Sunday, March 15, 2009

Fighting Their Battles , by way of utter deception


Fighting Their Battles , by way of utter perpetual deception

“If we can train and advise foreign militaries, they can fight our battles for us.”
-- Max Boot, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Nov. 14, 2007

A former editorial editor for The Wall Street Journal, Max Boot specializes in national
security, a domain where financial markets (and Wall Street) play a key role in pre-
staging conditions conducive to serial crises.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was formed in Paris in May 1919 during
negotiations on the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI. Its terms imposed on
Germany a reparations crisis that catalyzed WWII. The treaty also mandated that
long-warring tribes of Kurds, Shias and Sunnis occupy a single nation, pre-staging
the current crisis in Iraq.

Founded to guide public opinion, the CFR remains an influential force in harmonizing
U.S. foreign policy across branches of government. Since the WWI era, the interplay
of freedom and free markets has transformed the strategy for protecting and
promoting liberty.

Rather than freedom, the U.S. now advocates a proxy for freedom: free markets,
free trade and the free movement of funds in search of financial returns. Only the
financially sophisticated few knew the damage this mindset was destined to work on
democracies, including our own.

Those with specialized knowledge understood that unfettered finance would amass
wealth and income for the few. That consensus belief gradually displaced concerns
for non-financial results as the people in between – in education, think tanks, media,
politics and popular culture – persuaded us to believe that financial freedom must
prevail or we would endanger our personal freedom.

Military force pales in comparison to the effects of the systemic entropy unleashed by
the return-seeking forces of global finance. Disorder, instability and insecurity were
assured as those forces systematically displaced concerns critical to healthy
communities.

America’s proxy approach to freedom was also certain to wound – from within – the
nation most insistent on its globalization. That insistence discredited us abroad as we
pressured nations to adopt a model known to create results inconsistent both with
markets and democracies.

Americans would never knowingly forfeit their freedom. Yet we freely embraced the
globalization of forces that jeopardize self-governance. Absent intervention,
democracy will be lost to the people in between who persuaded us to entrust our
future to the globalizing forces of finance.

The Criminal USA will show how those with superior knowledge deployed this deception
to displace democracy. Future issues will identify who and why. This issue describes
how our shared belief in the wisdom of finance weakened our economy and
undermined our national security while catalyzing crises worldwide.

This special report chronicles the consistency of the people in between that created
serial crises, including the crisis in subprime mortgages. As a recurring figure in this
systemic deceit, the multi-decade role of Alan Greenspan confirms how a well-placed
few can affect the many.....