NuLab and Uncle Sam
In the last issue I discussed the research by Giles Scott-Smith on the US State Department’s funding of a big freebie trip to the US for Mrs Thatcher in 1967, after the US embassy in London had spotted her as a possible future prime minister. Scott-Smith has more information on the Net. His ‘Searching for the Successor Generation: Public Diplomacy, the US Embassy’s International Visitor Program and the Labour Party in the 1980s’(1) shows how the US cultivated the leaders of NuLab.
‘This article looks at the influence of US public diplomacy in the UK, in particular the use of the International Visitor Program as a channel for encouraging dialogue and the introduction of new ideas into the Labour Party during the 1980s.’
And Smith lists all those who took the freebies on offer (for the most part they are the usual suspects). He notes:
‘A meeting of the State Department’s Interagency Working Group on Public Diplomacy in December 1982 discussed “programs for gaining greater understanding among the ‘Successor Generation’ in Europe”……… In Britain one result of this was the formation of the British-American Project for the Successor Gener-ation (BAP), established in 1985 as a private enterprise.’
Declassified chapter and verse, this is the most important single piece of research on NuLab’s origins.
Looking at this piece and Scott-Smith’s related piece on the US promotion of Margaret Thatcher, if it is too much to say that they show how Uncle Sam installed governments of his choosing in Britain, it is not very much too much to say that.
Obama and the Bilderbergers
Bilderberg is now a legitimate subject for the Anglo-American media. Stories about it have appeared this year on the CBS News website(2) and in The Times.(3) Has the Bilderberg meeting stopped asking for media silence? That would be my guess. Never mind that the CBS story inevitably framed the subject matter – Bilderbergers in the Obama administration – as the ‘crazy’ concerns of ‘conspiracy theorists’,(4) this is a significant step for the major media of America; and only fifty-five years after the group’s inception.
The Times piece adopts a more wry and amused tone and gives the address of this year’s May meeting in Greece in the first paragraph. It quotes veteran Spotlight Bilderberg-spotter Jim Tucker, Daniel Estulin, author of a very bad book about the group,(5) and Jon Ronson. It names a few recent British participants.
The authors note that ‘Left-wing conspiracy theorists believe that Bilderbergers form a capitalist nucleus’ (this belief makes us conspiracy theorists?) but generously concede that ‘there is a germ of truth in this’. But lest the reader take it too seriously, they quote Metropolitan Seraphim, the Bishop of Piraeus, as describing the Bilderbergers as ‘a criminal cabal of world Zionism and its efforts to set up a cruel world dictatorship’.
The piece concludes:
‘But what we have been able to establish from a World Bank spokesman, Alexis OBrien, is that the organisations president, Robert Zoellick, will be in Athens on unspecified business on May 14. And that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s public schedule is mysteriously empty for the next two days. Jo Ackermann, head of Deutsche Bank, will be travelling somewhere in Europe. Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, will not be around until the end of the week…..’
Defence against which missiles?
There is one section of the John Diamond book on the CIA, reviewed below, which deserves picking out. Diamond points out that the missile defence system which the US is deploying, apparently against ‘rogue states’, is not to defend the US against nuclear attack by ‘rogue states’ but to enable the US to intervene in smaller states, free from the fear of nuclear attack. Its purpose is to prevent the US from being deterred from conventional military action.(6) Diamond quotes from a speech by Representative Henry Hyde, the Chair of the House Committee on International Relations, and a Bush-Rumsfeld ally. In his speech, says Diamond, Hyde claimed that the critics of the Bush assault on Iraq had missed the point when they announced that there were no WMDs. Hyde said:
‘The fact that we went into Iraq virtually alone…….is far from the ruinous negative it is often portrayed as. In fact it is all to the good, for it is unambiguous proof that absolutely nothing will deter us, that the entire world arrayed against us cannot stop us.’ (p. 286)
Let us not forget that the current Pentagon doctrine is called ‘full spectrum dominance’ and that the US currently has over 1000 military bases around the world. In his recent piece on the subject of the US ‘empire of bases’, Hugh Gusterson writes, ‘the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup’.(7)
Related to which is a short, sharp and deeply pessimistic summary of the problem presented by the US military-industrial complex by the altogether excellent Chalmers Johnson, ‘The Military-Industrial Complex: It’s Much Later Than You Think’.(8)
So far Barack Obama has said nothing about reducing the proportion of US federal tax income given to the Pentagon, though some cuts in future military spending were announced in April by Defense Secretary Gates.(9) It remains to be seen if these cuts and closures can be got through Congress. The Pentagon has spent the last 50 years making sure it has some plant or base in almost every congressional district, making cuts politically difficult.
There is nothing like a Dame
On his blog, Michael John Smith, who wrote about his wrongful conviction for espionage in Lobster 52, reproduces the text of an e-mail he has sent to the publisher of Dame Stella Rimington’s memoir.(10) Smith makes the interesting point that in her memoir Rimington does not refer to her part in Smith’s conviction for espionage and asks: ‘How many Director-Generals of MI5 have been responsible for the conviction of a major Russian spy, who was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment at the Old Bailey?’
Smith thinks Rimington is embarrassed by her part in framing him.
Something of the night….
There was curiously little follow-up to the extraordinary story by Caroline Gammell, ‘Convicted drug dealer “bribed former Home Secretary Michael Howard”’ in The Daily Telegraph 31 October 2008. It began:
‘Convicted drug dealer, John Haase, claims he bribed former Home Secretary Michael Howard £400,000 to get an early release from prison, Southwark Crown Court was told. John Haase told Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle that he arranged the alleged payment through a relation of Conservative cabinet minister, Southwark Crown Court heard. Haase, 59, and his cousin Paul Bennett, 44, received a Royal Pardon in 1996 and were released 11 months into a 17-year sentence for smuggling heroin, jurors were told. It was always thought they were allowed out of jail because the pair had turned supergrass and passed on important information to the police. But Haase allegedly told Mr Kilfoyle that he had paid large sums of money to the former Tory Party leader and a customs official to secure their freedom, the court heard.
Both Haase and Bennett are currently on trial for perverting the course of justice, accused of duping the authorities by setting up fake gun and drugs caches in order to get an early release.’
9/11
The thought does occur that there are so many things the American state would rather the American electorate didn’t look at about 9/11 – starting with the complete failure of very expensive US air defences – it is probably very happy that so much critical energy is being taken up with the America-and/or-Israel-did-it theses.
Once upon a time there was a Professor of Physics at Brigham Young University, Steven Jones, who claimed to have found traces of thermite in the dust left behind by 9/11. Thermite implied controlled demolition and Jones was swiftly shown the door by BYU. With nine other co-authors, Jones has recently published his account of the thermite discovery in ‘Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe’ in The Open Chemical Physics Journal.(11) As Al-Qaeda did indeed organise the plane bombings, how do we reconcile that fact with the thermite traces? The only account I know of which does suggest such a reconciliation came from someone who was told by a senior figure at the Otis elevator company that all the skyscrapers are wired for demolition when constructed just in case they have be brought down in a hurry.(12)
Common Purpose
The agitation on sections of the British right about Common Purpose is striking. CP is quite clearly a NuLab attempt to create a local civic network, from the worlds of business and charities (NuLab’s ‘third sector’), independent of political parties and trade unions. We are in ‘social enterprise’ territory.(13) Obsessed with the American top-down business model of organisations and afraid that ‘activists’ will embarrass them, NuLab people hate and despise local political parties and trade unions.
But the conspiracy-minded fringe of the Tory and UKIP parties see CP as either a European plot, part of a drive to reduce the nation state of Britain to just another EU region, or as a modern-day masonic structure, dealing in graft and influence. For these beliefs they have no evidence that I have seen. (14)
Did someone say prescient?
German satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote this in 1930. It was (literally) translated in 2009 by Jan Harlan.
Stock Market
When the market goes down, sorrow is everywhere but some flourish: Their recipe is short selling.
These knaves simply sell what they don’t have, causing the drop in value to serve themselves,
Truly great!
Even easier in this business is to deal with derivatives.
If paper polishes up the value, the effect is multiplied.
If the crash of banks is to follow, savers have nothing to laugh about, and the mortgage on the house means: inhabitants have to get out.
But if big banks are involved, the whole worlds gets out of balance – even speculators tremble and worry about their assets.
Should one endanger the system? One needs to do something about it:
Any profit, remains private, losses buys the government.
For that the state needs credit, which is another chance for profit, since, after all, in every country one can control the government.
For the cost these knaves incur the little man has to pay!
And – this is the best of it – not only in America!
And if the market goes up again, we start the whole thing anew – it is distribution pure, but always only in one direction.
But should the masses one day refuse and say no – the escape route has long been prepared: We make a little war.
Notes
- The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2006, Vol. 8, pp. 214–237 at <www.nciv.org/documents/BJPIRBlairNCIV.pdf.>
- <www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/15/politics/politico/main4866504.shtml>
- Roger Boyes and John Carr, ‘Shadowy Bilderberg group meet in Greece – and here’s their address’ The Times, 14 May 2009 <www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6283373.ece>
- Nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, economists Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker, and diplomats Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross.
- The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (Waterville [Oregon]: Trineday, 2007), reviewed in Lobster 54.
- Something that President Obama seems unaware of, if his Prague speech on April 6 is anything to go by. This is an aspect of the notion of military pre-emption discussed by Paul Todd in this issue.
- Hugh Gusterson, ‘Empire of bases’ in theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists at <http://tinyurl.com/aqq4zu>
- <www.ruthout.org/article/the-military-industrial-complex-its-much-later-than-you-think>
- <http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article6048291.ece>
- <http://parellic.blogspot.com/2009/03/this-morning-i-sent-off-e-mail-to.html>
- <www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM>
- See <www.rense.com/general48/chargesplacedinWTC.htm>. To my knowledge no-one has appeared to support the claims in this piece. But it isn’t difficult to imagine why, if true, insurance companies would not want the building whose insurance they are carrying damaged by the building next door falling on it; nor why this has been kept secret, if true. Who would want to work in a building wired for demolition?
- A speech by CP’s instigator, Julia Middleton is at <www.scribd.com/doc/12750477/Julia-Middleton-Speech-CP-South-West> It illustrates the CP aim of creating a new civic network independent of the existing powers that be. Middleton has – or affects – the brisk, ‘no nonsense’, ‘all reasonable people agree’ approach common among British army officers.
- William Clark called CP a ‘secret society for careerists’ in a piece he wrote about them six years ago in ‘The Tainted Word’ in Variant 13, <www.variant.randomstate.org/13texts/William_Clark.html>.