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HOW DOES THE US GET ITS DOLLAR ADVANTAGE?
Imagine this: you are deep in debt but every day you write cheques for millions of dollars you don't have -- another luxury car, a holiday home at the beach, the world trip of a lifetime.
Your cheques should be worthless but they keep buying stuff because those cheques you write never reach the bank! You have an agreement with the owners of one thing everyone wants, call it petrol/gas, that they will accept only your cheques as payment. This means everyone must hoard your cheques so they can buy petrol/gas. Since they have to keep a stock of your cheques, they use them to buy other stuff too. You write a cheque to buy a TV, the TV shop owner swaps your cheque for petrol/gas, that seller buys some vegetables at the fruit shop, the fruiterer passes it on to buy bread, the baker buys some flour with it, and on it goes, round and round -- but never back to the bank.
You have a debt on your books, but so long as your cheque never reaches the bank, you don't have to pay. In effect, you have received your TV free.
This is the position the USA has enjoyed for 30 years -- it has been getting a free world trade ride for all that time. It has been receiving a huge subsidy from everyone else in the world. As it debt has been growing, it has printed more money (written more cheques) to keep trading. No wonder it is an economic powerhouse!
Then one day, one petrol seller says he is going to accept another person's cheques, a couple of others think that might be a good idea. If this spreads, people are going to stop hoarding your cheques and they will come flying home to the bank. Since you don't have enough in the bank to cover all the cheques, very nasty stuff is going to hit the fan!
But you are big, tough and very aggressive. You don't scare the other guy who can write cheques, he's pretty big too, but given a 'legitimate' excuse, you can beat the tripes out of the lone gas seller and scare him and his mates into submission.
And that, in a nutshell, is what the USA is doing right now with Iraq.
AMERICA'S PRECARIOUS ECONOMIC POSITION
America is so eager to attack Iraq now because of the speed with which the euro fire could spread. If Iran, Venezuela and Russia join Iraq and sell large quantities of oil for euros, the euro would have the leverage it needs to become a powerful force in general international trade. Other nations would have to start swapping some of their dollars for euros.
The dollars the USA has printed, the 'cheques' it has written, would start to fly home, stripping away the illusion of value behind them. The USA's real economic condition is about as bad as it could be; it is the most debt-ridden nation on earth, owing about US$12,000 for every single one of it's 280 million men, women and children. It is worse than the position of Indonesia when it imploded economically a few years ago, or more recently, that of Argentina.
Even if OPEC did not switch to euros wholesale (and that would make a very nice non-oil profit for the OPEC countries, including minimising the various contrived debts America has forced on some of them), the US's difficulties would build. Even if only a small part of the oil trade went euro, that would do two things immediately:
* Increase the attractiveness to EU members of joining the 'eurozone', which in turn would make the euro stronger and make it more attractive to oil nations as a trading currency and to other nations as a general trading currency.
* Start the US dollars flying home demanding value when there isn't enough in the bank to cover them.
* The markets would over-react as usual and in no time, the US dollar's value would be spiralling down.
THE US SOLUTION
America's response to the euro threat was predictable. It has come out fighting.
It aims to achieve four primary things by going to war with Iraq:
* Safeguard the American economy by returning Iraq to trading oil in US dollars, so the greenback is once again the exclusive oil currency.
* Send a very clear message to any other oil producers just what will happen to them if they do not stay in the dollar circle. Iran has already received one message -- remember how puzzled you were that in the midst of moderation and secularization, Iran was named as a member of the axis of evil?
* Place the second largest reserves of oil in the world under direct American control.
* Provide a secular, subject state where the US can maintain a huge force (perhaps with nominal elements from allies such as Britain and Australia) to dominate the Middle East and its vital oil. This would enable the US to avoid using what it sees as the unreliable Turkey, the politically impossible Israel and surely the next state in its sights, Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of al Qaeda and a hotbed of anti-American sentiment.
* Severe setback the European Union and its euro, the only trading bloc and currency strong enough to attack the USA's dominance of world trade through the dollar.
* Provide cover for the US to run a covert operation to overturn the democratically elected government of Venezuela and replace it with an America-friendly military supported junta -- and put Venezuala's oil into American hands.
Locking the world back into dollar oil trading would consolidate America's current position and make it all but impregnable as the dominant world power -- economically and militarily. A splintered Europe (the US is working hard to split Europe; Britain was easy, but other Europeans have offered support in terms of UN votes) and its euro would suffer a serious setback and might take decades to recover.
It is the boldest grab for absolute power the world has seen in modern times. America is hardly likely to allow the possible slaughter of a few hundred thousand Iraqis stand between it and world domination.
President Bush did promise to protect the American way of life. This is what he meant.
JUSTIFYING WAR
Obviously, the US could not simply invade Iraq, so it began casting around for a 'legitimate' reason to attack. That search has been one of increasing desperation as each rationalization has crumbled. First Iraq was a threat because of alleged links to al Qaeda; then it was proposed Iraq might supply al Qaeda with weapons; then Iraq's military threat to its neighbours was raised; then the need to deliver Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's horrendously inhumane rule; finally there is the question of compliance with UN weapons inspection.
The USA's justifications for invading Iraq are looking less impressive by the day. The US's statements that it would invade Iraq unilaterally without UN support and in defiance of the UN make a total nonsense of any American claim that it is concerned about the world body's strength and standing.
The UN weapons inspectors have come up with minimal infringements of the UN weapons limitations -- the final one being low tech rockets which exceed the range allowed by about 20 percent. But there is no sign of the so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) the US has so confidently asserted are to be found. Colin Powell named a certain north Iraqi village as a threat. It was not. He later admitted it was the wrong village.
'Newsweek' (24/2) has reported that while Bush officials have been trumpeting the fact that key Iraqi defector, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, told the US in 1995 that Iraq had manufactured tonnes of nerve gas and anthrax (Colin Powell's 5 February presentation to the UN was just one example) they neglected to mention that Kamel had also told the US that these weapons had been destroyed.
Parts of the US and particularly the British secret 'evidence' have been shown to come from a student's masters thesis.
America's expressed concern about the Iraqi people's human rights and the country's lack of democracy are simply not supported by the USA's history of intervention in other states nor by its current actions. Think Guatemala, the Congo, Chile and Nicaragua as examples of a much larger pool of US actions to tear down legitimate, democratically elected governments and replace them with war, disruption, starvation, poverty, corruption, dictatorships, torture, rape and murder for its own economic ends. The most recent, Afghanistan, is not looking good; in fact that reinstalled a murderous group of warlords which America had earlier installed, then deposed, in favour of the now hated Taliban.
Saddam Hussein was just as repressive, corrupt and murderous 15 years ago when he used chemical weapons, supplied by the US, against the Kurds. The current US Secretary for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, so vehement against Iraq now, was on hand personally to turn aside condemnation of Iraq and blame Iran. At that time, of course, the US thought Saddam Hussein was their man -- they were using him against the perceived threat of Iran's Islamic fundamentalism.
Right now, as 'The Independent' writer, Robert Fisk, has noted, the US's efforts to buy Algeria's UN vote includes promises of re-arming the military which has a decade long history of repression, torture, rape and murder Saddam Hussein himself would envy.
It is estimated 200,000 people have died, and countless others been left maimed by the activities of these monsters. What price the US's humanitarian concerns for Iraqis? (Of course, the French are also wooing Algeria, their former north African territory, for all they are worth, but at least they are not pretending to be driven by humanitarian concerns.)
Indonesia is another nation with a vote and influence as the largest Muslim nation in the world. Its repressive, murderous military is regaining strength on the back of the US's so-called anti-terror campaign and is receiving promises of open and covert support -- including intelligence sharing.
AND VENEZUELA
While the world's attention is focused on Iraq, America is both openly and covertly supporting the "coup of the rich" in Venezuela, which grabbed power briefly in April last year before being intimidated by massive public displays of support by the poor for democratically-elected President Chavez Frias. The coup leaders continue to use their control of the private media, much of industry and the ear of the American Government and its oily intimates to cause disruption and disturbance.
Venezuela's state-owned oil resources would make rich pickings for American oil companies and provide the US with an important oil source in its own backyard.
Many writers have noted the contradiction between America's alleged desire to establish democracy in Iraq while at the same time, actively undermining the democratically-elected government in Venezuela.
Above the line, America rushed to recognise the coup last April; more recently, President Bush has called for "early elections", ignoring the fact that President Chavez Frias has won three elections and two referendums and, in any case, early elections would be unconstitutional.
One element of the USA's covert action against Venezuela is the behaviour of American transnational businesses, which have locked out employees in support of "national strike" action. Imagine them doing that in the USA! There is no question that a covert operation is in process to overturn the legitimate Venezuelan government.
Uruguayan congressman, Jose Nayardi, made it public when he revealed that the Bush administration had asked for Uruguay's support for Venezuelan white collar executives and trade union activists "to break down levels of intransigence within the Chavez Frias administration". The process, he noted, was a shocking reminder of the CIA's 1973 intervention in Chile which saw General Pinochet lead his military coup to take over President Allende's democratically elected government in a bloodbath.
President Chavez Frias is desperately clinging to government, but with the might of the USA aligned with his opponents, how long can he last?
THE COST OF WAR
Some have claimed that an American invasion of Iraq would cost so many billions of dollars that oil returns would never justify such an action.
But when the invasion is placed in the context of the protection of the entire US economy for now and into the future, the balance of the argument changes.
Further, there are three other vital factors:
First, America will be asking others to help pay for the war because it is protecting their interests. Japan and Saudi Arabia made serious contributions to the cost of the 1991 Gulf war.
Second -- in reality, war will cost the USA very little -- or at least, very little over and above normal expenditure. This war is already paid for!
All the munitions and equipment have been bought and paid for. The USA would have to spend hardly a cent on new hardware to prosecute this war -- the expenditure will come later when munitions and equipment have to be replaced after the war.
But amunitions, hardware and so on are being replaced all the time -- contracts are out. Some contracts will simply be brought forward and some others will be ramped up a bit, but spread over a few years, the cost will not be great. And what is the real extra cost of an army at war compared with maintaining the standing army around the world, running exercises and so on? It is there, but it is a relatively small sum.
Third -- lots of the extra costs involved in the war are dollars spent outside America, not least in the purchase of fuel. Guess how America will pay for these? By printing dollars it is going to war to protect. The same happens when production begins to replace hardware components, minerals, etc. are bought in with dollars that go overseas and exploit America's trading advantage.
The cost of war is not nearly as big as it is made out to be. The cost of not going to war would be horrendous for the USA -- unless there were another way of protecting the greenback's world trade dominance.
AMERICA'S TWO ACTIVE ALLIES
Why are Australia and Britain supporting America in its transparent Iraqi war ploy?
Australia, of course, has significant US dollar reserves and trades widely in dollars and extensively with America. A fall in the US dollar would reduce Australia's debt, perhaps, but would do nothing for the Australian dollar's value against other currencies.
John Howard, the Prime Minister, has long cherished the dream of a free trade agreement with the USA in the hope that Australia can jump on the back of the free ride America gets in trade through the dollar's position as the major trading medium. That would look much less attractive if the euro took over a significant part of the oil trade.
Britain has yet to adopt the euro. If the US takes over Iraq and blocks the euro's incursion into oil trading, Tony Blair will have given his French and German counterparts a bloody nose, and gained more room to manouevre on the issue -- perhaps years more room.
Britain would be in a position to demand a better deal from its EU partners for entering the "eurozone" if the new currency could not make the huge value gains guaranteed by a significant role in world oil trading. It might even be in a position to withdraw from Europe and link with America against continental Europe.
On the other hand, if the US cannot maintain the oil trade dollar monopoly, the euro will rapidly go from strength to strength, and Britain could be left begging to be allowed into the club.
THE OPPOSITION
Some of the reasons for opposition to the American plan are obvious -- America is already the strongest nation on earth and dominates world trade through its dollar. If it had control of the Iraqi oil and a base for its forces in the Middle East, it would not add to, but would multiply its power.
The oil-producing nations, particularly the Arab ones, can see the writing on the wall and are quaking in their boots.
France and Germany are the EU leaders with the vision of a resurgent, united Europe taking its rightful place in the world and using its euro currency as a world trading reserve currency and thus gaining some of the free ride the United States enjoys now. They are the ones who initiated the euro oil trade with Iraq.
Russia is in deep economic trouble and knows it will get worse the day America starts exploiting its take-over of Afghanistan by running a pipeline southwards via Afghanistan from the giant southern Caspian oil fields. Currently, that oil is piped northwards -- where Russia has control.
Russia is in the process of ramping up oil production with the possibility of trading some of it for euros and selling some to the US itself. Russia already has enough problems with the fact that oil is traded in US dollars; if the US has control of Iraqi oil, it could distort the market to Russia's enormous disadvantage. In addition, Russia has interests in Iraqi oil; an American take over could see them lost. Already on its knees, Russia could be beggared before a mile of the Afghanistan pipeline is laid.
ANOTHER SOLUTION?
The scenario clarifies the seriousness of America's position and explains its frantic drive for war. It also suggests that solutions other than war are possible.
Could America agree to share the trading goodies by allowing Europe to have a negotiated part of it? Not very likely, but it is just possible Europe can stare down the USA and force such an outcome. Time will tell. What about Europe taking the statesmanlike, humanitarian and long view, and withdrawing, leaving the oil to the US, with appropriate safeguards for ordinary Iraqis and democracy in Venezuela?
Europe might then be forced to adopt a smarter approach -- perhaps accelerating the development of alternative energy technologies which would reduce the EU's reliance on oil for energy and produce goods it could trade for euros -- shifting the world trade balance.
Now that would be a very positive outcome for everyone.
******* ENDS *******
Geoffrey Heard is a Melbourne, Australia, writer on the environment, sustainability and human rights.
© Geoffrey Heard, 2003.
Anyone is free to circulate this document provided it is complete and in its current form with attribution and no payment is asked. It is prohibited to reproduce this document or any part of it for commercial gain without the prior permission of the author. For such permission, contact the author at: gheard@surf.net.au.
INSANITY IN AMERICA
John Chuckman
It's always satisfying to have a pet theory supported by new data. A large and authoritative study, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, confirms a favorite hypothesis of mine, that there is more mental illness and insanity, far more, in America than you find in other advanced societies.
The study, led by a Harvard Medical School researcher, found evidence of mental problems in 26.4 % of people in the United States, versus, for example, 8.2% of people in Italy. The researchers were concerned with matters such as lack of access to treatment and under-treatment, but for those concerned about a safe and decent world, I think the salient finding is simply America's high percentage. The world is being led by a nation where more than one-quarter of the people have genuine mental problems... The finding is strangely both comforting and disturbing.
It is comforting because it helps explain why Americans continue supporting a man proven wrong every time he opens his mouth, a man who has de-stabilized parts of the world in the name of creating stability, a man claiming sound business principles who has pitched the United States into deficit free-fall, and a man who arouses suspicion and fear throughout the world.
The study is comforting, too, because it helps explain an opposition candidate like John Kerry. How can liberals generate excitement over this stale, fly-buzzed doughnut of a candidate?
I suppose the same way they get excited every time Bush's polls dip by something little more than statistical noise. Perhaps the same way a man like Michael Moore - who makes gobs of money playing to the suspicions and prejudices of the paranoid segment of America's great political market - could so eagerly embrace a crypto-Nazi like General Wesley Clark as "his candidate"?
The finding is comforting in explaining all those Americans shocked and appalled over The New York Times' recent apology for its drum-beating, pre-invasion coverage of Iraq's non-existent weapons. Here is a newspaper that, more often than not, comes down on the wrong side of human rights, always protects Establishment interests, always ignores abuses until they can no longer be ignored, and yet it somehow retains a reputation in America as guardian of treasured values and as the nation's newspaper of record.
Well, the "record" part is easily explained, since The Times often takes one position before an event and another after, adjusting its emphasis according to shifts in public opinion or facts discovered by someone else. With that kind of coverage, you surely do qualify as some kind of paper of record.
But nothing could be a bigger nonsense than The Times' reputation as guardian of values in a free society. Just ask Wen Ho Lee, or Richard Jewell, or the woman who accused a Kennedy of rape, or all the people who died unnecessarily at the Bay of Pigs. Go back and examine The Times at key points in the communist witch hunts or at the outbreak of the Korean War.
Go back and examine its views and emphasis when President Johnson offered his Hitler-like lies about the Gulf of Tonkin. Go back and see how often The Times has done any real investigative journalism - when it mattered, not in retrospect - about subjects as vital as the FBI's huge abuse of power during the 1960s or the shameful backgrounds of many of the country's leading politicians. Just examine the statements of the paper's signature columnist, Thomas Friedman, who sounds like Henry Ford condemned to bizarre re-incarnation as one the Jews he so hated..."
TV or Not TV? Not!
by William Norman Grigg
TV programming is designed to shepherd viewers into compromising their values. To preserve freedom, Americans should severely limit or entirely eliminate their TV viewing.
In the typical American home, the television set occupies the center of the living room, as if it were the household deity. People immersed in TV’s caricature of reality indulge in a delusional sense of intimacy with people they do not know -- and who usually don't exist -- at the expense of relationships with the most consequential people in their lives: their parents, children and neighbors.
Passive consumers of television also submit to the powers of people skilled in the use of fantasy as a means of re-calibrating public attitudes and values, not just about family life and sexual morality, but also about any other moral question of consequence....
"Of all the arts," commented founding Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin, "cinema is the most important." Lenin’s regime pioneered the use of cinematic propaganda as a means of building the total state, and Lenin’s heirs from Hitler to Kim Jong-Il have used his techniques.
In his precautionary tale 1984 George Orwell anticipated the use of television as an instrument of totalitarian social engineering: Every hapless subject of Big Brother’s regime was required to commune with the omnipresent "telescreen," a combination television and surveillance device.
Most Americans would disagree that our society has much if anything in common with the dismal despotism portrayed by Orwell. But Russian anti-Communist Alexander Zinovyev, a world-renowned author who actually lived under such a regime, sees America descending into the same nightmare — in large measure because of the influence of our popular media.
"It is enough to switch on the TV set, to go to the movies, to open a best-seller,... to listen to the ubiquitous music," complained Zinovyev in the July 24, 1999 issue of France’s Le Figaro, "and you’ll find them propagating the cult of sex, violence and money. Noble slogans about tolerance and respect for others are concealing those three pillars of totalitarian democracy."
The Devious Dialectic
To be most effective, the peddlers of cultural corruption must work in tandem with change agents who employ sophisticated tactics of psychological manipulation in the service of collectivism. Dean Gotcher of the Institute for Authority Research has spent much of his life studying the ways in which change agents infiltrate and subvert communities in order to undermine established values.
According to Gotcher, one of the most successful ploys used by those cultural revolutionaries is the "dialectic process," in which diverse groups of people, in a facilitated environment, are led to submerge their disagreements through a series of compromises leading to a "consensus." This can be carried out in discussion groups, classrooms, management seminars, or in many other settings.
"The objective of the facilitator is to break down barriers and normal restrictions," observes Gotcher. "The facilitator (sometimes called the change agent) uses the ‘consensus process’ [to] stifle sensible protests. This actually results in ‘induced paralysis’ of the objectors [those who seek to defend conventional social mores and customs]."
"Objectors to the process of ‘consensus’ are made to feel like they are ‘rocking the boat,’" Gotcher continues. "Those who object to the changes are encouraged to alter their standards so that ‘they can get along with others.’ The reason given to get rid of normal standards often is the claim that others are being ‘offended.’" Beguiled or brow-beaten into sacrificing principles for the sake of social amity, those being fed through the machinery of the "dialectic process" are carefully led through subtle but significant compromises intended ultimately "to remake human nature."
"Mama Bulls"?
In a typical dialectical exercise (such as a management seminar), the opening sortie in this assault is something apparently inconsequential, such as an "ice-breaker" routine involving a silly game. One example cited by Gotcher was a supposedly innocuous game involving "a papa bull, a mama bull, and a baby bull." Of course, a "mama bull" cannot exist. But for the purposes of the ice-breaker routine, participants are required to pretend that such a creature does exist, in order to form smooth and amicable relationships with each other.
As Gotcher points out, dialecticians use such "harmless" shared deceptions to lay a crucial predicate: The assumption that there are no absolutes, that reality itself is subjective, and that what really matters is conforming to the consensus, the will of the collective. Exercises of this sort, he warns, are being employed in corporate, professional, health care, educational and management training, as well as in "outcome-based" educational programs.
"Whether promoted by organizations such as the NEA [National Education Association], the local Chamber of Commerce, the United Nations, [the] United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO), or through grant programs such as Goals 2000 and School to Work, this process is having a direct effect upon all our lives," observes Gotcher. The purpose is to prepare the public mind for the onset of the total state, which would by definition be completely emancipated from all moral and legal restraints.
The process described by Gotcher works best in relatively small, intimate settings. But the public at large is also being run through the "dialectic process" through the instrumentality of prime-time television.
Gotcher’s example of a mythical "mama bull" has a real-life counterpart in the case of the so-called married couple that took the $1 million prize in CBS television’s Amazing Race. The couple in question, who won the round-the-world competition staged in the program, are two homosexual men. The decision to refer to them as "married" was approved at the network’s loftiest corporate echelon. After this gesture provoked a smattering of criticism, a CBS executive rebuked the objectors: "They’re gay and they’re married. What’s the problem?"
The problem, of course, is that men cannot be married to each other any more than a bull can be a mama. But just like the small group in the ice-breaker exercise described by Gotcher, the vast national audience for Amazing Race was required to be party to the collective falsehood of homosexual "marriage." And it’s hardly a coincidence that this took place at a time when serious efforts were underway — in Vermont, California, Massachusetts and at the U.S. Supreme Court — to lay the groundwork for officially recognizing homosexual "marriage."
Redefining Masculinity
The propaganda prep work for homosexual "marriage" continues this fall with a sitcom entitled It’s All Relative. In that program, the intelligent adult daughter of what is described as "a long-committed gay couple" is determined to marry a coarse, indifferently educated, blue-collar bartender whose church-going parents oppose homosexuality. The Advocate — a high-gloss homosexual-themed publication — smugly describes the sitcom as "subtly subversive."
"Just presenting a gay couple matter-of-factly might be the most revolutionary thing we’re doing," comments co-creator Chuck Ranberg. "You see them in bed together in the first episode, and they kiss each other on the way to work in the second one," adds co-executive producer Neil Meron. "It’s just like life."
Yep. Just a typical day in the life of two "mama bulls."
The "mama bulls" ran rampant on television during the summer of 2003. As The Advocate observed with satisfaction, the boob tube has been "saturated with queer eyes and boys meeting boys." The breakout program last summer was Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Each segment of that program, originally broadcast on the Bravo cable network but eagerly snapped up by NBC, features (in the words of social commentator Steve Sailer) "five witty gay men [who] refine … some straight slob’s entire look and lifestyle."
Often this miraculous makeover was intended to help the hapless heterosexual make a good impression for a woman. This fortifies a propaganda point made incessantly on NBC’s Emmy-winning sitcom Will & Grace — namely, that the homosexual male is the ideal man. This conceit has given birth in the media to a new social category: "Metrosexuals," or men of refinement and taste who, defying all expectations, somehow are not homosexual.
To appreciate just how rapid and effective the TV-centric "dialectic process" can be, consider this: Just two years ago, in the aftermath of 9-11, the masculine ideal was defined by the firefighters and rescue workers who heroically perished at Ground Zero, or Todd Beamer and the heroes of United Flight 93.
Assault on the Middle Class
Television emerged as a mass medium in the 1950s and quickly came to occupy a key role in an orchestrated campaign to eradicate conventional middle-class morals and culture.
In his monumental 1966 study Tragedy and Hope, the late Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley observed:
"The period since 1950 has seen the beginnings of a revolutionary change in American politics. This change is not so closely related to changes in American economic life as it is to the transformation in social life.... What has been happening has been a disintegration of the middle class...."
While economic factors certainly played an important role in this disintegration, continued Quigley, the most important development was the destruction of "the middle-class outlook … not by adult middle-class persons abandoning it, but by a failure or inability of parents to pass it on to their children."
This was partially due to radical changes in the American educational system undertaken for the purpose of using the schools to subvert middle-class morality.
But just as important was "the context within which the educational system has operated," noted Quigley — specifically, the popular culture and entertainment media.
"The chief external factor in the destruction of the middle-class outlook has been the relentless attack upon it in literature and drama throughout most of the twentieth century," Quigley wrote.
"In fact, it is difficult to find works that defended this outlook or even assumed it to be true, as was frequent in the nineteenth century." The anti-middle-class outlook, which was rapidly absorbed by television, exalted "violence, social irresponsibility, sexual laxity and perversion … human weakness in relation to alcohol, narcotics, or sex, or domestic and business relationships conducted along completely nonbourgeois lines."
Other themes woven into anti-bourgeois propaganda in literature and drama (including television) were "an oversimplified Freudianism that regarded all suppression of human impulse as leading to frustration and psychic distortions
… the salutary consequences of self-indulgence
… and a total rejection of middle-class values, including time, self-discipline, and material achievement, in favor of a cult of personal violence...."
The result, concluded Quigley, was "a total reversal of middle-class values by presenting as interesting or admirable simple negation of these values by aimless, shiftless, and totally irresponsible people." The political ascent of Arnold Schwarzenegger presents a splendid example of the reversal of values Quigley described.
The California recall movement began as a revolt by that state’s long-suffering middle class against a state government arrogantly determined to tax them into penury, regulate them into oblivion, and use the power of government to undermine their values and institutions.
California’s rebellious middle class was skillfully manipulated into supporting, as its champion, a novice politician
— a product of Hollywood’s depravity-exalting culture, and who unabashedly supports abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action, and the essential tenets of the socialist welfare state.
This was possible, in large measure, because California’s middle-class electorate, having passed through the dialectic process described by Gotcher, considered it more important to be part of the winning side than to defend sound principles.
Television is the single most effective means of shepherding the American population through the dialectic process.
This is why Americans seriously interested in preserving their freedoms should severely limit or entirely eliminate their TV viewing.
AMERIKKKA
Mediocre times produce the very worst that the world has to offer: Reagan, Bin Laden, Bush, Hussein, Sharon, and Blair. None but the feeble minded could draw inspiration from such a ghastly lineup of "leaders".
Turn Off TV and Turn On Quantum Mind
Humanity's most valuable possessions are Clean Water, Clean air, and Trees
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