On July 4th, from What Did America Declare Its Independence?

We declared ourselves free from those who would govern us based on what we could be deceived to believe. A generation weaned on the Age of Enlightenment insisted on government under the rule of law. And governance based on facts, not beliefs.

How’s that working out?

Remember Iraqi WMD? Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda? Iraq’s yellowcake uranium from Niger? Iraqi meetings in Prague? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories?

All those facts are now known to be false. Yet Americans were deceived to do what? Believe. Ground Zero of the True Believers was Washington, DC where those sworn to protect us instead took us to war in Iraq—relying on false beliefs.

If waging war on false beliefs is not proof certain of a Dark Age, what is?

It gets even better.

Do you believe money is smarter than people? Of course not, right? Or do you?

I did. As counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (1980-87), I helped craft federal legislation that grew funds under management (largely pension funds) from $800 billion in 1980 to $16.6 trillion by April 2007. The annual subsidy tops $150 billion.

Pile up that much money in one place and flies will gather. Akin to the casino skim, those massive sums were skimmed at least four times over the past two decades.

Remember the Savings & Loan fraud of the late 1980s? That fraud featured Arizona Senator John McCain and the infamous “Keating Five.” At a cost of $153 billion, that was just a warm-up. Then came the Enron scam and the dot.com crash. WorldCom alone was a $50 billion fraud. Now we’re talking real money.

Then came the subprime mortgage fraud enabled by the “financial creativity” that Fed Chief Alan Greenspan applauded as a sign of good old American ingenuity. What a guy.

Anything goes, he said. Let money do what money does best. After all, money is smarter than us, right? Believe it or not, that consensus belief is now enshrined in federal law. I had a True Believer hand in putting it there.

So did you. “Show me the money” you learned to insist. Why should you care about fiscal foresight, civil cohesion, environmental sustainability and such? That’s not your job, right? Just manage those funds to maximize your returns and fahgeddaboutit.

You too could be chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Deception on a Global Scale

How did this happen? How were we induced to abandon common sense and embrace a mindset so disconnected from reality?

How deep is this consensus belief imbedded in the American psyche? So deep we can’t even see it.

We were educated so that this belief became the lens with which—and through which—we now do our seeing. To see a consensus mindset is like trying to see your own eyeballs or bite your own teeth.

Where do consensus beliefs reside? In the shared field of consciousness akin to a shared belief that our sports team is better than theirs. Where does that reside?

How were we induced to embrace such a money-myopic worldview? Answer: step-by-step—in the same way we were induced to invade Iraq based on false beliefs that we were spoon-fed over years.

Rather than “let my people go,” the refrain is now “let my money go.” We were taught to Truly Believe that the freedom of money is an appropriate proxy for personal freedom. Now we even pursue money as a proxy for our pursuit of happiness.

Mindset Warfare

Ideas become weapons when waging Information Age warfare. Strategic psy-ops narrow the field of possibilities. Inside a narrowed mental framework, outcomes become probabilities and futures become predictable—within a range of probabilities.

At its internalized core, that’s how modern-day warfare proceeds in plain sight. The target (that’s us) is induced to freely embrace the very forces that undermine our freedom, step-by-step. While we put our faith in financial assets, our consensus-enabled purchasing power flowed overseas where China is reinvesting in commodities.

In Star Wars terminology, an internalized “force” becomes imbedded inside you—and you inside it. Thus the ruinous effects of false beliefs. And phony intelligence. And consensus economic policies. Thus the need to protect ourselves from such duplicity.

At its internalized core, this duplicity becomes “Zionism.” Zionists specialize in displacing facts with beliefs, thereby suspending the rule of law in plain sight. For Zionist strategists, “facts” don’t need to be true, just plausible. Tell that to a child whose parent perished in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Let’s keep it simple: Zionism operates in plain sight as transnational organized crime. This mindset-enabled systemic corruption is fast growing to global scale in plain sight. Absent a complicit media, deception on such a scale would be impossible.

The good news: this problem can be solved. The bad news: the solution requires that we abandon many of our ill-founded beliefs.

Never Again

The solution reverts back to the role that the Founders envisioned for education and information in preserving our liberty. Education comes from the Latin e-ducere – “to lead out of.” Out of where? Darkness.

That’s where Americans now reside with the help of Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, Newsweek and dozens of mainstream media outlets that keep us in the dark about the common source of this duplicity.

At the Ground Zero of Darkness are found those who duped America. How were we deceived to invade Iraq? The same way we were induced to brand the bastion of freedom with a “Washington” consensus that reveres financial freedom above all else.

As a People, how did we learn to hate people of another faith (Islam)? How did we slip into our longest ever war and what could yet become our deepest ever depression?

As we lead each other back into the light, let us resolve on this July 4th to force into the light those who induced us into a darkness that may yet be the undoing of democracy.

Let us resolve that never again will such systemic duplicity be allowed to gain a foothold. Not in our government. And not in the shared mindset of those who call themselves Americans.

Only with that shared commitment can we recover and protect our independence.

Jeff Gates

A Vietnam veteran, Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders worldwide. He served for seven years as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.

He is widely published in the trade, popular and academic press. His latest book is Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War.

His previous books include Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street From Wall Street and The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century. Topical commentaries appear on the Criminal State website.