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OBAMA, THE POSTMODERN COUP -- MAKING OF A MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE |
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A Mirror For Obama: The Catastrophic Presidency of Trilateral Puppet Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981
The catastrophic Trilateral presidency of James Earl Carter offers a not-so-distant mirror for Obama as he strives to seize the White House. Carter's disastrous tenure has tended to be eclipsed in recent years because of the long reactionary nightmare under Reagan which followed him, because of the horrors of Bush the Elder, because of the impeachment and right-wing hatred aroused against the Clinton presidency, and because of the terrible years of Bush the younger. But because the Carter administration was so completely dominated by such Trilateral Commission figures as David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Volcker, and others -- some of the same people who are functioning today as the puppet masters of Obama -- the Carter years will repay our study as we seek to look into the future and chart the course of a possible future Obama administration. The memories of the Carter years have also been repressed because they were so intrinsically painful and represented such a colossal waste of the golden post-Watergate opportunity. There can be no doubt that Jimmy Carter is a strong contender along with Herbert Hoover and George Bush the elder for the opprobrium of being the worst one-term president of the 20th century. The most important fact to understand about the Carter administration is that it was not a product of a normal political process as most people would understand this term, but was rather the artificially orchestrated outcome of a multi-year commitment by a faction of bankers, think tanks, professors, sociologists, economists and psychologists who sought to carry out a program which served the imagined interests of Wall Street, but which was so destructive to the average person and to the United States as a whole that it could not be avowed in public. Carter did not improvise or make up his lunatic policies as he went along; rather, he was pre-programmed as an exercise in Shumpeterian creative destruction before he ever got close to the Oval Office. CARTER CHOSEN AS PRESIDENT BY THE TRILATERALS For those who are able to read between the lines, Brzezinski has never made a secret of the fact that he personally chose Carter as the Trilateral candidate for president in 1976. As Brzezinski writes in his book Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977-1981: "I first met Jimmy Carter at one of the early meetings of the Trilateral Commission, which I directed in the early 1970s. I remember discussing his membership with my two principal Trilateral Commission colleagues, Gerard Smith and George Franklin. We wanted a forward-looking Democratic Governor who would be congenial to the Trilateral perspective. Reubin Askew of Florida was mentioned as a logical candidate, but then one of them noted that Jimmy Carter, the newly elected Governor of Georgia, courageous on civil rights and reportedly a bright and upcoming Democrat, was interested in developing trade relations between his State of Georgia and the Common Market and Japan. I then said, 'Well, he's obviously our man,' and George Franklin went down to Atlanta to explore his background further and came back enthusiastic. Jimmy Carter was invited to join and he accepted." (Brzezinski 1985, p. 5) Carter had won office in Georgia as a segregationist and friend of arch-racist Lester Maddox, but the point is clear: Carter was the Trilateral choice for 1976. David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates had been the masterminds of the phony oil crisis detonated by Henry Kissinger's Yom Kippur war in the Middle East in the autumn of 1973. Viewing the impact of this crisis, they then set about studying ways that artificial emergencies or scarcities of this sort could be used for the imposition of dictatorial and authoritarian rule. The actual research into these topics was assigned to academics like Brzezinski and his sidekick Samuel Huntington of Harvard. In the words of two investigative journalists, "In one of the earliest Trilateral Commission reports, 'The Crisis of Democracy,' published in 1975, Huntington demanded that democratic government be curbed in times of economic crisis. 'We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth,' he stated. There are also potentially desirable 'limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.' ... 'A government which lacks authority ... will have little ability, short of cataclysmic crisis to impose on its people the sacrifice which may be necessary.'" CARTER'S SCRIPT: THE CFR 1980s PROJECT Various accounts have attributed the Carter administration policy playbook to some smalltime lawyers, but the reality is that the Carter script came from a group of elite think tanks associated with Wall Street. In 1973, the Council of Foreign Relations launched its "1980s Project," which it called the "largest single effort in our 55-year history." By its own account, the 1980s Project was aimed at "describing how world trends might be steered toward a particular desirable future outcome." Zbigniew Brzezinski belonged to the 1980s Project's governing body, and Samuel Huntington served on its coordinating group. Among the most important products of the project was "Alternatives to Monetary Disorder," by the late Fred Hirsch, senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund. Hirsch wrote: "A degree of controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s and may be in order. A central normative problem for the international economic order in the years ahead is how to ensure that the disintegration indeed occurs in a controlled way and does not rather spiral into damaging restrictionism." "Controlled disintegration" became the policy of Jimmy Carter's Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, whose high interest rates wrecked the U.S. industrial and farm base during the Carter and Reagan years. (Kathleen Klenetsky and Herbert Quinde, "FEMA's structure for fascist rule," EIR, Nov 23, 1990) Even honest observers who do not understand the central fact that Carter was a puppet of the financiers of the Trilateral Commission have no doubt that this administration was a colossal failure. The journalist Haynes Johnson describes the Carter presidency as a "tragedy" in his book In the Absence of Power. In Carter's speeches and actions, we can see the hand of his partially cloaked Trilateral masters, and gain insight into what genocidal bankers like David Rockefeller actually think and what their real program includes today. The Carter presidency had many stumbling blocks. Among them was an aggressive and imperialist foreign policy that depended on blatant meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the guise of concern about human rights. The second, reflecting the dominant role of Brzezinski, was a course towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in Iran, Afghanistan, and over the question of limited nuclear war in such places as central Europe. Another fatal defect of the Carter presidency was a commitment to a Malthusian, zero growth, and neo-Luddite energy policy, that rejected nuclear power out of hand on the domestic front and sought to sabotage peaceful nuclear development worldwide as a means of perpetuating dependence on the oil and coal controlled by the U.S.-U.K., while betting the future of the United States on such technologically backward options as coal-fired power plants and a Synthetic Fuels Corporation. Carter posed as an outsider who wanted to reform the corruption of the Washington fleshpots, and at the same time as the high priest of the presidency as a civic religion based on austerity and sacrifice. Scholars of the Carter presidency have concluded that he "told the American people what they did not want to hear that they would have to renounce their profligate lifestyles." (Kaufman 1) Here we see a clear foreshadowing of an Obama presidency, which will demand painful sacrifices from working families in the name of global warming, a wholly unproven hypothesis which appeals to the Malthusian instincts of rich elitists and oligarchs worldwide. CARTER AS U.S. BANKRUPTCY ADMINISTRATOR Carter, like Obama, promised to end the partisan haggling in the Congress and in Washington generally. Carter felt that he was morally superior to the Congress, with its atmosphere of horse trading, log rolling, pork barrels, and earmarks. But in doing this, he courted his own worst defeats. During his time in office, Carter enjoyed a congressional majority for the Democratic Party of two to one in the House of Representatives, and of three to two in the Senate. Nevertheless he was constantly squabbling with Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill and other Democratic congressional leaders. As Burton I. Kaufman has pointed out, "For better or worse, there is a political process in any system of representative government which no leader can simply ignore on the basis of being above the fray." Carter imagined that he was a tribune of the entire American people and that he embodied the national interest. Naturally, the Congress had other ideas. Congress was intent on re-asserting itself after the outrageous abuses of the Nixon presidency -- the same thing that the self-styled uniter Obama would face in a Democratic Congress eager to reverse the destructive precedents of the Bush regime. Some scholars have pointed out that even if Carter had been the legitimate tribune of the people that he claimed to be, this was all the more reason "to operate in a tandem-institutions world," meaning to work closely with Congress. Some historians of the Carter years have suggested that Carter wanted to act as a trustee of the interests of the American people, or perhaps as a "common cause monarch." (Jones, passim) It would be more accurate to describe him as a kind of bankruptcy administrator and austerity enforcer running the country after the dollar collapse of August 15, 1971 in the interests of the creditors like David Rockefeller, in much the same way that Felix Rohatyn (another Obama backer today) in 1975 became the virtual dictator of the City of New York under the Mutual Assistance Corporation. Today, Obama claims that he will be able to float like a seraph above the nasty fray of partisan haggling on Capitol Hill. The traumatic experience of the Carter years suggests that this is pure utopia, as long as the Congress exists as a co-equal branch of government with decisive control over the power of the purse and taxation, where real economic and political interests inevitably clash by day and night, and all the more so now that the pie is shrinking. The main innovation offered by Obama in this context is that he proposes to establish national harmony and suppress partisan bickering by an almost mystical process centering on the beatific and transfiguring powers of his own personality. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the Obama campaign is indeed a personality cult, with a strong dose of venom thrown in for those who do not appreciate the candidate's magical appeal. HUMPHREY: ANTI-WASHINGTON IS THE NEW RACISM Carter, like Obama, marketed himself as someone who stood apart from the government in Washington, rejected its prevalent values, and proposed to reform it from top to bottom. Both candidates have devoted a special blather about the prevalence of special interests in the capital. This is an obvious form of demagogy with highly destructive implications for any notion of activist government or maintenance of the social safety net. Even Hubert Humphrey in 1976 was lucid enough to point out that "candidates who make an attack on Washington are making an attack on government programs, on blacks, on minorities, on the cities. It's a disguised new form of racism, a disguised new form of conservatism." (Leuchtenburg 11) This is of course a good diagnosis of the monetarist-Friedmanite demagogy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- or of Ron Paul today. But it was pioneered before Reagan by Carter. Catastrophic Presidency of Trilateral Puppet Jimmy Carter 203 Carter, like Obama, presented himself as a leader with the capacity to transcend the conventional left-right spectrum. In reality, Carter belonged to the center-right, and much of his patina of newness was achieved by his treacherous and deliberate abandonment of the FDR New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party. But his rhetoric was able to delude left liberals into believing that they were dealing with a novel historical phenomenon. Carter's speech writer, James Fallows, later commented: "I felt that he, alone among the candidates, might look past the tired formulas of left and right and offer something new." Today, Fallows is an editor for the Atlantic Monthly, one of the leading bastions of Obamaphilia. A celebrated definition of the essence of politics offered by Harold D. Lasswell states that politics boils down to "who gets what, when, how." (Jones 2) This political recipe inevitably clashes with the greed of austerity-minded bankers in an economic breakdown crisis. Carter and Obama agree that this is a scandal, and this holier-than-thou attitude marks both of them as apolitical or anti-political politicians, fundamentally incompatible with representative government, which must always justify its existence and legitimacy by providing some kind of amelioration and progress in the standard of living and general living conditions of the people. For Carter and Obama, government that wins support by delivering the goods -- technically called eudaemonic legitimation -- is inherently corrupt, and replaced by some set of mystical values which, upon closer examination, generally tend to reflect the interests of financiers and other oligarchs. CARTER'S 1966 NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AS PREREQUISITE FOR RELIABLE PUPPET STATUS Part of Carter's basic equipment for the presidency in the eyes of his Trilateral Commission sponsors was a 1966 nervous breakdown suffered after he had come in third in the race for governor of his home state of Georgia. According to Kaufman, Carter "fell into a deep depression, which was lifted only by the solace he found as a born-again Christian." (Kaufman, _) Questions about mental health caused Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, McGovern's first choice for vice president, to be forced off the Democratic ticket in 1972 in the midst of a firestorm of negative publicity. Similar questions were raised about Michael Dukakis in 1988 when it became known that he, too, had suffered a bout of prolonged depression after an election defeat. Qualified mental health experts have suggested that George W. Bush suffers from severe cognitive impairment as a result of youthful cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol abuse, and published reports have suggested that he is kept going from day to day with a cocktail of psychotropic medications. Obama, like Bush, offers some obvious symptoms of megalomania; one trait they share is the extreme reluctance to exhibit any moment of self-criticism, as shown by Obama in his response to the Jeremiah Wright revelations. This disturbing pattern makes it absolutely mandatory that all candidates for the presidency disclose their full medical records, including HIV test results, as well as records of any and all mental health treatments, including shock treatments, they may have received. This is the minimum that must be demanded of persons who wish to become the custodians of the thermonuclear button in a time of aggravated world crisis. Not even Obama should be exempt from this requirement, which must be imposed by an aroused public opinion. The establishment financiers are known to prefer presidents whose weakness and subservience are guaranteed by previous psychological traumas, which make it difficult or impossible for the president in question to undertake decisive actions against the wishes of his handlers and backers. These financiers prefer a chief executive who is too weak to break out of the prison which envelopes him. CARTER, LIKE OBAMA, STARTED OFF PLAYING THE RACE CARD In order to become governor of Georgia in 1970, Carter assumed the profile of a racist, attacking school busing, supporting segregated private schools, and signaling a willingness to collaborate with George Wallace, the infamously racist governor of neighboring Alabama. (Obama, needing a political base in Chicago, chose the church of Jeremiah Wright, a purveyor of the Ford Foundation who supported black liberation theology, a racist counterinsurgency ideology designed to pit black against white and keep both subjected to the financiers.) As governor of Georgia, Carter stressed radical environmentalism and austerity in the form of zero-based budgeting, a favorite gambit of the Wall Street bond holders who want to make sure that they are not taxed for the general welfare, and that such tax revenue as does get collected goes into their own pockets via debt service on state bonds, and not into the social programs they despise. In May 1971, Carter got his picture on the cover of Time magazine, indicating that he had already attracted sympathetic attention of the Luce/Skull and Bones faction. During these years, Carter assembled his insider clique, later known as the Georgia Mafia, composed of Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, Pat Caddell, Charles Kirbo and Dr. Peter Bourne. Peter Bourne was later to cause a scandal when it was discovered that he was providing the Carter White House staff with Quaaludes in violation of the federal controlled substances law. (Obama's kitchen cabinet is even worse than Carter's: here we find the ultra-left racist provocateur Jeremiah Wright, the bisexual Weatherman terrorist bomber Bill Ayers, the deranged Manson groupie Bernardine Dohrn, and the underworld figure Tony Rezko. Here, if ever, was a feast for Karl Rove's GOP attack machine.) CARTER: STUDIOUSLY VAGUE Carter started planning his campaign in 1972, just after his failed attempt to become George McGovern's vice presidential running mate. He began with the intention of capitalizing on the general distrust of government and politicians that existed on all levels of American society during the Nixon years. But at the same time, Carter carefully avoided any specific commitments on programs or measures to be implemented in favor of the American people: as Kaufman points out, "wherever he traveled, Carter remained intentionally vague on the issues." (Kaufman 12) Carter's main selling point was that the United States government had to reflect the decency and honesty of the American people. Carter possessed a disarming and folksy personal charm, which contrasted very favorably with the excesses and arrogance of Nixon. Obama, playing off popular disgust with the arrogant, thieving, and incompetent Bush administration, repeats a mantra of hope, change, unity, and moving beyond old divisions; he attempts to project the illusion of an approach that is both post-partisan and post-racial, to say nothing of post-political. CARTER'S STUMP STYLE: BETWEEN A CAMP MEETING AND HYPNOTISM The veteran journalist Jules Witcover evoked the mood of the early Carter campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire in the following terms: "Carter ... combined an easy, warm, personal style with an icy, resolute determination, a kind of soft-sell evangelism that won adherence across the ideological spectrum. There was almost a hypnotic quality to his stump technique. He spoke very softly, in a rush of words that obliged his audiences to listen closely. In all he said, he punctuated his remarks with frequent ingratiating smiles and expressions of affection. The word "love," awkward coming from the mouth of the commonplace politician was used by Carter as if it were a natural neighborly embrace with baffling effect. 'I want the government,' he would intone to his rapt audiences in a quiet, deliberate cadence, 'that is as good, and honest, and decent, and truthful, and fair, and competent, and idealistic, and compassionate, and is filled with love as are the American people.' He recited this sequence almost as if it were his personal rosary, and, in crowd after crowd, it worked. Then, having given the assembled this layman's benediction, he would descend among them, smiling benignly, this peanut-farmer Billy Graham, and put his hands upon them, and in the process commit them thoroughly. From these personal political baptisms came a small army of dedicated supporters who defied ideological classification, united in their conviction that "Jimmy" -- everybody called him that -- would restore harmony, and peace, and honesty, and decency, and compassion, and, yes, love, to government.... [Carter had] an almost missionary quality: no soul was not worth saving, nor beyond redemption, if only Carter persisted. And so persist he did, almost with a vengeance and, beyond that, with an unshakable conviction of right." (Witcover 210-211) The messianic and religious overtones of the Carter campaign are evident enough. Carter was in fact the first self-described born-again Christian to be elected to the presidency, and he attracted the support of many Christian evangelicals, although many of these turned against him during his tenure in office and went over to the reactionary Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell. In a very real sense, the right-wing orientation of the Christian evangelical movement in the late 20th century grows out of an abreaction against Carter. Carter was also famous for his tactic of feigning interest in each voter as a discrete individual, rather than a member of the masses. As Witcover pointed out, Carter dealt ... on an intensely personal level that was a big part of his effectiveness: he would listen long, no matter who was talking to him, important politician or crackpot on the street ... Carter's opponents in Iowa soon found out that the Good Shepherd was going to be no pushover ... He would call on a farmer in the morning, talk for a while, stay for lunch, then come by again a few weeks later. If the farmer wasn't home. he would leave a handwritten note pinned to the front door that said: 'Just dropped by to say hello. Jimmy.' Many such visits were followed by telephone calls or notes of thanks ... Carter and his wife and children pursued this retail campaigning ... From the beginning, in Iowa, his campaign was oriented to the individual voter; the premise was that if he could ignite a spark with the people, the press would have to come around. Supporters once made remained supporters, because they were not simply supporters made, but friends made. And not only Carter engaged in this Good Shepherd exercise; his wife, Rosalynn, his sons, and his sister, Ruth Stapleton, a sexy blonde mother who was also a professional evangelist, all worked Iowa like some foreign mission whose natives had not found salvation, but only needed to hear the word. Obama would seem to represent an adjustment of these techniques for a target population that is more heavily impacted by the smorgasbord of trendy New Age spirituality, while Carter was of the older, Elmer Gantry school. In Iowa and subsequent 1976 political battlegrounds, Jimmy Carter not only witnessed to voters about his Christian faith but about his faith in the nation and the American people. And when he left, he had organized his own church of political believers, thoroughly committed to him, willing to work with a zest and dedication approaching his own. And like a missionary so convinced of the Word that he was confident his new church would stand against all manner of secular pressures, Jimmy Carter openly disdained the demands of the infidel press that he speak in specifics, that he say exactly what his general proposals would do, would cost. He asked the voters the same 'leap of Faith' that is at the core of religious belief, and to a remarkable degree they gave it to him. (Witcover 211, 212, 222, 223) Here the necessary link between a lack of programmatic specifics on the one hand, and a messianic and utopian rhetoric on the other, is clearly pointed up. GNOSTICISM IN POLITICS The common messianic themes of Carter and Obama raise the question of Gnosticism in politics. Both of these politicians of the Trilateral Commission are associated with the promise that their candidacies will help to realize on earth the kinds of millenarian events or values which are traditionally associated with notions of Paradise. Carter suggested that voting for him would establish the reign of decency and truth and love over Washington, D.C. Obama, working on a more jaded target group in a more sophisticated post modern idiom, similarly implies that putting him in power will cause the lion to lie down with the lamb, when the bitterly contending lobbyists and special interests representatives in the capital are bathed in the transfiguring power of his personality. The core idea is that purely secular politics can bring about miraculous transformations reserved by traditional religion for the life of the world to come, be it paradise or nirvana, not the fallen world in which we live as mortals. Both Carter and Obama can thus be associated with a kind of ersatz or civic religion which invites comparison with the utopian and millenarian promises made by the totalitarian movements of the mid-20th century. GAMING THE IOWA CAUCUS OF 1976 Carter, especially in his exceptionally thorough, below-the-radar preparations for the 1976 Iowa caucus, was the first president to successfully and systematically game the emerging system of primaries and caucuses by which the Democratic Party would henceforth choose its presidential nominees. These primaries and caucuses are doubtless to be preferred to the smoke-filled room of yesteryear, but they also bring their own peculiar problems. The Democratic primary electorate is skewed in favor of affluent suburbanites, liberal ideologues, and Malthusian-Luddite activists. The party's working-class base among blue-collar strata and trade unionists has correspondingly declined, with many of them bolting to become Reagan Democrats, when the self-righteous environmentalist austerity and ultra-left socio-cultural preoccupations inside the Democratic Party became too suffocating. In 1976, Carter, using techniques that seem elementary today, successfully manipulated the newly emerging system of caucuses and primaries with its McGovern-Fraser gender-conscious and multicultural rules. As one analyst of the Carter campaign has pointed out, "following their tumultuous convention in 1968, the Democrats enacted many democratizing reforms in their presidential nominating process. One major result was the increase in the number of delegates selected by presidential primaries and committed to candidates. In 1952 there were 17 primaries that selected 46% of the delegates and committed 18% of them to candidates. Not much had changed by 1968 when the same number of primaries selected 49% and committed 36% of the delegates. The system was then reformed, and in 1976 there were 29 primaries that selected 75% and committed 66% of the delegates. Clearly, the advantage in 1976 would go to a candidate whose strategy and resources were directed to an open process of delegate selection that reduced the role of party leaders. Increasing the number of primaries has the effect of handicapping late entrance." (Jones 19) Carter was able to game the system by frontloading his campaign in Iowa, concentrating on the recruitment of dedicated party activists and ideologically committed supporters who could be relied on to turn out for the lengthy and inconvenient caucus process. A win in Iowa could then be parlayed (with the help of a complicit press whose palms had been greased by Trilateral gold) into a slingshot effect, allowing Carter to arrive in New Hampshire with more momentum than any of the other candidates. The 1976 process of gaming by Carter appears in retrospect as rather simple, compared to the elaborate strategy used in 2007-2008 by Obama. Obama has notoriously focused his efforts on caucuses in Republican or borderline states, to which the unrealistic and dysfunctional Democratic Party rules give an importance out of all proportion to their actual role in regard to the Electoral College. Obama has tended to win primaries and caucuses in Republican states which he could never hope to carry in the general election. But the sheer numbers of such meaningless victories have tended to drown out the central fact of the primary season, which is that Mrs. Clinton defeated her opponent by a 10% margin in the all-important Electoral College megastate of California, traditionally the one that shows the rest of the country its own future. Obama would appear to have a cynical gaming strategy for grabbing the Democratic nomination, but winning the general election in November is a very different matter, in which Obama may find himself facing insuperable difficulties if he ever gets that far. CARTER AND OBAMA: RUNNING TO THE RIGHT OF THE COMPETITION Some observers noticed that Carter was running well to the right of the other Democratic presidential candidates that year, in a Democratic Party that was still deeply influenced by the Roosevelt New Deal and the better moments of the Lyndon B. Johnson Great Society. Today, it is hardly a secret that Obama has been running to the right of Senator Clinton, and ran far to the right of the economic populist John Edwards. Carter found that his rejection of the New Deal and the Great Society was something of an embarrassment, and attempted to avoid the issue. Obama's supporters do the same thing today. The Daily Kos, dominated by a person who has admitted that he was once a CIA trainee, and who continues to admire the CIA as a humanitarian organization dedicated to world stability, has instructed its gullible readers that the entire question of centrism versus liberalism "misses the mark" in today's Democratic Party debates. Cass R. Sunstein is a University of Chicago Law Professor and adviser to Obama who argues that Obama transcends the usual ideological continuum and must be placed above it as a "visionary minimalist ... Willing to think big and to endorse significant departures from the status quo -- but [who prefers] to do so after accommodating, learning from, and bringing on board a variety of different perspectives." Obama offers a more recent example of a cynical and consummate strategy to successfully game the unrealistic rules installed by accretion in the Democratic Party nominating process over the years. After virtually living in Iowa for about two years, Carter came in first in the Iowa caucus with about 28% of the vote, topping a field that included Birch Bayh and Governor George Wallace. Carter was then able to parlay the Iowa momentum into a win in New Hampshire. An important success for Carter came when he defeated Wallace in the state of Florida. But in Massachusetts, Carter came in fourth. He won in Illinois and North Carolina, but was badly beaten in New York, and barely managed to take Wisconsin. Carter was able to win in Pennsylvania, but was defeated in such vital states as California and New Jersey. On the whole, Carter's performance, though weak in itself, appears to be stronger than that of Obama, who has failed to take any of the electoral vote mega-states except for his own home base of Illinois. Every now and then, Carter's racist past broke through the carefully cultivated veneer of his new Trilateral political persona. At one point he told reporters that he had "nothing against" an ethnically-based community "trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods." (Kaufman 13) Jesse Jackson found that Carter's reference to ethnic purity made the Georgia governor "a throwback to Hitlerian racism." Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary Indiana called Carter a "Frankenstein monster with a Southern drawl." (Kaufman 14) Carter was also foolish enough to give an interview to Playboy magazine in which he confessed that he had committed adultery in his heart many times by lusting after women. As we will doubtless see with Obama, any candidate whose political project is so strongly dependent upon his own supposed personal magnetism is likely to be vulnerable to the narcissistic erotic self-indulgence of the megalomaniac. In Obama's case, the Larry Sinclair revelations suggest that possible partners would evidently include men as well as women. CARTER: "I'LL NEVER LIE TO YOU," PRELUDE TO CYNICISM Carter continued to proclaim his own qualities of openness, truthfulness, and morality, going so far as to formally promise that he would never lie to the American people. "I'll never lie to you," he intoned hundreds of times. It is an impossible standard. This is of course the kind of utopian idealism which inevitably leads to corresponding cynicism once these impossible promises have been betrayed, as they must be in the world of practical politics. Realistic voters are more concerned about securing an improving standard of living for themselves and their children, rather than attempting to purge the universe of sin. Rather than stress specific solutions to urgent economic problems, Carter preferred to pontificate about the superiority of his principles and his general value system. Like Obama today, Carter was a process-oriented candidate, concerned far more with methods than results. Compare this with decadent socialite Caroline Kennedy's endorsement of Obama at UCLA, where she announced that "It's rare to have a candidate who can help us believe in ourselves and tie that belief to the highest ideals." THE FUZZINESS ISSUE Like Obama, Carter successfully inveigled many voters into supporting him through a posture of studied vagueness. "On a range of issues, he showed all the elusiveness of the scat back. In time, that very slipperiness would become one of the most effective issues against him -- the 'fuzziness issue' -- but it took his foes, and the press, months to fully identify it and brand it for more effective tracking." (Witcover 239) When Carter joined combat with the Republican nominee Gerald Ford, this systematic vagueness became a major issue in the campaign, with Ford constantly harping on Carter's lack of specificity and "fuzziness." Observers marveled at Carter's ability to fuse contradictions and reconcile opposites to produce a singular assortment of "unified ambiguities and ambiguous unities," as C. Vann Woodward put it. (Kaufman 16) One of Ford's favorite lines against Carter was: "He wavers, he wanders, he wiggles, and he waffles, and he shouldn't be president of the United States." This would fit Obama remarkably well, but such lese majeste would elicit accusations of sacrilege from the left liberal acolytes who guard the shrine of the Perfect Master. The Wall Street Journal in July 1976 focused on Carter's lack of clarity on the issues as a main factor in public confusion about what he represented. Carter lacked any coherent ideology, this newspaper argued. Here Carter was described as a candidate who promised love and healing and wanted to be "all things to all people," with a campaign that was "studiously vague on the substance of government." (Rozell 14) Time magazine saw in Carter a "grab bag political personality that offers something for almost everyone." Carter was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma wrapped up with a question mark. After Carter had won the presidency the Wall Street Journal editorial was entitled "A Change, but What Kind?" -- a direct anticipation of Obama's mantra of vagueness, and of the kind of real political problem this represents once such a candidate enters the White House. Like Carter, Obama poses as a non-ideological, non-doctrinaire candidate: "I don't think he's wedded to any ideological frame," comments a source. With Obama, there is only the man himself -- his youth, his ease, his race, his claim on the new century. His candidacy is essentially a plea for voters to put their trust in his innate capacity for clarity and judgment. There is no Obama-ism, only Obama. (See "Destiny's Child," Rolling Stone, Feb. 22, 2008) The young Mussolini argued that fascism rejected programs, since there were already too many of them. The fascist program, he argued, was simple -- to govern Italy. Mussolini pointed to the quality of his men, not to any specific promises, as the best guarantee of the outcome. THE CORPORATE MEDIA GAVE CARTER A FREE PASS On the whole, the controlled corporate media were at first exceedingly favorable to Carter, whom they regarded as a breath of fresh air after the suffocating paranoia and exclusionary measures of the Nixon years. During the 1976 New Hampshire primary, it was evident that the controlled corporate media were favoring Carter. As Witcover notes, "in Carter's case a chartered bus now followed him, carrying his large press contingent. By such signs are winners and prospective winners gauged." (Witcover 239) Carter enjoyed a preponderance of positive coverage, just as Obama does today: "In early 1977 the journalistic reviews of Carter's symbolic activities and political rhetoric were highly favorable. Journalists portrayed Carter as a 'great communicator' seeking to establish his leadership by building public support through symbolic activities." (Rozell 7) But even Carter never enjoyed anything approaching the unprecedented hysterical media swoon carried out by the fawning journalists of the controlled corporate media who chose in late 2007 and early 2008 to join the media whores for Obama. The adulation and immunity to all investigative journalism and criticism which have been vouchsafed to Obama are so extreme that he may experience a severe psychological shock once this controlled environment is broken, and this fantasy world comes crashing down. This may be happening with the Jeremiah Wright revelations, which have caused some fits of stammering and stuttering by the previously mellifluous candidate. It will be even worse if the collapse of the fantasy world built up by the media around Obama comes at some future moment when the reality of world economic depression and/or superpower confrontation reasserts itself. Under these circumstances, Obama could experience a nervous breakdown. CARTER NEEDED VOTE FRAUD IN OHIO TO SEIZE POWER Carter would never have entered the White House without the help of systematic vote fraud, especially concentrated in the key battleground state of Ohio. There were reports that Walter Mondale, Carter's vice president show running mate, had told his supporters to "vote early, vote often" on Election Day. Obama prefers to have his opponents destroyed by carefully orchestrated and timed scandals. One of Carter's biggest handicaps in the White House was that the new Democratic Congress, energized by many new members, was interested in reasserting its constitutional prerogatives in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the oppressive Nixon years. That mood can be expected to prevail on Capitol Hill starting in January 2009 as well, when Congress will try to re-assert itself after the end of the Bush nightmare. Among other things, there will be a long backlog of patronage requests which Obama is likely to consider as corrupt and beneath his seraphic dignity. Just as Carter was on a collision course with his own party in Congress because of his claim to represent the honesty and probity of the collective will, so Obama is headed for grave difficulties when he attempts to assert the primacy of hope over the need of every legislator to bring home the bacon and the patronage jobs to his or her own state or district. Many of Carter's supporters, especially among trade unionists and blue-collar strata, had come to regard the Nixon years as a kind of aberration which could now be set aside in favor of a return to the Johnson Great Society. They expected that Carter would restart the war on poverty, increase programs for the working poor, and undertake an array of other social reforms. But Carter had heeded the advice of crackpot futurologist Alvin Toffler who called on Democrats in 1975 to "throw out all the old New Deal claptrap," and of elitist Gary Hart, who raved in 1976 that "the New Deal has run its course. The party is over. The pie cannot continue to expand forever." (Leuchtenburg 18) As soon as Carter got into office, it was evident that he was hostile to new social spending, and that he wanted to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, as demanded by his right-wing economic advisers such as Blumenthal. In late 1978, Carter launched what amounted to a national austerity program, involving draconian cuts in programs designed to combat poverty. "We look heartless," said Vice President Mondale. But Carter paid more attention to pro-Wall Street ideologues like Alfred Kahn, who blurted out after the administration had been thrown out of office: "I'd love the Teamsters to be worse off. I'd love the automobile workers to be worse off." Carter began the process of dismantling the New Deal state in favor of the unlimited domination of the "market," meaning in reality monopolies, oligopolies, cartels, and Wall Street predators in general. It was under Carter that the disastrous process of deregulation of oil and gas, airlines, banks, communications, railroads, trucking, and public utilities got into high gear, creating the future potential for Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia, and the mess we see before us today. These tendencies of Carter doomed his attempt at reelection in 1980, when even one of his supporters had to admit, "he often seems unduly concerned with appeasing right-wingers, not realizing that it's all but impossible to outflank the Reaganites [on the right] without coming out for child labor, apartheid, and the Great White Fleet." (Leuchtenburg 14) ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.: CARTER NOT A DEMOCRAT Many contemporaries saw Carter as a Democrat who thought like a Republican. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, who had been an aide to President Kennedy, took the judgment further in 1980 when he wrote that, "the reason for Carter's horrible failure in economic policy is plain enough. He is not a Democrat -- at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word." For Schlesinger, Carter was "an alleged Democrat" who had "won the presidency with demagogic attacks on the horrible federal bureaucracy and as president made clear in the most explicit way his rejection of ... affirmative government. But what voters repudiated in 1980 was not liberalism but the miserable result of the conservative economic policies of the last half dozen years." (Leuchtenburg 17) Obama seems to be expressing the same intent when he praises the right-wing reactionary Reagan: "I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times ... I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." (Reno Gazette Journal, Jan. 17, 2008) Mark well that what Obama is talking about here is the process of the demolition and destruction of the New Deal state, the most effective form of human organization yet devised, which was begun under Carter and consummated under Reagan. Obama is known to be considering Republicans like Hagel and Lugar for the vice presidency and the Pentagon. (London Times, March 2, 2008) Obama also promises a foreign policy in which Republican elements will predominate: "The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan," Obama told his supporters at a rally in Greensburg, Pennsylvania on March 28, 2008, according to an AP wire that day. Between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they'll vote for the Republican every time. OBAMA AS BLANK SLATE AND RORSCHACH TEST: NO MANDATE Perhaps even more than Carter, Obama has been described as a blank slate upon which voters are invited to project their own fondest hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Some observers have described Obama as a kind of political Rorschach test, with the voter being invited to decide what kind of an image is really being shown. This can work well enough in gathering votes, but once such a candidate enters the White House, he or she inevitably encounters the problem of a wide range of strong but contradictory expectations among duped voters who now expect their dreams and aspirations to become reality. Once the newly elected president is forced to act, it is inevitable that the large majority of voters will find that the dreams and aspirations they thought were in the process of fulfillment are actually going to be cruelly discarded. This virtually guarantees a hangover of bitterness, resentment, and disillusionment in the first months of the new presidency. This is, in other words, a question of the new president's mandate. A presidential candidate who makes specific promises and runs on an intelligible program of reform can actually educate the public and build consensus for what he or she wants to do. After taking power, such a president can claim the legitimacy of popular approval for his or her legislative agenda. The Carter-Obama method of vague and fuzzy aspirational campaigning means that there is no mandate or popular consensus for anything. Therefore, when the policies dictated by the bankers who actually control these puppet candidates begin to be implemented, the crisis of the new administration begins almost immediately. A good example is the fact that Carter talked most of all in his election campaign about the need to address the problem of unemployment, which was then rapidly rising. But once he got into the White House, he suddenly decided that inflation, and not the growing ranks of the jobless, was the real problem. This was of course the Wall Street view. Carter reached a peak approval rating of between 71% and 75% at the end of April 1977, just after he had completed his first hundred days in office. From then on, his approval ratings and personal popularity fell steadily and precipitously, interrupted only by an upward bump frequented by a crisis rallying reflex occasioned by the seizing of American hostages by the Khomeini regime in Iran in November 1979. Before long, Carter's popularity rating had fallen to the lowest point in recorded history, lower than Truman, and lower than Nixon in the depths of the Watergate scandal. Carter touched 29% job approval several times between July and November 1979, and once reached a nadir of 28%. Bush the younger has since explored these depths. Obama may be able to challenge Harry S. Truman, who reached 22% job approval in February 1952. CARTER FLIP-FLOPS: INFLATION, NOT UNEMPLOYMENT AS TOP PRIORITY Mass unemployment is unquestionably the foremost issue discussed around the kitchen table by blue-collar working families. Carter's abrupt reversal of field to make fighting inflation the top priority was in effect an attack on important groups inside his own electoral base. The trade unionists of the AFL-CIO had expected Carter to propose a $30 billion public works program for 1977 to fight unemployment. When Carter threw this idea overboard, the unions began to rapidly turn against him. One can imagine the same thing befalling Obama. The same thing happened to Carter with the Democratic mayors, who wanted more help for the cities. The anti-inflation austerity campaign pleased Wall Street, but it was also a direct betrayal of Carter's own Election Day coalition. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill tried to convince Carter to defer to some extent to the needs of the legislative process in Congress, but Carter was obdurate in favor of austerity and sacrifice. Carter started his tenure in office by demanding the elimination of a large number of dam and water projects, which he placed on a porkbarrel hit list and touted as a means to fight waste in government. These 19 water projects represented jobs and economic modernization, but they did not fit the Trilateral outlook. Carter axed the water projects in a surprise attack, and the resentment from congressional Democrats was immense. Carter's pose was always that he represented the purity of the national interest, while the Congress was a gang of hagglers, tainted and corrupt. Another early defeat for Carter came when he failed to secure confirmation of Theodore Sorenson as CIA chief, largely because of a contemptuous refusal to coordinate with Democratic congressional leaders. We can already see Obama colliding with the Congress over the question of the earmarks in much the same way in 2009. OSTENTATIOUS DISLIKE FOR CONGRESSIONAL NEGOTIATING Like Carter, Obama cultivates a pose of holier-than-thou distaste for the operations of Congress. According to a recent profile, "Beyond his considerable charm, Obama can be righteous and cocky. He came to Washington pushing the hope that politics could be better -- but now he can give the impression that he'd rather be just about anywhere other than in Washington. 'It can be incredibly frustrating,' he tells me. 'The maneuverings, the chicanery, the smallness of politics here.' Listening to a bloviating colleague [Could this be Biden? -- WGT] at his first meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama slipped a three-word note to a member of his staff: 'Shoot Me Now."' (Ben Wallace Wells, Destiny's Child, Rolling Stone, Feb. 22, 2008) This posturing is enough to doom any legislative agenda, especially one packed with austerity and sacrifice, as Obama's is sure to be. CARTER'S ADMINISTRATIVE CHAOS All of Carter's political problems were doubtless exacerbated by the endemic chaos that prevailed inside the White House. Carter had been the governor of a state of some size, and considered himself to be an expert in the administrative reform of government. But he long refused to appoint a White House Chief of Staff to manage the paper flow, and busied himself obsessively with the minutest details of government operations, while neglecting questions of overall policy and strategy. He thought to some degree as an engineer, regarding every problem as susceptible to a technical or technocratic solution. He was offended when Congress wanted to haggle about his findings. Still, Carter had considerable executive experience. Obama by contrast has none whatsoever. What would a future Obama White House look like? Would it be an anarchic chaos populated by multicultural extremists, Malthusian visionaries, and resurgent cold warriors with virtually no executive guidance, all dancing to the tune of powerful Wall Street interests? At this point, this seems to be the best guess, especially in light of what happened to Carter under the same puppet masters. ENERGY AUSTERITY THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR (MEOW) In a new expression of his contempt for his supposed allies on Capitol Hill, Carter insisted on developing an emergency energy program as a virtual covert operation inside the White House, without congressional input. On April 18, 1977, Carter made an address to the nation in which he referred to his energy program as "the moral equivalent of war." Some noticed that the acronym for the slogan would be MEOW. Even so, Newsweek praised Carter as "a strong activist president" who "had seized the initiative on energy." (Kaufman 33) If we delve into the details of Carter's energy policy, we find an eerie and bizarre parallel to Obama today: both demand an increased reliance on coal as an energy source, ignoring pollution even as they exclude any consideration of nuclear energy. In his speech that night, Carter argued: "If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source ... Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power ... Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals, to measure our progress toward a stable energy system...." Among the goals that Carter wanted to reach by 1985 were the following: "Reduce the annual growth rate in our energy demand to less than two percent. Reduce gasoline consumption by ten percent below its current level. Cut in half the portion of United States oil which is imported, from a potential level of 16 million barrels to six million barrels a day. Establish a strategic petroleum reserve of one billion barrels, more than six months' supply. Increase our coal production by about two thirds to more than 1 billion tons a year." This emphasis on increased use of coal prefigures a similar policy advocated by Obama, in blatant contradiction to his other claims to be the most environmentally sure candidate in the Democratic field. The Washington Post of January 10, 2008 carried an article detailing Obama's strong and consistent support for measures to increase the use of coal in U.S. energy production, with special emphasis on coal liquefaction, which has been condemned as an obsolete technology. Obama was of course pandering to southern Illinois coal mining interests, which he in reality represents on this issue, although this relationship is covered by the usual cloak of hypocrisy. A sane environmental policy focused on human needs would attempt to deemphasize the use of coal as a source of energy, while reserving coal deposits for use in petrochemical production. Only the most dramatic technological breakthroughs could promote coal to the front rank of energy sources. The close parallels between Carter's coal-based energy policies and the Obama campaign of today can help provide new evidence as to the puppet masters of these two candidates. It is evident that Wall Street, from David Rockefeller in the 1970s to such figures as Felix Rohatyn and Warren Rudman today, is committed to a labor-intensive, low-technology energy policy based on coal, coal gasification, coal liquefaction, and synthetic fuels. During his presidential campaign, Carter had railed against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his notorious practice of secret diplomacy, and for his thinly veiled contempt for the moral values of the American people. Carter's own foreign policy was to be administered by Trilateral Commission founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, a revanchist and reactionary Polish aristocrat who soon pushed aside the nominal Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. Brzezinski was a well-known anti-Soviet cold warrior and hawk, and his presence in the critical NSC post was an ominous sign of disastrous events to come. Carter aroused right-wing resentments by his advocacy of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977. Carter stated that he would rather commit suicide than hurt Israel, but in practice he expected the Israelis to make concessions according to Brzezinski's estimate of the needs of the U.S. superpower position vis-a-vis the Soviets. Carter also began talking about a total withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea, which at that point, with the unstable Kim Il Sung still in command, might easily have detonated a war in the Far East in which China and Japan might have become embroiled, which may have been what Brzezinski wanted. This notion of getting rid of rival powers by playing them one against the other is a hallmark of Brzezinski's cynical and manipulative approach to foreign policy. BERT LANCE, LANCEGATE, AND CRONYISM Utopian and messianic aspirational rhetoric can have no greater deflator than a scandal centering on corruption in high places in government. In the case of Carter, the first scandal involved his best friend, Bert Lance, an Atlanta banker whom Carter had made head of the new Office of Management and Budget. Lance was accused of taking sweetheart loans based on his political position, and he was hounded out of office in September 1977. Carter had shown exceedingly poor judgment in attempting to defy public opinion by keeping his crony in government as long as possible, despite the firestorm of corruption charges. As Kaufman points out, "there seems little question that his support of Lance did irreparable harm to his administration. Even the president later conceded this point. Not only did the controversy distract the administration from more pressing domestic and foreign policy matters and helped poison relations with Congress, it undermined public trust in Carter, which he had worked so hard to foster and which was so essential to his success as president." (Kaufman 63) If a politician becomes president after campaigning as an ordinary mortal, the inevitable instances of corruption that will plague any administration can be taken in stride. But a candidate whose stock in trade is a messianic or utopian perspective like that of Carter and Obama finds the inevitable scandal to be especially damaging, since it is the delusion of purity which is being demolished. By the end of 1977, the media question du jour was, "can Carter cope?" Squabbling between the Carter administration and the Democratic Congress was pervasive. By February 1978, only 34% of the American people thought that Carter was doing an excellent or good job, which represented a 21% decline over six months. From this we might be able to conclude that the popularity of a future Obama presidency would begin to collapse in the late summer and early autumn of his first year in office. Naturally, the worldwide economic breakdown crisis of 2008-2009 is already far more serious than what Carter faced in 1977, so it is perfectly plausible that an Obama administration would collapse at an even more rapid rate. This time, the consequences might be much uglier than they were three decades ago. CARTER CREATED FEMA Carter was instrumental in setting up some of the key institutions needed for a U.S. police state. One was the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. "FEMA was established in March 1979 by presidential Review Memorandum 32, with the mandate to maintain 'the continuity of government' (COG) during a national security emergency. PRM 32 bypassed the U.S. Constitution, and awarded power to the unelected officials at the National Security Council to direct U.S. government operations by emergency decree. By placing FEMA under the NSC's control, Huntington, Brzezinski, et al., turned the NSC into a shadow technocratic dictatorship, waiting for a real or manufactured crisis to seize control of the country." (Kathleen Klenetsky and Herbert Quinde, "FEMA's structure for fascist rule," EIR, Nov. 23, 1990) In 1978, Carter increasingly turned his attention to foreign affairs. One of his obsessions was to prevent West Germany from building a nuclear reactor in Brazil, since this violated the Trilateral Commission policy of making third world countries depend either on oil from the Anglo-American controlled Middle East, or on coal, in which countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia had a virtual world export monopoly. Then as now, nuclear energy meant national independence and economic development not controlled by the Wall Street bankers. Carter's biggest project of 1978 was the Camp David Accords between the Egypt of Anwar Sadat and the Israel of Menachem Begin. Although some observers claimed that Carter had dealt brusquely with the Israelis, the net effect of the Camp David Accords was to split the united front of Arab states, leaving an isolated Egypt to contend with an aggressive rejection front led by Iraq, Syria, and the other Arab states. This was of course the handiwork of Brzezinski. Beyond the fixed points of attempting to sabotage the industrial development of the Third World, and the quest for an anti-Soviet breakthrough, Carter's policy appeared on the surface as incoherent, contradictory, and lacking in direction. But from the Trilateral point of view, it was largely coherent, although it could not be avowed in that form to the public. CARTER AND BRZEZINSKI INSTALL KHOMEINI IN IRAN By August 1978, there were clear signs of impending revolution in Iran. This was of course a CIA people power coup orchestrated by British intelligence, the BBC, and the CIA in order to overthrow the Shah and to install in power the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Brzezinski supported in the context of his notorious policy that Islamic fundamentalism was the strongest bulwark against the danger of Soviet communism. Carter and Brzezinski betrayed the trust of their nominal ally, the Shah, with the help of U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan. Their objections to the Shah did not revolve around his monstrous human rights abuses, but rather focused on the Shah's attempts to make independent deals with Italy, other European countries, and the Soviets, for the purpose of accelerating the scientific, technological and industrial development of his country. This was a matter of naked power politics based on the Trilateral program of blocking Third World economic development at all costs -- it was not a matter of human rights. After the Shah had departed from Iran in January 1979, Carter, Brzezinski and NATO commander Al Haig sent Haig's deputy General Huyser to Tehran with the mission of overthrowing the moderate Bakhtiar government, blocking the possibility of a military coup or any other non-theocratic solution, and installing none other than Khomeini and his benighted supporters. In Brzezinski's view, Iran was destined to become a point from which Khomeini's doctrines of Islamic fundamentalism would radiate out into the considerable Islamic population of the Soviet Union, preparing the final downfall of communist rule. One immediate result of Khomeini's seizure of power in Iran was a new fake oil crisis, with a 200% increase in energy prices. This constituted the second great oil hoax perpetrated on the world economy by the Anglo-American oil cartel and its Wall Street and City of London owners. Carter tended to attribute rising oil prices to an actual scarcity, rather than to the reality of oligopolistic machinations and price gouging. FAKE OIL CRISIS AND GAS LINES, JULY 1979 During June and July of 1979, many parts of the United States experienced a severe gasoline shortage. This quickly produced the shocking spectacle of long lines of automobiles waiting at service stations in the hopes of being able to buy gas. Normal economic activity was severely disrupted, as commuters ran out of gas before they could reach their jobs. It was a scene of appalling chaos. Intelligent people realized that there was no absolute gasoline shortage, but rather a cynical strategy of the oil companies to create panic and hysteria as a way of getting the price of gasoline up into the ionosphere. There was growing contempt for Carter as a stooge and chump of the Rockefeller oil interests, as a president too weak and cowardly to face down the malefactors of great wealth in the way that Kennedy had crushed the rapacious Roger Blough of U.S. Steel. Carter would soon exacerbate the rage directed against them by attempting to blame the public, and not his own fecklessness, for the crisis situation that was now engulfing the country. Will Obama react in a similar way? By mid-1978, Carter was again announcing that inflation was public enemy number one. He decided to abolish the tax-deductible three martini lunch, earning the lasting enmity of businessmen all over the country. Some said that Carter governed more like a crusty old New England Puritan than the Southern Baptist that he claimed to be. For her part, Michelle Obama has promised sacrifice and forced changes in living standards if her husband gets to the White House. BRZEZINSKI PLAYS CHINA CARD AGAINST MOSCOW In early 1979, Carter and Brzezinski played their own version of the China card, breaking U.S. diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan and opening full-fledged diplomatic ties to Beijing. Brzezinski pressed for military cooperation between the United States and China. When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited Carter in Washington in January, the final U.S.-Chinese joint communique denounced "hegemony," the Chinese propaganda term for Soviet expansionism. During this same visit, Deng told the Americans of his plan for a punitive military strike into Vietnam, and this occurred in February of that same year. It was evident that Brzezinski had given a green light to this reckless and adventurous move by the Chinese against a well-known ally of Moscow. During this same period, Brzezinski was supporting the Chinese backed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, also against the Vietnamese. Not surprisingly, this emerging Sino-American block caused a backlash in Moscow, and the passage of the SALT II nuclear disarmament treaty was seriously impeded. All this is of course exactly what Brzezinski wanted. These events offer the merest hint of the kind of superpower adventurism and brinksmanship that octogenarian Brzezinski can be relied upon to produce as a controller of a future Obama administration. In fact, playing China against Russia in a Eurasian World War III is at the heart of Brzezinski's designs for an Obama administration, and represents a ploy that is sure to blow up in his face. CARTER REGIME IMPLODES, JULY 1979 In the summer of 1979, the Carter regime for all intents and purposes imploded. If it had been a parliamentary government, it would have fallen. The occasion for this crisis was an address to the nation which Carter had announced for July 5, 1979, which he had billed in advance as one of the major addresses of his presidency. But just one day before he was to go on the air, Carter canceled this speech without any public justification. At this point, in one of the most extraordinary pieces of political theater in recent American history, Carter left the White House and took up residence for 11 days at his Camp David retreat, where he received a series of visits from business, government, labor, academic, and religious leaders. He made occasional sorties by helicopter to visit with average middle-class families in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, in a self-described bid to tap the pulse of the common man. Establishment figures including the Harrimanite Clark Clifford were brought in, and they roundly berated Carter for his lack of leadership. Carter's pollster Pat Caddell argued that the problem the United States was facing was a "crisis of spirit," and that this was the issue that had to be solved before any progress on the energy front could be made. THE MALAISE AND 'CRISIS OF SPIRIT' SPEECH, JULY 15, 1979 Carter strongly espoused this "crisis of spirit" thesis and made it the centerpiece of his television address to the nation on July 15, 1979. This is the famous malaise speech which became the defining moment of Carter's entire presidency. Carter argued that a solution to the energy crisis was vital for the future prospects of the American economy, but that success depended on the American will. "We are at a turning point in our history," Carter stated. "All the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. What is lacking is confidence and a sense of community. Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation." (Kaufman 145) Here we see a clear note of utopian transcendence of the normal legislative and political process in the name of what amounts to a mystical goal. Observers pointed out that Carter's oratorical delivery and voice inflection were more eloquent in this speech than in any previous address. Brutal energy austerity and price gouging, since that is what Carter was concretely proposing, were imbued with spiritual and transfiguring significance. This demagogic synthesis of mysticism and spiritualism in a Gnostic key in the service of bankers' austerity is even more prominent in the Obama campaign of today. CARTER: BLAMING THE PUBLIC FOR HIS OWN INCOMPETENCE Many of the 100 million Americans who heard this speech came to the conclusion that the Carter administration was in effect berating and scapegoating the American people because of the incompetence and ineptitude of the Carter White House. Carter was in effect passing the buck to the public at large because he was unwilling to face the consequences of his own subservience to Wall Street and its doctrines of austerity and Malthusianism. Will Obama imitate Carter's crude ploy of blaming the people for his own deception and treachery? For those who remember the Carter years, it would appear to be just a question of time. MICHELLE OBAMA'S VERSION OF MALAISE: "OUR SOULS ARE BROKEN" Carter's central argument has been echoed in a slightly different context by Michelle Obama, the wife of the current Trilateral candidate for the presidency. Part of Michelle Obama's standard stump speech is a remark that we cannot fix the health care system until we have fixed Washington. Obama himself agrees: according to The Swamp, the politics blog of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Obama says that to fix health care, "we have to fix Washington," according to the New York Times online blog The Caucus. (Feb. 26, 2008) This begs the question of what is wrong with Washington. Michelle Obama's answer generally goes like this: "Before we can fix our problems, we have to fix our souls," Michelle Obama says repeatedly in her stump speech. "Our souls are broken in this nation. We have lost our way. And it begins with leadership. It begins with inspiration. It begins with leadership. This race is about character. I am married to the only person in this race who has a chance of healing this Nation ... And right now we need some inspiration. Inspiration and hope are not words. Everything begins and ends with hope. And the only person in this race who has a chance of getting us where we need to be is Barack Obama." "We need a leader who's going to touch our souls because you see, our souls are broken," Michelle Obama stresses. "The change Barack is talking about is hard, so don't get too excited because Barack is going to demand that you too be different." "We need to be inspired ... to make the sacrifices that are needed to push us to a different place," she repeats. "Dreaming does count. You need to dream to realize your possibilities." It is important to call attention to the sinister hints in this demagogic performance that point towards a future of austerity and sacrifice of the American people. The American standard of living has by the best calculations been cut since the Eisenhower-Kennedy era by something approaching two thirds. Any proposals for austerity and sacrifice inside the United States have obvious genocidal overtones against the American population, and can only serve the interests of the parasitical Wall Street bankers who bear the full responsibility for the present catastrophic world depression. It is these Wall Street banking and financial interests whom Obama obviously serves. BEYOND MALAISE: CARTER'S CABINET MASSACRE OF JULY, 1979 Two days after the infamous malaise speech had been broadcast, Carter provoked a total crisis of his own regime at the cabinet meeting of July 17, 1979 by demanding the resignation of all of his Cabinet secretaries and all of the senior members of the White House staff. This reckless and ill-considered action created a worldwide impression that the United States government had descended into total chaos. In the words of White House spokesman Jody Powell, this July massacre had unleashed "semi-hysteria" among the White House staff and in the executive departments. The next day, Carter announced that he would accept the resignations of Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, Secretary of the Treasury Blumenthal, and Health Education and Welfare Secretary Califano. Shortly thereafter, Carter also announced the ouster of Transportation Secretary Brock Adams and Attorney General Griffin Bell. The big winner in the July massacre was Carter's crude and incompetent crony Hamilton Jordan, who became White House Chief of Staff and Carter's direct proxy in giving orders to the executive departments. VOLCKER'S 22% PRIME RATE DESTROYS U.S. INDUSTRY In August 1979, Carter named longtime treasury official Paul Adolf Volcker to become a head of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Volcker promptly set about the systematic destruction of the United States' remaining industrial base through a merciless process of interest rate hikes, soon reaching the astronomical level of a 22% prime rate. Volcker claimed that his policy was aimed at purging the economic system of inflationary tendencies, but the cure was far worse than the disease. The economic theory of John Maynard Keynes had been described as inflation as a remedy for economic depression. The Volcker method was sometimes called Keynesianism in reverse: this time it was self-imposed depression as a remedy for inflation. This monetarist insanity straight out of the Friedman-von Hayek playbook, more than any other single factor, destroyed the Carter regime. In January 1980, the consumer price index rose 14% year-on-year, translating into an annual rate of 18.2% inflation, which was the highest level attained in six years. Wholesale prices for January 1980 were rising at a rate of 21% on a yearly basis. It was calculated that the purchasing power of an average wage worker living in a city declined by 1.4% during February 1980 alone. By March 1980 the prime rate touched 16.75%, and by April it was 18.5%. As a result of the Volcker high-interest policy, the two most important industries left in the American economy, housing and automobiles, virtually collapsed. Housing starts in March 1980 fell 42% from the rate of a year before; this was also the worst monthly decline in 20 years. The sharp decline in the housing industry ravaged the entire first quarter of 1980, generating a ripple effect in which building suppliers closed their factories and laid off the remaining workers. Auto sales fell 24% compared to the previous year. Unemployment in Detroit was at 24%. By July 1980 the Labor Department reported 8.2 million unemployed, an increase of almost 2 million new jobless since February. The economic situation was so wretched that commentators began talking about a misery index, which consisted of the unemployment percentage added on to the yearly inflation rate. A new term had to be coined to describe the horrors of the Carter Volcker Trilateral economic bust: this was stagflation, a combination of high unemployment and high inflation which had hitherto been thought theoretically impossible, but which Carter, Volcker and the Trilateraloids had succeeded in achieving. Between April and June 1980, corporate profits declined by more than 18%, which represented their third biggest drop since 1945. Gold reached $850 per ounce. The dollar tanked on international markets. Both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve allowed the sociopathic Hunt brothers of Texas to run wild as they attempted to corner the silver market in early 1980. Carter, following the model of Herbert Hoover rather than that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, focused on defeating inflation by trying to balance the federal budget. Given the gravity of the situation, these priorities were simply insane in economic terms, as well as being politically suicidal. Today, with the collapse of the U.S. automobile industry, the drastic slowdown in the housing as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, the signs of incipient hyperinflation, and the confused alarms of banking panic across the globe, it is easy to see the eerie parallels between the Carter era and our own time. An uncanny calculus has apparently motivated the Trilaterals to dish up yet another Manchurian candidate for president in the midst of a crisis which is similar to, though far more severe than, that of the Carter years. (Kaufman 168-169, 183) Given Carter's economic mismanagement, reactionary commentators had a field day: William Safire wrote in the New York Times during the 1980 primaries that the "wind that chilled the Carter candidacy this week was made up of four Is -- Inflation, Iran, Israel, and Ineptitude." (Kaufman 171) Things were so bad in the U.S. economy that when Carter left office and opened the blind trust into which he had placed his financial assets before taking office in 1977, he found that the Carter peanut warehouse business, his main economic asset, had gone bankrupt, leaving him deeply in debt. BRZEZINSKI PROVOKES THE SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR, 1979 In June and July 1979, Brzezinski ordered U.S. special forces and subversion teams to cross the border into Afghanistan and begin a campaign of destabilization in that country, with a view to defeating neutralist and pro-Soviet forces and favoring the rise of a pro-NATO regime. This aggressive move in a country along their own border was watched with growing alarm from Moscow. In the Christmas season of 1979, the Soviet Red Army intervened in force inside Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Soviet government there. As Brzezinski told the Nouvel Observateur of Paris in 1998, he had ordered the U.S. subversion and the destabilization teams into Afghanistan with the express hope that he could provoke the Soviets to make a large-scale military countermove that might bog them down in their own version of the bloodletting that the U.S. had just experienced in Vietnam. In that 1998 interview, Brzezinski boasted that he had successfully prompted the Soviets to invade, setting off a war which had lasted almost 10 years and killed between two and three million people. Brzezinski exulted that this geopolitical ploy had begun the downfall of the Soviet Union. He scoffed at questions about the role of the Afghan war in stoking the fires of worldwide Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Brzezinski jeered that a bunch of angry Muslims were of no importance in comparison to the vast historical significance of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. This is another good insight into Brzezinski's characteristic method: any tactic that will damage Moscow is to be embraced and ruthlessly implemented. The collateral damage that may be generated against the United States or against traditional U.S. allies is to be simply disregarded as a matter of no importance. Brzezinski clearly helped to lay the groundwork for the creation of the U.S. and British intelligence patsy army or Arab Legion known as al Qaeda, whose origins reach back to his watch. BRZEZINSKI ORCHESTRATES THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian militants seized the United States Embassy in Tehran Iran and took 60 American diplomatic personnel as hostages. This incident was cynically exploited by Brzezinski as a proto-September 11 pretext to create a strategic crisis in the Persian Gulf region. The pretext cited for the seizure of the embassy in the taking of the U.S. diplomatic hostages was the fact that the Shah of Iran had been admitted to the U.S. on October 22, 1979 in order to receive medical treatment. The Shah had been living in Mexico, and there was no reason why he could not have received top-flight medical care in that country. But Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller had demanded that the Shah be admitted to the United States. Since David Rockefeller was Brzezinski's boss on the Trilateral Commission, the orchestration of the seizure of the hostages becomes evident. Carter was dimly aware of the implications of admitting the Shah to this country and he did reportedly ask at a meeting, "when the Iranians take our people in Tehran hostage, what would you advise me then?" At this very same time the Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where he inveighed against the United States as "the great Satan." But this posturing did not prevent Yazdi from holding a closed-door meeting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The London Financial Times reported on October 5, 1979 that, as a result of these meetings, the Carter regime had ordered the "resumption of large-scale airlifts of arms to Iran" and was considering dispatching a "limited number of technicians" to that country. Simultaneously, the U.S. military began a buildup in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The Carter regime was in contact with Yazdi through former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark of the left wing of the U.S. intelligence community. Clark wrote to Yazdi: "it is critically important to show that despots cannot escape and live in wealth while the nations they ravaged continued to suffer." When this letter later became public, it was "taken as evidence that special envoy Clark had incited the Iranians to take over the embassy and demand the return of the Shah to Iran." BRZEZINSKI AND YAZDI; BRZEZINSKI AND SADDAM HUSSEIN On November 1, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski held a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Yazdi in Algeria. "According to intelligence sources, it was during this last tete-a-tete that final details concerning the embassy takeover were hammered out." Further details of the embassy seizure and hostage-taking were discussed by Yazdi upon his return to Teheran with the U.S. charge d'affaires Bruce Laingen, who was a key operative in the political charade that was about to begin." (Robert Dreyfus, Hostage to Khomeini [New York: RTR 1981]. pp. 59-60) Because U.S. hostages had been taken, Brzezinski circles were able to argue behind the scenes that it was imperative to keep up arms shipments to the Iranians, because this appeasement of the Khomeini regime was the only way to keep the hostages alive. At no point during the entire Carter administration were arms shipments by the United States to Iran ever halted. They were seamlessly maintained, and this is the beginning of the weapons trafficking which came into public view years later in the form of the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986. Another reason why Brzezinski wanted to arm Iran was that he was already planning to play Iran off against Iraq in the genocidal Gulf War, which went far towards destroying both of these countries. The characteristic feature of Brzezinski's method is to avoid direct U.S. military intervention as long as possible, while attempting to destroy emerging Third World powers and other possible rivals of the United States by playing them off one against the other. (The Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, as a result of the gullibility of the U.S. asset Saddam Hussein. Brzezinski's emissaries convinced Saddam that it would be easy to invade Iran and grab the oil province of Khuzestan or Arabistan, where the Abadan refineries and the Karg island tanker terminal are located. In reality, Brzezinski was seeking to consolidate and perpetuate the Khomeini regime, which by that point was in the process of internal collapse. The attack by a foreign enemy gave the Khomeini regime a second wind, and led to a bloody stalemate which lasted for eight full years, until September 1988. Iranian casualties in this war approached one million dead, with those of Iraq being estimated at about 400,000 fatalities. This is the characteristic handiwork of Brzezinski.) SEIZING IRANIAN ASSETS TO ABORT EUROPEAN MONETARY REFORM A key feature of the crisis was Carter's seizure of more than $6 billion in Iranian assets inside the United States. The new Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, just founded by Brzezinski and Huntington, was a key part of the planning of this illegal move. The resulting turmoil in the international financial markets was useful to Brzezinski in that it blocked the development of the emerging French-German European Monetary System as a global alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, both controlled by the Anglo-Americans. Only one month before the Iranian crisis erupted, French Foreign Minister Jean Francois-Poncet had told reporters at the United Nations in New York of the European "vision" that the EMS would come to replace the IMF and World Bank at the center of the world financial architecture. (Dreyfus 63) As a result of the hostage crisis, Brzezinski was perfectly positioned to blackmail Western Europe and Japan on a series of points that were of interest to the Wall Street banking community. Brzezinski demanded that the Europeans and Japanese scrupulously observe the U.S. economic sanctions and economic blockade against Iran. The only alternative to economic sanctions and economic warfare, he argued, was a direct military attack by the U.S. on Iran. It was in this context that Brzezinski told the Frankfurter Rundschau: "It is now up to Europe to prevent World War III." (Dreyfus 66) This was helped along by a pattern of U.S. military threats to bomb Iranian oilfields or tanker terminals as part of an alleged retaliation for the seizure of the hostages. It was clear that the main victims who would suffer from any U.S. attack on Iran were more the Europeans and Japanese than the Iranians themselves, since oil deliveries out of the Persian Gulf would be severely restricted. Brzezinski's blackmail was clearly understood by European leaders, who had long despised him. A November 28, 1979 column published in the Figaro of Paris by Paul Marie de la Gorce is indicative in this regard. The author was widely regarded as speaking for French President Giscard d'Estaing. This column stated that any U.S. military attack on Iran would cause "more damage for Europe and Japan than for Iran." Those who propose such a strategy, the French observer noted, were quite possibly courting a new world war, and were "consciously or not inspired by the lessons given by Henry Kissinger." (Dreyfus 65) All quite correct, except for the fact that the crisis was being orchestrated by Brzezinski, an even greater madman and lunatic adventurer than Kissinger. THE CARTER DOCTRINE OF JANUARY 1980: SOURCE OF THE IRAQ WAR Brzezinski used the hostage crisis to promulgate the so-called Carter Doctrine on the Persian Gulf, which was included in the January 1980 State of the Union address. Brzezinski insisted against all objections on the inclusion of this critical passage: "Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Columnist Joseph Kraft called this lunacy "a breathtaking progression from the dream world to the world of reality." (Rozell 161) This was a piece of incalculable folly, since it threw down the gauntlet to the Soviet Union in the most provocative possible way. This Carter doctrine has also provided the basis for every U.S. fiasco in the Persian Gulf region over the last several decades, including the first Gulf War to eject Iraq from Kuwait and the current Iraq war itself. If you don't like the Iraq war, you need to reserve a significant part of the blame for Brzezinski, who is so to speak the founder of the policy carried out by Bush the Elder and Bush the younger. The fact that Brzezinski today tries to acquire left cover by posing as a principled enemy of the Iraq war simply underlines his hypocrisy and guile, and the gullibility of the left liberals who believe him. BRZEZINSKI'S DESERT ONE DEBACLE By the spring of 1980, it was clear to the world that the Carter regime was preparing a desperate military launch into Iran under the pretext of freeing the hostages. In an article that hit the streets on April 22, 1980, the Executive Intelligence Review reported that the Carter regime "has begun a headlong drive towards a Cuban missile crisis-style nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over Iran, timed to occur between late April and May 11, for the purpose of blackmailing Western Europe and Japan into submitting to Anglo-American political dictates." (Dreyfus 65) The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda editorialized on April 11, 1980: "Washington is not only aiming at aggravating its conflict with Teheran. Judging from everything, it is venturing a risky bluff: blackmailing Iran, as well as America's allies who depend on oil deliveries from the Persian Gulf with the threat of direct military intervention." The Soviet commentary saw that "this strategy puts Western Europe and Japan in the position of being forced participants in a game designed to strengthen the shaken position of U.S. imperialism in the near and Middle East." This Moscow observer concluded that "the prospect of being deprived of Iranian oil does not provoke any enthusiasm, especially not in Tokyo, Bonn, or Paris." (Dreyfus 66) VANCE FEARED WORLD WAR III WITH MOSCOW The tragic failure of the hostage rescue mission at Desert One, a rendezvous point inside Iran, was on the surface yet another proof of the incompetence and chaos of the Carter administration. There was some question as to whether the rescue mission had been sabotaged by CIA forces loyal to the Bush political machine to abort a pre-October surprise by Carter, since George H. W. Bush was now on his way to becoming Reagan's vice presidential running mate. This may have been what Iraqi state radio was driving at when it alleged that the failed U.S. attack was "playacting carried out in orchestration between Washington and Tehran." Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned in protest at the rescue mission, although this fact was not made public until after the mission had failed. "We haven't begun just an attack on Iran," Vance reportedly commented, "We may have started World War III." Rumors swirled around Washington to the effect that the failure of the hostage mission had been caused by a direct Soviet military intervention including MIG-21 aircraft, and according to some unconfirmed accounts the Soviet bombardment of the Desert One site. But this may have been an obvious enough cover story to hide the actions of the Bush crowd, or of deliberate sabotage by Brzezinski networks. (Dreyfus 67-68) With the failure of the hostage rescue mission at Desert One, some key Wall Street backers of the Carter administration such as George Ball and Averell Harriman bolted for the exits, abandoning the peanut farmer to his fate. Brzezinski, by contrast, constituted a stay-behind operation to run the Carter administration to its bitter end, which he personally had done so much to hasten. At about the same time that the Soviet Union was moving into Afghanistan, fundamentalist fanatics attacked the grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine of Islam, holding hundreds of pilgrims as hostages. In Pakistan, a mob of 20,000 Muslim rioters attacked and destroyed the American embassy in Islamabad, killing two Americans. The rioters had been told that the U.S. had orchestrated the attack on the grand Mosque in Mecca. Another serious incident was an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, which resulted in the murder of the U.S. ambassador. Given Brzezinski's commitment to crisis and confrontation, it is not difficult to establish him as a prime suspect in the orchestration of all these attacks. PD-59: BRZEZINSKI STRIVES FOR TACTICAL NUCLEAR WAR, COUNTERFORCE STRIKES In the wake of the failed hostage rescue mission, Brzezinski promulgated a new piece of strategic insanity and brinksmanship in the form of Presidential Directive 59, issued in August 1980. This document called for the United States to adopt a policy of limited or tactical nuclear war wherever needed to be able to deal with Soviet strategic moves. It was the brainchild of Brzezinski and Carter's Defense Secretary, Harold "Bomber" Brown, one of the Strangeloves who had helped carry out strategic bombing during the Vietnam War. PD-59 represented a giant step away from the doctrine of deterrence, otherwise known as mutually assured destruction (MAD), which had been the only means of keeping the peace of the world after the late 1950s. PD-59 talked about the possibility of counterforce attacks against Soviet nuclear assets in addition to the long-standing targeting of population centers as part of a so-called counter-value strategy. Brzezinski and Brown claimed that this harebrained scheme meant that the United States nuclear deterrent would continue to be credible even in the face of a Soviet military buildup. But sane observers pointed out that the PD-59 policy vastly increased the chances of crossing the nuclear threshold into the unthinkable realm of nuclear exchange, because it made atomic hostilities easier to start. The Soviet news agency TASS described this new strategy as "madness," while Pravda attacked it as "nuclear blackmail" destined to cause a new acceleration of the arms race. BRZEZINSKI'S EUROMISSILES CRISIS, 1979-1983 In 1979, NATO had decided under prodding by Brzezinski to begin the process leading to the stationing of U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe as a counter to the deployment of Soviet SS 20 intermediate range ballistic missiles. Carter had held a very public discussion with himself about building the neutron bomb, which further inflamed the suspicions of Moscow. He then decided to build and deploy the MX multi-warhead ICBM. All of these moves were dictated by the insane warmonger Brzezinski, and they helped to move the world towards the brink of general thermonuclear war, as the French and German governments noted with alarm. Combined with events in Afghanistan and in Iran, the new U.S. doctrine of counterforce combined with tactical nuclear warfare had created a superpower crisis of the first magnitude, all within about 36 months of the Carter Brzezinski regime coming into power. To further antagonize the Soviets, Carter slapped a total grain embargo on the Soviet Union, and boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Relations between Washington and Moscow reached an absolute nadir. Although he is approaching 80 years of age, it is a safe bet that the aging Strangelove Brzezinski will still be capable of taking today's world to the brink in even less time under a future Obama administration. THREE MILE ISLAND ON CARTER'S WATCH Perhaps the event which best symbolized and summed up the abyss of cultural pessimism and historical despair into which the Carter administration had led the United States was a nuclear incident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in late March, 1979. A malfunction at a nuclear reactor was used by the controlled corporate media to unleash a wave of panic and hysteria which gripped the United States for several days. Not one person was killed in the entire incident. Nevertheless, the Three Mile Island affair was used to solidify and consolidate the post-1968 cultural paradigm shift away from traditional notions of science and progress in that direction of historical pessimism and the limits of growth which had been proclaimed by the neofascist Club of Rome just a decade earlier. Carter had come into office with the firm intent to sabotage the nuclear modernization of the developing countries, and this Three Mile Island incident allowed him to shut down the nuclear reactor industry inside the United States. Since the Three Mile Island media circus, not one new nuclear reactor has been completed and placed online in this country. The incident inside the reactor was extremely suspicious: the entire fiasco came just two weeks after the premiere of a film entitled The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. This was an obvious scenario film which showed a devastating incident at a nuclear reactor. It is a good rule of thumb to assume that when a scenario film appears on television or in the movies, and the actual event then occurs soon afterward, an intelligence network has used the scenario film to prepare public opinion for the real-world event. Just a few months before the events of September 11, 2001, for example, Fox television broadcast the scenario film The Lone Gunmen, which showed a hijacked airliner almost colliding with the World Trade Center towers in New York City. With a few variations, the plot was broadly similar to what then happened on September 11. It was known at the time of Three Mile Island that the most likely cause of this incident had not been a mechanical failure of the reactor itself, but rather deliberate sabotage by one of the employees at the plant, obviously enough in the framework of a covert operation designed to paralyze or destroy the nuclear power industry in the United States. The Carter administration failed miserably in determining what had actually happened at Three Mile Island, and eagerly embraced the thesis that nuclear energy was inherently unsafe. Together with the Volcker interest-rate policies at the Federal Reserve, Three Mile Island was a principal factor in the de-industrialization of the United States carried out during the Carter years. Here again, this country has not recovered to this day from the destruction wrought under the Carter regime. Those who are concerned about greenhouse gases today should recall that it was under Carter that the fateful decision against nuclear energy and in favor of coal-fired plants was made. Speaking on the National Public Radio Diane Rehm program on February 27, 2008, correspondent Joe Hebert of the Associated Press speculated that another incident on the scale of Three Mile Island would essentially doom the nuclear power industry in the United States, putting an end to the current trend for nuclear power to make a comeback in this country. This raises the obvious question: is a new nuclear reactor incident being planned for a future Obama administration? We can be reasonably sure that if such an incident were to occur, Obama would be just as hostile to finding out what had really happened as Bush was in regard to September 11. GLOBAL 2000: GENOCIDE AS OFFICIAL U.S. POLICY It was during the Jimmy Carter regime that policies of population reduction in the Third World, amounting to thinly veiled genocide, were instituted as the imperative doctrine of the United States government. Many of the documents in question, such as Global 2000 and Global Futures, were produced in the State Department under Carter's second secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, who replaced Vance in 1979. By the spring of 1980, the resident Strangelove of the White House, who had now outlasted his rival Cyrus Vance, had also become a huge public relations liability, both in terms of his track record and in terms of his personality. Newsweek magazine wrote that: ''as things now stand, the president's uncertain diplomatic strategy has left allies perplexed, enemies unimpressed, and the nation as vulnerable as ever in an increasingly dangerous world." One prominent historian of the Carter presidency writes that: "because of his high profile and combative Cold War views, Brzezinski came under particular attack, prompting Jody Powell to urge Carter to curb the NSC adviser's public appearances. 'To put it bluntly,' Powell stated, 'Zbig needs to almost drop from public view for the next few months at least.'" (Kaufman 176) This analysis was correct: when Brzezinski appeared at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York City, he was heavily booed, especially by Kennedy delegates. Brzezinski was widely recognized at that time as the most unpopular member of the Carter administration -- no mean feat, given how much Carter and some of his underlings were hated. It may well be that Brzezinski was the most unpopular figure in any Democratic administration since Johnson left office in January 1969 until of course Zbig rehabilitated himself by becoming a critic of the Iraq war. Today, Obama is wisely keeping Brzezinski in the closet and denying his relationship with the Polish incendiary. BILLY CARTER AND BILLYGATE Yet another factor dragging down the Carter regime was the dubious role of the president's younger brother, Billy Carter. Billy had attracted notoriety by attempting to market a brand of beer bearing his own name, the so-called Billy Beer. He had also undertaken a highly publicized trip to Libya in 1978 to meet with officials of the regime of Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. Soon the Justice Department had to ask Billy to register as a foreign agent for the Libyan government. One of Billy's missions was to procure an increase in Libyan oil deliveries to the Charter Oil Company. By July 1980, it became known that Billy Carter had received $220,000 from the Libyan government. Zbigniew Brzezinski had had a role in the scandal, and may have been one of the leakers who had started the ball rolling. A White House statement specified that Zbigniew Brzezinski had met with Billy Carter and a Libyan official in November 1979 to talk about the possibility of getting Libyan help to release the U.S. hostages held in Iran. This idea had been endorsed by First Lady Rosalind Carter. When Billy had traveled to Libya for his second trip in early 1980, he had taken with him some confidential cables from the State Department. This dose of new corruption evidence was yet another blow to Carter's popularity. "That damn Billy Carter stuff is killing us," commented Hamilton Jordan of the Carter White House. (Kaufman 191) THE CARTER REGIME: AUSTERITY, PAIN AND SACRIFICE Perhaps another of the reasons that Carter and Brzezinski did not in fact pitch the world into all-out thermonuclear war during 1980 had to do with the precipitous collapse of the Carter regime on the home front. In November 1980, Eizenstat warned Carter that in the public perception, his economic policy was "viewed solely as austerity, pain, and sacrifice." (Kaufman 179) Carter had been programmed as an austerity president, and he was now the target of widespread popular rage and resentment for precisely that reason. He had betrayed his own political base. In early 1980, Carter secured the creation of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation with authority to spend $88 billion over the next decade to develop alternative energy sources. This is yet another precursor to the current alternative proposals pushed by Bush and Obama. Carter during early 1980 was also demanding a 10 cents per gallon surcharge on all imported oil. He also demanded the creation of an Energy Mobilization Board, to override state laws and regulations on matters pertaining to energy supplies. He was doing this a few months before a general election, and despite his own wretched popularity ratings in the public opinion polls. On June 4, 1980, both houses of Congress repudiated Carter by approving a joint resolution killing the proposed oil import tax. The vote was 73 to 16 in the Senate and 376 to 30 in the House, in spite of the three-to-two Democratic majority in the Senate, and a two-to-one edge in the House. It was the first time that a two-thirds majority of the Congress had overwritten the veto of a president from the same party since Harry Truman in the early 1950s, and showed that Carter had so alienated and antagonized the Democrats on Capitol Hill that he had no working majority. Carter whined that his defeat represented a new low in congressional performance during his time in office. Fortunately for the world, Carter settled into the status of a lame duck and concentrated on his doomed reelection effort against the Republican Reagan-Bush ticket. NOVEMBER 1980: CARTER CARRIES FIVE STATES AND D.C. In the November 1980 elections, Carter was able to carry the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, and Maryland for a total of 49 electoral votes to the 489 rolled up by Reagan Bush. This landslide marked the beginning of a reactionary nightmare in American politics which continued unmitigated until the arrival of Bill Clinton in 1992, and has continued to exercise a profoundly negative influence on the United States until this very day. DID BRZEZINSKI RECRUIT OBAMA IN 1981-83? As for Carter, he became a virtual pariah after leaving office, taking no part whatsoever in the 1984 Democratic national convention or in the campaign of his former Vice President Walter Mondale. He seemed to retreat into the argument that the United States had become ungovernable during his time in office, and that there was nothing that he could have done differently. As for Brzezinski, he went back to Columbia University and by all indications busied himself with the recruitment of a stable of new Manchurian candidates on the Carter model to be deployed farther down the line, in a total political and economic crisis which Samuel Huntington was then predicting for the years between 2010 and 2030. Among the bright young men on the make that Brzezinski began to draw into his orbit at this time was, in all probability, the youthful Barack Obama, who had transferred to Columbia University in 1981, and who graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science, a specialization in international relations, and a thesis topic involving Soviet nuclear disarmament -- a topic that represented Brzezinski's personal area of interest as the boss of the Columbia Institute for Communist Affairs. CARTER AS HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PESSIMIST In an essay entitled "Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency," the new deal scholar William E. Leuchtenburg cites an important line from Carter's inaugural address of January 1977: "we have learned that 'more' is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits." Leuchtenburg then goes on to quote the following comment by Carter in his later memoirs: "Watching the sea of approving faces [on Inauguration Day], I wondered how few of the happy celebrants would agree with my words if they analyzed them closely. At the time, it was not possible even for me to imagine the limits we would have to face. In some ways, dealing with limits would become the subliminal theme of the next four years and affect the outcome of the 1980 election." Carter evidently knew well enough right at the outset that he had hoodwinked the American people. Leuchtenburg quotes a remark by Michael Malbin that "Americans remain a people of the Enlightenment who find it hard to accept the postmodern (or ancient) view of a world of limited possibilities." In other words, a presidency founded on historical and cultural pessimism, most notably in the form of Malthusian austerity, is unlikely to be accepted by Americans, and leads to failure and ungovernability. Despite indications of ideological decadence and moral senility in the American people around the turn of the 21st century, it is very likely that the tendency to reject historical and cultural pessimism remains surprisingly strong, and could emerge powerfully under conditions of crisis. A resurgence of scientific optimism and activist government is precisely what synthetic candidates like Carter and Obama have been designed to sabotage. Leuchtenburg cites a reporter who summed up the conclusion of the Carter presidency by remarking: "He preached to us constantly about sacrifice and limitations, which none of us wanted to hear." The tremendous demoralization and despair associated with the Carter presidency opened the door for the right-wing reactionary Ronald Reagan, who went to the White House wearing a mask of sunny optimism. Leuchtenburg quotes the comment of one scholar that "whatever Reagan did, many Americans felt, would be better than the handwringing, sermons, and demands for sacrifice of the last four years." One former Carter official summed up his boss's message in the following terms: "in order to be a good American ... You've got to drive cars you don't like ... And turn up the thermostat in the summer and down in the winter. You're a pig, you've been using too much energy all your life and you've got to change." (Leuchtenburg 22-23) CARTER AND THE DEMOCRATS' RETREAT FROM THE NEW DEAL The Carter presidency inaugurated a retreat from the heritage of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal which has been disastrous for the Democratic Party. It was under Carter that the great U-turn in American life, from rising standards of living to falling standards of living, became evident and institutionalized. From the Carter era onwards, American living standards have been in a process of precipitous decline, down to the current level of barely a third of the Eisenhower-Kennedy norm. When Walter Mondale ran for president in 1984, he began including trade unions and teachers' unions among the sinister interest groups whose influence in Washington had to be contained, as if they were big oil or big pharmaceuticals -- he was carrying on the same process. When Michael Dukakis in 1988 said that the main issue in the election was competence and not ideology, this was another coded repudiation of the Roosevelt tradition. Dukakis ostentatiously refused to offer any promise of increased federal spending to fight poverty. Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over, embraced free trade sellouts, and abolished the welfare system, abandoning millions of poor children to a grim fate. These wretched policies could never take the place of FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, and LBJ's Great Society. A FITTING MONUMENT TO CARTER: A BOTTOMLESS PIT After the Carter administration had left Washington, the prominent trade unionist William R. Winpisinger of the International Association of Machinists was asked for his evaluation of Carter's place in history. He replied: ''as presidents go, he was on a par with Calvin Coolidge. I consider his abilities mediocre, his actions pusillanimous, and his administration a calamity for America's working people. Since an obelisk soaring 555 feet into the air symbolizes the nation's admiration and respect for George Washington, it would seem the only fitting memorial for Jimmy Carter would be a bottomless pit." (Leuchtenburg 17) MALTHUSIANISM SPELLS DOOM FOR DEMOCRATS Jimmy Carter is of course not the only failed president of the last several decades, but he is the only Democrat other than Clinton to reach the White House since the end of the Johnson administration in 1969. Carter's administration is today little understood by younger voters, and older voters are not anxious to remember the agony of the Carter years. The Democratic Party has had its share of failed and dysfunctional presidential candidates -- George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry come to mind. All of these figures shared the same essential crippling flaw: they could not understand that an embrace of the ideology of the limits of growth and the inevitability of scarcity had to doom any concerns about the alleviation of poverty, the defense of the middle class, or the provision of adequate education, health care, housing, transportation, and other social services -- to say nothing of improving the lot of the impoverished masses of the developing countries. Before 1968, Malthusianism was considered an alien doctrine among American leftists. It was after all the New Deal and not any free-market orgy that for the first time in human history unlocked the secrets of the atom, put human beings on the moon, and opened the era of computer technology. It is only as a result of the disorientation, disillusionment, defeat, and despair of the late 1960s and early 1970s that ideas about the limits of growth and the impossibility of making people's lives better through science, technology, and progress became pervasive. During his first year in office, French President Nicholas Sarkozy told the French that they are now living in an "age of scarcity." Yet, there is no objective reason why this should be so. The age of scarcity ideology represents a self-imposed block, a universe in which no progressive causes can survive. Jimmy Carter's greatest failing was his intellectual incapacity to reject the ideology of scarcity and austerity. Today, under circumstances which have qualitatively deteriorated since Carter's time, the Obama candidacy proposes a final capitulation to these reactionary and inhumane ideas. OBAMA: A NEW DISASTER A LA CARTER It is hoped that this retrospective summary of the Carter-Brzezinski-Volcker Trilateral administration of 1977 to 1981 will help the public to identify the Obama candidacy as a warmed-over version, more sophisticated and elaborate to be sure, of the same sinister methods which made the Carter regime such a nightmare. Far from being fresh and new, Obama represents a thoroughly discredited model which has already been tried and which has failed. In spite of his own reckless folly, Carter was nevertheless able to complete four years in office. There is, however, no guarantee that the United States of America could survive an Obama-Brzezinski presidency for that long. THE BRZEZINSKI PLAYBOOK -- HINTS OF THE FUTURE UNDER OBAMA This brief retrospective of the 1977-1981 Brzezinski-Carter administration can perhaps provide us with a repertoire of tricks and tactics in which Brzezinski can be considered well-versed, and which we may therefore expect may well be carried out during a possible Obama administration. We can call this brief catalogue the Brzezinski Playbook. 1. Economic stagflation was a new term that had to be invented to describe the Carter-Brzezinski Volcker Trilateral combination of unprecedented unemployment and high inflation. Now the newspapers are full of dire predictions of stagflation. This time, Brzezinski's policies will consummate the existing tendencies toward hyperinflationary depression, something like the Carter economic crisis raised to the third or fourth power. 2. Brzezinski is a past master of orchestrating and exploiting for political purposes attacks on embassies and the seizure of diplomatic personnel as hostages. On his watch, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan was murdered, and the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan attacked by a large mob. The most celebrated example of Zbig's handiwork in this department was of course the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the taking of the 52 U.S. personnel there as hostages from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. This was a complex operation arranged via many channels, but the finishing touches were applied when Brzezinski met with Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi in Algeria on November 1, 1979. Shortly after the Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence in February 2008, a strange attack on the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia occurred which could not be assigned to any known Serbian group. This had all the earmarks of a Brzezinski operation. 3. Brzezinski is also an expert in the use of color revolutions and people power coups. The most notable example on Brzezinski's watch remains the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the installation of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Brzezinski wanted to use as a means of popularizing Islamic fundamentalism, which he wanted to use as a weapon for the subversion of the USSR. The March 2008 Tibet insurrection is a typical Brzezinski gambit, aiming at the destabilization and weakening of China as a whole. The fact that the vehicle is that feudal monster and parasite, the very spiritual NATO agent and provocateur who calls himself the "Dalai Lama," only increases the gusto for Brzezinski, who is a low-level Polish nobleman. Look for color revolutions in Syria, Venezuela, and other countries. Pakistan is experiencing the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's failed color revolution, and is being pushed into breakup by the U.S.-U.K. 4. Playing one country against another in an attempt to destroy both is one of Brzezinski's favorite ploys. He boasts that he played the USSR against Afghanistan and destroyed the Soviet regime in the process. He also played Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Iran, to weaken both countries and also to consolidate the Khomeini fundamentalist dictatorship in Iran, which probably would have fallen without the extra cohesion afforded by a foreign aggressor. The playing of Ethiopia against Somalia in late 2006-early 2007 and of Colombia against Venezuela in the spring of 2008 are typical examples of Brzezinski's handiwork. Look for him to attempt to play Syria and Iran against Russia. His larger goals include playing Europe and China against Russia in the huge pincers operation. This ploy is likely to blow up in his face -- the last world war grew out of the British attempt to play Hitler against Stalin, an equally crackpot scheme. 5. Olympic boycotts for political purposes are a Brzezinski specialty; he led the effort by the U.S. and other countries to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in response to Brzezinski's own subversion operations there. In 2008, look for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics to make the Chinese leaders lose face. Consider Mexico City 1968 and Munich 1972 for possible variations. The U.S. will face the later harvest of hate, but Brzezinski hardly cares about that. 6. As a fanatical feudalist, Brzezinski hates science and progress. The deliberate sabotage of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor was played out on Brzezinski's watch in 1979. The incident had been immediately preceded by the release of the film The China Syndrome, which provided an accurate scenario for the staged incident that was about to happen. With Obama heavily in debt to the coal mine owners, a new sabotage of a nuclear reactor, this time perhaps with real victims, might well be on the agenda, in a bid to end the U.S. nuclear industry forever, condemning this country to fall farther and farther behind the rest of the world, which is going for nuclear energy on an unprecedented scale. 7. To increase environmentalist-Malthusian hysteria and increase public willingness to accept carbon taxes and the burdens of a "cap and trade" speculative market, Brzezinski might well opt for a new fake energy shortage like that of the summer of 1979, complete with endless gas lines stretching over the horizon. 8. Brzezinski's tenure at the NSC also coincided with the great European terrorist offensive of 1977-78 against the European Monetary System and the Schmidt-Giscard-Moro push towards European self-assertion. In Germany in 1977, the Baader-Meinhof group, a tool of NATO intelligence, murdered state prosecutor Buback, the business leader Schleyer, and the banker Ponto, while CIA-controlled Palestinian crazies hijacked a German plane to Mogadiscio, Somalia. In 1977, gun-toting extremists engaged in firefights with police in the center of Rome, and in March 1978 the CIA's own Red Brigades kidnapped and later murdered former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Watch therefore for a new wave of terrorism against those who oppose Brzezinski's plans. This brief account is indebted to the following works: William E. Leuchtenburg, "Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency," in Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998) Charles O. Jones, The Trusteeship Presidency: Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) Mark J. Rozelle, The Press and the Carter Presidency (Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1989) Burton I. Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993) Robert Dreyfus, Hostage to Khomeini (New York: Executive Intelligence Review, 1981) Jules Witcover, Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 (New York: Signet, 1977)
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