We Really Are Gangsters

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

It is one thing if you can’t ask a kindergarten teacher about world affairs or politics.  In America, you can’t ask members of congress, military leaders or even our president. 

You certainly can’t ask the majority of members of what we still call “the press.”  All you get is silliness, stories that they don’t even know where they come from. 

With few exceptions like Zbigniew Brzezinski’s interview on MSNBC last week, one that gave me an apoplectic moment, American leaders are nuts.

It isn’t as though we didn’t always have plots and secrets.  There were always questions, “Who blew up the USS Maine?” and “Did Roosevelt know about the attack on Pearl Harbour?”

[youtube teSaJ4-RZkw]

You can’t attend a history class over 400 level at a good university or turn on the History Channel without being bombarded with revelations about how historical reality differs from the version the public is told.  Generally the reason is that the truth isn’t “patriotic enough.”  We used to laugh when we heard Russia claim they invented the light bulb and telephone.

In America, you can pick any period and decide that’s the one, where we became like Russia, that the press quit digging for the truth and started playing “lapdog” to a government that, itself played “lapdog.” 

An easy way to know something is wrong is the “bail outs.”  We are told some sort of businesses that called themselves “banks” began making billions of dollars of their own money and lending it out.

Suddenly the country was filled with billionaires, all this new money when nothing important was invented, a new pocket phone that takes really good pictures, a sandwich maker that drains fat off a frozen chicken breast. 

Suddenly, we are flooded with Rolex watches, Ferraris and Swiss and Cayman banks are overflowing. 

Money that doesn’t exist is invested by “hedge funds” that lose it all and people who should go to jail instead, with one or two exceptions, get trillions of dollars from our government, bankrupting America, because their bizarre criminal scheme is so huge, so pervasive, that admitting it and jailing those responsible would be too upsetting.

Journalists lie about alot of things, lie like dogs, but most write exactly what I wrote.  Check on it.  You can read this in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times, anywhere.  It didn’t matter, nobody did anything about it.  If you haven’t read “Ponzi scheme” a hundred times, heard about “banksters” or told of how much was stolen, this time the press tried to tell the story, just nobody was listening.

Why?  The answer is “politics.”

[youtube hZEvA8BCoBw]

The criminals were paid off, not jailed, because they have the real people who run America, the staffers who tell the dullards we elect what to do, remind them who is buying the elections, on speed dial.  In fact, most laws, most regulations, even the purchase requirements for everything from the Air Force’s jet tanker fleet to toilet paper are in documents given to “staffers” but written by, well, we don’t know.

Sometimes “front” groups like “public relations agencies” or “think tanks” write these things.  Sometimes it is “associations” like the US Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers.  Almost all the time, suppliers write the “requirements” for what the government needs.

In fact, these groups actually control our budget, deciding what roads are built, even if they go nowhere at all, what weapons are bought, even if they don’t work or aren’t needed.

They even help us decide to start wars.  This is no secret either, it has been in print so many times, said by so many famous people that it is engrained in most people around the world but those who do it are still around, doing it every day and nobody says a word.

We call this “the gravy train” or the “pig trough.”  No one wants to leave the “gravy train” and no pig, and those who run America can’t be called anything else, wants to leave a trough.

Think about this process when you see Marines walking through a poppy field in Afghanistan and are told the Taliban is flying heroin around the world.  The real Taliban doesn’t own a single pickup truck in decent condition, not one with both working steering and brakes anyway.

They fly what?  They bank tens of billions?  The Taliban outlawed banks, thought them “the work of the devil.”  Where do I join?

Lets take a boring moment to talk about foreign affairs.  The term itself is a “con.”  Back during the Cold War, we were told every day that the “Russians” were going to blow us all up and that we had to surround them with bases, hundreds of them all over the world, everywhere in fact.

Big companies built the bases and got rich.  Hangers were built, filled with planes, hundreds of bases, thousands of planes, the Mediterranean was so full of American warships at one time that it wasn’t safe to take a fishing boat out anymore.

Around the world, the ports, Singapore, Manila, Okinawa, Yokohama, Athens, Naples, 50 more, turned into entertainment centers for our traveling military.  In the areas served by the Pacific Fleet alone, one million prostitutes were “stationed” to “service the troops.”  Some “red light districts” were several square miles, Bangkok, Okinawa, Manila (Subic Bay/Clark Field)

This is as close as we ever got to seeing “trickle down” economics actually work, the Reagan economic principle that started America’s decline into catastrophic debt.

Before this, America, even with the Cold War, even with over 500,000 troops in Europe and more in Vietnam did ok.  You see, America made things, cars, television sets, telephones, blue jeans, furniture.

Americans also paid taxes, not just factory workers and farmers but corporations paid taxes, rich people paid alot of taxes but they also made money by the ton, more than they would ever be able to spend in a hundred lifetimes.

Mexicans came to America to pick fruit and vegetables every year.  Then they went home.  Americans could use soldering irons, sewing machines, Americans could read blue prints, in fact Americans could do anything and do it better than anyone in the world. 

This was called “productivity” and it made for profits, it paid the government’s bills, it paid for our huge Army and Navy, it paid for wars, it sent kids to college, it allowed people to buy cars, buy homes and it began ending poverty, the generations that never recovered from the Great Depression, or the poor of Appalachia and the inner cities.

By today’s standards, the Johnson “war on poverty” cost hardly enough to keep a phony Wall Street bank afloat for a month.

Then some things happened.  “Red China” quit being our enemy.  Nobody ever asked why, we simply woke up one day and “Tricky Dick,” the ‘war monger” had made peace.  It took nothing, all we had to do was ask.

Two decades later, Russia did the same thing.  They woke up one day and decided Communism seemed dumb.  They wanted what we had instead. 

They now have it, somewhat.  Problem is, we don’t anymore, Russia decided to become America and we decided to become Russia.

You see, Russian “Communism” was never real.  It was always about what we call an “oligarchy,” people who take but never give, those who want to be paid but who never work.

Sound familiar?  Sound like Washington or Wall Street?

Russians used to wake up every day to newspapers telling them America was ready to attack, wild conspiracy theories made up by a press that got the “news” from a government bureau that invented it.

Sound familiar?  Sound like America today?

Let’s talk history, the painlessly oversimplified kind.  Long ago there was talk of the “Reagan revolution.”  The decision was made that democracy, as America had known it, had to end.  Why make things in America when they could be made cheaper overseas?  This increased profits, it was more efficient.

In the process, American workers were supposed to become part of what was called the “service economy.”  This meant trading full benefit jobs that paid enough to buy a new car every three years, money to send kids to college and buy a small house for jobs that paid minimum wage.

Instead of making steel, you could help people find the right size screw driver at a big “home improvement” store.  If your wife worked too, you might be able to survive.

There was an economic concept, sold as conservatism that included these basic tenets:

1. All manufacturing labor should be performed at the lowest cost, free from labor laws, limitations on pollution, requirements of health and safety, even if performed by children or human slaves.
2. Unlimited immigration into the US from Mexico and Central America will create a downward spiral of wages while disintegrating the “Johnson Great Society” social welfare system with “extreme overload.”  Subsequent social disintegration is to be answered by streamlining the justice system, massive prison building projects and eventual diminishment of rights of citizen-hood as described by the constitution.  Terror threats, first domestic, then foreign, will provide cover for this systematic destruction of constitutional rights.
3. All tax burdens are to be removed from corporations and high income individuals.  Social mobility, from “skilled working class” to “middle class” has to end and all but the wealthiest classes have to be “decapitalized.”  This can be done through a series of banking collapses beginning with the “Savings and Loan” crisis and regularly scheduled “pump and dump” collapses of the equity, bond and currency markets.  Eventually real estate itself, after being overcollateralized in banking collapses, will eventually have to be devalued.
4. “Control of message” has to be spread from tight control of congress, first through the “seniority system” to eventually full control of the electoral process, initially by “soft money” campaign financing followed by legalization of unlimited corporate financing of politics to open rigging  of elections through usurpation of electronic voting controls.  Lines between “the press” and the entertainment industry must be removed and all put under tight control, replacing “investigative reporting” with blind acceptance of government “press releases.”
5. Accepting that there is no inherent responsibility of government to guarantee the welfare of the people, the very essence of “conservatism,” all power and wealth has to be moved “offshore” under a program of “globalization” while the endless public debt generated by ending revenue generation, the result of “free ride for the rich” tax schemes, open economic looting and the elimination of any middle class “wealth generation” expressed in ownership of securities or real estate, requires a systematic program of covert deception.  This can be done through stressing class envy, racial hatred, religious divisions and regionalization, the creation of two America’s, the “red” and the “blue” states.

   

   WWII – Poland – Young Sister Finds Older

It isn’t that the public isn’t aware they are being lied to.  Every day one lie, one plot after another is exposed.  The point is not to hide deception but to overwhelm the public with so much deception they no longer care what is true and what isn’t. 

If humans are reduced to scavengers, ideas about justice and morality or any hope for nation building will become secondary.

In such a society, all human progress is then gauged, not by progress, by but the failure of others.  If your neighbor loses his job or home, and you don’t, you are a success.  If a neighbor’s child returns from Afghanistan crippled and maimed while your child is healthy, you are a success.

This is the nature of “conservatism,” or, more aptly described, the ethical consideration of starving rats.

Ten years ago, 3 huge buildings in New York were destroyed.  Two were hit by aircraft we are told.  The other, much stronger, much newer, mysteriously collapsed with almost no damage at all.

It is said the plane meant to hit it crashed elsewhere but the building fell anyway.  Where there was controversy over the two larger buildings, why they would “dissolve” in ways that scientists around the world are incredulous over, thousands of tons of steel turned to dust, molten granite and steel burning for months underground from fairly small fires in the upper stories of the buildings, this third building is inexorable proof.

It is proven it was blown up with explosives and the government chose to lie about it and was caught.  What does this mean?

It can mean anything anyone wishes it to.  It can mean there never was such a thing as Al Qaeda.  It could mean that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction and the war fought over that lie was a criminal act.  However, we all accept this last part, it is proven and accepted, long held in fact while other facts, just as true, are denied.

[youtube mztfFdpd1Rk]

If Building 7 was destroyed by explosives that could only have been planted with government knowledge, a fact, one not openly disputed but also not openly reported, then the events of 9/11, are all false.

There were no hijackers.  There was no Al Qaeda.  As with the O.J. Simpson trial, if one fact is a lie, all facts dependent on it are lies. 

If Building 7 was destroyed after months of cutting beams and planting explosives, something now proven, then the other inconsistencies, the missing videos, the tortured “witnesses,” the lies about Iraq and the 10 year war in Afghanistan than has had no effect other than to flood the world with heroin, so cheap our children can buy it like candy, create, not a mosaic of “conspiracy theory” but proof of a government that is no longer American at all.

If America will kill 7000 of its own troops in Iraq over proven lies, accepted as lies by all, then why wouldn’t it kill 3000 on 9/11?  Same decision makers, same ethical concerns, same profit incentive, almost identical acts.

When did we start on this “roller coaster to hell?”

November 22, 1963, when a President was murdered and his killers were allowed to write The Warren Report exonerating themselves?

What do you think the 9/11 Commission Report is?

Every day, something we have always believed is proven false.  TV archeologists tell us they have Jesus’ body in Tel Aviv, in a cardboard box.

Every day, men and women we were told were heroes are exposed as thieves and liars.

We hear this so much, this member of congress is a spy, this one has sex with young boys, this one takes bribes from defense contractors, it goes on forever, we are drowning in it all, so much information, too much information.

We don’t care we are being lied to, most Americans want to die before the end comes, before civil war breaks out, before the starvation begins, before they have to accept the fact that their children will live as slaves because they stayed silent too long.

Tens of thousands of our young veterans have killed themselves for just these reasons.  They went to war to keep America safe and came back and found America didn’t really exist.

In September, 2011, the Census Bureau announced that 46.2 million Americans live in poverty.    We know the number to be double that.

If you get a pension or salary based on COLA (Cost of Living Allowance) you are told that, over the years, prices in the US have not gone up and your pension, be it Social Security or that of a Disabled Veteran, has stayed the same for years.

What they don’t tell you is that the math used to figure COLA is based on every American buying a new home, a new “worthless” home every month.  So, the money you got when gasoline was $1.95 a gallon and milk cost even less has to live in an imaginary world.

You are told your government paid out $2.7 trillion for military things that it never got, money “misplaced.”

You are told your government paid out $2.3 trillion to bankers who misplaced money in their trust.  Soon afterward, half the money we had just given them they had stolen again.  Thus Bank of America, Wells Fargo and others face “re-collapse,” compounding sin with sin.

We are told your government paid out $4 trillion to fight a ten year war, one we seem to be losing against 19 “Al Qaeda hijackers” who may not have existed in the first place, according to what we can prove about Building 7.

While congress is voting themselves raise after raise, while Washingtonians spend $300 bucks on lunch, real Americans plan their week around how much food and gasoline they can afford.

Our new values?  Is being health when someone else gets cancer?

Is economic security when you haven’t lost our job yet?

Is justice when you aren’t one of the thousands of innocent people in prison or the hundreds of innocent people on “death row?”

I live in Ohio.  Why should I vote? Someone with a laptop simply opens a program, pushes a button and a thousand votes, a million votes, whatever they need, “flipped.” 

The guy who wrote the program died in a plane crash after being threatened by Karl Rove.  Look it up.

The guy who financed it is doing 22 years in prison.  None of it was reported unless you get local papers.  This is how we enjoy “freedom of the press.”

What’s in store for us next?  We will have to wait and see.  Maybe they will come for you, maybe me.  Who knows, just  keep looking out the window.

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

• Gordon’s Archives:  2008-2015
• Gordon’s Archives:  2016-2022