The Commentary magazine website has posted an interesting article from its March issue authored by John Bolton, who served as the United States Representative to the United Nations during 2005-2006.  The article reviews a report published in September 2008 entitled, A Plan for Action, which carries the subtitle, “A New Era of International Cooperation for a Changed World:  2009, 2010, and Beyond.”  The thesis of the report can be pretty much summed up by a sentence from its Executive Summary:  “International cooperation today must be built on the principle of responsible sovereignty, or the notion that sovereignty entails obligations and duties toward other states as well as to one’s own citizens.”  It is interesting to note that A Plan for Action appeared not long after a May 2008 paper published by the Council on Foreign Relations, which dealt with many of the same issues.  Coincidentally, one of the three authors of A Plan for Action, Carlos Pascual, is a CFR member.

As Mr. Bolton points out in his critique, “There is no question, however, that the ideas advanced in A Plan for Action have become mainstays in the liberal vision of the future of American foreign policy.  That is what makes A Plan for Action especially interesting, and especially worrisome.”  It is worrisome, because its authors view the European Union as a model worth emulating.  And a statement from the official communiqué at the conclusion of the recent G20 summit in London reinforces that concern:  "We believe that the only sure foundation for sustainable globalization and rising prosperity for all is an open world economy based on market principles, effective regulation, and strong global institutions."

The global power elites view national sovereignty as some quaint, old-fashioned notion that has been overtaken by the complexity of our modern world.  They view the political and economic ideas relating to free markets, private property, and limited government as being adequate for the relatively simple conditions of the 19th century, but not for a more advanced global civilization.  It is important to understand and debunk this fallacy that we need “effective regulation, and strong global institutions,” because it leads directly to socialistic planning and a collectivist world government.

Imagine the simplest situation, which would be a society populated by two individuals.  Could anyone honestly think that Person A would be competent enough to determine what Person B should do with his time, how he should act, etc.?  Now imagine a society populated by a hundred people.  Would Person A be competent enough to control all of their creative actions?  Now imagine a society populated by hundreds of millions of individuals, such as the United States.  If one were to suggest that one person, or even a committee of so-called “experts,” would be competent enough to manage their lives and their billions of associations and exchanges, any rational observer would consider that suggestion to be absurd.

Hence, it is obvious that the more complex a society, the more certain it is that governmental control will retard productive effort.  And it logically follows that, the more complex a society, the more we should rely on the self-adapting processes of individuals acting freely, liberated from the coercive influence of government.  In the end, it should be intuitively obvious that “global institutions” cannot accurately anticipate, let alone intelligently control, every aspect of human activity everywhere on the planet.  And yet, that is precisely what the global power elites expect us to believe.  That collectivist mindset must be resisted, if we are to retain what rights and freedoms we still possess.
 

There are some elementary historical data about the communist movement which are ignored by most people and less known or well forgotten by the leading cultivated minorities, but without which it is literally impossible to understand anything whatsoever about recent world history. If you try to inform yourself and to take these data into account, you’ll realize how many obscure issues become automatically transparent, with little interpretative effort.
 

1. Communism has been, throughout human history, the only – I repeat: the only – globally organized political movement, with ramifications and agents in the most remote places of the Earth, all disciplined and prepared to immediately, coordinately and simultaneously spring into action upon the first call issued from their command centers.
    
2. Although it has at its disposal a huge number of organizations and mass parties, Communism is substantially a clandestine movement, whose command and action plans must remain invisible to the masses, even in such periods of lawfulness when many communist organizations can move publicly without being persecuted. The primacy of the clandestine elite over the visible leadership has been, at least since Lenin’s time, a keystone clause of the communist strategy. It is impossible to understand this strategy and the tactics that implement it by taking into account only the undisguised role of the most visible communist leaders in each country, and without having access to the internal discussions and the international connections of each organization.
    
3. Communism has been, throughout the world and throughout the ages, the only political movement that has at its disposal unlimited financial resources, far superior to the West’s biggest known fortunes and to the combined budgets of many governments. Its potentials of action must be measured according to the level of its resources.
    
4. Only a tiny part of the communist activity consists of directly or indirectly recognizable doctrinarian propaganda. The main and most significant part consists of infiltrating and blending into all sorts of organizations – political parties (liberals and conservatives alike), media, unions, government and private enterprises, cultural, educational and charitable institutions, the armed forces, Freemasonry and so on – it is an endless list – in order to turn them into useful tools for the communist strategy, through which it is possible to control the entire society, making the Party an “omniscient and invisible power” (the phrasing comes from Antonio Gramsci, but the idea itself existed much earlier). It is infantile to believe that, once implanted in those entities, the Communists will then turn to indoctrination or proselytism, as if they were protestant shepherds preaching the Gospel among infidels. Co-opting all forces that may serve the communist strategy is an extremely subtle and complex mechanism, which requires massive doses of camouflage and deceptiveness, with many contradictory moments on its way.
    
5. It is foolish to imagine communism as a “doctrine” or an “ideal”, particularly when it purports overtly preaching the abolition of private property. The communist movement has never had nor needed any doctrinal unity, and has proved one thousand times its capacity to tactically adapt to the most disparate ideological formulas, either sequentially or simultaneously, thus leaving the uninformed observer (including politicians in general and the near entirety of liberal and conservative intellectuals) completely bewildered. The most aggressive atheistic campaigns, for instance, coexist pacifically, in the midst of the communist movement, with the practice of taking advantage of the religious discourse to reach the heart of the masses. Mutatis mutandis, exploring radical nationalistic feelings goes side by side with the effort to dilute national sovereignties into bigger, regional or world unities, so that, behind the scenes, the communist movement benefits from the patriotic resistance as well as from the ascendant global power. The unity of the communist movement is strategic and organizational, not ideological. Communism is not a set of theses: it is a power scheme, the most flexible, vast, integrated and efficient one that ever existed. Even Islamic radicalism, which is so quickly expanding nowadays, would be powerless without the support of the world network of communist organizations.
    
6. An even more egregious form of foolishness is to believe that the logical-formal opposition between the abstract concepts of capitalism and communism can be translated, in the field, into a mortal conflict between capitalists and communists. To the multiple local and temporal situations corresponds a countless number of shades and transitions, which leaves much room for the apparently strangest arrangements and complicities (but only apparently so). No one will understand anything whatsoever about the historical world we live in without taking into consideration the enduring collaboration between the communist movement and some of the West’s greatest fortunes, Rothschild’s and Rockefellers’s for instance. The classic books on this matter are those from the English economist Anthony Sutton, but already in 1956 the US House of Representative’s Reece Committee gathered substantial proof that some billionaire foundations were using their huge resources “to destroy or discredit the same free market system that gave rise to them.” Today these foundations rank among the most solid pillars supporting the socialist government of Barack Obama.

Ignoring or misunderstanding these facts lies at the root of liberals’ and conservatives’ incapacity to resist the triumphant march of communists in Latin America. Many still believe, for example, that democracy will win a big victory by forcing the FARC to abandon the armed struggle and to constitute a legal party. They can’t understand that to create a recognized political force is the final purpose of any armed struggle – in Colombia or anywhere else. Guerrillas don’t win wars: all they want is a politically advantageous defeat. That’s the reason why they open fire on the government forces, in the jungle and in the city, and, at the same time, place their agents in key posts of the legal leftist parties, where they protest the blood shed and appeal dramatically for a return to lawfulness. They did it in Brazil, and they are doing it now in Colombia.

While liberals and conservatives can’t attain a clear vision of the whole and complex phenomenon of communism, while they insist on fighting the most immediate and repugnant aspects of this movement, if not only communist doctrines in abstract, they are doomed to defeat even as they claim victory.

The fact that no international anti-communist movement has emerged makes it difficult for many people to put together this whole picture, which communists themselves so easily get. But the absence of social support cannot work as a pretext for intellectual laziness. There will always be some individual minds capable of thinking above group prospects, when they exist, or without them, when they don’t exist. Nothing justifies that these minds be kept aside from the public discussions, while the ignorant hold the monopoly of the microphones. In this as in all other human affairs, those who have studied nothing are full of simplistic certainties and proclaim them with a huge sense of superiority, totally unaware of their ridiculous role. Those who have studied the issues may look deranged or eccentric, but after all, why do we study if not to learn something that most do not know?





Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian writer and philosopher presently living in the United States as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers. He taught Political Philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana (South of Brazil) from 2001 to 2005 and is the author of a dozen successful books, besides being a lecturer and media columnist with a large audience in his native country and a growing one in the United States. Website: www.olavodecarvalho.org.

In advance of the Group of 20 Summit in London on April 2nd, official press organs around the world have dutifully reported on calls to empower the arm of the United Nations known as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Does a chorus singing the same song suggest people are working from the same sheet of music? "We think so. (And, rather shockingly, so do Dick Morris and Sean Hannity.)"

Let's recap the year's events so far:

Jan 28 -  In keynote speech, Vladimir Putin tells Davos World Economic Forum: "excessive dependence on what is basically the only reserve currency is dangerous for the world economy."

Feb 13 - IMF mulls giving more power to emerging nations within its organization. (That would be China, Russia, etc.)

Feb 22 - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton begs China to keep buying U.S. dollar debt (And the enticement was?).

Mar 10 - FED chief Bernanke appears before The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and states that the financial crisis, "...is very much an international problem.  And it requires international solutions."

Mar 16 - UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer and "senior officials" in the U.S. Treasury suggest IMF print billions of its "currency" the SDR.

Mar 18 - FED announces direct purchases of U.S. Treasury notes. (This is monetization/printing of money/counterfeiting).

Mar 23 - Bank of China governor calls for "super-sovereign reserve currency," wants IMF to reconsider old Keynes proposal for a "bancor" unit of international currency controlled by IMF.

Mar 25 - U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner appears before the CFR, suggests he is open to considering proposals for a world currency, in spite of the fact that the day before he told the House Financial Services Committee he would denounce such a plan. The dollar immediately drops on world currency markets. Before his presentation is over, Geithner has to clarify that he believes dollar will remain reserve currency of the world for a "long time".

Mar 26 - UN panel calls for "new global reserve system" based on expanded use of SDR's.

Mar 26 - Obama Administration issues statement defending dollar as world reserve currency.

Setting aside President Obama's rhetoric in the defense of the U.S. dollar, and the globe spanning U.S. military machine behind it, it does appear that the end of the dollar era in world history is quickly approaching. What we suggest is that when such a switch out of the U.S. dollar does come, it will not be the result of random market forces or a natural evolution out of some mystical economic soup of players all seeking their own best interests. 

People with the authority to conjure trillions of dollars out of thin air do make plans. The governor of The People's Bank of China, who helps manage nearly two trillion dollars of foreign reserves amassed by his own government through productive trade, thinks so. His recent essay calling for a "super sovereign reserve currency" was widely reported. What went unmentioned in all major news outlets was his inference that our current financial crisis remains suspicious in its origins (emphasis added):

Although crisis may not necessarily be an intended result of the issuing authorities, it is an inevitable outcome of the institutional flaws.

The "issuing authorities" of the world's current reserve currency under discussion would, of course, be the U.S. Federal Reserve. The Chinese are still willing to be polite and so do not call the FED crooks outright. Likely, this is because there are plenty of crooks and collaborators in the communist Chinese financial system as well. (We have a bit of a competition going on as to who can play themselves off better to the general public.) Here is what the governor's "an inevitable outcome of the institutional flaws" translates to in the vernacular: "If you allow a system where people can rob you blind, they will." 

While we can't match the current international cache carried by the governor of the Bank of (communist) China, The John Birch Society does believe that the current financial situation our nation finds itself in has been at least 100 years in the making. And, we don't mean by an unfortunate series of mistakes and unintended consequences.  No, we believe, like the founders of our nation, that a "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design..."

In tracing the history of how we arrived to our current predicament, like Senator William Jennings Bryan and Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. of 100 years ago, we point to machinations of the Money Trust. Among their many agents were men like Edward Mandell House. House, who President Woodrow Wilson called his "alter ego," was instrumental in helping develop and move forward the legislation that created our Federal Reserve System in 1913. He was also a leading figure in the attempt to have the United States join the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I. 

When a Senate that had not yet become a millionaires club via the 17th Amendment balked and refused to ratify U.S. entry into the League, House and his patrons moved to create an organization dedicated to making an institution for world governance a reality. That organization was The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). From its birth, the CFR, and its invited membership, have always championed the creation and expansion of a global system of governance. It's first major success was the creation of the successor to the failed League of Nations — the United Nations. No opting out for the United States that time around. 

Proving that the axiom "follow the money" is the best advice to understanding all things political, we need to digress and make note of one key historical footnote. While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is part of the UN system, the IMF and its global money system technically preceded the United Nations into existence. The Articles of Agreement for the IMF were signed at the conclusion of the Bretton Woods Conference on July 22, 1944. The proposals that created the United Nations were then worked out at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference which started a few weeks after Bretton Woods and lasted through October of that year. 

Having completed their heavy paperwork lifting, the Allied Powers led by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, then took a break to mop up the unfinished business of obtaining unconditional surrenders from the governments of Germany and Japan in May and August of 1945 respectively. Mission accomplished, The United Nations then publically came into being with the signing of the UN Charter on October 24, 1945.  It should be noted that the Allies had taken to referring to themselves as a group of "United Nations" many months before the official birthing of the organization. A few weeks later, the Articles of Agreement for the IMF signed off on in July of 1944, came into force on December 27, 1945.

Flash forward now to where in the span of just the last few weeks, The Council on Foreign Relations has brought before it both the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to pledge their allegiance to a system of "international regulation" as a solution to the current financial crisis. As the President Emeritus and Machiavelli wannabe of the CFR puts it, Power Rules. 

Lest there be any doubt that the CFR stands against the political independence that comes with a nation being able to control its own monetary system, advertised alongside the official transcripts of Bernanke's and Geithner's remarks is the latest CFR book on the matter, Money, Markets, and Sovereignty. The abridged promo for the book makes the author's (and publisher's) point clear: "monetary nationalism...represents the single greatest threat to globalization. (Be sure to check out their full review of the book.  It's an excellent exhibit of the audacity CFR members are capable of. They suggest that their arguments for unified system of global fascism are actually the "most powerful defense of economic liberalism since F. A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom." 

The heirs to the movement to create a League of Nations, under the cover of a financial crisis and a Group of 20 Summit in London, are now poised to make the greatest step forward in the creation of a world government since the founding of the United Nations. As in the midst of World War II, these men who expect to prevail seek first an agreement on the money system. The political structure that will be used to implement it comes next. (For example: Look for passage of the UN's pending Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which gives control and taxing authority over the world's oceans to the UN, to become an even more intense effort in the U.S. Senate. Also look for a new global warming agreement that gives the UN further controls over national industrial output and polices governing that output.)

A United Nations with power to regulate and tax the world's money system and control the oceans (and rivers that feed them) will be more than powerful enough to dictate how Americans are to live their lives. Such an unelected and unaccountable world governing body would be the ultimate in taxation without representation — the ultimate tyranny. 

We reject all calls for our government to empower the United Nations and create a world government. Instead the United States should "Get US Out of the UN!"

If you are willing to work to preserve your freedom against the efforts of those who seek to take it from you, it is time to join The John Birch Society. Don't worry, in spite of them admitting they finally agree with our assessment of the situation, we guarantee you that Dick Morris and Sean Hannity are not secret members. 

Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, having served two years of their 11- and 12-year sentences for shooting an illegal drug smuggler in their capacity as U.S. Border Patrol agents, have been released from prison.

President George Bush commuted their sentences on January 19, his last full day in office, with both prison sentences to end on March 20. The actual prison term is cut short, but the conviction remains unless a pardon or an action by the Supreme Court can be obtained in the future.

Oddly, Ramos and Compean will serve the remaining 31 days under house arrest, and Ramos under supervised release for up to three years. Until the prison sentence ends, the Bureau of Prisons has restricted Ramos from having any contact with the press. But he is home and in the loving arms of his family. His first words to his wife, Monica: “I love you.”

Jose and Patty Compean, who had a child while her husband was in prison, were spending their first day back, together and quietly, so that Jose could meet his new baby. He too, is under a gag order until March 20.

U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and his staff, as well as Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), worked tirelessly for well over a year on behalf of Ramos and Compean. Rohrabacher spearheaded an informal grass-roots and personal campaign to get the two wrongly convicted agents out of prison; he already thanked Bush for the commutation when Bush left office.

Rohrabacher issued this statement saying, “At last, Ramos and Compean have been rightfully reunited with their families. This day is long overdue. I wish the Ramos and Compean families the best as they now try to pick up the pieces and begin to heal from this terrible ordeal.”

Both the Ramos and Compean families say they will not rest until the convictions are wiped off the record, and both men are totally vindicated of any wrongdoing. That process has already been started by their lawyer, David Botsford, who has asked the Supreme Court to review the convictions on the remaining counts that the Fifth Circuit did not set aside.

Welcome home, gentlemen, welcome home.