Why Bankers, Governments and the Media Hate Gold

By Mac SlavoSHTFplan.com August 30th, 2011

Our entire financial, economic and political systems since 1971 have been built on nothing but fantasy – paper fantasy.  It was after President Nixon closed the gold window and took our nation off the gold standard that we saw US debt explode, media conglomerates merge and expand their control of propaganda, and elite banking institutions take hold of the financial future of the people.

The inflationary fiat paper monetary policies of the United States made it possible for private institutions to enrich themselves at the expense of working Americans, and for government to take a once productive individual and make them wards of the state.

In Three terrible lies you need to know about gold, Porter Stansberry of Stansberry and Associates provides a must-read essay that explains how and why the media, government and economic experts lie to us about gold, the failures of paper fiat currency systems, and how a gold standard would change our lives – for the better:

Paper money works great for the rich, who can hedge their exposure to the currency and whose access to fixed-rate credit allows huge asset purchases. But it is horrible for the middle class, whose wages do not keep pace with declines in purchasing power caused by inflation. If you want to know why there’s so much discrepancy in incomes and per-capita wealth in the U.S., look no further than paper money.
…
…prices steadily fell from the end of the Civil War until the early 1890s, when they finally stabilized. You’d be hard-pressed to find a working economist today on Wall Street who could explain why the greatest decades of economic growth in American history could have been achieved during a period of deflation.
Mainstream economists all believe prices ought to only fall during economic depressions because they’ve become so blinded by paper money. But I can explain what happened in the 1880s easily: With real money in place, investors were willing to make long-term investments.

The result was an economy led by capital investments – not consumption. It was an economy fueled by real savings – not foreign loans. There was no need for a central bank to set interest rate policies or to “safeguard” us from inflation because the gold standard insured parity and fairness between borrowers and lenders. This all led to big increases in productivity and production – and wealth for the entire economy, not just the rich.
And therein lies the secret to our story…

Any reasonable study of paper-money systems versus gold-backed monetary systems demonstrates the superiority of gold immediately. So… why does almost every modern government choose paper? The answer is because paper money allows the wealthy and powerful vested interests in our economy to manipulate interest rates, prices, the money supply, and credit to their exclusive advantage.
Read the full article

Clearly, the government and the elite who benefit from the paper money system will do everything to avoid a gold standard. And, chances are that those among us who are uninformed will join them, because a transition would certainly not be easy. In fact, a switch to a gold standard would completely change the world as we have come to know it in modern times, perhaps destroying our existing economic and financial system during such a transition. But, the alternative may be much worse

The end result of such a transition to a sound money gold backed currency, one advocated by many contrarian thinkers like Porter Stansberry and Ron Paul, will be a more prosperous America and a more successful individual American – and perhaps most important of all, a government that would be required to live within its means.

Recommended Reading: Three terrible lies you need to know about gold

Author: Mac Slavo
Date: August 30th, 2011
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Assad: Suicidal Desperado Apparently Bent on “Armageddon” in the Middle East to Avoid Great Power Ultimata

From The Voice of Mossad, 30 Aug. 2011: Well-informed military sources warn that /Syria´s President)Assad will not be cowed by the international, military and economic noose tightening around his neck. He is far more likely to try and loosen it by lashing out against his enemies, starting with Israel. Iran will certainly be a willing supporter of such belligerence, starting a war which could spread like wildfire across the region.

Monday night and Tuesday, Aug-29-30, three international heavyweights - Russia, the European Union and  key Muslim nations – gave Syrian President Bashar Assad tough ultimatums for ending his ferocious crackdown on protest. Nevertheless, on Monday, his troops shot dead 17 people in Syrian cities - even as he received Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov who arrived in Damascus with a last warning from President Dmitry Medvedev: Recall you soldiers to their bases immediately and implement changes or Moscow will endorse UN Security Council sanctions stiff enough to stifle the Syrian economy. Those sanctions are only a step away from a resolution authorizing NATO, together with Muslim and Arab nations, to intervene militarily in the Syrian crisis.
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources disclose that Turkey, as a NATO member, and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council, have been in discussions this past week on the form this intervention would take:
1. The long-considered Turkish plan to send troops into northern Syria and carve out a military pocket from which Syria’s rebels would be supplied with military, logistic and medical aid.
2. Ankara and Riyadh will provide the anti-Assad movements with large quantities of weapons and funds to be smuggled in from outside Syria.
3. The Turkish military incursion would be matched by Saudi troops entering southern Syria at the head of GCC contingents. They would move in via Jordan and establish a second military enclave under GCC auspices.
Ahmadinejad  said Iran would never renege on its pact with Assad.
Two days later, our military sources report, Syria deployed 25 anti-air missile batteries along its Turkish border.
Saturday, Aug. 27 Assad saw his own capital rallying against him with big demonstrations in central Damascus. The pressure from the street continued to build up through Sunday and Monday. The EU sanctions on Syrian oil export will soon exhaust Syrias main source of foreign currency.
_____--


Related:

Syrians Fear NATO To Attack Their Country After Libya

Bitcoin: FBI Admits To Engaging In Infiltration, Disruption and Dismantling of Competing Currencies

From Libertarian News:

In a March 18, 2011 press release regarding the Liberty Dollar case, the FBI admitted to waging a secret war against any private currency system that competes against the US Dollar.  In the press release, the FBI equates the use of sound money to an act of domestic terrorism.  The FBI states that it uses methods of infiltration and disruption against private citizens engaged in the use of voluntary currencies.
The FBI writes:

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country [ie. unconstitutional Federal Reserve notes] are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Tompkins said in announcing the verdict. “While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence [ie. they are voluntary systems with no victim], they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country [ie. their wide spread adoption may collapse the corrupt banking system],” she added. “We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption, and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.” [ie. we will engage in acts of domestic terrorism to prevent the voluntary trade of private property.]

I think this open admission by the FBI that it engages in acts of domestic terrorism against private currency systems bears a particular importance for users of the Bitcoin monetary system.  If we look at the history of Bitcoin since it gained notoriety, we see a slew of hacking attacks against major exchanges that have indeed disrupted and undermined the currency system.
Of course, no matter what the FBI does, short of breaking the underlying Bitcoin encryption (which is impossible even for them), the monetary system will continue to function.   However, this message should put users of the monetary system on notice.

Any major exchange or retailer that comes online in the future should be treated as either a potential victim of FBI hacking attacks or as an FBI run operation that will be used to disrupt the Bitcoin market at some future date.   This means that people should be especially leery of using new exchanges or wallet sites without having an extremely thorough knowledge of who is involved and how their systems are administered.

Given the above admission by the FBI that it engages in acts of domestic terrorism to disrupt the trade of private property, we should expect any Bitcoin exchange or major retailer to have security systems strong enough to withstand a domestic terrorist attack by a US Federal agency.   If they don’t, it is highly likely that they will suffer a crippling domestic terrorist attack perpetrated by our own government.

For end users, this means you should not entrust the bulk of your coins to anyone but yourself.  You should operate your own Bitcoin client and keep any major holdings of coins off line in a file that is replicated and backed up on an encrypted drive.  All exchanges, wallet sites, and retail outlets should be presumed to be compromised.

That is not to say people should stop using the currency… far from it.  It is simply a warning that people should note when doing business in Bitcoins.   The reality is that the Federal government is waging a war of infiltration and disruption against systems like Bitcoin, so we should expect to see more highly sophisticated attacks like the one which was perpetrated against Mt. Gox recently.

State of the Art of American Leftist War Pimps

By JOHN WALSH | CounterPunch | August 30, 2011

Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted.  And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan.  After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.”  Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”?  Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya.  This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country?  Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the “left.”  Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been  fine and dandy.  But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time.   The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown.   Within a week of the Times piece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.”   Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies.  Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Now transcript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?
GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.”  But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one?   It would appear so.  Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”
GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions.  (Emphasis mine.)  I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing. There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life.  It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims.  But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk.  What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections?  Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya.  Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psy-ops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission.  That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it.  But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya.  At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.”  It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not.  (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.)  In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy.  The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention? 
None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk.  But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion.  One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole pro-war.  It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention.  Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam.  But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort.  Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate?  That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day.  But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests.  Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya.  There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam.  Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument.  Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle.  With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama.   In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions.  And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that  many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism.   Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya .  It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.
Democracy Now, quo vadis?  Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com
After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.

Next Stop For NATO Regime Change: Syria

By Paul Joseph WatsonPropaganda Matrix, Tuesday, August 30, 2011

According to DebkaFile’s military and intelligence sources, several different blueprints for military intervention in Syria are now being considered by NATO powers and allied states in the region, including the use of Turkish and Saudi troops to overthrow Assad’s regime.

“Well-informed military sources warn that Assad will not be cowed by the international, military and economic noose tightening around his neck. He is far more likely to try and loosen it by lashing out against his enemies, starting with Israel. Iran will certainly be a willing supporter of such belligerence, starting a war which could spread like wildfire across the region,” states the report.

Earlier this month NATO powers, including US President Barack Obama, called on Assad to step down. The UN has already pulled all its non-essential staff out of the country.

Obama’s demand that Assad step aside is exactly what happened prior to the bombardment of Libya. On February 26, Obama called on Gaddafi to give up power. Three weeks later, US B-2 bombers were attacking Libyan airfields.

The establishment media is repeating precisely the same rhetoric we were bombarded with prior to the attack on Libya, where for weeks rebel troops who had seized control of fighter jets, tanks and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were described as “protesters” and “demonstrators”.

Given that the western press has proven adept at manufacturing lies to justify military interventions, whether the actions of Assad’s regime represent genuine atrocities or legitimate conduct in the midst of a civil war remains unclear. Some have claimed the abuses are being embellished, while both former CIA agent Robert Baer and ex-MI6 officer Alastair Crooke point out that the Syrian people definitely want change, but not in the form of a NATO “humanitarian” assault.

“Syrians want change. But whether Westerners believe it or not, most people in Damascus, in Aleppo, the middle classes, the merchant classes and the [sectarian] minorities believe Assad is the only person who can bring in reforms,” he said. “They fear two things above all else – civil war and Western intervention … They would like to avoid the example of Libya because it would lead them into civil war,” said Crooke.

Whether or not Assad’s regime has committed atrocities, as Congressman Ron Paul points out today, both Assad and Gaddafi are no worse than some of the tyrants currently being propped up by western powers, such as the US and British-backed unelected monarchy in Bahrain which has terrorized and murdered its people for almost six months. Fellow western ally Saudi Arabia also sent troops into Bahrain, trained by the British Armed Forces, to crush the popular uprising, leaving behind a trail of human rights abuses.

There was no NATO “humanitarian” intervention when Bahraini troops acting on behalf of the dictatorship began indiscriminately firing tear gas into villages and homes, killing old women and children via asphyxiation, before detaining thousands of pro-democracy protesters and subjecting them to torture while killing scores of others.

Meanwhile, western ally Saudi Arabia is trying to pass a law that would designate any form of protest against the monarchy as a terrorist act. This follows widespread protests by pro-reform demonstrators earlier this year which were met with police brutality, murders and arrests without charge.

“Gaddafi may well have been a tyrant, but as such he was no worse than many others that we support and count as allies,” writes Ron Paul. “Disturbingly, we see a pattern of relatively secular leaders in the Arab world being targeted for regime change with the resulting power vacuum being filled by much more radical elements. Iraq, post-Saddam, is certainly far closer to Iran than before the US invasion. Will Libya be any different?”

Given that Libya has now been seized by Al-Qaeda terrorists who are already committing atrocities against the country’s black population, NATO’s “humanitarian” pretext for further interventions has been completely discredited, but don’t expect that to stand in the way of the opportunity to capture another “rogue state” and homogenize it into the global empire of the new world order.

The decade's biggest scam (

By Glenn Greenwald.

Salon, Aug 30, 2011

The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
Despite these increasing economic insecurities -- actually, precisely because of them -- the sprawling domestic Security State continues unabated. The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market ‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns." It details how budget cuts mean "homeland security" growth may not be as robust as once predicted, but "Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more contracts from DHS"; as a Boeing spokesman put it: "You’ll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs.”

Of course, the key to sustaining this Security State bonanza -- profit for private industry and power for Security State officials -- is keeping fear levels among the citizenry as high as possible, as National Defense expressly notes, and that is accomplished by fixating even on minor and failed attacks, each one of which is immediately seized upon to justify greater expenditures, expansion of security measures, and a further erosion of rights:

Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market, analysts say. . . .
Small-scale attacks, whether successful or not, will continue to prompt additional spending, the market analysts at Homeland Security Research Corp. say. They point to the failed 2009 Christmas plot of a man trying to blow up a flight to Detroit with explosives sewn into his underwear and the attempted car-bombing in Times Square early the next year. Though unsuccessful, these events led to immediate White House intervention, congressional hearings and an airport screening upgrade costing more than $1.6 billion.

The LA Times, while skillfully highlighting these wasteful programs, depicts them as some sort of unintended inefficiencies. That is exactly what they are not. None of this is unintended or inefficient but is achieving exactly the purposes for which it is designed. That's true for two reasons.

First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist threats. That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does. As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress -- contrary to popular opinion -- is not "broken"; it is working perfectly for its actual owners. Or, as he puts it, "Washington isn't broken -- it’s fixed":

Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more and nothing less than a handsome return -- deficits be darned -- in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government contracts.

The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting Terrorism isn't the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it. For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.

Second, while the Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing wealth gap. This Alternet article by Sarah Jafee, entitled "How the Surveillance State Protects the Interests Of the Ultra-Rich," compiles much evidence -- including what I offered two weeks ago -- demonstrating that the prime aim of the growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and anticipated unrest.

Pointing out disparities between surveillance programs and the Terrorist threat is futile because they're not aimed at that threat. The British Government, for instance, is continuing its efforts to restrict social media in the wake of the poverty-fueled riots that plagued that country; as The New York Times reports today, it is secretly meeting with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and the company that owns Blackberry "to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest." That revelation prompted taunting condemnations of British tyranny from China and Iran, both of which have been routinely excoriated for surveillance abuses and Internet suppression of the type increasingly common in the West.

Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic policing. As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are "are now deployed by police across the country; the arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on insurgents in Baghdad." Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border. Surveillance measures originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA -- created with a taboo against domestic spying -- now does that regularly.

Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.

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Related:

Pentagon’s No-Bid Contracts for Defense Have Tripled Since 9/11