(Received October 8, 2013)
Following the publication of my article, “DisinfoWars: Alex Jones War on Your Mind,” I was disheartened to read a blazing critique of the piece and Project Censored–who published it–from James Tracy. Given that we both worked on Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times, which was released just a few days before his critique, I would have assumed Tracy would have contacted Project Censored or me about the release of his article: “With ‘Disinfo Wars’ Project Censored Abandons Principles.” However, he did not and consequently released a critique chock-full of omissions and distortions.
Tracy cherry picked and misrepresented the sources used in my essay. He disingenuously wrote that my essay “is based largely on the work of writers such as Alex Seitz-Wald, Jeremy Stahl, Mark Potok, Alexander Zaitchik, and Jonathan Kay, media personalities like Rachel Maddow, and dubious if not defamatory websites including “RationalWiki” and “AlexJonesDebunked.”
However, he ignored the data from Media Matters, interviews with people who knew and worked with Jones such as Dr. Peter Phillips and radio host Jake Blood, the scholarly work of UC Davis History professor Kathryn Olmsted, Florida State University professor Lance deHaven-Smith, and the work of James Tracy himself, articles from Jones’ websites Infowars and PrisonPlanet, and Jones’ radio show and interviews. Tracy falsely insinuated that I support Maddow’s critique of Jones and the 9/11 Movement.
Quite the contrary, I cite Maddow’s fallacious views as part of a reactive problem to people like Jones. However, I referenced her to document how corporate press personalities silence debate on controversial subjects through Jones’ work, and others like him that get widespread attention. I wrote “The corporate press has ignored most evidence-based researchers’ conclusions about 9/11 by falsely identifying anyone in the 9/11 Truth Movement with Jones and his unproven, sensationalist claims.”
Tracy’s critique focused on lambasting the cherry picked sources instead of addressing the actual evidence in the Jones article. Some of the piece’s strongest evidence —ignored by Tracy—were Jones’ own words. The litany of unfulfilled predictions, flat out wrong statements, and speculative conclusions by Jones demonstrate a pattern of making things up for profit, fame, or some other, undefined reason. Rather than address why this is a problem for other scholars who look into similar controversial subjects once Jones becomes a mainstream face of the topic, Tracy defends Jones and his websites, citing Jones as a “skilled interviewer.”
Tracy does critique the overall thesis of my essay. He argues that Jones is the face of the 9/11 movement because of a vacuum created by the “timidity or disinterest of Progressive-Left scholars” on the subject, and that “Such indifference long-preceded the popularity of Infowars,..” Tracy is right on this point, and that is why I cited this exact claim in my piece by explaining where that “timidity” comes from, “The ability of the corporate press to undermine the message of the 9/11 Truth Movement, one that questions official reports, by associating it with Jones results in part from tactics used by COINTELPRO and the CIA during the Cold War.” My essay argued that the timidity Tracy discusses does not come from a vacuum, it has an origin– the specific causes vary by time and topic– but the contemporary source for many controversial subjects is Jones and the corporate press which peddle him.
The hypocrisy of Tracy in his article is disheartening as he lambastes all of Project Censored for an article written by one individual. Tracy accused my essay of erroneously introducing Jones’ speculation as tantamount to all of Infowars’ reporting: “‘Disinfo Wars’ fails to distinguish between Jones’ on-air antics and Infowars’ journalism.” Then in an illuminating act of hypocrisy, Tracy does what he accused me of doing, by arguing that my essay is representative of the entire Project Censored organization despite it having been written by a single author, myself. “The notion,” Tracy writes, “that the entity [Project Censored] would lash out at any public figure in such a fashion is troubling.” He falsely claims that “PC has chosen to abandon its own essential impartiality to assail one of its own honorees,” despite the byline which identifies myself, not Project Censored, as the author. Further, outside this one article which I wrote, Tracy offers no evidence for why he feels there has been a growing trend, especially among the leadership of the Project, whom Tracy speaks with on a relatively regular basis.
Most troubling is that Tracy’s article promotes censorship through its insinuation that any criticism of Jones and his websites is tantamount to censorship. Tracy argued that PC practices censorship and my essay was an effort to blame it on Jones. He argued that PC “now derogates a media personage [Jones] and outlet [Infowars] producing undeniably important work that is at least as concerned and focused on corruption in high places, threats to civil liberties, and an extremely dangerous American foreign policy as the journalism generated by the array of Progressive news media PC increasingly tends to celebrate.”
Tracy’s claim insinuates that despite the glaring inconsistencies and lack of evidence in Jones’ and Infowars’ work, Project Censored should not criticize them because they produce some good work. This artificial measuring system created by Tracy—for who can and cannot be criticized—is essentially arguing that, even though Project Censored knows people like Jones peddle falsehoods, the Project should censor itself because it shares (some) common interests with Jones on other issues. Thus, critiquing Jones, Infowars, and anything that resembles them for behaving in a specious manner—like the very corporate media PC has critiqued for over four decades—is off limits, because they share a common goal which supersedes their commitment to truth.
The Project has published full chapters applying the propaganda model to the left progressive press and lack of coverage of issues like 9/11 and election fraud, and has regularly critiqued Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! The Project did this again in their newest book Censored 2014 (which also published two pieces by Tracy, one on conspiracy panics) in a piece by John Pilger which points out liberal foundations and censorship in the left progressive press. Jones’s work, like the work of any journalistic outlet with wide viewership, should not be beyond critique.
The work of Tracy is still something to be read and discussed. I welcome debate on this subject and any other. I applaud people like Tracy who want to have dialogue on these subjects, but it is in the best interest for all of us if we stick to the facts and not misrepresent the scholarship of either person. I hope for a continued relationship between Tracy, Project Censored, and myself, focused on maintaining the free flow of information as well as continued dialogue about Jones and his effects on movements.
References
Higdon, Nolan. “Disinfo Wars: Alex Jones’ War on Your Mind,” Project Censored. September 26, 2013, accessed October 5, 2013.
Tracy, James. “With “Disinfo Wars” Project Censored Abandons Principles,” Memory Hole. October 3, 2013, accessed October 5, 2013.
-Nolan Higdon
Higdon writes:
“Tracy’s claim insinuates that despite the glaring inconsistencies and lack of evidence in Jones’ and Infowars’ work,” and ” even though Project Censored knows people like Jones peddle falsehoods,”
You could takes Higdon’s claims against Alex Jones & Infowars and transfer them over to all the writers & economists who have been exposing the financial fraud and terrorism (Max Kaiser, Jim Sinclair, Matt Taibbi, Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Hudson, John Williams) and so on and claim that all their critiques are falsehoods and lack evidence because, after all, we have not had an economic collapse as predicted.
Higdon himself is spreading falsehoods. If he really does read Infowars and Prison Planet and watch Alex Jones then he knows that the writers for Infowars, better than almost any other source, consistently provide links to each statement or claim they are making so that people can see the source themselves.
On-Air live Jones does the same thing. He not only has the sources of his claims laid out before viewers, when he makes other claims his speedy staff pulls up the source for those claims and shows them on-air while Jones is talking. Higdon’s claim of “lack of evidence” is itself a falsehood.
I have been a subscriber to Counterpunch for 20 years and followed Alexander Cockburn’s writing in the Nation etc. As I first watched Alex Jones’ films Endgame and the Obama Deception I realized I could–if I had the technical capability and time–have put a subtitle source on almost every scene referencing a Counterpunch article.
Alexander Cockburn was one of America’s greatest journalist and proudly “left”. But he knew BS when he saw it. These last 5 years the excellent journalism of Counterpunch has been a virtual partner in Alex Jones’ reporting of the truth of what is happening. Of course we know there is no connection between the two and Jeffrey St. Clair would probably be horrified at the suggestion.
In the same way that the attacks earlier this year on James Tracy led so many people here to Memory Hole to discover that, in fact, James Tracy is a fabulous source of journalistic analysis and truth, attacks like Higdon’s do the same for Alex Jones.
Higdon hasn’t really listened to Alex Jones and hasn’t really read Infowars. In the end it is just too absurd to claim that a man who systematically brings to the attention of millions of people the corruption of the elites and through his interviews brings people into contact with innumerable other sources of information is working a counter-intelligence program.
What counter-intelligence program would freely bring people into contact with endless sources of more information through interviews with other investigative reporters and activists of every kind. Are we to believe that having Greg Palast on the Alex Jones show is a propaganda ploy? One could give 50 examples. Come on, Higdon, in the end, it’s embarassing to read what you claim and you deserved Professor Tracy’s criticism.
His rebuff made more sense than his original piece, Erik. He seems to say Jones has some crazy ideas on 9/11 and weather warfare. These are the very topics Jones is most accurate on. He goes on to cite the wimpy critique of someone named Kay, who sounds as if she thinks Jones lacks credibility because he’s too masculine and doesn’t eat enough food with estrogen mimickers in it. I don’t know—maybe this Higdon needs to explain what conspiracy, specifically, Jones is wrong about, and why. He’s right to bring up the fault in Jones’ that has him making predictions. That’s a decent starting point. It doesn’t make Tim Osman go away though. It doesn’t make the cover story of 9/11 credible.
James Tracy’s critique of the original piece is accurate for what it assesses. (Tracy had no obligation to run it by Higdon before uploading it. Why would he? Are they friends?) This is not to say, amongst all the silliness defending camping in the park, i.e. occupy wall street, and citations of media matters (does Higdon’s care who funds media matters at all?), that there is nothing relevant in his piece. The key to all effective counter intelligence is to mix deception with truth. This explains the presence of truth at infowars and in Higdon’s essay. If it also explains the deceptions we have two problems.
Merely citing a lot of sources means nothing (especially when those sources are poorly interpreted). Let’s consider a serious deception put forth on Infowars. Jones had “a guy” on to promote a movie called “Dreams of my Father.” The movie sought to establish that Obama’s real father is a communist black poet. Of course, the movie was for sale at Infowars and of course, Jones concluded the interview with a “That’s it. Now we know who Obama’s father is.” No source can make this nonsense appear reasonable. Here we had a counter intelligence agent, trying to bring back the fears and delusions of the cold war, as a guest—and it wasn’t even a joke!
The Infowars operation is more a hub of censorship than its operators would have you believe (there are certain things one cannot say at its forum, for example). We cannot deny as much. We cannot yet say if the entire project is a very complex counterintelligence operation or if it’s just a misguided scheme to convert neocons to libertarianism. But it’s one of these; perhaps both, but at least one. Read the headlines; then move on . . . not to media matters though.
“or if it’s just a misguided scheme to convert neocons to libertarianism”
I can’t for the life of me think of how any effort to get neoconservatives to stop worshiping the state could possibly be misguided. It’s what those deluded souls need, more than anything else. If that’s what Alex is doing, everyone should send him money. It won’t work, though. Neoconservatives love the state more than leftists do, and that’s saying something.
Oh, and if you can name a better political philosophy than libertarianism, please tell me about it.
I would say political philosophies get us in to trouble, in the first place. I’m against things like murder, disrespecting any kind of life, destruction. Pretty hard to put a philosophy to it but I almost always know who the killers are.
To my mind, an even handed, well reasoned, and well paced response. There are indeed many problems with the piece “With ‘Disinfo Wars’ Project Censored Abandons Principles,” and Nolan Higdon pretty much highlights all of them. A good example of ‘critical’ thinking in action. Many thanks, Prof. Tracy, for setting up the ‘debate.’ We learn to think by example.
Project censored never really confronted the difficult issues of the day. It’s not an important information source compared to Memory Hole.
I agree with Charles that James attacks false news with more clarity and focus. Now here’s the fake news today about Boston which James has covered much better than most news services – at USA Today –
For all those knowledgable of history and military history – Ms Abbot and the other Boston victims have no scars from the so called shrapnel supposed to be in the smoke bombs on their stumps or faces or arms so this USA Today story below is nonsense. NO one bled profusely from their faces or limbs at the time either.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2013/10/06/challenged-athletes-foundation-boston-marathon-clinic/2933505/
Photo did not transfer but here is the description of real shrapnel: the 1st Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment’s first line transport being hit by shrapnel at Signy Signets. Sadly nine horses were killed (the water cart was also riddled with shrapnel). The man in the centre running into the ditch belongs to the Intelligence Corps, he was badly wounded (his head and face being covered in blood). This was the Battle of the Marne, 8 September 1914.
Hi Charles,
I don’t think the issue is whether ‘Project Censored’ is better or worse than ‘Memory Hole’ as a source of information. To criticize the ‘content’ of something someone wrote is not necessarily an attempt to discredit either the person who wrote the article or anything, such as a blog, that a person is doing. And certainly, though Higdon expresses a degree of dismay at the manner in which he sees his ‘article’ characterized by Prof. Tracy, he does not call into question either Prof. Tracy’s personal integrity or what Prof. Tracy is doing, here, at Memory Hole. He is, however, trying to hold Prof. Tracy to higher standards of argumentation and interpretation.
Seems simple: when you say a piece of information is skewed, falsified or invented, ferret it out from general statements of ‘dubious’ content. That way, the reader can follow up, decide for him/herself. Be specific, Mr. Higdon.
Jones does, IMO, over-elaborate and has a talk host’s unfortunate habit of hyping for hype’s sake. That predilection seems to stem from untold hours filling airspace; but that is the format of talk radio. My personal biases come into play, of course. I love to listen to John Bachelor’s even-handed, calm and unpreturbed interviews. He doesn’t rile my terpermental nature. Sometimes we need that after pondering doomsday scenarios through the day. People may be in their particular place for a reason. In any event, let the conversation continue.
Addendum to that statement: Where do we go for in-depth coverage of all questionable events? (And those have been piling up over decades.)
We certainly can’t access establishment sources–media or government narratives to uncover facts. So we turn to ‘fringe’ sites on the free-for-all Internet. If this is our societal profile, leadership is to blame, not the American people. Confusion reigns; clarity is at a premium. Anyone who values their employment or security is falling into the trap–except for a moxy few who will face the consequences without public approbation.
Is Alex Jones one of the clever rascals who has broken the code, has managed to outwit the ruling junta? Only time will tell. We must wait inside the Matrix for enlightenment.
from the 9/11 Consensus Panel —
Award-winning film showing the taboo that shields the
American
Government 9/11 narrative from scholarly examination
http://911inacademia.com
I found Higdon’s rebuttal of Tracy on Alex Jones so irritating that I had to turn to other matters before I could address it. Alex Jones, a right populist, is not my favorite journalist, as I have previously mentioned. But he is worth a hundred Higdon’s, always allowing for exaggeration. Which Higdon doesn’t.
Jones’ basic mantra is THERE IS A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND. Right. I would go further, there is a war on for your soul. Politics is war conducted by other means. Especially in the USA at the present time under the Terror War, where the American people have lost all control of American power.
American power has been taken over by plutocratic gangsters, completely lawless, completely selfish, completely deranged morally, the last stage of Free Enterprise. They are installing an Orwellian gangster plutocracy as a power system, thinly disguised with the left over veneer of the visible institutions our former plutocratic Democracy, drained of people power. The pluts and their governmental reps lie with every breath they take, and the media repeats these lies as if they were true.
Jones rebuts them, often as has been criticized, as if he were excitedly describing a robbery in progress. THERE IS A ROBBERY IN PROGRESS, a political robbery of the American people by the American plutocracy in power. Since Aristotle it has been known that the best way for tyranny to rule is to impoverish the population, who are so involved in simple survival that they have no time or energy for political struggle.
The gangster tactics of American plutocracy, in addition to the continuous war, include the homicidal conspiracies and coverup conspiracies of the American media. Jones reveals them. Alexander Cockburn attacked conspiracy theorists from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, in concert with the mainstream media. Jones attacks instead the gangster imposition of power. His news reports discuss how disgusting it is for the Congress to give a standing ovation to police thugs who shot down an unarmed Black woman. No other American media source does so.
Jones’ audience appears to be the alienated working class rather than the professional-managerial class that Project Censored focuses on. This is where resistance to the Orwellian gangster plutocracy will come from, after a useful ideological consensus is created. God knows it will not come from a wussy presentation of facts that strives for sterile impartiality in a war where the impartial are in no-man’s land.
Just a brief question, Mark: what part of what you are writing, here, do you want me to focus on: the ‘cogency’ of your ‘argument’ and the ‘facts’ as you see them, or … what?
In other words, do you yourself imagine your ‘position’ as you express it in your post to be informed by a regard for ‘truth’ and internal logical consistency?
Beyond ‘prejudice,’ what should a person be appealing to in trying to get their ‘viewpoint’ across to anyone else who may not be seeing things from the angle of that particular viewpoint.
Not all viewpoints are equal. And the criteria that sorts them out for us are epistemological. What are your grounds for believing anything?
Right, Norm, not all viewpoints are equal. And the criteria for sorting them out is whether the support people or power. Focus, if you would, on the ideological predisposition underlying the facts and logical cogency.
“the criteria for sorting them out is whether the [sic] support people or power.”
Well, we certainly agree about that, Mark.
Freedom is the ultimate object in view. The problem is, as always, the state. It will always attract monstrous personalities who wish to use it to reduce liberty and aggrandize the state.
Look at America. Perhaps the freest place in history (excluding the slaves London elites forced upon us), we thought we were throwing off the yoke of tyranny by rebelling. But under the Articles of Confederation we were almost as free. The elites did not like that. The coup that replaced our happy estate is fetishized today, but it began a long, mostly steady, march into today’s Orwellian Hell. The Constitution was never good, because it contained the seed of the tyranny we are enduring today. It took time to germinate, that’s all. Power grew. And grew. People lost their primacy. Very sad.
Of course, it was always sad for blacks and Indians, back when America was the freest place ever, so it was by no means ideal. And all whites didn’t have lovely lives. But that’s not the point. The point is that the state was close to nothing back then. The state demands of each and every one of us essentially everything today. Egads, as the daughter said in The Music Man.
America is a frightfully right-wing country and always has been. The source of tyranny which Jones rants about is, without question, the capitalist elite. And yet Infowars imputes tyranny to a non-existent “socialist” elite using shamelessly twisted propaganda.
Like any competent disinformation artist, Jones blends factual and forthright reports with shamelessly specious ones. The exact mixture seems to be calibrated daily to maintain the intended market niche.
Having made a career and a personal fortune from besmirching the left, successfully fouling the air with regard to important conspiracy theories, a bit of push back seems not only in order but long overdue.
I agree, Alex, that Jones leaves a lot to be desired in style, substance, and ideology. But Higdon isn’t pushback, it is discrediting a source among liberals that is a voice, however distorted, that is better than nothing. And that is pretty much the alternative, Jones or nothing. He interviewed Tracy, and who did in the major media.
Patrick, what the American people need is not freedom, but power. If they attain power, they will make their own freedom. Or not, as they choose. That is a major political reason that the pluts are depriving the population of money, since in a capitalist society, money is power.
Indeed, Mark! The most revolutionary thing that could happen in America in the short term would be the dismantling of the private banking cartel, that is to say, taking ‘the money power’ out of private hands and placing it in the hands of the public at large.
It is an obscene abuse of power over the people that a consortium of private institutions should have the right ‘to print the medium of exchange out of thin air’ and then charge everyone ‘interest’ on it for the right to use it for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. By controlling the ‘medium of exchange,’ the banking cartel, owned by the richest of the rich of America, effectively lays a claim of ‘ownership’ over all of the goods and services produced collectively by ‘all’ Americans.
Banking, the issuance of the medium of exchange, should be a public utility controlled by and for the public. If only in the short term, on the way to liberating ourselves from the domination of the plutocrats and because practically speaking everything that is needed to make this a reality is already in place, the nationalization of the Federal Reserve, so that money could be printed and injected ‘directly’ into the economy for the creation of goods and services would be a boon to most everyone.
For those of you who may not know much about how ‘banking’ in the US functions, because they are an accessible read, I’d recommend Ellen Brown and Michael Hudson, although Ellen Brown first, as a primer, so to speak.
A collection of essays by Ellen can be found, here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/ellen-brown
She also, of course, has her own website:
http://ellenbrown.com/2013/02/24/how-the-fed-could-fix-the-economy-and-why-it-hasnt/
As for Michael Hudson, you can find his website here:
http://michael-hudson.com/
Hudson is also a very enlightening read as to how, by maintaining the petro-dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the US dominates the world both economically and militarily.
If Americans as a whole are to take power out of the hands of their class of oppressors, they must in the short term, at some point, take hold of the ‘banking function’ in the economy.
The system you are propounding here, Norm, goes by the name Social Credit, or Greenbackism. It is premised on the notion that money has no inherent value. In essence, it says that you can create wealth by putting pictures on pieces of paper. If that were true, of course, Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world.
Gary North has been debunking this silly idea for more than half a century. Here is what appears at the top of his Ellen Brown page (http://www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm):
Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt Is an Anti-Gold Currency, Pro-Fiat Money, Greenback, Keynesian Tract. Here, I Take It Apart, Error by Error.
Gary North
Ellen Brown has thrown in the towel. She is no longer willing to argue with me. I finished my critique of her on November 17, 2010. On November 20, she publicly switched sides. She came out in favor of Bernanke, the Federal Reserve System, and quantitative easing.
Hard to believe? Read it here: http://www.garynorth.com/public/7286.cfm
I spent almost 200 hours over a two-month period refuting this left-wing lawyer, line by line. I said repeatedly that she is intellectually unreliable. She has just proved my case. She has joined the Federal Reserve’s cheeleaders.
On November 24, 2010, she followed up with a long article in praise of quantitative easing. She said quantitative easing is the Populist solution. It took me 52 articles and 30 responses, but I finally flushed her out.
Therefore, the following is ancient history. Here is what this department originally said.
Here is a short article by Dr North discussing the disaster that is the Federal Reserve System:
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2013/10/09/rothbard-fed-told-us/
Bad as the Fed is, allowing Congress to create as much money as it wants would make Zimbabwe look like Switzerland.
Hi Patrick,
You write: “The system you are propounding here, Norm, goes by the name Social Credit, or Greenbackism. It is premised on the notion that money has no inherent value. In essence, it says that you can create wealth by putting pictures on pieces of paper. If that were true, of course, Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world.”
Clearly, you neither understand the meaning of what I wrote nor the connection between ‘money,’ the ‘pieces of paper,’ and the ‘goods and services’ that are the true ‘wealth’ of a nation. You can’t eat paper but you can eat food. In our society, you can’t get food without the ‘pieces of paper.’ To get the ‘pieces of paper’ to get your food, as you should, you yourself need to give something, i.e., work in return. The ‘pieces of paper’ are but a means to facilitate an efficient ‘exchange’ of ‘goods and services.’ No one should be allowed access to the ‘pieces of paper’ without giving something in return. Under the current system, the rich give themselves the ‘pieces of paper’ without giving anything, while they ‘loan’ those very ‘pieces of paper’ out to everyone else who not only has to give something in return, but at “interest.”
Very obviously to me, you need to read both Ellen Brown and Michael Hudson. Otherwise, you speak in ignorance of what you ‘quite obviously’ do not understand.
Brown. Hudson. Trustworthy. Informed. Do yourself a favor.
North wrties: “I spent almost 200 hours over a two-month period refuting this left-wing lawyer, line by line. I said repeatedly that she is intellectually unreliable. She has just proved my case. She has joined the Federal Reserve’s cheeleaders.”
Why not have a first hand read of Ellen Brown’s cheerleading:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-fed-could-fix-the-economy-and-why-it-hasnt/5324184
QE is absolutely NOT the ‘printing of money’ for the purpose of ‘directly’ stimulating the economy, although the ‘right wing’ tries very hard to convince you and me that it is. It is the ‘printing of money’ for the ‘accounting’ trick of patching up the balance sheets of the BIG Money Cartel. If, instead of printing up 17 (or 20) trillion dollars and giving it to the Banks to speculate in the derivative markets, that money had been spent ‘directly’ into the economy, i.e., making it available as collateral to ‘produce’ actual goods and services, well guess what, you would actually have those ‘goods and services’ — no? And aren’t ‘goods and services’ what a market economy is supposed to be about?
I can understand why Brown gave up speaking to the obvious genius that North must be.
“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” Murray Rothbard
That applies to you, Norm… and Ellen Brown, and Bill Still, and all the other proponents of “the State” issuing the money. Dear Goodness… it would be just as bad!!! Trouble is, it “sounds good” to people who do NOT understand the first principles of money… Check out Rothbard. You may have your eyes opened….
Hi Martha,
I’ll have a read of Rothbard as I’ve not read him.
I don’t think the Brown and Hudson proposals would turn out as badly as you think.
If my tone came off a tad disrespectful, it had less to do with ‘economics’ than with someone — in this instance Gary North — misrepresenting (I think, willfully so) the views of another — in this instance Ellen Brown. And that would explain my sassy dig of ‘his being an obvious genius,’ because to my mind it is quite obvious that he is misreading Brown — “as a cheerleader of the Federal Reserve,” you will recall.
So North is either disingenuous or can’t read. For clearly, if you bother to read Brown, what she is advocating cannot in any way, shape, or form be construed as what the Fed is actually doing, and so North stands discredited in at least this instance.
The state has grown to the point where it has the asserted the right to fondle your genitals as a condition to enter a private company’s airplane; to forbid a bus full of visitors to take pictures of Mt. Rushmore; to deny the citizenry the chance to gaze at Old Faithful, or to walk on the open-air Mall in Mordor…er, Washington. It controls every aspect of our lives. It insists on monitoring every financial transaction every person engages in. It believes it can forcibly medicate everyone, by fluoridating the water, by mandating poisonous vaccines, etc. It forbids us the right to drink raw milk. And now it has seized absolute control over the medical realm, with an eye on itself soon being the only medical provider.
In short, the now state has complete power over every aspect of our lives.
Freedom IS power. Lack of freedom is lack of power. The problem is, the state continues, relentlessly, to reduce our freedom. It is a steady, logarithmic curve away from freedom and into Orwell’s predicted totalitarianism. It is the gulag.
At the time of the War to Prevent Southern Independence, the only contact the average person had with the federal government was mail delivery. At the turn of the 20th century, there were no taxes on sales, income, property, or anything else outside of excises and tariffs. There were no police, to speak of. There were no bureaucrats.
If you want a picture of the power that freedom provides, put the movie Jeremiah Johnson to the top of your Netflix queue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le0PV1I-T9U&w=420&
Patrick…. Not to sound condescending here, but you are STILL supporting Ellen Brown and the “Greenbackers” out of a mis-understanding. And, still denigrating Gary North’s point of view….. IF you were to read a bit more of Rothbard and his “first principles” of what “money” actually is, you will see that Brown deserves a nastier approach than North ever took.
Until you have a grasp of ‘money’, you might not want to be so free with your unsubstantiated “opinions”… just makes you look all the more ignorant.
THIS is the division that all will come down to at the collapse of our current monetary policy… there’ll be so many of YOU looking to give the power of “creating money” to the government, that our dilemma will never change.
Sorry… my previous comment was directed to “Norm”…
I knew that. Glad you raised your voice here, martha. I don’t mind standing alone, but it’s nice to have company on the front lines.
I wonder if Dr. Tracy has any ass left after that chewing!! I applaud Dr. Tracy for posting this and allowing Mr. Higdon a full response.
Good of Nolan Higdon to respond to Prof. Tracy’s critique of his Alex Jones essay on Project Censored, but Higdon continues to be in denial about his sources and the central theme of his piece.
He claims that Jones is always wrong about his predictions and then backs into this premise by citing paid “anti-conspiracists” like Alexander zaitchik, Jonathan Kay, and Alex Seitz-Wald. Higdon is so flat-out wrong, that his PC essay is irredeemably, fatally flawed. The least Higdon could have done is actually spend some time listening to Alex Jones rather than making it seem as if he did real research by citing 100+ footnotes sourcing paid shills who demonize anyone who questions 9/11.
Here’s what I don’t understand. Is Higdon an unshakable believer of the official government account of 9/11, or does he believe there’s more to the story? If he is the former, then his motive for demonizing Alex Jones is readily apparent, and he can take his place proudly next to hacks like Seitz-Wald and Jonathan Kay. (Still, his piece has no place whatsoever on Project Censored.)
But if he’s the latter, then he is dangerously off-the-mark. Alex Jones breaks stories that are constantly censored by the MSM. His citations are impeccable. Some of his predictions may not come true because HE EXPOSES THE FALSE FLAG before it happens.
With uninentional humor, Higdon wrote “The corporate press has ignored most evidence-based researchers’ conclusions about 9/11 by falsely identifying anyone in the 9/11 Truth Movement with Jones and his unproven, sensationalist claims.”. This is a shocking statement from someone who works on Project Censored. No, Nolan, the corporate press doesn’t report on 9/11 because THE MEDIA IS CONTROLLED.
Nolan Higdon had a real story here, but he was too busy reading tripe from AlexJonesDebunked.com and Snopes to get it. The real story was and is, why is Alex Jones the only radio show with millions of listeners who reveals all the stories censored by the corporate media? In this sense, Alex jones is on the same side of the information war as Project Censored. That’s why Higdon’s piece is not only flawed, but why it has absolutely no place whatsoever on the Project Censored website.
This perceptively underscores a central impetus for writing the critique, the foremost being that any journalistic or scholarly argument (and there are certainly similarities between the two) must have a firm footing. This is impossible to establish with authors such as Seitz-Wald, Zaitchik, and others whose observations cannot sustain serious scrutiny. They mainly function to confirm their own readerships’ unexamined beliefs and, speaking of COINTELPRO, arguably to create infighting and confusion within more thoughtful and inquisitive circles.
I do not envy Nolan Higdon’s position in this exchange, but do appreciate his ambition in attempting to tackle such a challenging topic. A crossroads where scholars examining conspiracy research typically find themselves involves seriously approaching–and by implication validating–the given conspiracy researchers being examined, or dismissing and sometimes even attacking these. The latter is far more common and can take the form of careless disparagement that is either oblique or direct. This comes down to a question of intellectual honesty, and at the end of the day most scholars are no different than other professionals such as medical doctors and pharmacologists, with professional relationships, reputations and livelihoods to attend to.
Along these lines, I find it interesting that where Higdon’s initial essay garnered many shares on PC’s site and few comments, my critique on this site has had the exact opposite effect, which is what one would desire in any scholarly-intellectual exchange.
In an effort to confirm Jones’ evil intent, we may comparatively review other commentators who address similar if not identical themes as Jones and Infowars. Indeed, in some cases they are readily cited by Jones as inspirational. For example, Dr. Stan Monteith and Alan Watt are both very astute observers in their own right who see geopolitics and similar phenomena through a like-minded lens. Their even-keeled on-air style is almost the opposite of how Jones’ monologues shape up. Are they also perhaps disinformation or COINTELPRO operatives? Since Monteith has been at this for a half century this is a very long-running and elaborate conspiracy indeed!
I think that Mr. Higdon is correct to point out that Rachel Maddow’s remarks are employed by him to fulfill another purpose apart from establishing his central thesis, and here I stand corrected. Yet as Havlicek notes, the academics (myself included) Higdon points to, are no where to be found in the article’s introductory paragraphs but are utilized to support the erroneous thesis. I suggest this in an endnote appearing in my original critique. Maddow is nevertheless typically the most wrongheaded and inflammatory of the “anti-conspi-racists,” which is perhaps unsurprising given her employer’s record.
Throughout this whole conversation I had Dr. Stan’s endorsement in the back of my mind. I have listened to his interviews long enough to know how intensely concerned he is about infiltrators and frauds; yet he endorses Alex highly, having him on the show and going on Alex’s show. I don’t think he is always correct when he says one or another commentator is or is not a snake in the grass. But he definitely thinks Alex is a force for good.
It’s a puzzle; all life is a puzzle. We can only attempt to unravel it piece by piece with patience. Much said of political stripes. This link is a starting place where modern Western economic theory intersects political bias, where money and ego drive the world of overarching process.
Long but thorough; break it into segments. You will recognize many names in the news of past and present. “From the advent of Marx to the advent of PNAC” is a brief synopsis. The terms get garbled. Alex Jones should read it carefully…he often confuses issues.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0812/S00378.htm
I read the Anonymous article (above) and the rebuttal by Dr. North. The scholarship of the authors and their political biases really come through loud and clear. Does it merely put us back to square one. Everyone is guilty; no one is guilty. Everyone has an agenda; no one does. Impossible to get a fix on facts.
I do recall reading, after the overthrow of Allende in Chili, that the Chicago School of Economics and Henry Kissinger were more than passing shadows haunting the event. I do know that globalization is not healthy for any country but the IMF and World Bank have been practicing what John Perkins (whistleblower) called economic hits on vulnerable countries. Big money swoops in, offers assistance at skyhigh rates, which the country cannot pay back, then buys out resources at pennies on the dollar. Gangsters flourish when civil societies break down. That is the take-away lesson.
So in view of these global facts of life, quibbling over the Illuminati and who set up libertarian polices or how far back the history goes are
hardly germane to the situation at hand. I know nothing about the intricasies of economics; I do know money rules and is corrupting all institutions. Foreign and domestic. But I have learned a bit in this discussion, though it does seem far afield from the original thread re Nolan Higdon.
My dear Norm,
You say “you speak in ignorance of what you ‘quite obviously’ do not understand.” Oh, on the contrary. I have spent many years studying the subject. You say “Clearly, you neither understand the meaning of what I wrote nor the connection between ‘money,’ the ‘pieces of paper,’ and the ‘goods and services’ that are the true ‘wealth’ of a nation. ” This is not at all clear. I understand Brown’s position, and reject it completely.
It all comes down to the question: What is money? Greenbackers, like Brown, believe it can be created out of thin air, and that Congress should be the entity to do it. She and her ilk believe that Congress can be trusted only to counterfeit just the right amount of money each year, like Goldilocks. That is preposterous.
Money can’t be created out of thin air. When the virtual printing press adds units of currency to the money supply, it simply dilutes the value of the original units. No new money comes into existence; the original pool of value remains the same size, the units thereof becoming less valuable.
Brown’s is a statist hallucination; she trusts the bureaucracy. I’ve heard her say it in interviews. She loves Washington’s bloated class of takers, the busybodies who gleefully haul barrycades out of storage to block access to the people’s parks, and lock up busloads of of foriegn visitors who came here to see our public lands ( read this and weep: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/360744/america-your-vacation-wonderland-mark-steyn). She thinks the bureaucrats are adding value to society, and she believes we should have lots more of them.
I call her argument a hallucination because she agrees with what you argue when you say this: “No one should be allowed access to the ‘pieces of paper’ without giving something in return.” “Should,” you say; “allowed access,” you say. If you trust the state to this extent, you are deluded, and cannot detect the glide path we are on to 1984. The state can never be trusted to do the right thing. It can always be trusted to aggrandize itself.
When you say “The ‘pieces of paper’ are but a means to facilitate an efficient ‘exchange’ of ‘goods and services,’” you must understand that the currency you are talking about, in your idyl, is created by Congress, out of thin air. You are quite correct that today we have a very bad system (as Dr. North’s article on the Fed states beautifully). But again, what is “money”?
Originally, our money was silver coins, and gold coins. Paper “warehouse receipts” representing physical metal stored in banks served as convenient substitutes. Because of fractional reserve banking–inflation–the value of those currency units in terms of goods and services has declined. That is a bad thing, but it’s important to remember that the value of a “dollar” today is directly tied to its value when you could walk into the bank with a $20 banknote and exchange it for an ounce of gold. The value of an ounce of gold, of course, was directly tied to how hard it was to mine and refine.
What greenbackers like Brown propose is nothing but inflation–the accelerated dilution of the original units of currency that started out as derivatives of gold ounces.
Now, it is important to note that there is no gold backing to our money today, but that is quite irrelevant to the point I’m making. Originally, there was, so when the Fed was created, and Federal Reserve Notes gradually were substituted for the gold certificates in circulation, culminating with the despicable Franklin Roosevelt outlawing the gold backing altogether, there was a continuous thread of perceived value to what a “dollar” was worth.
All the new “money” Brown wants Congress to create is not money at all. Creating new units of currency does not create wealth.
Hi Patrick,
You write: “It all comes down to the question: What is money? Greenbackers, like Brown, believe it can be created out of thin air, and that Congress should be the entity to do it. She and her ilk believe that Congress can be trusted only to counterfeit just the right amount of money each year, like Goldilocks. That is preposterous.”
First off, money ‘is’ the ‘dollar’ or whatever you want to call the unit of currency being used to facilitate exchange. And yes, when a dollar that you ‘print’ is put into circulation, it should correspond to a unit of — what? A dollar’s worth of ‘goods’ or ‘services,’ correct? Therefore, if you print a ‘dollar,’ and require of whomever your give the newly minted dollar to, a contribution by way of producing ‘goods’ or ‘services’ equivalent in value to that dollar, which that person then ‘sells,’ you do not have the so called depreciation of the value of the money, since on one side of the balance sheet you have ‘the printed dollar’ — which, I’m sorry to say, you had to ‘print’ or create in digital form, i.e., create from ‘nothing,’ so to speak — and on the other side of the balance sheet, you have the ‘promise’ to produce the dollar’s worth of ‘goods’ or ‘services.’ That’s what ‘borrowing’ and ‘loaning’ is, or what to my mind it should be. Once the dollar’s worth of ‘goods’ or ‘services’ is sold in the course of commerce, the dollar, originally created out of ‘thin air,’ is returned to its point of origin by the original borrower paying back his ‘debt,’ and so fulfilling his end of the bargain, which was to ‘produce’ a dollar’s worth of ‘goods’ and ‘services’ for the newly-minted, invented-out-of-thin-air dollar that at the beginning of the money cycle he was ‘loaned,’ and at no interest if you will. One ‘denominated dollar,’ here, on this side of the balance sheet; one ‘dollar’s’ worth of ‘real’ ‘goods and services’ on that side of the balance sheet, in perfect correspondence with the ‘newly minted’ dollar that was put out on ‘loan’ to the real economy. The circle is complete. Nothing hard to understand, here.
Today, we have something like this: money gets ‘created’ and handed over to the ‘private’ banks who then loan the cash to the public for ‘profit’ to themselves, that is, on money ‘gifted’ to them, or they use the funds to ‘gamble’ it away in the financial markets, again for profits to themselves.
The printing of money, to benefit people and not profiteers, should be in the hands of the people. Otherwise, it is a means of enslaving a people, of getting more value out of people than the initial value ‘loaned’ to them.
I’d like to get into gold and silver as ‘money,’ but I’m running late. At the next opportune moment.
And I apologize if I put anyone’s nose out of joint. I was annoyed with ‘North’ for making attributions to Brown that are simply false.
And I still like you guys. Topics will surely exude a little heat from time to time. And that’s because we all know what a crappy situation it is that we are all trapped in. We are all wracking our brains to find a way out. Not easy.
I bid you a very good afternoon, or what is left of it.
“The printing of money, to benefit people and not profiteers, should be in the hands of the people”
No, the printing of money should not happen at all. And if you agree with Ellen Brown, what you mean when you say “the hands of the people” you mean Congress. God help us, if that were ever to happen.
Oh, and as for this: “I was annoyed with ‘North’ for making attributions to Brown that are simply false,” Dr. North would LOVWE to have you demonstrate that to him. He simply lives for that sort of challenge.
So, are you suggesting a market economy without ‘money.’ A system of barter?
Hi Patrick,
You write: “Dr. North would LOVWE to have you demonstrate that to him. He simply lives for that sort of challenge.”
Well Dr. North, with the emphasis on the “Dr.,” is not so far a very impressive read, unless ‘ad hominem’ arguments have a way of clinching issues for you.
And example:
“If she tries to defend herself by saying, “This is consistent with what I have always said,” then she is dumber than dirt, or else she thinks her followers are dumber than dirt. If she says, “Yes, I switched. So what?” then she is just another lawyer.”
Well, then, there is just not escaping North’s incontrovertible logic: if, by argument, you prove Brown to be consistent, you are simply ‘dumb.’ And if Brown concedes North’s point, well she shows herself to be what she is, a ‘lawyer,’ in the most pejorative sense of the term.
The “Dr.” certainly has me convinced.
An odd question, Norm, in light of the mini tutorial I offered you on the history of money. Money is a physical object that has intrinsic value. Humans have used gold and silver as money because they are scarce, and the human effort to obtain them is quantifiable. These metals can be traded in proportion to the value of what it took to produce them. Ellen Brown’s world does not function that way. For her, you just type a few keys on Congress’ computer, and you’ve produced a few trillion new “dollars.” No sweat required.
Incidentally, I’m really curious about your comment that Gary North’s argument is “simply false.” That’s a fantastic claim, considering that he quotes he directly. If she has flip-flopped back since then, shouldn’t that cause you to lose confidence in her mind?
Leapfrogging each other.
Look, Gary North is as exacting a historian as anyone alive. He has no patience with weak argumentation. Maybe he shouldn’t say “dumb,” and maybe he shouldn’t accuse her of being a lawyer, as a pejorative. That’s his prerogative. But he has in fact an earned doctorate (in history), and has published perhaps dozens of books. He is scrupulous. His disdain for Brown’s work is well deserved.
I prefer logic to disdain, especially from a Phd.
North ‘does’ misinterpret Brown. Taking what she says about QE2 completely out of context, you know, the very consistently elaborated economic view that Brown espouses. About QE2, Brown is essentially saying, look everybody, the Fed is ‘monetizing’ the governments debt, thereby proving the ‘thesis’ that the government doesn’t have to borrow funds from a private consortium of banks printing private money and then having to reimburse all that printed money along with a premium of interest. Of course, the Fed isn’t a public institution, but in principle, the concept of ‘interest and debt free money’ is in practical terms ‘proven.’
So unless I completely misunderstand Brown, I can ‘see’ with my eyes that what North ‘prints’ as a reading of Brown’s assertions on QE2 is completely off the mark, notwithstanding his lofty academic title. And I’m fairly certain that my reading of Brown is accurate.
As for gold and silver being money. I suppose they can be and are money providing ‘people’ agree with one another that these metals ‘can’ serve a monetary function. Thus, so many ounces of silver will be equal to so many ounces of gold. And then what? Ah yes, now we must decide what so many ounces of these metals will be worth on the market. So many fractions of gold or silver will be worth so many loaves of bread, so many tomatoes, so many Toyota Camries, and so on. Who gets to decide these equivalencies is the market, I presume. 20 ounces of gold for a Toyota Camry, please. Okay.
But as you pointed out, ‘pieces of paper’ are more convenient than gold or silver coins. But as long as a strict equivalence between the ‘paper units’ representing ‘gold or silver units’ is respected, the ‘paper’ should retain its purchasing ‘power’ in ‘gold or silver terms.’ Okay.
So how do I get me the ‘paper’ that represents the ‘gold or silver’ on deposit somewhere? Oh, that’s right, I have to find someone who has the ‘legal right’ to issue the ‘paper’ backed by the ‘gold or silver.’ Once everyone has taken out a loan, the sum of which equals all the ‘gold and silver’ on deposit, that’s it, no more loans because otherwise the ‘paper’ and ‘precious metal’ ratio would become skewed. But at this point the economy can no longer grow, even if there is a screaming need for growth to accommodate, say, an increase in population. For all the gold and silver, in paper equivalent, is already in circulation. I guess the excess population will just have to go away. Starving only takes a month or so.
And then in this perfect monetary system, wherein the value of a dollar is always worth 1/20th of an ounce of gold or whatever, we have — what? That dollar. That piece of paper. Where did that come from? Did it get ‘printed’ somewhere? Or does the dollar ‘inherently’ sprout directly out of the precious metals? And then who ‘owns’ the ‘basis’ of the dollar? All that gold and silver? How does the ownership of that get determined? And then, if you loan out the value of all your gold and silver supply, but you charge interest, where is the interest portion of the overall value of the gold and silver supply to come from? For interest is value — no? All the gold and silver gets loaned out at interest, nominally speaking, and nothing is added to the supply because otherwise that would be inflationary. All the stuff comes back, but guess what, no interest can possibly return because that ‘interest portion’ would need to match up with a precious metal basis that is ‘nonexistent,’ since the original supply was what it was and cannot return in a quanta of value exceeding its original magnitude. For otherwise, the ratio between the ‘paper’ and the pool of precious metal goes all out of whack, right? Am I getting this, more or less, would you say?
So there are a few problems with ‘backing a currency with precious metals.’ Not the least of which would be this one: who would ensure that the paper ratio would remain tied to the precious metal supply? Would that be a private entity? And unless the public had access to the accounting, how could the public know that the private bank was not cheating in issuing the ‘paper,’ as in engaging in fractional banking? If not a public institution to conduct the oversight to keep the private bank honest, then what?
But that’s right, you can trust a private banker more than a banker working for a public bank under public scrutiny. Hayek says it is so, and so it is. And Gary-the-Phd.-North says so also. So it must be. And if you don’t believe them, you will be smitten by their disdain, quite deservedly, and shown to be dumb as dirt if only because Gary says so.
I’m also uncertain of what it means to declare a precious metal to be ‘inherently’ valuable. Valuable in terms of what and in what proportion? If people have to ‘decide’ that, what does that do to the ‘inherence’ of that value? Rather, as with ‘pieces of paper,’ the ‘relative’ value of a ‘specified’ unit of gold or silver is ‘prescribed’ and ‘attributed’ either by convention or formal agreement. It is not ‘inherent’ or ‘independent’ of what men and women decide that it is.
This is a hopeless jumble of false assertions and straw men, just the kind of thing Ellen Brown makes her stock and trade. I will be brief.
You say: “I’m also uncertain of what it means to declare a precious metal to be ‘inherently’ valuable.” One does not “declare” it so. It’s value is a function of the human effort required to produce it; a combination of the search for it (prospecting), developing and financing a mine, working the ore, refining the metal, minting coins or bars transporting the finished product and storing it. Today, the all in cost of producing an ounce of silver for the average primary silver producer is around $32–that’s break even–no profit. For Gold, I believe, its $1,300-$1,400, on average. Like anything else in the marketplace, money has an inherent value–what it costs to produce plus a margin of profit. This, of course, is not true of electronic impulses, and almost so with paper–it costs just as much to print “a gazillion trillion dollars” on a slip of paper as it does “one dollar.”
All this silly talk about loans and interest presupposes the system we have today, which, I have stated, is very bad. We had a very fine system before the Fed was imposed upon us: a gold coin standard. Fractional reserve banking should be outlawed, but it will be hard to maintain in any event if the state does not give banks special privilege (bank holidays).
Under that system, there will be a steady rise in the value of money over time (price deflation), as the economy grows more efficient and goods and services cost less and less to provide. There is no need for more money in the system, although mining will continue to add more anyway. It really does not matter how many ounces exist. Over time, an ounce might grow in value to the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money–so one ounce will go a great deal farther in the future than it does today.
Private bankers can be trusted to cheat, to create more banknotes than ounces of metal in storage. Which is why the people should have the ultimate power over the money: bank runs. When the public suspects that something is fishy at a certain bank, and all its customers go there to exchange their banknotes for metal on the same day, the crook banker is quickly found out. The bank ruptures, and goes out of business. Besides losing his business, he should also go to jail (I’d advise that he be executed, personally).
In a free market, obviously, there will be a very good living in forming a private company to assess the soundness of banks and provide ratings on them to the public for a fee. Bad banks will be less likely to emerge with such competition. And government will, happily, have absolutely no hand in the money system–outside of punishing crooks.
Hope that helps.
Hi Patrick,
About the ‘inherent’ value of gold, you write: “One does not “declare” it so. It’s value is a function of the human effort required to produce it;”
Why does a miner like Barrick Gold mine gold? Because it has a value in terms of ‘the medium of exchange’ that circulates in the economy of which Barrick Godl is a part. You yourself say it: you state the ‘value’ or ‘cost’ of gold in dollar terms — no? In our context, because the ‘dollar’ is the medium of exchange, there is no other way to state the so called ‘inherent’ value of gold. Barrick does not mine for the ‘inherent’ value of gold, which as you yourself state, is the ‘cost’ of production. Barrick and all other miners extract gold out of the ground for a margin of profit, over and above the ‘production cost’ of gold, or as you call it, the ‘inherent’ value. Barrick and all miners of gold have an eye on the ‘dollar’ value of gold, that is, its ‘exchange value’ in terms of the circulating ‘medium of exchange,’ which is the ‘dollar’ — no?
The problem with the concept of gold as both ‘money’ and ‘being inherently valuable’ is that it implies that this precious metal can be defined as valuable in ‘non relational’ terms. But in an economy where trade is not barter but functions on the basis a ‘medium of exchange,’ whatever that ‘medium’ may be, the ‘substance’ of the ‘medium of exchange,’ its essence or meaning, if you will, is ‘relational,’ that is to say, it mediates ‘equivalencies’ of value: a dozen tomatoes is $4.00; a pack of cigarettes is also $4.00; a dozen tomatoes is equal to a pack of cigarettes — no? Thus outside of this ‘relation of equivalence,’ the ‘dollar’ is without meaning. And so it is with anything that we use as a ‘medium’ of exchange, gold and silver included. Gold is not a ‘stand alone value’ determined by its cost of production. And the proof is that ‘production costs’ vary over time, and therefore so must the ‘average’ dollar value of gold, or its ‘relative value’ in relation to the costs of production of all other commodities in the universe of ‘relational equivalencies of which it is a part.’
If Barrick Gold and Gold Corp and Yamana Gold and Newmont Mining mined gold for its ‘inherent’ value, they would quickly go out of business.
So I think you can see that I see a certain lack of elaboration in your concept of what ‘money’ is. I don’t mean that in a dis
respectful manner. And my previous post was in the principles of its purport ‘on the money,’ so to speak. It highlighted some of the ‘logical’ problems ‘inherent’ to a monetary system tying the ‘issuance’ of the medium of exchange to a more or less ‘fixed’ ratio between a currency and a commodity hoarded as the basis of that currency. The real basis of a currency should be the overall aggregate of all available goods and services, including those in the pipeline as ‘promises’ to repay ‘loans’ advanced in the circulating currency. For ‘goods and services’ are the wealth and the ‘medium of exchange’ the means of distributing that wealth.
“Why does a miner like Barrick Gold mine gold? Because it has a value in terms of ‘the medium of exchange’ that circulates in the economy of which Barrick Godl is a part. You yourself say it: you state the ‘value’ or ‘cost’ of gold in dollar terms — no?”
I explained that in a previous comment, Norm: we retain a residual sense of the value of a dollar because there is a continuity between the present and the time in the past when a dollar was 1/20th of an ounce of gold. It is impossible, in other words, to impose new form of money arbitrarily, because no one would know what it was worth.
Take the Euro, for instance. All European currencies converted from a known standard of value to the new one. So when a Frenchman traded whatever it was, 6 Francs for a single Euro, he knew how much a baguette was worth in Euros.
This is to say that all money originated in the free market, where people as a group collectively, spontaneously, agree on value.
If it takes a day of hard work to physically mine a certain amount of ore, it is worth, in trade, something that takes a day of hard work to produce. It is not worth a pice of paper, whatever the picture on it says. And no government can change that reality; all the state can do is wrest control over the money away from the marketplace, and debase it–and the users of it will adjust to its changing value over time. But that sense of its value can always be traced back in time to the moment the collective Mind of society decided what it started out being worth, thousands of years ago.
Ellen Brown understands none of this.
So you would you agree that new dollars minted out of thin air, can’t create goods and services out of thin air. Hence the stupidity of stimulus schemes in the first place.
“Gold is not a ‘stand alone value’ determined by its cost of production. And the proof is that ‘production costs’ vary over time, and therefore so must the ‘average’ dollar value of gold, or its ‘relative value’ in relation to the costs of production of all other commodities in the universe of ‘relational equivalencies of which it is a part.’”
This would be true, more or less, if we had an actual marketplace that was devoted to price discovery in the metals. But we don’t. In our era, the LBMA and the Comex “fix” the price by manipulated futures markets. The central banks, desirous of propping up the perceived values of their fiat currencies, provide any sum of money needed to do this, and the futures markets happily comply.
You write: “This would be true, more or less, if . . .”
No, Patrick. It is always true so long as ‘gold’ serves a ‘monetary’ function. Money is the term of ‘value equivalence’ or ‘value reference’ between commodities being exchanged. It is a ‘relation.’ It says, in terms of ‘me,’ ‘this’ equals ‘that.’ At bottom. At its core. Although it may be true that the ‘equivalence,’ the ‘true’ value of ‘this’ in terms of ‘that,’ is being miss-stated because, as you imply, the ‘mechanism of price discovery’ may be broken.
The reality, today, is that the metals can’t be produced at the prices set on the Comex and the LBMA. Unless the manipulation ends, soon, the marginal producers will be driven out of business. Then, shortages will be acutely felt. This might force a disconnect between the physical price and the futures price, and save the big producers. We shall see.
Gold has long since ceased to be tied to currency; for the first time in history, all currencies are fiat–which is just what Ellen Brown wants to see. She hates the very idea that gold would be restored to its historical role as money.
The point I keep repeating, and that you don’t seem to hear, is that the state cannot create money. Only the market can do that. Dollars have a perceived value that is a direct descendent from the time when their value was tied to the value of a miner’s effort to bring gold to the market. The state has seized control over money, and systematically diluted the dollar’s value, but it is the continuity with the original perceived value that tells us what a dollar is worth today.
Do I have to keep saying the same thing in different words, Norm?
The state, in other words, could not eliminate the dollar and start a new currency without using the dollar as a benchmark. Any new fiat currency will always retain a “racial memory” of the value of the one that preceded it. The state simply does not have the power that Brown believes it does.
These are trying times, appreciate those brave enough to keep speaking and when voices like Mr. Jones are stiffled, we are doomed. Yesterday the leader invited conservative journalists to the house for an off the record discusssion. Sure wonder what that was about, Charles Krautheimer indicated he went, but could not speak about what transpired as it was off the record. Here, we have the AP speaking of the most untransparent and threatening admin ever… http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_PRESS_FREEDOM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-10-10-10-02-45
The dispute between James Tracy and Higdon is important because it speaks to the police state being installed in the USA by Bush-Obama. This is not the classic fascism of Italy and Germany of pre-world war 2. It is what Michael Parenti has called ” the gangster state.” It is the end product of Free Enterprise when the plutocracy of billionaires are unconstrained by law, and by the traditional political morality that is Proclaimed to underlie it.
A major distinction of fascism and the gangster state was pointed out by the political scientist Sheldon Wolin in DEMOCRACY, INC. Fascism mobilizes the people around the state while, in the USA, the function of the government and major corporations is to DE-MOBILIZE the American population. The American power system has traditionally used racism in particular to separate, isolate, and alienate groupings of people from each other, allowing the White plutocracy to divide and rule.
They have put a non-White in the White House in the same way that planters have flogged their slaves by recruiting other Black slaves to do it. The racist policies–the enormous unemployment of African Americans, the deportation of over a million Hispanics, breaking up families– continues under Obama while, like Clinton, he ‘feels their pain.”
The White House, not incidentally, was named by Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 after the racist outcry when he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him there. It was previously known as ‘the president’s mansion’ and other names, but the media took it up and it became the citadel of White power under the racist president Woodrow Wilson.
The feature of the gangster state is that the law is a weapon of the powerful. Not only is it horrifically harsh on the population, it is increasingly non-existent on the billionaire plutocracy and their agents. Michael Mukasey, the AG under Bush jnr, stated in a speech to the American bar in 2008: ” Not every wrong, or even a violation of the law, is a crime.”
He and the other ziocons got together a few days ago to roast the war criminal Dick Cheney, where they joked about torture, and in not winding up in prison; i.e. they got away with it. The roast was funded by six Zionist billionaires under the Zioncon magazine COMMENTARY.
The point is that these homicidal conspiracies are crimes, and James and Alex Jones treats them as that, among other things. Higdon implicitly backs off because some of the accusations and predictions are speculative, or even, in the case of Jones, wild. This effectively and operatively whitewashes the criminal behavior of the political Elite; not only the war crimes, but the peace crimes as well. It thus helps to effectively legitimate the gangster state currently being imposed.
I’m with you on most of what you write here, Mark, although not quite yet on what you specifically assert about Higdon. I have to give that more think.
Thoughtful observations Mark. Wolin’s important thesis, written with palpable consternation in the post 9/11 “W” period, might be revised to critique the Obama brand’s R2P (“peace crimes”) humanitarianism.
As Chris Hedges has observed, Wolin’s timely and elegant works today would likely fail to appear in the Times’ Book Review, for clear violations of propriety.
Loathe as I am to engage Mark on his race obsession, I will once again wade into it, reluctantly, for the sake of all involved.
The White House is not called that for racist reasons. That’s howlingly ridiculous.
While we may all doubt the veracity of Wikipedia, its take on the matter is pretty much trustworthy:
The earliest evidence of the public calling it the “White House” was recorded in 1811.[16] A myth emerged that during the rebuilding of the structure after the Burning of Washington, white paint was applied to mask the burn damage it had suffered,[17] giving the building its namesake hue.[18] The name “Executive Mansion” was used in official contexts until President Theodore Roosevelt established the formal name by having “White House–Washington” engraved on the stationery in 1901.[19][20] The current letterhead wording and arrangement “The White House” with the word “Washington” centered beneath goes back to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.[20]
Although it was not completed until some years after the presidency of George Washington, it is also speculated that the name of the traditional residence of the President of the United States may have derived from Martha Washington’s home, White House Plantation in Virginia, where the nation’s first President had courted the First Lady in the mid-18th century.[21]
Right off hand I can’t remember the source of the account of how the designation of ‘White House’ entered the American truth consensus. However I can understand your dismay, Patrick, since you are an adherent of two racist theory traditions: ‘small government’ and primitive religion. I greatly fear that if you don’t change your ways, Patrick, when the Rapture comes, you will be put on a no-fly list.
I always am edified by your replies, Mark. This one particularly.
Between you and me, I confess that when I read your racial comments I hear Eddie Murphy as Shabazz K. Morton, in the Black History Moment, particularly at the end, when he loses his cool while promoting the career of George Washington Carver:
Hello, my name is Professor Shabazz K. Morton. In 1895, at the Tuskagee Institute in Alabama, a black man named George Washington Carver developed a new method of soil improvement through crop rotation to end the South’s African cultural dependence on cotton alone. As a result, Carver came up with hundreds of industrial uses for the peanut. Sure, industrial uses.
Meanwhile, one night, he’s having a few friends over to his house for dinner. And one of them leans over and says to Dr. Carver, “Excuse me, George? What’s that your putting on your bread?” Carver says, “Oh, that’s nothing but a butter substitute that I made from peanuts. I can’t digest all that animal fat, you know.”
So the other fellow tasted it, and he says, “Hmm.. this tastes pretty good, man. Mind if we take a peek at the recipe?” And Dr. Carver says, “Take a peek? Man, you can have it. Who’s gonna eat butter made out of peanuts? No, I’m working on a method to compress peanuts into phonograph needles.”
So, Professor Carver’s two dinner guests…Edward “Skippy” Williamson and Frederick “Jif” Armstrong – two white men – stole George Washington Carver’s recipe for peanut butter, copyrighted it, and reaped untold fortunes from it. While Dr. Carver died penniless and insane, still trying to play a phonograph record with a peanut.
This has been “Black History Minute”. I’m Professor Shabazz K. Morton. Good night.
You could write that stuff, Mark. Oh. You do.
Again, the critique of Alex Jones is justified. Alex Jones and Amy Goodman are part of the diminishing cult of personality. They mark an end of an era. Time to step up the game and raise the bar to another level. Let James Tracy, James Corbett, Michel Chossudovsky, Tony Cartalucci, Nile Bowie, Tariq Ali, Ben Swann and the rest have our deserved attention for the future.
I second the motion!
Interesting breakthrough, Rip. I will add Jon Rappoport to that mix.
He is always ahead of the pack without fear of disturbing the status quo, and takes no prisoners on either side of the aisle.
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/obamacare-sign-up-crash-whats-really-behind-it/
Mark and Patrick, Patrick and Mark –
First, when it comes to race (and I think I can say something as I am tri-racial!) I hope that Patrick begins to realize that a) there has been such a thing as institutional racism – certainly things have changed, but there’s still a way to go. and b) you said in a post before that slavery was IMPOSED by the English elites. which I don’t believe is quite accurate. I posted a link before which told of how raclal/slavery laws came into effect in VA – and this seems to me to be a very conscious decision. Not that I’m letting anyone off the hook – as slavery occurred in most colonies and without trade from the North (and even the blinking of my beloved Episcopal Church), etc, it would not have flourished.
And Mark – I didn’t find support for Teddy Rossevelt “RENAMING” as you suggest ,The White House – but here are two links: a) a White House Name History:
http://quezi.com/11441
and b) a blog blurb on the TR/BTW fisasco: http://nlt.ashbrook.org/2008/12/teddy-roosevelt-and-booker-washington.php
BTW – During The Contenders series (C-Span) they had a show on Chief Justice Charles Evens Hughes who got a blacklash for having an African American dine with him (BTW again?) and he really told the lawyers who berated him in no uncertain terms that racism was evil!
And now I’d like to tell a made-up story if I may. I don’t know you two gentlemen personally so I don’t know if you’re baseball fans or not, but here goes:
Once Upon a Time in New York City lived Patrick and Mark. Their usual habit was to visit a certain sports bar every Friday after work. Mark was a fan of the Mets and Patrick a fan of the Yankees. They’d sit down at the bar, order their beers and eye each other for a moment, then maybe Mark would say “Dann Yankees.” , Patrick would reply, “Miserable Mets” and they’d go on like that until they both paid their tabs and went home.
That is until one Friday with Mark didn’t show up. Patrick grumbled a bit under his breath and ended up going home early.
The next Friday, Patrick went to the usual bar not knowing quite what to expect. But in a couple of moments, Mark walked in . “Where ya been?” Patrick asked him.
“Oh, I had to go to L.A. on business last week.” Silence
Patrick said: “You mean your turning into a Dodgers fan now?”
“Me?” replied Mark. “No way I’d root for the Brooklyn Desserters! – oh no offense to Number 22, of course.”
“Agreed,” said Patrick. “You know Juan Centeno couldn’t catch a ball my sister would throw.”
“‘And Travis Hafner can’t buy a hit and he’s your DH!” Mark retorted.
The bartender shook his head and smiled. Order had been restored to the world.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments, Mollie.
Indeed, I do find this forum a load of fun–talking only to people you agree with quickly becomes dull.
The Colonies were corporations, chartered by the King, and financed by investors, who expected a return on their investment. They would never actually visit North America. They resided in London. It is they who made the decision to introduce African slavery into the North American colonies, just as they were doing in the Sugar Islands in the Caribbean, where they were astonishingly profitable. Obviously, slavery caught on here in a big way, and took on a unique form. As you know, many years of research has persuaded me that American slavery bore almost no resemblance to the histrionic portrayal in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s overwrought novel. But that’s another subject, and we’ve been over that more than once. Do I have to say out loud the obvious, that slavery is not a good thing, and that my providing a more accurate picture of our history with it does not condone it? I certainly hope not.
As for racism, it has its roots at the Tower of Babel, when God created a future of separated ethnicities by changing everyone’s language, to force them to do what He’s told them to do and they refused: spread around the globe.
This is the reason it is inherent in the human psyche to be suspicious of the “other.” Race is just a higher level category of ethnicity, an umbrella, if you will; the less like me the other is, the more suspicious I would be, in general–but not necessarily. Take Rwanda, for example, where one tribe of blacks slaughtered millions of their neighbors who were of another tribe of black people with machetes. To outside observers, it was impossible to distinguish between the two tribes. Yet they held the deepest form of racism imaginable, one toward the other.
We can overcome our suspicion of the “other,” and should endeavor to do so, but to blame it for all our ills is to me foolish. Tomas Sowell and Walter Williams both grew up in poor black neighborhoods and look at them now: as accomplished and admired as anyone in America. If they had focussed instead on blaming racism for their poor start in life, they would not be where they are today, and we’d be way poorer for it. Theirs is the model I advise.
HI Patrick –
Glad you appreciated my post…. yes, debate and interchange with many points of view are a good thing.
I don’t know about the Tower of Babel being the root of racism – I guess I read it another way – but again, that’s another story!
You hit on being suspicious of ‘the other” – and that is an excellent point. It’s a shame we look so superficially at differences – and too often stigmatize those different from us or worse.
You also bring out something else in mentioning Sowell and Williams (who I’m not familiar with right off hand). Norm and I ( hi Norm – home you ‘re not too upset with me) – were mentioning the victim/oppressor mentality some people slip into. My take on that is that we have to work on both ends of the spectrum: encouraging individual responsibility (as an educator, I certainly wanted my students to do their part!) AND keep fighting for an end to discrimination, more opportunities for all, etc.
And you folks are so kind – you didn’t get on my case too hard for getting Jackie Robinson’s number wrong… the movie was on Jeopardy tonight and I thought – oh my, did I make a mistake!
Upset? Not at all, Mollie. I thought — in retrospect — that it was me who might have given offence, which I might have. I therefore plead forgiveness.
It doesn’t take much poison to taint the caviar. And that is what Disinfo wars website does. Little bits of truth and smidgets of poison and a whole lot of BS.
Such as the Nazis are running things or that the Saudis own Hollywood.
Jones and crew cover up for the the real culprits. If there should be any critique worth seeing, it would be surrounding that issue, not trying to legitimize the cover-up, which is what is going on here.
Bad show.
Thank you for your comment, Mollie. Patrick and I have been arguing about racism, which he thinks is normal, natural, justified, or non-existent, and which I think is a basis for the Terror War. The racism against non-White Muslims is being used to impose an Orwellian gangster state on the American people, to keep us Safe and Secure.
Do you think that this argument is similar to two people arguing about sports teams? One might consider that it trivializes the ideas, which makes them unimportant and that it is silly to argue about them. My experience is that Americans are threatened by ideas that conflict with traditional American ideology, and wish to avoid discussions about religion or politics.
Did you know that Murray Rothbard, one of Patrick’s intellectual mentors, was a racist? He supported David Duke, the former head of the Klu Klux Klan, and organized his college class to support Thurmand who ran for president on a Dixie racist ticket. He was against state government in order to allow the powerful the freedom to oppress the powerless, including children.
He was against laws that required parents to feed, clothe and educate their children and was for legally allowing parents to starve their children to death. I know this sounds grotesque, but you can look it up. That is the ideas I am arguing against. Is it the same as arguing about sports?
I still can’t remember where I saw the account of how the appellation of the ‘White House’ entered the American truth consensus, and the consciousness and unconsciousness of the American people. Apparently the Memory Hole is psychological as well as political. Your sources give the preliminaries alright, but, in the usual way, sweep the racist implications under the narrative rug. The point of course is not that Roosevelt initiated it, but that the media took it up and instilled it in the American racist consciousness.
Hi Mark,
In responding to Mollie, you write: “Do you think that this argument is similar to two people arguing about sports teams? One might consider that it trivializes the ideas, which makes them unimportant and that it is silly to argue about them.”
I may be wrong, but I don’t think Mollie intends to ‘trivialize’ anything, but rather to emphasize that between ‘you’ and ‘Patrick,’ although a good deal of acrimony exists over the very real issue of racism, not as a whole, but in some respects ‘only,’ the two of you may not be as far apart on the overall issue as you may both believe.
But Mollie will surely correct me if I am wrong. I do not sense an intent to trivialize in anything that she wrote, and I actually thought that her story was apt, given the way that both you and Mark carry on. And do notice that the bartender, who is a witness to the debate and acrimony, is quite willing to let it go, as he recognizes that out of the contention, some common ground may yet emerge:
” “Agreed,” said Patrick. “You know Juan Centeno couldn’t catch a ball my sister would throw.” “
Hi Norm and in reply to Mark as well
Thanks for getting in here! Glad you found my story apt.
I think in one respect you’re close to my intent. Of course Mark, I don’t want to trivialize debates about racism… but I think that Norm is right here in that you two are not QUITE as far apart as you might think. I think that was probably more evident in the debate Mark and Patrick had in the other debate – I remember Mark calling for a spiritual revolution – and that seemed unnoticed by Patrick.
One thing I was trying to get across, Mark, was the dynamic between the two debaters. They might debate – fight, whatever – but if one participant were absent – he would be sorely missed. I’ve seen that with my Mother’s siblings. They might fuss and fight – but you couldn’t break that bond – no way!
Yes, Mark – Americans ARE scared to pieces to touch on issues of race, politics, anything touchy. But I think we need to clear the air. Debate and discuss we must. And we must be like Rep. Lewis; he said he was not prepared to give up on any human being. So we must not give up on each other!
I realize that comments here are rather ‘over’ by now, and I did comment earlier about some economic misconceptions that were posted, but the more I think about it, the more upset I get with Higdon stating, in the first place, that Alex Jones has been “wrong” on “so many issues”.
Absolutely false, Mr. Higdon. Statistically, Alex has been almost totally correct in his reporting on events, but has a Time Delay involved until other media catch up with him…even other ‘alternative’ media.
Mr. Higdon has his head in the sand.
Well, Mollie and Norm, you are certainly entitled to your opinion, but it is precisely contrary to mine. I think Patrick and I are much farther apart ideologically and politically than we have exhibited here. I have not critiqued his libertarianism and primitive religion because they are beneath criticism, they are too childish to argue against. But they implicitly legitimate and facilitate the gangster state that is descending upon us.
Patrick’s political position is to the right of fascism. He is in favor of the freedom of the powerful to oppress the powerless without the state intervening. He is operatively in favor of the ruling class oppressing the other classes, the White oppressing the non-White, males oppressing women, and adults oppressing children. Freedom for class, race, gender, and age discrimination. His intellectual mentor is not only in favor of allowing parents to kill their children, he is in favor of allowing the police to torture the people they pick up. This is the kind of society that Patrick’s ideas lead to, although of course he does not defend them as such explicitly. He Proclaims his love of freedom while preventing women from controlling their own bodies and deciding if and when to procreate.
And what should we do about it? We shouldn’t do anything, according to Patrick, the powerful are too strong. We should pray and wait for the Savior to come. That is the precise opposite of what I espouse. We should develop an ideology that unite people against anti-people power, and James’ revelation of the homicidal conspiracies precisely reveal the gangsterism of American power under the Terror War. But this requires that we reject the gangsterism that is implicit in Patrick’s view of social reality.
But since both Patrick and I espouse unconventional ideas with regard to traditional American ideology, you both feel that we are more alike than we realize. And it is true, we both understand the importance of the ideas floating around when a crisis occurs, since some of them will be implemented. Since we both agree on the importance of ideological ideas, we therefore shouldn’t “carry on” and realize that we are not politically and ideologically that far apart.
I don’t think so.
For the record, not a word of this, concerning what I believe and the implications thereof, is true in any way at all. I laugh out loud when reading it. What crazed nonsense.
On further thought, perhaps I should add this. While Mark’s comments about me sound as if he dropped acid and waited for the trip to peak before sitting down to write a summary of my thought, jumbling up specific factual elements into a phantasmagoria, Mollie’s point, which Mark purports to refute, has a strong element of truth.
Peter Dale Scott gave a lecture a few years ago (http://www.globalresearch.ca/continuity-of-government-is-the-state-of-emergency-superseding-our-constitution/22089), and at the end he said this:
“A CNN Special Assignment assessment of the COG planners was even more dramatic: ““In the United States of America there is a hidden government about which you know nothing.”[54]”
I am confident that Mark and I agree on this, and it is at the core of the purpose of the memoryholeblog (along with the fact that the media and the academy are in league with it to hide it from public consciousness).
OF COURSE libertarianism is to the right of fascism. Fascism and communism are kissing cousins, crowded all the way on the extreme left of the political spectrum, where government has complete control over individual lives, and life is Hell. Libertarianism is waaaay across the spectrum, right next to anarchism (i.e. no state at all). America was pretty much a libertarian world until the tyrant Lincoln murdered all those hundreds of thousands of women, children and old men, bombing cities and burning farms so as to end the voluntary union. I’d go back to those days (anything between 1620 and whenever a lifetime ended by 1860), in a New York Minute. What a wonder it must have been, to live in a world with almost no state grinding you down! (Well, not so much, if you were black or an Indian; I’m not saying it was ideal–it was full of evil, just lots less of it than the world that Lincoln’s curse delivered to us, which has led us directly into 1984).
My point is that while Mark can state an utterly asinine thing like my point of view “implicitly legitimate[s] and facilitate[s] the gangster state that is descending upon us,” when the exact opposite is true–I believe the state, “gangster” or no, is the enemy, and should be shrunk to the point of vanishing, not legitimated of facilitated–he and I agree with Peter Dale Scott.
Mark gets it just a tad right here, when he says “And what should we do about it? We shouldn’t do anything, according to Patrick, the powerful are too strong,” (it’s not that we shouldn’t do anything–there’s lots we should do–it’s that we can’t stop Orwell’s prediction from coming true). He’s driving the car down the road with one tire on the shoulder here, but then he veers away altogether, driving it right off the cliff: “We should pray and wait for the Savior to come.” Well, he’s just making stuff up. He does not know me, he only thinks he does.
If you want to understand how deeply embedded the enemies of freedom are in this modern world, I recommend reading Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker. Lew Rockwell’s web site has been linking to a series Baker is publishing, as the articles appear, which are excerpts from the book. The most recent is called Bush and the JFK hit, Part 4: Barbara’s Hair-Raising Day (http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/10/09/bush-and-the-jfk-hit-part-4-barbaras-hair-raising-day/). It is indeed hair-raisng–for all of us. I recommend the whole series, but this one is enough to chill the blood. No one has ever before been able to tease out these threads of truth about the Bushes. The intelligence world, since WWII, is in complete control.
I’m guessing Mark is some species of communist, and believes that there can be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Obviously, I believe Orwell’s cycle of history theory. What we have in common is that we both see the dark reality of today. Whether he recognizes how deep it is secretly embedded, and how complete is its power, well, I have my doubts.
I can’t find the account of the changing of the name of the ‘Presidential Mansion’ to the ‘White House’ after the dinner of Roosevelt with Booker T. Washington. I read it not very long ago; I wonder if it has been dropped down the memory hole.
I have a scholarly biography of Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, THEODORE REX. but these are usually sanitized of any incident that too sharply violates American ideology. The White House dinner and the racist outcry is still documented, but its influence in the naming the citadel of White power is not available, or at least I can’t find it. The dinner hardened Roosevelt’s later racism.
Well, I suppose Mollie and Norm are right, as Patrick points out, that we DO agree that there is a hidden, concealed, and invisible form of governance, what Peter Dale Scott calls “deep politics,” and what DEMOCRACY, INC calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is inevitable when the visible power system is not strong enough to defeat the plutocracy that inevitably rises in all societies as the rich gain power. The gangster policies of homicide and torture, and the delusion used to conceal and justify it, is inevitable when the powerful are unconstrained by law and a people’s power of governance.
Hi there all –
See Mark and Patrick! Personally, I think you both have some good points to make – and it’s stimulating to hear different points of view.
Anyway, I just hope that you two – and the rest of us in this and other contexts – appreciate that we have someone to debate with!