1121 USA is an Oligarchy - Col. Larry Wilkerson; names Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, George Soros

USA is an Oligarchy - Col. Larry Wilkerson; names Sheldon Adelson, Paul
Singer, George Soros

Newsletter published on February 9, 2020

(1) Sanders vs the Oligarchy; why the Left supports China
(2) USA is an Oligarchy - Col. Larry Wilkerson; names Sheldon Adelson,
Paul Singer, George Soros
(3) Mexico Is Showing the World How to Defeat Neoliberalism - Ellen Brown
(4) Michael Hudson - Note to China on Dollar Hegemony

(1) Sanders vs the Oligarchy; why the Left supports China
- by Peter Myers, February 9, 2020

Col. Larry Wilkerson says that the USA is an Oligarchy (item 2).

"Don't talk to me about Moscow and Putin. We are the oligarchy clan in
the world today. We are the personification of what Plato and Aristotle
talked about when they said, oh, let's let the rich people run
everything. They are doing that in this country, whether it's Sheldon
Adelson funding West Bank settlements, Paul Singer doing the same thing,
or George Soros pretending like he's a philanthropist ..."

All 3 are Jewish. Wilkerson knows, but does not say so.

"Don't talk to me about China and state owned enterprises. We are a
state owned country by these oligarchs and we're killing ourselves."

Several candidates for 2020 are against the Oligarchy, but none moreso
than Bernie Sanders.

He has moved to the Left in 2020, allowing the Open-Borders Left (eg
AOC) to run his campaign. So, in terms of the Culture War, it's bad news.

But this appeals to Millennials, the young people who have huge Student
Debt and who can't afford a house.

Returning power to the people, unseating the Wall Street crooks who run
everything at present, is the most important issue. Therefore, we must
back Sanders.

But, since the DNC is clearly going to cheat him once again, and since
his supporters won't put up with that, it will be a 3-horse race:
Bloomberg, Trump and Sanders. I believe that Sanders will win, despite
the odds, because most people are desperate, worried about their future.

Even if the DNC were to allow Sanders to be the candidate, Bloomberg
would run as an Independent. So, one way or another, there will be a
3-horse race.

Hillary wants to be on the DNC candidate's ticket, but it's unclear if
Bloomberg would have her. Who wants that sort of baggage?

Hopefully they will change the voting system in the US, to Instant
Runoff (Preferential Voting), so that votes for minority candidates are
not wasted.

The Jewish Lobby does not seem very keen on Sanders; they ran ads
against him in Iowa. This is another reason to support him.

If he wins, Sanders will inaugurate Public Banks to fund his
infrastructure program, as Ellen Brown has long campaigned for.

I doubt that President Sanders would go down the Open Borders path,
despite the campaign rhetoric. By that time, Trump's wall will be built.
An influx of southern migrants would destabilize the new regime. Anyway,
Sanders would be trying to implement so many changes to the economy, and
having to overcome so much resistance from Congress and from the MSM
(read 'Wall Street'),  that Culture War issues would be put on the back
burner. Left for 2024, that is.

Congress, Wall Street and the Media would give Sanders just as hard a
time as they gave Trump. The 1% will not give up power voluntarily.

Ellen Brown presents the new government of Mexico as an example for the
US to follow (item 3).

Item 4 is Michael Hudson's Note to China, on Dollar Hegemony. No-one
else in the world can explain how the World Economy works like him.

Like many on the Left, he supports a rising China as a way to curb the
American Empire. The goal is returning power to the pwople, but I fear
that, were King Dollar to be dethroned, we would then be faced with King
Yuan.

(2) USA is an Oligarchy - Col. Larry Wilkerson; names Sheldon Adelson,
Paul Singer, George Soros

Kelvin Heslop <keljohn01@gmail.com>

https://russia-insider.com/en/watch-america-oligarchy-trying-screw-you-colin-powells-fmr-chief-staff-nails-it-col-wilkerson

WATCH: America Is an Oligarchy Trying to Screw You! - Colin Powell's Fmr
Chief of Staff Nails It (Col. Wilkerson)

Great short speech by anti-war activist and truth-teller Col. Larry
Wilkerson (Wikipedia). He made these remarks at a rewards ceremony for
heroic CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, whose Kafkaesque ordeal you
can read about in this excellent article on Consortium News by Ray McGovern.

Wilkerson had his dander up because after attending an anti-war meeting
about Iran recently, he was visited by 2 FBI agents asking questions
about the other attendees. He really raises the roof, speaking plain
truth about the rot in Washington.

Highly recommended!  Full transcript follows below. ==

Transcript: (Machine transcribed, includes inaccuracies)

Introducer:  We have Larry Wilkerson, colonel, former colonel. And if
you haven't watched Democracy Now and a bunch of other places after the
killing of Soleimani, he has been out there just like what I write on
Facebook. He's been hitting a home run on these things. Just telling the
truth. Telling the truth about the situation. Thanks.

Col. Wilkerson:  Congratulations to you. (Turning to Jeffrey Sterling).
And my hearty applause to you for joining this group.

I want to get a little more serious for a moment about another issue
altogether. I want to tell you that the FBI came to see me because I was
at your Iran gathering. Two young swashbuckling agents. I said, you
don't even look like FBI. If you don't show me your badges, I'm going to
shoot you on my doorstep!

God, what a couple of arrogant assholes!

In the middle of the conversation, we finally got around to it. - Well,
you were with this woman at this Iran thing. (they said).

That's the state we're in now. That's the state we're in.

And what we have happening right now that I've come to codify and
understand in a level of detail I never thought I would approach is
because I've been for 15 years on a campus with some of the brightest
students in the world, over 400 of them doing in case study after case
study for me. So it's not just my experience in the government for 40 years.

It's this incredible comprehensive look at what's happening to us right
now. We are involved in a fundamental battle for our life. The battle is
not as the newspapers tell you about. That's all a bunch of bull. The
battle is between what has been happening for some time in this country.

It's between the national security state whose raison d'être is war,
war, war, and the predatory capitalist state whose reason for existence
is to screw you out of every penny you have in your life, any way it can
do it. That's there's no deep state. The deep state is the meritocracy,
the bureaucracy that runs the country when the goddamn politicians
aren't there or when they're changing or when they're idiots like we
have today. The real deep state, the pernicious poisonous deep state is
the oligarchs who are running this country.

Think about this for a minute. These two states are in a mortal battle
right now with one another. You see it every day. You just don't
understand it. Most people don't anyway. You have people in both camps.
Exxon-Mobil sells more fossil fuel to D.O.D than anybody else on the
face of the earth. If d.O.D were, a country would rank 55th in 200 right
beside Portugal. Lockheed Martin is a member of the national security
state, the biggest merchant of death on earth. Its sales to the national
security state. But they're killing each other in this battle. It's a
mortal battle between the two. And guess who's in between the demos? The
people your democracy are in between your democracies.

Poor people are going in dying in 19 plus years of war. Your democracy's
people are being forced out of their jobs. Wait, do you see automation
and robotics and what's coming down the road with A.I.? Then these
predatory capitalists can do everything they do without you, without any
of the people out there. There right now are worried sick about their
jobs. Do you know that distress as analyzed by medical personnel in this
country has tripled in the last 15 years? We are the most distressed
country in the world.

Mental health has gone to hell. Oh, just put them in the private run
prisons and they'll die anyway. This battle is existential. We won't
even talk about the climate crisis is coming down the road at us that
most people are ignoring. This battle's existential. The national
security security state is now going to spend a trillion dollars of your
money to make nuclear weapons better. You know what the Pentagon thinks
about nuclear weapons being better in terms of use on the battlefield?
Those low yield nuclear weapons we're going to develop are going to be
used on the battlefield. Disregarding 50 years of escalatory theory and
doctrine. Oh, it won't be escalatory. The hell it won't be escalatory.
The Russians have already adopted in their written doctrine the use of
nuclear weapons to blunt a NATO incursion into their sphere of influence.

This is all happening while we go about our daily lives and think things
are maybe, you know, halfway decent or maybe they're falling apart.
Whatever your thoughts might be, these two states are waging this
colossal battle in your country and the people in the middle and the
democracy in the middle are dying.

They're giving in to these two states. If you haven't read Tom Muellers
book, Crisis of Conscience whistle-blowing in an age of Fraud, you
should read the first chapter alone.

It'll make you ill that Johnson and Johnson and their subsidiaries were
able to infect children all across this country. In ways that will stay
with them for the rest of their lives, however short that is, that their
subsidiaries were complicit, that they actually sat around in their
offices and talked about the cost being worth it because 35 billion
dollars was the profit and the costs was only these poor people dying
and so forth. Then you begin to understand what I'm talking about.

You begin to understand the dimensions of the poison that is amongst us
and the poison that is taking over our country and our democracy. I
hesitate sometimes with my students even to call us a democracy anymore
because these oligarchs are in charge.

Don't talk to me about Moscow and Putin. We are the oligarchy clan in
the world today. We are the personification of what Plato and Aristotle
talked about when they said, oh, let's let the rich people run
everything. They are doing that in this country, whether it's Sheldon
Adelson funding West Bank settlements, Paul Singer doing the same thing,
or George Soros pretending like he's a philanthropist ...

{All 3 are Jewish. Wilkerson knows, but does not say so - Peter M.}

A book by Marc Fisher, a gentlemen who committed suicide in New York a
few months ago is called Capitalist Realism. Read that book. You'll have
to have an Oxford English Dictionary, a dictionary of American medical
terms and so forth. But look at the stats in that book on what is
happening to this country. It's just unbelievable when you look at and
it's all because of this predatory capital state.

That's what we are today. We're a predatory capitalist state. Don't talk
to me about China and state owned enterprises. We are a state owned
country by these oligarchs and we're killing ourselves.

And as Tom tells you in that book, the one really brilliant flash of
lightning through this whole morass is people like this and people like
Bill and Tom and John and Edward Snowden. They are the people who are
shining at least a little bit of light on this stuff. And Karen and
Jessalyn and the people who defend them.

That's the only thing I see out there that's shining brightly and
occasionally actually get some retribution and some accountability and
some justice.

So that's why this group is so important. That's why you're so
important. That's why the entire concept of this is so important. Don't
stop.

I think it was Martin Luther King who said something to the effect of if
you're silent, you're wrong. If you're silent in the face of wrong,
you're doubly so.

This group isn't silent. Thank you.

(4) Michael Hudson - Note to China on Dollar Hegemony
https://michael-hudson.com/2020/01/note-to-china/

Note to China

By Michael

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

My book "Super Imperialism" was about how the United States has gained a
free lunch by establishing the dollar as international reserve currency
by replacing gold. I also showed that the U.S. balance of payments
deficit is almost entirely military related to support its 800 bases
around the world. Ending the gold-exchange standard in 1971 created a
situation in which the excess U.S. dollars thrown of by the U.S.
payments deficit end up in foreign central banks.

For these central banks, the inflow of surplus dollars poses the problem
of what do we do with them. Central banks don’t buy stocks and bonds, or
control of corporations, because that is risky and also does not
directly help their own economy. So central banks buy US Treasury bonds
and bills – IOUs of the U.S. Government. For the United States, the
money that is spent on running a balance-of-payments deficit on account
of the military and on American investors buying Chinese stocks and
Chinese companies, dollars are recycled back to the United States to buy
US Treasury bonds.

That is how the U.S. balance of payments deficit serves to finance the
domestic government budget deficit. The larger the U.S. balance of
payments deficit grows as the U.S. spends more militarily and
politically around the world, the more foreign central banks end up
financing the domestic budget deficit.

That frees the United States Treasury from having to balance its budget
to avoid having to borrow from US investors. More and more of the U.S.
federal debt has been owed to foreign central banks. That means that
foreign countries are, in effect, financing the costs of surrounding
them(selves) with the 800 U.S. military bases. This enables the United
States to make military threats, in case they cannot conquer you
intellectually by making you follow the University of Chicago and IMF
financialization policy.

Another reason not to use the dollar is to avoid taking the risk of
being victimized in the way that the United States has treated Iran and
other countries. U.S. strategists have threatened to isolate foreign
banks from using the Swift bank-clearing system. They have imposed
sanctions on European investors in the Nordstream gas pipeline, and had
imposed unilateral penalties on other governments that do not favor U.S.
investors.

The U.S. strategy is to control your economy in order to force you to
sell your most profitable industrial sectors to US investors, to force
you to invest in your industry only by borrowing from the United States.

So the question is, how do China, Russia, Iran and other countries break
free of this U.S. dollarization strategy? As now constituted,
dollarization creates a circular flow that finances American military
spending by forcing the costs onto foreign central banks holding dollars.

The solution obviously is to avoid using dollars in order to break free
of American control of your economy. To do this, you have to have a
non-Dollar currency. This currency alternative has to be large enough to
have a critical mass, so that it can be used internationally. That’s why
China, Russia, Iran and their allies are trying to create their own
currency area, incorporating largely the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. The aim is denominate your foreign trade, investment and
government spending in your own currency.

It is necessary to break away not only from the U.S. dollar, but also
from the International Monetary Fund. The objective of U.S. and IMF
monetary policy is basically to make your economy much more expensive
and inefficient than that of the United States. Its government runs a
budget deficit and balance-of-payments deficit by creating its own
money. It does not expect or intend to repay its debt. Other countries
are to treat it as their own monetary backing, in place of gold.

But outside the United States, countries are told to finance their
budget deficits by selling off whatever is in their public domain –
namely, their land, real estate and natural resources, their commanding
heights in the form of basic infrastructure and electric utilities.

The ideal the United States would like China to do is to let U.S.
investors do to it what they did to Russia after 1991. They told Russia
that it needed to back its domestic Ruble issues by holding an
equivalent amount of U.S. dollars, in the form of private dollar loans
or dollar-denominated U.S. Treasury securities. This involved borrowing
dollars from the United States instead of simply issuing domestic
rubles. Russia paid 100 percent interest a year to U.S. investors in
1993-1994.

Yet Russia did not have enough foreign exchange to pay domestic
ruble-wages or to pay for domestic goods and services. But neoliberal
advisors convinced Russia to back all Ruble money or domestic currency
credit it created by backing it with U.S. dollars. Obtaining these
dollars involved paying enormous interest to the United States for this
needless backing. There was no need for such backing. At the end of this
road the United States convinced Russia to sell off its raw materials,
its nickel mines, its electric utilities, its oil reserves, and
ultimately tried to pry Crimea away from Russia.

Suppose China would follow the U.S. plan. At a certain point it will be
asked to sell off Macau and Hong Kong as a US military base. It will be
advised to sell its information technology to the United States. And
politically, U.S. diplomacy would like China to divide itself into three
or four countries, starting with Xinjiang as a separate country. This
divide-and-conquer strategy aims at carving up China, and it uses
financial policy to do this.

The U.S. has discovered that it does not have to militarily invade
China. It does not have to conquer China. It does not have to use
military weapons, because it has the intellectual weapon of
financialization, convincing you that you need to do this in order to
have a balanced economy. So, when China sends its students to the United
States, especially when it sends central bankers and planners to the
United States to study (and be recruited), they are told by the U.S. "Do
as we say, not as we have done."

The United States is not telling China or Russia or third world
countries or Europe how to get rich in the way that it did, by
protective tariffs, by creating its own money and by making other
countries dependent on it. The United States does not want you to be
independent and self-reliant. The United States wants China to let
itself become dependent on U.S. finance in order to invest in its own
industry. It wants Chinese corporations to borrow from the United
States, and to sell its stocks to US investors just like Khodorkovsky in
Russia was trying to sell Yukos oil to Standard Oil, and essentially
turn Russia’s oil reserves to U.S. investors.

The United States is trying to convince China that its tax system should
be based on raising your cost of labour. The objective of the United
States is to injure China, to make it a high-cost economy by imposing
the value-added tax, a VAT, which will increase the cost of consumer
goods. The aim of this anti-industrial tax policy is to make you pay
your labor a high enough wage to afford to pay the taxes on consumer goods.

The United States could never pass such a tax domestically. There would
be a revolution. The amazing thing is that there is no revolution in
China. It and other countries have been gullible in accepting the logic
of U.S. economists teaching the students you send over, hoping that they
will draw up a plan for China along neoliberal lines.

The neoliberal plan is not to make you independent, and not to help you
grow except to the extent that your growth will be paid to US investors
or used to finance U.S. military spending around the world to encircle
you and trying to destabilize you in Sichuan to try to pry China apart.

Look at what the United States has done in Russia, and at what the
International Monetary Fund in Europe has done to Greece, Latvia and the
Baltic states. It is a dress rehearsal for what U.S. diplomacy would
like to do to you, if it can convince you to follow the neoliberal US
economic policy of financialization and privatization.

De-dollarization is the alternative to privatization and financialization.


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