Empire Of Chaos - USA's Empire for Profit [of a few]]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16006 Tue, 22 Jan 2019 07:02:48 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16006 EMPIRE OF CHAOS

[Image: redpinkline.gif]

The United States' empire was at its peak following World War II. America ruled the globe economically and militarily. It's influence was ubiquitous and its soft power seemingly unlimited. But, arrogance and greed transformed the United States into a pariah. We are feared for our power, but no longer respected for our institutions. Inequality, injustice, corruption, hypocrisy, betrayal and violence, have turned much of the world against us.Sanctions, structural-adjustment, economic warfare. Coups, regime change, color revolutions. 'Responsibility-2-protect', 'coalitions-of-the-willing'. Counter-insurgencies, assassinations. Weapons trade, drug trafficking. Napalm, cluster bombs, landmines, depleted uranium, chemical and biological weapons.This destructive legacy has resulted in the suffering and death of millions, so that American corporations and banks can expand their markets and reap enormous profits, while the United States military achieves strategic global hegemony.As the United States continues to demonstrate how easily it can manipulate elections, exploit popular unrest and undermine economies around the world, many developing nations are concluding that less freedom and more authoritarianism may be their best option to withstand the 21st century 'realpolitik' of U.S. 'democracy promotion'.And, while U.S. financial and military aggression escalates in reaction to America's economic, societal and democratic decline, the global chaos that results may leave millons in misery and a world in ruins. [Image: redpinkline.gif] THE 'INDISPENSIBLE NATION'

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensible nation."

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (1998)

"Since World War Two the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders, helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements, has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet, in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum, in a speech at the University of Vermont, 2007

"Coming to grips with U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"The US spends almost half of all the military spending in the entire world, equal to virtually all the other countries combined. More than half of the weapons sold in the world are sold by the United States. The US has more than 700 military bases scattered across dozens of countries. The US is the world's leading trainer of paramilitaries. The US has a series of courses, from interrogators to generals, that have graduated military people guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in dozens upon dozens of countries. The US has a series of covert paramilitary forces of its own that get almost no attention. This is the U.S. military machine. In addition, there's the support for repressive non-democratic governments and for governments that commit aggression. There are about forty of them that the US backs."

journalist Allan Nairn, 2010

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations."

Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a cynical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

British playwright Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Lecture

"New military bases have been built since 9/11 in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Bahrain. The US military has 737 bases in 63 countries according to the 2005 Base Structure Report, but the actual number probably exceeds 1,000."

Eric Walberg, 2011

"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said 'I just got this from upstairs [meaning the Secretary of Defense's office] today. This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran'."

General Wesley Clark, 2007

"The real motivation behind US military interventions during the cold war was not Soviet deterrence, but the crushing of popular, indigenous nationalist movements for independence, and the establishment of US control over strategic regions."

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in his book "Behind the War on Terror"

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it."

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright
on "60 Minutes" (1996), when she was asked whether she considered the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as the result of U.S. sanctions - acceptable

"Do American leaders really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the words "god" and "prayer" are regularly invoked in their talks, while American Hellfire missiles are sent screaming into a city center or a village marketplace teeming with life ...when they carry on endlessly about democracy and freedom, while American soldiers are smashing down doors, dragging off the men, humiliating the women, traumatizing the children. When they proclaim the liberation of a people and the bringing forth of a better life, while vast quantities of American depleted uranium are exploding into a fine vapor which will poison the air, the soil, the blood, and the genes forever."

William Blum

"Stop talking so much about democracy and instead support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American."

U.S. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, 1954

"Almost from the beginning, the CIA engaged not only in the collection of intelligence information, but also in covert operations which involved rigging elections and manipulating labor unions abroad, carrying on paramilitary operations, overturning governments, assassinating foreign officials, protecting former Nazis and lying to Congress."

former Senator George McGovern, 1987

"In every country, embassies are used for spying. So, it would be dumb for a country to put its real intelligence-gathering officers inside an embassy or consulate or attaché', because that is the first place a hosting nation is going to look for spies. So, the number one place the United States and other countries place their intelligence-gathering officers and informants is NGOs. In Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere in the world, United States' NGOs - over 90% of them - are operations bases for the CIA."

Sibel Edmonds

"With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, NATO's real role in the US empire has become clearer as, instead of disbanding, it expanded to encompass, in conjunction with US military commands, most of the world. It has become the centerpiece of the empire's military presence around the world, moving quickly to respond to US needs to intervene where the UN won't."

Eric Walberg, 2011

]]> EMPIRE OF CHAOS

[Image: redpinkline.gif]

The United States' empire was at its peak following World War II. America ruled the globe economically and militarily. It's influence was ubiquitous and its soft power seemingly unlimited. But, arrogance and greed transformed the United States into a pariah. We are feared for our power, but no longer respected for our institutions. Inequality, injustice, corruption, hypocrisy, betrayal and violence, have turned much of the world against us.Sanctions, structural-adjustment, economic warfare. Coups, regime change, color revolutions. 'Responsibility-2-protect', 'coalitions-of-the-willing'. Counter-insurgencies, assassinations. Weapons trade, drug trafficking. Napalm, cluster bombs, landmines, depleted uranium, chemical and biological weapons.This destructive legacy has resulted in the suffering and death of millions, so that American corporations and banks can expand their markets and reap enormous profits, while the United States military achieves strategic global hegemony.As the United States continues to demonstrate how easily it can manipulate elections, exploit popular unrest and undermine economies around the world, many developing nations are concluding that less freedom and more authoritarianism may be their best option to withstand the 21st century 'realpolitik' of U.S. 'democracy promotion'.And, while U.S. financial and military aggression escalates in reaction to America's economic, societal and democratic decline, the global chaos that results may leave millons in misery and a world in ruins. [Image: redpinkline.gif] THE 'INDISPENSIBLE NATION'

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensible nation."

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (1998)

"Since World War Two the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders, helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements, has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet, in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum, in a speech at the University of Vermont, 2007

"Coming to grips with U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"The US spends almost half of all the military spending in the entire world, equal to virtually all the other countries combined. More than half of the weapons sold in the world are sold by the United States. The US has more than 700 military bases scattered across dozens of countries. The US is the world's leading trainer of paramilitaries. The US has a series of courses, from interrogators to generals, that have graduated military people guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in dozens upon dozens of countries. The US has a series of covert paramilitary forces of its own that get almost no attention. This is the U.S. military machine. In addition, there's the support for repressive non-democratic governments and for governments that commit aggression. There are about forty of them that the US backs."

journalist Allan Nairn, 2010

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations."

Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a cynical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

British playwright Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Lecture

"New military bases have been built since 9/11 in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Bahrain. The US military has 737 bases in 63 countries according to the 2005 Base Structure Report, but the actual number probably exceeds 1,000."

Eric Walberg, 2011

"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said 'I just got this from upstairs [meaning the Secretary of Defense's office] today. This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran'."

General Wesley Clark, 2007

"The real motivation behind US military interventions during the cold war was not Soviet deterrence, but the crushing of popular, indigenous nationalist movements for independence, and the establishment of US control over strategic regions."

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in his book "Behind the War on Terror"

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it."

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright
on "60 Minutes" (1996), when she was asked whether she considered the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as the result of U.S. sanctions - acceptable

"Do American leaders really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the words "god" and "prayer" are regularly invoked in their talks, while American Hellfire missiles are sent screaming into a city center or a village marketplace teeming with life ...when they carry on endlessly about democracy and freedom, while American soldiers are smashing down doors, dragging off the men, humiliating the women, traumatizing the children. When they proclaim the liberation of a people and the bringing forth of a better life, while vast quantities of American depleted uranium are exploding into a fine vapor which will poison the air, the soil, the blood, and the genes forever."

William Blum

"Stop talking so much about democracy and instead support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American."

U.S. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, 1954

"Almost from the beginning, the CIA engaged not only in the collection of intelligence information, but also in covert operations which involved rigging elections and manipulating labor unions abroad, carrying on paramilitary operations, overturning governments, assassinating foreign officials, protecting former Nazis and lying to Congress."

former Senator George McGovern, 1987

"In every country, embassies are used for spying. So, it would be dumb for a country to put its real intelligence-gathering officers inside an embassy or consulate or attaché', because that is the first place a hosting nation is going to look for spies. So, the number one place the United States and other countries place their intelligence-gathering officers and informants is NGOs. In Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere in the world, United States' NGOs - over 90% of them - are operations bases for the CIA."

Sibel Edmonds

"With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, NATO's real role in the US empire has become clearer as, instead of disbanding, it expanded to encompass, in conjunction with US military commands, most of the world. It has become the centerpiece of the empire's military presence around the world, moving quickly to respond to US needs to intervene where the UN won't."

Eric Walberg, 2011

]]> <![CDATA[Phil Agee Interview from 1975 - Enlightening still]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16003 Sun, 20 Jan 2019 06:50:44 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16003


Someone I had the pleasure to meet and talk to several times.......]]>


Someone I had the pleasure to meet and talk to several times.......]]> <![CDATA[Cris Hedges: America IS Entering It's Final Phase]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15917 Fri, 07 Sep 2018 16:34:41 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15917
I, and others here, have been bleating on about the forthcoming end of the American Empire for many years - and particularly as a consequence of the forthcoming collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency (already happening btw) - that Hedges also addresses.

With the US Fed unable to repatriate foreign owned dollars back to the US to service the ever growing national debt ($21 trillion and growing rapidly), the US will be forced to repudiate its debts that are no longer able to be serviced. That will spell the end of the Pentagon as a major force in the world.

It's only a matter of time and when it comes it's likely to come very fast. Personally, I can't wait. The world needs a period without permanent war and strife.

]]>
I, and others here, have been bleating on about the forthcoming end of the American Empire for many years - and particularly as a consequence of the forthcoming collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency (already happening btw) - that Hedges also addresses.

With the US Fed unable to repatriate foreign owned dollars back to the US to service the ever growing national debt ($21 trillion and growing rapidly), the US will be forced to repudiate its debts that are no longer able to be serviced. That will spell the end of the Pentagon as a major force in the world.

It's only a matter of time and when it comes it's likely to come very fast. Personally, I can't wait. The world needs a period without permanent war and strife.

]]> <![CDATA[Unipolar vs Multipolar: The Transnational Ideological Battle underpinning the Russian Meme]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15907 Wed, 29 Aug 2018 08:08:10 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15907
This peculiarity of unfettered capitalism began with the end of the cold war and the Vodka soaked Yeltsin turning over Russian assets to anyone who cared to offer a bribe. Then along came Putin and shut the sale of the century down and ensured that Russian assets remained Russian - and act for which he will never be forgiven.

The result of which is this was that the neoliberal steamroller of greed met real resistance for the first time. You can't take down a nuclear power in the same way you take out a Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or stamp on other nations for non compliance to imperial diktat (nor can you expect to invade Russia militarily and win; a lesson learned both by Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler).

Suddenly the ever spreading power of the dollar was challenged. And the neoliberal grab for world power faltered as the plans for "their" exceptional nation floundered. And to add injury to insult, China arose to challenge the US economically, making itself into an instant enemy.

The transnational neoliberal elite concluded that Russia had to be brought to heel to get their world domination plans back on track - or suffer the consequences; complete failure.

And the rest is the history we are witnessing unfold.

Quote:The Real Russian Interference in US Politics

August 27, 2018 33 Comments



If Russia were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, it wouldn't be attempting to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change Russia's, argues Diana Johnstone.

By Diana Johnstone

[Image: edited-Diana-Johnstone-150x150.jpg]
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was ostensibly a conflict between two ideologies and two socio-economic systems.

All that seems to be over. The day of a new socialism may dawn unexpectedly, but today capitalism rules the world. At first glance, it may seem to be a classic clash between rival capitalists. And yet, once again an ideological conflict is emerging, one which divides capitalists themselves, even in Russia and in the United States itself. It is the conflict between American unipolar dominance and a multipolar world.

[FONT=&amp]The defeat of communism was brutally announced in a certain "capitalist manifesto" dating from the early 1990s that actually proclaimed: "Our guiding light is Profit, acquired in a strictly legal way. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who can lead us to wealth as the norm in life." The authors of this bold tract were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who went on to become the richest manin Russia (before spending ten years in a Russian jail) and his business partner at the time, Leonid Nevzlin, who has since retired comfortably to Israel.

Loans for Shares

Those were the good old days in the 1990s when the Clinton administration was propping up Yeltsin as he let Russia be ripped off by the joint efforts of such ambitious well-placed Russians and their Western sponsors, notably using the "loans for shares" trick.In a 2012 Vanity Fairarticleon her hero, Khodorkovsky, the vehemently anti-Putin journalist Masha Gessen frankly summed up how this worked:

"The new oligarchsa dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that money broughtconcocted a scheme. They would lend the government money, which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises without parliamentary approval."

This worked so well that from his position in the Communist youth organization, Khodorkovsky used his connections to get control of Russia's petroleum company Yukos and become the richest oligarch in Russia, worth some $15 billion, of which he still controls a chunk despite his years in jail (2003-2013).

His arrest made him a hero of democracy in the United States, where he had many friends, especially those business partners who were helping him sell pieces of Yukos to Chevron and Exxon. Khodorkovsky, a charming and generous young man, easily convinced his American partners that he was Russia's number one champion of democracy and the rule of law, especially of those laws which allow domestic capital to flee to foreign banks, and foreign capital to take control of Russian resources.[Image: Mikhail_Khodorkovsky_2013-12-22_2-400x267.jpg]Khodorkovsky: Interfering in U.S. politics. (Wikimedia Commons)

Vladimir Putin didn't see it that way. Without restoring socialism, he dispossessed Khodorkovsky of Yukos and essentially transformed the oil and gas industry from the "open society" model tolerated by Yeltsin to a national capitalist industry. Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were accused of having stolen all the oil that Yukos had produced in the years 1998 to 2003, tried, convicted and sentenced to 14 years of prison each. This shift ruined U.S. plans, already underway, to "balkanize" Russia between its many provinces, thereby allowing Western capital to pursue its capture of the Russian economy.

The dispossession of Khodorkovsky was certainly a major milestone in the conflict between President Putin and Washington. On November 18, 2005, the Senate unanimously adopted Resolution 322introduced by Senator Joe Biden denouncing the treatment of the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev as politically motivated.

Who Influences Whom?

There is an alternative view of the history of Russian influence in the United States to the one now getting constant attention. It is obvious that a Russian who can get the Senate to adopt a resolution in his favor has a certain influence. But when the "deep state" and the corporate media today growl about Russian influence, they aren't talking about Khodorkovsky. They are talking about alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. They are seizing, for example, on a joking response Trump made to a reporter's snide question during the presidential campaign. In a variation of the classic "when did you stop beating your wife?" the reporter asked if he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to "stay out" of the election.

Since a stupid question does not deserve a serious answer, Trump said he had "nothing to do with Putin" before adding, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

"Many Trump opponents think this proves collusion. Irony appears to be almost as unwelcome in American politics as honesty.

When Trump revoked his security clearance earlier this month, former CIA chief JohnBrennan got his chance to spew his hatred in the complacent pages of The New York Times. Someone supposed to be smart enough to head an intelligence agency actually took Trump's joking invitation as a genuine request. "By issuing such a statement," Brennan wrote, "Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

"As America's former top intelligence officer, Brennan had to know that (even if it were true that Trump was somehow involved) it is ludicrous to suggest that Trump would have launched a covert intelligence operation on national television. If this were a Russian operation to hack Clinton's private server it would have been on a need-to-know basis and there is no evident need for Trump or his campaign team to have known.

Besides, Clinton's private server on the day Trump uttered this joke, July 27, 2016, had already been about nine months in possession of the Department of Justice, and presumably offline as it was being examined.

Since Brennan knows all this he could only have been lying in The New York Times.

The Russians, Brennan went on, "troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters."

But which Russians do that? And who are those "individuals?"



'[Image: Kerry-and-Winer-cropped-248x400.jpeg]Secretary of State John Kerry with Winer, then Special Envoy for Libya and Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement, in Rome, February 1, 2016. (State Department Photo)

[/FONT]The Fixer-in-Chief

To understand the way Washington works, one can focus on the career of lawyer Jonathan M. Winer, who proudly says that in early 2017 the head of the Carnegie Endowment, Bill Burns, referred to him as "The Fixer-in-Chief." Let's see what the fixer has fixed.

Winer served in the Clinton State Department as its first Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Law Enforcement from 1994-1999. One may question the selectivity of Bill Clinton's concern for international law enforcement, which certainly did not cover violating international law by bombing defenseless countries.

In any case, in 1999 Winer received the State Department's second highest award for having "created the capacity of the Department and the U.S. government to deal with international crime and criminal justice as important foreign policy functions." The award stated that "the scope and significance of his achievements are virtually unprecedented for any single official."

After the Clinton administration, from 2008 to 2013, Winer worked as a high-up consultant at one of the world's most powerful PR and lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide. As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works for Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest of APCO's many clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered in Guernsey. The trust tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch got out of Russia before he was jailed.

Corbiere money was spent to lobby both for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovsky after his arrest in Russia) and for the Magnitsky Act. APCO president Margery Kraus is a member of the Institute of Modern Russia, which is headed by Khodorkovsky's son Pavel, with the ostensible purpose of "promoting democratic values" in other words, of building political opposition to Putin.

When John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, allowing Hillary to prepare her presidential campaign, Winer went back to the State Department.[FONT=&amp]Winer's extracurricular activities at State brought him into the public spotlight early this year when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) named him as part of a network promoting the notorious "Steele Dossier," which accused Trump of illicit financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia, in a word, "collusion" with Moscow.

[FONT=&amp]By Winer's own account,he had been friends with former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled Steele reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence agents, to Victoria Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, as well as to top Russia experts. Among these reports was the infamous "Steele dossier," opposition research on Trump financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]But dirt seemed to pass the other way too. According to a Feb. 6 Washington Post story, Winer passed on to Steele the story of Trump being urinated on by prostitutes in a Moscow hotel with Russian agents allegedly filming it for blackmail material. The Post says the story was written by Cody Shearer, a Clinton confidante. A lawyer for Winer told the paper that Winer"[/FONT]was concerned in 2016 about information that a candidate for the presidency may have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. Any actions he took were grounded in those concerns." Shearer did not respond to a request for comment from Consortium News. [FONT=&amp](Full disclosure: Cody Shearer is a member of the advisory board of the Consortium for Independent Journalism, which publishes Consortium News, and has been asked to resign.)

[/FONT]All this Democrat paid-for and created dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media before being revealed publicly just before Trump's inauguration. The Steele dossier was used by the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

Winer and the Magnitsky Act

Winer played a major role in Congress's adoption of the "Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012" (the Magnitsky Act), a measure that effectively ended post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington and Moscow. This act was based on a highly contentious version of the November 16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky as told to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder. According to Browder, Magnitsky was a lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.

However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's investigative documentary (blacklisted in the U.S.), Magnitsky was neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate prison care. The case was hyped as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian tax fraud charges against himself.

By adopting a law punishing Magnitsky's alleged persecutors, the U.S. Congress acted as a supreme court judging internal Russian legal issues.

The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds.

It was Winer who found a solution to Browder's predicament. As Winer wrote in The Daily Beast: "When Browder consulted me, he wanted to know what he could do to hold those involved in the case accountable. As Browder describes in his book, Red Notice, I suggested creating a new law to impose economic and travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand corruption. Browder decided this could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky. He initiated a campaign that led to the enactment of the Magnitsky Act. Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts, including Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom."

[Image: Browder--1028x771.jpg]Browder: Fabulist. (Editions Kero)

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have been trying for years to pursue their case against Browder. Putin brought up the case in his press conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump. Putin suggested allowing U.S. authorities to question the 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, among others. Putin observed that such an exchange was possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999, back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend.

But the naïve Russians underestimated the craftiness of American lawyers.

As Winer wrote, "Under that treaty, Russia's procurator general can ask the U.S. attorney general … to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a criminal case. But there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general can provide no such assistance in a politically motivatedcase(my emphasis). I know this because I was among those who helped put it there. Back in 1999, when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the senior State Department official managing U.S.-Russia law-enforcement relations.

"The clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. It doesn't apply to a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated. (The irony is that Mueller's indictment of 12 GRU Russian military intelligence agents appears to be more a political than a legal document. For one thing, it accused the agents of interfering in a U.S. election but never charges them under U.S. electoral law.)

On July 15, 2016, Browder's Heritage Capital Management firm registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice accusing both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); adopted in 1938 with Nazis in mind.

As for Russian lawyers attempting to bring their case against the Act to the U.S., the Heritage Capital Management brief declared:

"While lawyers representing foreign principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the attorney does not try to influence policy at the behest of his client. By disseminating anti-Magnitsky material to Congress, [lawyer Natalia] Veselnitskaya is clearly trying to influence policy and is therefore in violation of her filing requirements under FARA.

"Veselnitskaya was at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in the summer of 2016 to lobby a possible incoming Trump administration to oppose the Magnitsky Act. A British music promoter, not a spokesman for the Russian government, offered dirt on Clinton in an email to Donald Trump Jr. No dirt was apparently produced and Don Jr. saw it as a lure to get him to the meeting on Magnitsky. Democrats are furiously trying to prove that this meeting was "collusion" between the Trump camp and Russia, though it was the Clinton campaign that paid for opposition research and received it from foreigners, while the Trump campaign neither solicited nor apparently received any at that meeting.

The Ideological Conflict Today

Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied hard to get Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act. This type of "Russian interference intended to influence policy" goes unnoticed while U.S. authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.

The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia. Russia's position, as Putin made clear in his historic speech at the Munich security conference in 2007, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries' politics on principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to do the same.

The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs.

So, if Putin were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, he would not be trying to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change his own.

U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics so long as those Russians like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world sought by the State Department. Indeed, the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans all those who come to Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from and put themselves in power. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America.

Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public opinion against "multipolar" Putin, glorifies American democracy, serves U.S. interests, including the military industries, helps break down national borders (except those of the United States and Israel) and puts money in appropriate pockets in the halls of Congress.[/FONT]

edited to restore original formatting]]>
This peculiarity of unfettered capitalism began with the end of the cold war and the Vodka soaked Yeltsin turning over Russian assets to anyone who cared to offer a bribe. Then along came Putin and shut the sale of the century down and ensured that Russian assets remained Russian - and act for which he will never be forgiven.

The result of which is this was that the neoliberal steamroller of greed met real resistance for the first time. You can't take down a nuclear power in the same way you take out a Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or stamp on other nations for non compliance to imperial diktat (nor can you expect to invade Russia militarily and win; a lesson learned both by Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler).

Suddenly the ever spreading power of the dollar was challenged. And the neoliberal grab for world power faltered as the plans for "their" exceptional nation floundered. And to add injury to insult, China arose to challenge the US economically, making itself into an instant enemy.

The transnational neoliberal elite concluded that Russia had to be brought to heel to get their world domination plans back on track - or suffer the consequences; complete failure.

And the rest is the history we are witnessing unfold.

Quote:The Real Russian Interference in US Politics

August 27, 2018 33 Comments



If Russia were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, it wouldn't be attempting to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change Russia's, argues Diana Johnstone.

By Diana Johnstone

[Image: edited-Diana-Johnstone-150x150.jpg]
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was ostensibly a conflict between two ideologies and two socio-economic systems.

All that seems to be over. The day of a new socialism may dawn unexpectedly, but today capitalism rules the world. At first glance, it may seem to be a classic clash between rival capitalists. And yet, once again an ideological conflict is emerging, one which divides capitalists themselves, even in Russia and in the United States itself. It is the conflict between American unipolar dominance and a multipolar world.

[FONT=&amp]The defeat of communism was brutally announced in a certain "capitalist manifesto" dating from the early 1990s that actually proclaimed: "Our guiding light is Profit, acquired in a strictly legal way. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who can lead us to wealth as the norm in life." The authors of this bold tract were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who went on to become the richest manin Russia (before spending ten years in a Russian jail) and his business partner at the time, Leonid Nevzlin, who has since retired comfortably to Israel.

Loans for Shares

Those were the good old days in the 1990s when the Clinton administration was propping up Yeltsin as he let Russia be ripped off by the joint efforts of such ambitious well-placed Russians and their Western sponsors, notably using the "loans for shares" trick.In a 2012 Vanity Fairarticleon her hero, Khodorkovsky, the vehemently anti-Putin journalist Masha Gessen frankly summed up how this worked:

"The new oligarchsa dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that money broughtconcocted a scheme. They would lend the government money, which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises without parliamentary approval."

This worked so well that from his position in the Communist youth organization, Khodorkovsky used his connections to get control of Russia's petroleum company Yukos and become the richest oligarch in Russia, worth some $15 billion, of which he still controls a chunk despite his years in jail (2003-2013).

His arrest made him a hero of democracy in the United States, where he had many friends, especially those business partners who were helping him sell pieces of Yukos to Chevron and Exxon. Khodorkovsky, a charming and generous young man, easily convinced his American partners that he was Russia's number one champion of democracy and the rule of law, especially of those laws which allow domestic capital to flee to foreign banks, and foreign capital to take control of Russian resources.[Image: Mikhail_Khodorkovsky_2013-12-22_2-400x267.jpg]Khodorkovsky: Interfering in U.S. politics. (Wikimedia Commons)

Vladimir Putin didn't see it that way. Without restoring socialism, he dispossessed Khodorkovsky of Yukos and essentially transformed the oil and gas industry from the "open society" model tolerated by Yeltsin to a national capitalist industry. Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were accused of having stolen all the oil that Yukos had produced in the years 1998 to 2003, tried, convicted and sentenced to 14 years of prison each. This shift ruined U.S. plans, already underway, to "balkanize" Russia between its many provinces, thereby allowing Western capital to pursue its capture of the Russian economy.

The dispossession of Khodorkovsky was certainly a major milestone in the conflict between President Putin and Washington. On November 18, 2005, the Senate unanimously adopted Resolution 322introduced by Senator Joe Biden denouncing the treatment of the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev as politically motivated.

Who Influences Whom?

There is an alternative view of the history of Russian influence in the United States to the one now getting constant attention. It is obvious that a Russian who can get the Senate to adopt a resolution in his favor has a certain influence. But when the "deep state" and the corporate media today growl about Russian influence, they aren't talking about Khodorkovsky. They are talking about alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. They are seizing, for example, on a joking response Trump made to a reporter's snide question during the presidential campaign. In a variation of the classic "when did you stop beating your wife?" the reporter asked if he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to "stay out" of the election.

Since a stupid question does not deserve a serious answer, Trump said he had "nothing to do with Putin" before adding, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

"Many Trump opponents think this proves collusion. Irony appears to be almost as unwelcome in American politics as honesty.

When Trump revoked his security clearance earlier this month, former CIA chief JohnBrennan got his chance to spew his hatred in the complacent pages of The New York Times. Someone supposed to be smart enough to head an intelligence agency actually took Trump's joking invitation as a genuine request. "By issuing such a statement," Brennan wrote, "Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

"As America's former top intelligence officer, Brennan had to know that (even if it were true that Trump was somehow involved) it is ludicrous to suggest that Trump would have launched a covert intelligence operation on national television. If this were a Russian operation to hack Clinton's private server it would have been on a need-to-know basis and there is no evident need for Trump or his campaign team to have known.

Besides, Clinton's private server on the day Trump uttered this joke, July 27, 2016, had already been about nine months in possession of the Department of Justice, and presumably offline as it was being examined.

Since Brennan knows all this he could only have been lying in The New York Times.

The Russians, Brennan went on, "troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters."

But which Russians do that? And who are those "individuals?"



'[Image: Kerry-and-Winer-cropped-248x400.jpeg]Secretary of State John Kerry with Winer, then Special Envoy for Libya and Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement, in Rome, February 1, 2016. (State Department Photo)

[/FONT]The Fixer-in-Chief

To understand the way Washington works, one can focus on the career of lawyer Jonathan M. Winer, who proudly says that in early 2017 the head of the Carnegie Endowment, Bill Burns, referred to him as "The Fixer-in-Chief." Let's see what the fixer has fixed.

Winer served in the Clinton State Department as its first Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Law Enforcement from 1994-1999. One may question the selectivity of Bill Clinton's concern for international law enforcement, which certainly did not cover violating international law by bombing defenseless countries.

In any case, in 1999 Winer received the State Department's second highest award for having "created the capacity of the Department and the U.S. government to deal with international crime and criminal justice as important foreign policy functions." The award stated that "the scope and significance of his achievements are virtually unprecedented for any single official."

After the Clinton administration, from 2008 to 2013, Winer worked as a high-up consultant at one of the world's most powerful PR and lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide. As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works for Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest of APCO's many clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered in Guernsey. The trust tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch got out of Russia before he was jailed.

Corbiere money was spent to lobby both for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovsky after his arrest in Russia) and for the Magnitsky Act. APCO president Margery Kraus is a member of the Institute of Modern Russia, which is headed by Khodorkovsky's son Pavel, with the ostensible purpose of "promoting democratic values" in other words, of building political opposition to Putin.

When John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, allowing Hillary to prepare her presidential campaign, Winer went back to the State Department.[FONT=&amp]Winer's extracurricular activities at State brought him into the public spotlight early this year when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) named him as part of a network promoting the notorious "Steele Dossier," which accused Trump of illicit financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia, in a word, "collusion" with Moscow.

[FONT=&amp]By Winer's own account,he had been friends with former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled Steele reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence agents, to Victoria Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, as well as to top Russia experts. Among these reports was the infamous "Steele dossier," opposition research on Trump financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]But dirt seemed to pass the other way too. According to a Feb. 6 Washington Post story, Winer passed on to Steele the story of Trump being urinated on by prostitutes in a Moscow hotel with Russian agents allegedly filming it for blackmail material. The Post says the story was written by Cody Shearer, a Clinton confidante. A lawyer for Winer told the paper that Winer"[/FONT]was concerned in 2016 about information that a candidate for the presidency may have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. Any actions he took were grounded in those concerns." Shearer did not respond to a request for comment from Consortium News. [FONT=&amp](Full disclosure: Cody Shearer is a member of the advisory board of the Consortium for Independent Journalism, which publishes Consortium News, and has been asked to resign.)

[/FONT]All this Democrat paid-for and created dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media before being revealed publicly just before Trump's inauguration. The Steele dossier was used by the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

Winer and the Magnitsky Act

Winer played a major role in Congress's adoption of the "Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012" (the Magnitsky Act), a measure that effectively ended post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington and Moscow. This act was based on a highly contentious version of the November 16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky as told to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder. According to Browder, Magnitsky was a lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.

However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's investigative documentary (blacklisted in the U.S.), Magnitsky was neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate prison care. The case was hyped as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian tax fraud charges against himself.

By adopting a law punishing Magnitsky's alleged persecutors, the U.S. Congress acted as a supreme court judging internal Russian legal issues.

The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds.

It was Winer who found a solution to Browder's predicament. As Winer wrote in The Daily Beast: "When Browder consulted me, he wanted to know what he could do to hold those involved in the case accountable. As Browder describes in his book, Red Notice, I suggested creating a new law to impose economic and travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand corruption. Browder decided this could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky. He initiated a campaign that led to the enactment of the Magnitsky Act. Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts, including Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom."

[Image: Browder--1028x771.jpg]Browder: Fabulist. (Editions Kero)

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have been trying for years to pursue their case against Browder. Putin brought up the case in his press conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump. Putin suggested allowing U.S. authorities to question the 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, among others. Putin observed that such an exchange was possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999, back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend.

But the naïve Russians underestimated the craftiness of American lawyers.

As Winer wrote, "Under that treaty, Russia's procurator general can ask the U.S. attorney general … to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a criminal case. But there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general can provide no such assistance in a politically motivatedcase(my emphasis). I know this because I was among those who helped put it there. Back in 1999, when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the senior State Department official managing U.S.-Russia law-enforcement relations.

"The clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. It doesn't apply to a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated. (The irony is that Mueller's indictment of 12 GRU Russian military intelligence agents appears to be more a political than a legal document. For one thing, it accused the agents of interfering in a U.S. election but never charges them under U.S. electoral law.)

On July 15, 2016, Browder's Heritage Capital Management firm registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice accusing both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); adopted in 1938 with Nazis in mind.

As for Russian lawyers attempting to bring their case against the Act to the U.S., the Heritage Capital Management brief declared:

"While lawyers representing foreign principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the attorney does not try to influence policy at the behest of his client. By disseminating anti-Magnitsky material to Congress, [lawyer Natalia] Veselnitskaya is clearly trying to influence policy and is therefore in violation of her filing requirements under FARA.

"Veselnitskaya was at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in the summer of 2016 to lobby a possible incoming Trump administration to oppose the Magnitsky Act. A British music promoter, not a spokesman for the Russian government, offered dirt on Clinton in an email to Donald Trump Jr. No dirt was apparently produced and Don Jr. saw it as a lure to get him to the meeting on Magnitsky. Democrats are furiously trying to prove that this meeting was "collusion" between the Trump camp and Russia, though it was the Clinton campaign that paid for opposition research and received it from foreigners, while the Trump campaign neither solicited nor apparently received any at that meeting.

The Ideological Conflict Today

Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied hard to get Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act. This type of "Russian interference intended to influence policy" goes unnoticed while U.S. authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.

The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia. Russia's position, as Putin made clear in his historic speech at the Munich security conference in 2007, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries' politics on principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to do the same.

The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs.

So, if Putin were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, he would not be trying to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change his own.

U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics so long as those Russians like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world sought by the State Department. Indeed, the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans all those who come to Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from and put themselves in power. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America.

Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public opinion against "multipolar" Putin, glorifies American democracy, serves U.S. interests, including the military industries, helps break down national borders (except those of the United States and Israel) and puts money in appropriate pockets in the halls of Congress.[/FONT]

edited to restore original formatting]]> <![CDATA[Zionism as an Ideology of Global Domination]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15763 Sun, 25 Feb 2018 03:31:55 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15763 The biblical mind of Israel's founding fathers

The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is for the committed Jew as much a record of his ancient origins, the prism through which all Jewish history is interpreted (is not the "Holocaust" a biblical term?), and the unalterable pattern of Israel's promising future. That is why the Bible, once the "portable fatherland" of the Diaspora Jews as Heinrich Heine put it, remains at the core of the national narrative of the Jewish State, whose founding fathers did not give it any other Constitution.

It is true that the earliest prophets of political Zionism Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem, 1862), Leon Pinsker (Auto-Emancipation, 1882) and Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State, 1896) did not draw their inspiration from the Bible, but rather from the great nationalist spirit that swept through Europe at the end of the 19th century. Pinsker and Herzl actually cared little whether the Jews colonized Palestine or any other region of the globe; the first thought about some land in North America, while the second contemplated Argentina and later Uganda. More important still than nationalism, what drove these intellectual pioneers was the persistence of Judeophobia or anti-Semitism: Pinsker, who was from Odessa, converted during the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II; Herzl, at the height of the Dreyfus affair.

Nevertheless, by naming his movement "Zionism," Herzl himself was plugging it into biblical mythology: Zion is a name used for Jerusalem by biblical prophets. And after Herzl, the founders of the Yishuv (Jewish communities settled in Palestine before 1947) and later of the Jewish State were steeped in the Bible. From their point of view, Zionism was the logical and necessary end of biblical Yahwism. "The Bible is our mandate," Chaim Weizmann declared at the Peace Conference in Versailles in 1920, and David Ben-Gurion has made clear that he only accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan as a temporary step toward the goal of biblical borders. In Ben-Gurion, Prophet of fire(1983), the biography of the man described as "the personification of the Zionist dream," Dan Kurzman entitles each chapter with a Bible quote. The preface begins like this:

"The life of David Ben-Gurion is more than the story of an extraordinary man. It is the story of a Biblical prophecy, an eternal dream. […] Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a light unto the nations' that would help to redeem all mankind."

For Ben-Gurion, Kurzman writes, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 "paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt." Yet Ben-Gurion had never been to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast. According to the rabbi leading the Bible study group that he attended, Ben-Gurion "unconsciously believed he was blessed with a spark from Joshua's soul." "There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible," he used to say.[1] He wrote in his diary in 1948, ten days after declaring independence, "We will break Transjordan [Jordan], bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo," then he adds: "This will be in revenge for what they did to our forefathers during biblical times."[2] Three days after the Israeli invasion of the Sinai in 1956, he declared before the Knesset that what was at stake was "the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon."[3]

Ben-Gurion's attachment to the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation and the next. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six Day War, wrote a book entitled Living with the Bible (1978) in which he justified the annexation of new territory by the Bible. More recently, Israeli Education minister Naftali Bennett, a proponent of full-scale annexation of the West Bank, did the same.[4]

Zionism is biblical by ideology, but also in practice. As Avigail Abarbanel wrote, the Zionist conquerors of Palestine "have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. […] For a supposedly non-religious movement it's extraordinary how closely Zionism […] has followed the Bible."[5] The paradox is only apparent, because for Zionists, the Bible is not a religious text, but a textbook of history. And so it should be obvious to anybody paying attention that Israel's behavior on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible's underlying ideology.

Prophecies and geopolitics

Only by taking account of the biblical roots of Zionism can one understand why Zionism has never been a nationalist movement like others. It could not be, as Gilad Atzmon remarked, from the moment it defined itself as a Jewish movement, aimed at creating a "Jewish state".[6] Jewish exceptionalism is a biblical concept that has no equivalent in any other ethnic or religious culture.

Neither can Zionism be correctly assessed as a form of colonialism, despite Jabotinsky's effort to do so. For colonialism seeks not to expel the natives, but to exploit them. If Zionism is colonialism, it can only be in the sense of the colonization of the world by Israel, according to the program laid out by Isaiah:

"The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you" (60:5);

"You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings" (60:16);

"You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory" (61:5-6);

"For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed" (60:12)

Christians find hope in Isaiah that, some day, all peoples "will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles. Nations will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war" (Isaiah 2:4). But more important to Zionists are the previous verses, which describe these messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when "all the nations" will pay tribute "to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob," when "the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem," so that Yahweh will "judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples."

No wonder Isaiah is the biblical prophet most often quoted by Zionists. In a statement published in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, Ben-Gurion predicted for the next 25 years:
"All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah."[7]

The launching of the Iraq War was a decisive step toward that goal of a new world order headquartered in Jerusalem. It was the context for a "Jerusalem Summit" held in October 2003 in the highly symbolic King David Hotel, to seal an alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists. The "Jerusalem Declaration" signed by its participants declared Jerusalem "the key to the harmony of civilizations," replacing the United Nations that had become "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships":

"Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [. . .] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets."

Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Richard Perle, the guest of honor, received on this occasion the Henry Scoop Jackson Award.[8]

When Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the (Hebrew) Bible, we should take them seriously and study the Bible. It might help, for example, to know that according to Deuteronomy Yahweh plans to deliver to Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than [it]," adding: "you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them. You shall not make marriages with them…" (7:1-2). As for the kings of these seven nations, "you shall make their name perish from under heaven" (7:24). The destruction of the "Seven Nations," also mentioned in Joshua 24:11, is considered a mitzvah in rabbinic Judaism, included by the great Maimonides in his Book of Commandments,[9] and it has remained a popular motif in Jewish culture, known to every Israeli school child.

It is also part of the Neocon agenda for World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz names the current global conflict in World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, 2007). General Wesley Clark, former commandant of NATO in Europe, wrote in his book Winning Modern Wars (2003), and repeated in numerous occasions, that one month after September 11, 2001, as he was paying a visit to Paul Wolfowitz, a Pentagon general showed him a memo "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran."[10] In his September 20, 2001 speech, President Bush also targeted seven "rogue states", but included Cuba and North Korea instead of Lebanon and Somalia. The likely explanation to that discrepancy is that Bush or his entourage refused to include Lebanon and Somalia, but that the number seven was retained for its symbolic value, as an encrypted signature. Without question, the neocons who were writing Bush's war agenda were Zionists of the most fanatical and Machiavellian kind. But the neocon viper's nest is not the only place to look for crypto-Zionists infiltrated in the highest spheres of US foreign and military affairs. Consider, for example, that Wesley Clark is the son of Benjamin Jacob Kanne and the proud descendant of a lineage of rabbis. It is hard to believe that he never heard about the Bible's "seven nations"? Is Clark himself, together with the Amy Goodmans who interviewed him, trying to write history in biblical terms, while blaming these wars on the Pentagon's warmongers? What's going on, here?

A lesson from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah

To understand how the crypto-Zionists have hijacked the Empire's military power into proxy wars, a lesson can be learned from Book of Ezra and its sequel, the Book of Nehemiah. At the time of Ezra, the imperial power was Persia. After the Persians had conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, some of the exiles and their descendants (42,360 people with their 7,337 servants and 200 male and female singers, according to Ezra 2:64-67) returned to Jerusalem under the protection of King Cyrus, with the project of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus begins the Book of Ezra:

"Yahweh roused the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia to issue a proclamation and to have it publicly displayed throughout his kingdom: Cyrus king of Persia says this, Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem, in Judah.'" (Ezra 1:1-2).

For acting on behalf of Yahweh, Cyrus is bestowed the title of God's "Anointed" (Mashiah) in Isaiah 45:1.

"Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings: […] It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you." (Isaiah 45:1-5)
A succeeding Persian emperor, Darius, confirmed Cyrus' edict, authorizing the rebuilding of the Temple, and ordering gigantic burnt offerings financed by "the royal revenue." Anyone resisting the new theocratic power backed by Persia, "a beam is to be torn from his house, he is to be impaled on it and his house is to be reduced to a rubbish-heap for his offense" (Ezra 6:11). Then another Persian king, Artaxerxes, is supposed to have granted Ezra authority to lead "all members of the people of Israel in my kingdom, including their priests and Levites, who freely choose to go to Jerusalem," and to rule over "the whole people of Trans-Euphrates [district encompassing all territories West to the Euphrates]" (7:11-26). In 458 BCE, the priest Ezra went from Babylon to Jerusalem, accompanied by some 1,500 followers. Carrying with him the newly redacted Torah, Ezra called himself the "Secretary of the Law of the God of heaven" (7:21). He was soon joined by Nehemiah, a Persian court official of Judean origin.

The edicts of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes are fake. No historian believe them authentic. But the fact that Persian kings granted to a clan of wealthy Levites legal authority for establishing a theocratic semi-autonomous state in Palestine seems historical. What did these proto-Zionists give the Persian kings in return? The Bible does not say, but historians believe that the Judeans exiles in Babylon had won the favor of the Persians by conspiring to help them conquer the city.[11]

What is of interest in this biblical narrative is the blueprint for the Zionist strategy of influencing the Empire's foreign policy for its own advantage. In the late 19th century, the empire was British. Its foreign policy in the Middle East was largely shaped by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Born in a family of Marranos converted back to Judaism in Venice, Disraeli can be considered a forerunner of Zionism, since, well before Theodor Herzl, he tried to include the "restoration of Israel" in the Berlin Congress' agenda, and hoped to convince the Ottoman Sultan to concede to Palestine as an autonomous Jewish province. He failed, but succeeded in putting the Suez Canal under British control, through funding from his friend Lionel Rothschild (an operation which also consolidated the Rothschilds' control over the Bank of England). That was the first step in binding British interest and fate to the Middle-East[12]. In short, Disraeli was a modern-day Ezra or Nehemiah, capable of steering the Empire's policy according to the Jewish agenda of the conquest of Palestine, a dream he had cherished ever since his first trip to Palestine in 1830, at the age of 26, and which he had expressed through the hero of his first novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy:

"My wish is a national existence which we have not. My wish is the Land of Promise and Jerusalem and the Temple, all we forfeited, all we have yearned after, all for which we have fought, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs."

A quarter of a century after Disraeli, Theodor Herzl also failed to convince the Sultan. It therefore became necessary that the Ottoman Empire disappear and the cards be redistributed. Zionists then played the British against the Ottomans and, by means now well-documented, obtained from the former the Balfour Declaration (in fact a mere letter addressed by Secretary of State Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild). But when the British started to limit Jewish immigration in Palestine in the 1930s, the Zionists turned to the rising new Imperial power: the United States. Today, the stranglehold of Zionists on US imperial policy is such that a few Jewish neocons can pull the US into a series of wars against Israel's enemies with a single false flag attack.

The capacity of Israel to hijack the Empire's foreign and military policy requires that a substantial Jewish elite remain in the US. Even Israel's survival is entirely dependent on the influence of the Zionist power complex in the United States (euphemistically called the "pro-Israel lobby"). That is also a lesson learnt from Ezra and Nehemiah's time: Nehemiah himself retained his principal residence in Babylone and, for centuries after, the kingdom of Israel was virtually ruled by the Babylonian exiles. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Babylon remained the center of universal Judaism. The comparison was made by Jacob Neusner in A History of the Jews in Babylonia(1965), and by Max Dimont in Jews, God and History (1962). The American Jews who prefer to remain in the United States rather than emigrating to Israel are, Dimont argued, as essential to the community as the Babylonian Jews who declined the invitation to return to Palestine in the Persian era:

"Today, as once before, we have both an independent State of Israel and the Diaspora. But, as in the past, the State of Israel today is a citadel of Judaism, a haven of refuge, the center of Jewish nationalism where dwell only two million of the world's twelve million Jews. The Diaspora, although it has shifted its center through the ages with the rise and fall of civilizations, still remains the universal soul of Judaism."[13]

Conclusion

In the words of the Zionists themselves, including Herzl himself, Zionism was supposed to be the "final solution" to the Jewish question[14]. In 1947, the whole world hoped that it would be, except for Arab leaders who warned against it. But Israel's existence has only resulted in changing the "Jewish question" into the "Zionist question": the question about the true ambitions of Israel. Part of the answer is to be found in the Hebrew Bible. The Zionist question is the Biblical question. Zionists themselves tell us so. Their mouths are full of the Bible.

On March 3, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dramatized in front of the American Congress his deep phobia of Iran by referring to the biblical Book of Esther (the only Bible story that makes no mention of God, incidently). It is worth quoting the heart of his rhetorical appeal to a US strike against Iran:

"We're an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we'll read the Book of Esther. We'll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved. Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us."[15]

Netanyahu managed to schedule his address to the Congress on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy end of the Book of Esther the slaughter of 75,000 Persians, women and children included. This typical speech by the head of the State of Israel is clear indication that the behavior of that nation on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible's underlying ideology. Such is the main objective of my new book, From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, translated by Kevin Barrett.

May those who still want to believe that Zionism has nothing to do with the Bible think twice. Even the nuclear policy of Israel has a biblical name: the Samson Option.[16] And let them read the Prophets:

"And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths." (Zechariah 14:12)
Notes:

  1. Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, p. 17-18, 22, 26-28. ↑
  2. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2007, p. 144. ↑
  3. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10.↑
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Png17wB_omA ↑
  5. Avigail Abarbanel, "Why I left the Cult," October 8, 2016, on mondoweiss.net ↑
  6. Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, pp. 66-67. ↑
  7. David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116 ↑
  8. Official website: www.jerusalemsummit.org/eng/declaration.php. ↑
  9. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cd...nt-187.htm ↑
  10. Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars, Public Affairs, 2003, p. 130. ↑
  11. For example, Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. 1, p. 343. ↑
  12. On Disraeli's proto-Zionist policy, read my article : https://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2015/02/...ssophobia/ ↑
  13. Quoted in Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme, American Free Press, 2009, p. 27 ↑
  14. The first Zionist association inspired by Herzl's program, the National-jüdische Vereinigung Köln, declared as its goal in 1897: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question lies therefore in the establishment of the Jewish State" (quoted in Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 18971918, Transaction Publishers, 1998, p. 17). Herzl wrote: "I believe I have found the solution of the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one," repeating further that Zionism was "the only possible, final, and successful solution of the Jewish Question" (The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1, p. 118). ↑
  15. "The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu's Address to Congress," on www.washingtonpost.com ↑
  16. Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991. ↑

Source]]> The biblical mind of Israel's founding fathers

The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is for the committed Jew as much a record of his ancient origins, the prism through which all Jewish history is interpreted (is not the "Holocaust" a biblical term?), and the unalterable pattern of Israel's promising future. That is why the Bible, once the "portable fatherland" of the Diaspora Jews as Heinrich Heine put it, remains at the core of the national narrative of the Jewish State, whose founding fathers did not give it any other Constitution.

It is true that the earliest prophets of political Zionism Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem, 1862), Leon Pinsker (Auto-Emancipation, 1882) and Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State, 1896) did not draw their inspiration from the Bible, but rather from the great nationalist spirit that swept through Europe at the end of the 19th century. Pinsker and Herzl actually cared little whether the Jews colonized Palestine or any other region of the globe; the first thought about some land in North America, while the second contemplated Argentina and later Uganda. More important still than nationalism, what drove these intellectual pioneers was the persistence of Judeophobia or anti-Semitism: Pinsker, who was from Odessa, converted during the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II; Herzl, at the height of the Dreyfus affair.

Nevertheless, by naming his movement "Zionism," Herzl himself was plugging it into biblical mythology: Zion is a name used for Jerusalem by biblical prophets. And after Herzl, the founders of the Yishuv (Jewish communities settled in Palestine before 1947) and later of the Jewish State were steeped in the Bible. From their point of view, Zionism was the logical and necessary end of biblical Yahwism. "The Bible is our mandate," Chaim Weizmann declared at the Peace Conference in Versailles in 1920, and David Ben-Gurion has made clear that he only accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan as a temporary step toward the goal of biblical borders. In Ben-Gurion, Prophet of fire(1983), the biography of the man described as "the personification of the Zionist dream," Dan Kurzman entitles each chapter with a Bible quote. The preface begins like this:

"The life of David Ben-Gurion is more than the story of an extraordinary man. It is the story of a Biblical prophecy, an eternal dream. […] Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a light unto the nations' that would help to redeem all mankind."

For Ben-Gurion, Kurzman writes, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 "paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt." Yet Ben-Gurion had never been to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast. According to the rabbi leading the Bible study group that he attended, Ben-Gurion "unconsciously believed he was blessed with a spark from Joshua's soul." "There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible," he used to say.[1] He wrote in his diary in 1948, ten days after declaring independence, "We will break Transjordan [Jordan], bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo," then he adds: "This will be in revenge for what they did to our forefathers during biblical times."[2] Three days after the Israeli invasion of the Sinai in 1956, he declared before the Knesset that what was at stake was "the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon."[3]

Ben-Gurion's attachment to the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation and the next. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six Day War, wrote a book entitled Living with the Bible (1978) in which he justified the annexation of new territory by the Bible. More recently, Israeli Education minister Naftali Bennett, a proponent of full-scale annexation of the West Bank, did the same.[4]

Zionism is biblical by ideology, but also in practice. As Avigail Abarbanel wrote, the Zionist conquerors of Palestine "have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. […] For a supposedly non-religious movement it's extraordinary how closely Zionism […] has followed the Bible."[5] The paradox is only apparent, because for Zionists, the Bible is not a religious text, but a textbook of history. And so it should be obvious to anybody paying attention that Israel's behavior on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible's underlying ideology.

Prophecies and geopolitics

Only by taking account of the biblical roots of Zionism can one understand why Zionism has never been a nationalist movement like others. It could not be, as Gilad Atzmon remarked, from the moment it defined itself as a Jewish movement, aimed at creating a "Jewish state".[6] Jewish exceptionalism is a biblical concept that has no equivalent in any other ethnic or religious culture.

Neither can Zionism be correctly assessed as a form of colonialism, despite Jabotinsky's effort to do so. For colonialism seeks not to expel the natives, but to exploit them. If Zionism is colonialism, it can only be in the sense of the colonization of the world by Israel, according to the program laid out by Isaiah:

"The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you" (60:5);

"You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings" (60:16);

"You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory" (61:5-6);

"For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed" (60:12)

Christians find hope in Isaiah that, some day, all peoples "will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles. Nations will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war" (Isaiah 2:4). But more important to Zionists are the previous verses, which describe these messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when "all the nations" will pay tribute "to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob," when "the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem," so that Yahweh will "judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples."

No wonder Isaiah is the biblical prophet most often quoted by Zionists. In a statement published in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, Ben-Gurion predicted for the next 25 years:
"All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah."[7]

The launching of the Iraq War was a decisive step toward that goal of a new world order headquartered in Jerusalem. It was the context for a "Jerusalem Summit" held in October 2003 in the highly symbolic King David Hotel, to seal an alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists. The "Jerusalem Declaration" signed by its participants declared Jerusalem "the key to the harmony of civilizations," replacing the United Nations that had become "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships":

"Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [. . .] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets."

Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Richard Perle, the guest of honor, received on this occasion the Henry Scoop Jackson Award.[8]

When Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the (Hebrew) Bible, we should take them seriously and study the Bible. It might help, for example, to know that according to Deuteronomy Yahweh plans to deliver to Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than [it]," adding: "you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them. You shall not make marriages with them…" (7:1-2). As for the kings of these seven nations, "you shall make their name perish from under heaven" (7:24). The destruction of the "Seven Nations," also mentioned in Joshua 24:11, is considered a mitzvah in rabbinic Judaism, included by the great Maimonides in his Book of Commandments,[9] and it has remained a popular motif in Jewish culture, known to every Israeli school child.

It is also part of the Neocon agenda for World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz names the current global conflict in World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, 2007). General Wesley Clark, former commandant of NATO in Europe, wrote in his book Winning Modern Wars (2003), and repeated in numerous occasions, that one month after September 11, 2001, as he was paying a visit to Paul Wolfowitz, a Pentagon general showed him a memo "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran."[10] In his September 20, 2001 speech, President Bush also targeted seven "rogue states", but included Cuba and North Korea instead of Lebanon and Somalia. The likely explanation to that discrepancy is that Bush or his entourage refused to include Lebanon and Somalia, but that the number seven was retained for its symbolic value, as an encrypted signature. Without question, the neocons who were writing Bush's war agenda were Zionists of the most fanatical and Machiavellian kind. But the neocon viper's nest is not the only place to look for crypto-Zionists infiltrated in the highest spheres of US foreign and military affairs. Consider, for example, that Wesley Clark is the son of Benjamin Jacob Kanne and the proud descendant of a lineage of rabbis. It is hard to believe that he never heard about the Bible's "seven nations"? Is Clark himself, together with the Amy Goodmans who interviewed him, trying to write history in biblical terms, while blaming these wars on the Pentagon's warmongers? What's going on, here?

A lesson from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah

To understand how the crypto-Zionists have hijacked the Empire's military power into proxy wars, a lesson can be learned from Book of Ezra and its sequel, the Book of Nehemiah. At the time of Ezra, the imperial power was Persia. After the Persians had conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, some of the exiles and their descendants (42,360 people with their 7,337 servants and 200 male and female singers, according to Ezra 2:64-67) returned to Jerusalem under the protection of King Cyrus, with the project of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus begins the Book of Ezra:

"Yahweh roused the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia to issue a proclamation and to have it publicly displayed throughout his kingdom: Cyrus king of Persia says this, Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem, in Judah.'" (Ezra 1:1-2).

For acting on behalf of Yahweh, Cyrus is bestowed the title of God's "Anointed" (Mashiah) in Isaiah 45:1.

"Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings: […] It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you." (Isaiah 45:1-5)
A succeeding Persian emperor, Darius, confirmed Cyrus' edict, authorizing the rebuilding of the Temple, and ordering gigantic burnt offerings financed by "the royal revenue." Anyone resisting the new theocratic power backed by Persia, "a beam is to be torn from his house, he is to be impaled on it and his house is to be reduced to a rubbish-heap for his offense" (Ezra 6:11). Then another Persian king, Artaxerxes, is supposed to have granted Ezra authority to lead "all members of the people of Israel in my kingdom, including their priests and Levites, who freely choose to go to Jerusalem," and to rule over "the whole people of Trans-Euphrates [district encompassing all territories West to the Euphrates]" (7:11-26). In 458 BCE, the priest Ezra went from Babylon to Jerusalem, accompanied by some 1,500 followers. Carrying with him the newly redacted Torah, Ezra called himself the "Secretary of the Law of the God of heaven" (7:21). He was soon joined by Nehemiah, a Persian court official of Judean origin.

The edicts of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes are fake. No historian believe them authentic. But the fact that Persian kings granted to a clan of wealthy Levites legal authority for establishing a theocratic semi-autonomous state in Palestine seems historical. What did these proto-Zionists give the Persian kings in return? The Bible does not say, but historians believe that the Judeans exiles in Babylon had won the favor of the Persians by conspiring to help them conquer the city.[11]

What is of interest in this biblical narrative is the blueprint for the Zionist strategy of influencing the Empire's foreign policy for its own advantage. In the late 19th century, the empire was British. Its foreign policy in the Middle East was largely shaped by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Born in a family of Marranos converted back to Judaism in Venice, Disraeli can be considered a forerunner of Zionism, since, well before Theodor Herzl, he tried to include the "restoration of Israel" in the Berlin Congress' agenda, and hoped to convince the Ottoman Sultan to concede to Palestine as an autonomous Jewish province. He failed, but succeeded in putting the Suez Canal under British control, through funding from his friend Lionel Rothschild (an operation which also consolidated the Rothschilds' control over the Bank of England). That was the first step in binding British interest and fate to the Middle-East[12]. In short, Disraeli was a modern-day Ezra or Nehemiah, capable of steering the Empire's policy according to the Jewish agenda of the conquest of Palestine, a dream he had cherished ever since his first trip to Palestine in 1830, at the age of 26, and which he had expressed through the hero of his first novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy:

"My wish is a national existence which we have not. My wish is the Land of Promise and Jerusalem and the Temple, all we forfeited, all we have yearned after, all for which we have fought, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs."

A quarter of a century after Disraeli, Theodor Herzl also failed to convince the Sultan. It therefore became necessary that the Ottoman Empire disappear and the cards be redistributed. Zionists then played the British against the Ottomans and, by means now well-documented, obtained from the former the Balfour Declaration (in fact a mere letter addressed by Secretary of State Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild). But when the British started to limit Jewish immigration in Palestine in the 1930s, the Zionists turned to the rising new Imperial power: the United States. Today, the stranglehold of Zionists on US imperial policy is such that a few Jewish neocons can pull the US into a series of wars against Israel's enemies with a single false flag attack.

The capacity of Israel to hijack the Empire's foreign and military policy requires that a substantial Jewish elite remain in the US. Even Israel's survival is entirely dependent on the influence of the Zionist power complex in the United States (euphemistically called the "pro-Israel lobby"). That is also a lesson learnt from Ezra and Nehemiah's time: Nehemiah himself retained his principal residence in Babylone and, for centuries after, the kingdom of Israel was virtually ruled by the Babylonian exiles. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Babylon remained the center of universal Judaism. The comparison was made by Jacob Neusner in A History of the Jews in Babylonia(1965), and by Max Dimont in Jews, God and History (1962). The American Jews who prefer to remain in the United States rather than emigrating to Israel are, Dimont argued, as essential to the community as the Babylonian Jews who declined the invitation to return to Palestine in the Persian era:

"Today, as once before, we have both an independent State of Israel and the Diaspora. But, as in the past, the State of Israel today is a citadel of Judaism, a haven of refuge, the center of Jewish nationalism where dwell only two million of the world's twelve million Jews. The Diaspora, although it has shifted its center through the ages with the rise and fall of civilizations, still remains the universal soul of Judaism."[13]

Conclusion

In the words of the Zionists themselves, including Herzl himself, Zionism was supposed to be the "final solution" to the Jewish question[14]. In 1947, the whole world hoped that it would be, except for Arab leaders who warned against it. But Israel's existence has only resulted in changing the "Jewish question" into the "Zionist question": the question about the true ambitions of Israel. Part of the answer is to be found in the Hebrew Bible. The Zionist question is the Biblical question. Zionists themselves tell us so. Their mouths are full of the Bible.

On March 3, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dramatized in front of the American Congress his deep phobia of Iran by referring to the biblical Book of Esther (the only Bible story that makes no mention of God, incidently). It is worth quoting the heart of his rhetorical appeal to a US strike against Iran:

"We're an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we'll read the Book of Esther. We'll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved. Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us."[15]

Netanyahu managed to schedule his address to the Congress on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy end of the Book of Esther the slaughter of 75,000 Persians, women and children included. This typical speech by the head of the State of Israel is clear indication that the behavior of that nation on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible's underlying ideology. Such is the main objective of my new book, From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, translated by Kevin Barrett.

May those who still want to believe that Zionism has nothing to do with the Bible think twice. Even the nuclear policy of Israel has a biblical name: the Samson Option.[16] And let them read the Prophets:

"And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths." (Zechariah 14:12)
Notes:

  1. Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, p. 17-18, 22, 26-28. ↑
  2. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2007, p. 144. ↑
  3. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10.↑
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Png17wB_omA ↑
  5. Avigail Abarbanel, "Why I left the Cult," October 8, 2016, on mondoweiss.net ↑
  6. Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, pp. 66-67. ↑
  7. David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116 ↑
  8. Official website: www.jerusalemsummit.org/eng/declaration.php. ↑
  9. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cd...nt-187.htm ↑
  10. Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars, Public Affairs, 2003, p. 130. ↑
  11. For example, Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. 1, p. 343. ↑
  12. On Disraeli's proto-Zionist policy, read my article : https://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2015/02/...ssophobia/ ↑
  13. Quoted in Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme, American Free Press, 2009, p. 27 ↑
  14. The first Zionist association inspired by Herzl's program, the National-jüdische Vereinigung Köln, declared as its goal in 1897: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question lies therefore in the establishment of the Jewish State" (quoted in Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 18971918, Transaction Publishers, 1998, p. 17). Herzl wrote: "I believe I have found the solution of the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one," repeating further that Zionism was "the only possible, final, and successful solution of the Jewish Question" (The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1, p. 118). ↑
  15. "The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu's Address to Congress," on www.washingtonpost.com ↑
  16. Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991. ↑

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