CREDIT OR DEBIT, PAPER OR PLASTIC?

 By Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.

 For several years I have been making as many purchases as possible in cash. Recently, when asked if my purchase would be credit or debit, I answered as I frequently do with: “Little green pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them.” In reply, the clerk remarked, “Wow, we don’t see many of those around here anymore.” My long-time preference for paying cash has been further reinforced after viewing what I consider the best Christmas gift money can buy, Aaron Russo’s “America From Freedom To Fascism” documentary, which sadly, is still only available online and must be paid for by means of the ubiquitous, “credit or debit.” Among a host of issues addressed in the film is the extent of the United States government’s tracking of its citizens’ behavior, illumined by a chilling interview with Catherine Albrecht, who along with Liz McIntyre, authored SPYCHIPS: How Major Corporations And Government Plan To Track Your Every Purchase And Watch Your Every Move. Even a cursory reading of Albrecht and McIntyre will send you running to cut up your credit cards and tuck your debit card away in the farthest recesses of your dresser drawer because there is now virtually no separation between corporate marketing’s tracking of consumer purchases and government surveillance of them. Every purchase with a paper or digital trail tells the imperial corporatocracy more about you than you would care to imagine and gives frightening new meaning to the expression “Too Much Information.” 

Those familiar with my writings know that for years I have advocated not using credit cards at all and debit cards only minimally as a way of avoiding debt by paying in cash. Doing so makes money more tangible to oneself and prevents spending money one does not have. But now with Albrecht and McIntyre’s research, we have a new and terribly compelling reason for using those little green pieces of paper instead of plastic: the RFID chip. Radio frequency identification chips are being imbedded in products, credit and debit cards, and other types of plastic identification cards, such as frequent shopper cards, at frightening speed. At some point, the U.S. government will print paper currency containing RFID chips in order to track its circulation, but that hasn’t happened yet. Albrecht and McIntyre clarify the implications of chipped currency:

 Imagine if when you took a hundred dollars out of the ATM, each of the twenty-dollar bills you withdrew contained its own unique ID number that could be captured and associated with your account. When you later used on of those bills to make a payment, its number would be captured again by the retailer at the point of sale. If records of these transfer were stored in a master database operated by the federal government (or a private entity that would provide it on demand), it would be possible to literally follow the trail of cash through the economy.[1] 

RFID technology is being sold to the American people as a “necessity” in order to “protect” us from terrorism and identity theft and to save time and make our lives oh so much more convenient. As “America From Freedom To Fascism” explains, by 2009, every state in the U.S. will be issuing drivers licenses with an RFID chip containing an integration of the holder’s personal data, such as Social Security, medical and insurance information, and other information now considered private. Moreover, one will not be able to drive or open a bank account in the United States without a chipped drivers license. When this happens, it will not be the American citizen who will be protected, but rather, the federal government. Obviously, if one wishes to purchase products or services from the Internet which cannot be purchased locally, such as Aaron Russo’s documentary, using a credit or debit card is necessary. In my opinion, such purchases should be minimal and transacted only with sites where one is reasonably certain that one’s data will not be compromised or shared with government agencies.  And yes, you may be asking, Why should I pay with fiat currency—paper money which is essentially without value because it is not backed by a gold standard and with every passing day appears to be circling the drain in relation to other major world currencies? Perhaps the only reason you should use fiat currency for everything is for the benefit of your own privacy, and while you’re at it, start buying small quantities of silver and certainly gold if you can afford to, so that when the rest of the world has dumped the dollar, you will still have currency with real value instead of just a bunch of bogus bills. Another reason to watch the Russo documentary is to understand how those green pieces of paper became bogus, thanks to a private bank that has been deceivingly named the Federal Reserve and to grasp the fiduciary control that that very NON-federal institution exerts over your life, from the value of the currency in your wallet to the interest rates you are required to pay on purchasing a home or an automobile. 

According to statistics from Shop.Org, an online retailers’ network, almost 30% of US consumers who go on the Internet do not buy products online. The biggest obstacle is concern about the safety of entering credit card information on the Web — 62% cited this as a deterrent.[2] While online commerce offers the consumer immeasurable convenience, and in some instances may be the only option for purchasing products or services, it supports our focusing globally rather than locally—the only place where possible solutions to the daunting issues of human and planetary survival can be implemented. One of the most encouraging signs of economic transformation on the horizon is the burgeoning of movements across the nation for relocalization on which Michael Brownlee of the Boulder, Colorado relocalization movement comments:

 Why is relocalization so important? Because we are regenerating or rebirthing community; our most precious resource is community, and this resource is rapidly diminishing. It turns out that a fossil-fuel-based culture of consumption—and the economic globalization that it inevitably spawns—destroys community. And it is only by building community self-sufficiency in energy, food and economy that we have a chance of preserving what’s most important about the human species into the future and ensuring the future of human freedom. We live on one planet, and it is becoming essential to our survival that we begin thinking and acting as one people; this can only realistically begin on the level of community.[3] 

What might happen if the trillions spent each year through electronic purchases were put back into our communities through those still-yet-unchipped little green pieces of paper? What would happen for you and for your community this holiday season if nearly all of your purchases occurred in local stores and when possible, consisted of products made locally? This nation just completed a national election and is scheduled to hold another in two years. That’s a long time to wait to vote for politicians who ultimately accomplish very little for the American people. Today, tomorrow, and every day, you will vote with your money and time, and your vote will either work for you or against you. Will you vote for your neighborhood and your community, or will you vote for the global corporatocracy that increasingly undermines the value of your hard work and financial resources with every passing day? This holiday season, pull out those green pieces of paper and spread them around your community. If enough of us do so, we just might help save the entire planet, place by place. 

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of history and author of U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You which may be ordered at your local bookstore or at her website www.carolynbaker.org

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[1] Spychips, P. 197.

[2] http://www.shop.org/learn/stats_ebizz_fulfillment.asp

[3] http://www.boulderrelocalization.org/articlesessays/index.htm

WHEN HISTORY BECOMES CHOPPED LIVER

By Carolyn Baker

Nixon had no readiness at all to see Saigon under a Vietcong flag after a “decent interval” of two or three years—or ever….And so it meant that the war would essentially never end. His campaign promise of ending the war was a hoax. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and The Pentagon Papers

On Friday, George W. Bush arrived in Vietnam with the intention of strengthening business ties with that nation and used his photo op to make one of the most jaw-dropping statements of his presidency regarding the subject of history. “History has a long march to it,” he banally proclaimed as we all yawned, recalling that his major at Yale, where he barely managed to maintain a 2.3 average, was history. Then came the clincher as Bush was asked if any lessons from Vietnam apply to the war in Iraq: “One lesson,” he babbled, “is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile. It’s just going to take a long time for the ideology that is hopeful, and that is an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate. We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

Oh really, the “lesson” of Vietnam is that we shouldn’t “quit”? There it is again, that Orwellian mindset that has pervaded this administration; war is peace, and evil is good. No one should be shocked that Bush has no sense of history, that he has never read anything beyond the Reader’s Digest version of it, and that he willfully ignores the genuine lessons of the Vietnam era, but every American should be outraged by this statement, but one of the myriad reasons the vast majority of Americans have allowed the most criminal administration in the history of this nation to continue unabated, with nary a peep of indignation, is that they themselves have so little knowledge of their history.

Listen further to Daniel Ellsberg: “What I was hearing was not just that the war was going to go on, indefinitely, but that it would get larger, eventually larger than it had ever been.” In his memoir, Secrets, we are shown incontrovertible evidence that what drove the former Rand Corporation economic analyst to hide top-secret, classified documents, which became the Pentagon Papers, in his brief case upon leaving the Defense Department every night and thereby risk serving decades in prison, was moral outrage over the appalling reality that the Nixon administration had no intention whatsoever of ending the Vietnam War, but in fact, was actively engaged in continuing it for as long as possible. Are we shocked that the Bush administration lied us into war? Almost all U.S. presidential administrations have lied into war, but never as blatantly as this one has.

As noted in my new book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You, in the early 1960s, a decade prior to Ellsberg’s employment at the Defense Department, Air Force Colonel, L. Fletcher Prouty worked in the Pentagon as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. His experience corroborates seamlessly with Ellsberg’s as Prouty observed that in the early days of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. was not only financing the French against the North Vietnamese, but was also financing the North Vietnamese. Why? Because the military-industrial complex is amoral and doesn’t quibble over “sides” but how to most effectively bloat the profits of war. “War is the best business in town,” opines Prouty, echoing the words of the World War I hero, General Smedley Butler and his famous indictment that “War is a racket.”

In my book I recount the story of an attempt by pro-fascist corporate capitalists in the 1930s to enlist Butler into leading a coup against Franklin Roosevelt in order to implement a fascist government. Pretending to go along with the coup, Butler later disclosed its details to Congress, but no action was taken against the coup plotters.

Lest my inbox become glutted with emails reminding me that Prouty was a Scientologist, I hasten to add that his religious beliefs pale by comparison with the documentation he provided us regarding the JFK assassination and the Pentagon’s Vietnam policies. My point is that we can pick an administration—any administration, Democratic or Republican, since the end of World War II, and despite its rhetoric, it will upon investigation, reveal itself as subservient to the war machine, doing whatever it takes to feed that mechanism, either during the infinite wars it has fueled or in between them.

Moreover, another lesson of history that the Bush administration ignores is that asymmetric wars cannot be “won” but merely endured, and while that serves the strategy of infinite war, history is replete with examples of how it decimates a citizenry and its resources. Stan Goff, Ret. U.S. Army Special Forces, former West Point instructor, and author of Full Spectrum Disorder, describes asymmetric warfare as “When they retreat, pursue. When they attack, retreat. Match your strengths to their weakness.”

A stunning example of asymmetric warfare is Hezbollah’s victory over the Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Asymmetric warfare is a gradual wearing down of the enemy and his resources and morale. Furthermore, Goff writes, “The U.S. inflicted a terrible empirical toll on Southeast Asia and ultimately lost the Vietnam War. The U.S. never grasped the political character of that war.” Nor did the U.S. grasp the will of traditional peoples to use non-conventional means to fight conventional wars. For example, even though the U.S. military had highly sophisticated weapons technology in the Vietnam War, hundreds of Vietnamese people were willing to rip up railroad tracks with their bare hands, dealing strategic blows to American forces as sectarian violence in Iraq, a textbook example of asymmetric warfare, is now doing.

Try as you may, Mr. President, you cannot “pretzelize” history to fit your political and war machine agenda. Distort it however you wish, it will have the last word. Goff said it best in his recent article, “Reflecting On Rumsfeld:

The United States is not suffering from some collective personality disorder called compassion fatigue. We are suffering from the most well-funded thought-control experiment in history, more sophisticated and deadly by many orders of magnitude than anything contrived by Kim Jong Il—the latest bete noir of American public discourse, and we are suffering from the complicity of journalistic hacks like Judith Miller and the anodyne intellectual narcotics of policy think tanks. It is our empathy that is under attack, because if it is aroused to a point where Iraqis or Afghans or even our own imperial soldiers become real people (and not a yellow-ribbon magnet), the jig is up. So here is a simple reminder. This war is wanton cruelty in our name; there is no rationalization that can mitigate or excuse it; “we” will not win it and somehow transmogrify a swine into a swan … and it is not over.

What Vietnam teaches us, Mr. President, is that war is the “health of the state” as described by World War I progressive Randolph Bourne, and as long as the American people allow you or any other president to lie us into wars, you will do so, perpetuating the Iraq War as long as possible—as long as the Nixon administration attempted to perpetuate Vietnam: forever. And, in order to justify your crimes against the world and the American people, you and your military industrial complex must turn history into chopped liver.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. is author of U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn’t Tell You which can be ordered at her website www.carolynbaker.org  where she may also be contacted.

THE REAL MEANING OF A DEMOCRATIC SWEEP: NEO—CONS OR LIBERALS?

By Carolyn Baker

 For the past six years we have been held hostage by the neocon mob of the George W. Bush administration, selected in 2000 by the Supreme Court and taking power again in 2004 through countless dirty electoral tricks, particularly in the state of Ohio, abundantly documented by researchers of electronic voting. No one should assume that dirty tricks were not again in the works as the Democrats swept the Congressional elections of 2006 this week, followed the next day by the resignation of Dr. Death, Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Bev Harris’ recent documentary, “Hacking Democracy” made very clear that both parties have been complicit in election-rigging. What is certain, however, as one witnesses the Democratic sweep is that neocon policies are guaranteed to be supplanted by neoliberal ones.Before thinking about what that means, it is important to understand the terms used, and particularly the origins, theory, and definitions of liberalism and neoliberalism. Essentially, neoliberalism is not simply an economic structure, it is a philosophy. This is most visible in attitudes toward society, the individual and employment. Neo-liberals tend to see the world in terms of market metaphors and couch their agenda in concepts such as “diplomacy”, “humanitarian aid”, “creating jobs”, and “growing the economy.” In fact, www.answers.com adds a further definition: “A political movement beginning in the 1960s that blends traditional liberal concerns for social justice with an emphasis on economic growth.” [Emphasis added]A clear articulation of the neoliberal paradigm is exemplifed by Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations in the summary of his recent Foreign Affairs article, “The New Middle East” in which the author emphasizes the necessity of “diplomacy” geopolitics:The age of U.S. dominance in the Middle East has ended and a new era in the modern history of the region has begun. It will be shaped by new actors and new forces competing for influence, and to master it, Washington will have to rely more on diplomacy than on military might.Haass knows, in fact, that the age of U.S. dominance in the Middle East has not ended, but what the rest of the article clarifies is that for Haass, “dominance” is not unlike the neocon dominance of the region and the world. What is different is the methods employed. The neocons have blatantly proclaimed their agenda of geostrategic hegemony, achieved largely through military efforts, whereas the neoliberal strategy, which envisions the same hegemony, is sold with the above-named concepts, constituting the velvet glove encasing the iron globalist fist. Witness the famous June, 1991 quote by David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission who spoke unashamedly of the necessity of concealing the globalist mission:

We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. [Emphasis added]

While many Democrats feign opposition to globalization, their votes tell another story. Master Globalist, Bill Clinton, put together with his former Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, the Hamilton Project, to “generate new ideas and an election strategy”, according to Washington Post business columnist, Steven Pearlstein, who noted that at the Project’s July 25 symposium, “Protect people, not jobs, was the headline message in the Hamilton Project briefing paper that rejected the protectionist policies of the union left as well as the ‘you’re-on-your-own’ economics of the laissez-faire right.” In other words, centrist for the globalists means more outsourcing of American jobs, but implementing their hegemonic strategy discreetly.In the world envisioned by globalist Democrats, Haass comments: As for the opportunities to be seized, the first is to intervene more in the Middle East’s affairs with nonmilitary tools. Regarding Iraq, in addition to any redeployment of U.S. troops and training of local military and police, the United States should establish a regional forum for Iraq’s neighbors (Turkey and Saudi Arabia in particular) and other interested parties akin to that used to help manage events in Afghanistan following the intervention there in 2001. Doing so would necessarily require bringing in both Iran and Syria. Syria, which can affect the movement of fighters into Iraq and arms into Lebanon, should be persuaded to close its borders in exchange for economic benefits (from Arab governments, Europe, and the United States) and a commitment to restart talks on the status of the Golan Heights. In the new Middle East, there is a danger that Syria might be more interested in working with Tehran than with Washington. But it did join the U.S.-led coalition during the Persian Gulf War and attend the Madrid peace conference in 1991, two gestures that suggest it might be open to a deal with the United States in the future.The “non-military tools” to which Haass refers are essentially economic arm-twisting as employed by U.S. corporations worldwide to manipulate chaotic areas of the globe or developing nations with the assistance of the World Bank, World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and U.S. corporate privatization of resources.On this day following the mid-term elections, many individuals around me are cheering, but I am yawning—the other wing of America’s one and only corporate party has triumphed and is certain to anoint another consummate globalist in 2008. Whether the name is Clinton or Obama matters little. The Democrats, also tied to government contracts and petroleum in Iraq, champion leaders like Zbigniew Brzezinski whose Grand Chessboard laid out the globalist strategy of petro-dominance during the Clinton administration. In one moment, they wildly embrace the neoliberal agenda, then behave like contortionists in the next, frantically veering toward “the center.”Meanwhile, issues of Peak Oil and global climate chaos, “the dark matter” of American politics, are virtually ignored by the Democrats, and the next two years will see little achieved by them in addressing those ecological emergencies, unless doing so profits the corporations who own them.Yes, the Democrats swept Congress and a number of governorships, and yes, Rumsfeld resigned, now to be replaced by former CIA Director, Robert Gates of Iran-Contra fame. Don’t waste your energy cheering. You’ll need it when the temperature in Buffalo is the same 125 degrees as the temperature in Baghdad, and you have no energy for air conditioning.