by
Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org

Recently
by Paul Craig Roberts: Brewing
a Conflict with China

Some readers
have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of
Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation
from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama
and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left
and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to americans.

If I may give
some examples: The other day Chuck Colson, one of the Nixon officials
imprisoned for Watergate crimes, died. This gave NPR the opportunity
to relive the Nixon horror.

What precisely
was the Nixon horror? Essentially, there was no such thing. Watergate
was about President Nixon lying about when he learned about the
Watergate burglary.
When Nixon learned about the burglary, he did not act on it prior
to his reelection, because he reasoned, rightly, that the Washington
Post would blame him for the burglary, although he had nothing
to do with it, in the hopes of preventing his reelection.

By going along
with a cover-up, Nixon enabled the Washington Post to make
an issue of the precise date on which Nixon learned of the burglary.
White House tapes indicated that Nixon had learned of the burglary
before he said he learned of it. So Nixon had permitted a cover-up
and had to go, but what was the real reason?

What was the
Watergate burglary? We donÂ’t really know. A group of men including
former CIA operatives were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the
President to break into a Democratic campaign office in the Watergate
complex. We donÂ’t know the purpose of the burglary. Some claim
it was to wire-tap the telephones in the belief that the Democratic
Party was getting re-election money from communists in Cuba or elsewhere.
Others claim that the burglars were looking for a list of call girls,
that compromised a White House official, as his fiancee was allegedly
one of the call girls.

Looking back
from our time during which Bush and Obama have deep-sixed the US
Constitution, violated numerous US and international laws, and behaved
as if they were caesars unconstrained by any law or any morality,
Nixon’s “crimes” appear so trivial as to be unremarkable.
Yet, Nixon was driven from office and is regarded as a criminal.

What was Watergate
really about?

I doubt we
will ever know. But I can offer one possible explanation. Nixon,
like John F. Kennedy before him, alarmed the military/security complex
with his plans to withdraw US troops from Vietnam (Vietnamization)
and his determination to open communication with communist China
and improve relations.

As President
Eisenhower warned in his last address to the American people, conflict
brings power and profit to interest groups that benefit from conflict.
Nixon, like Kennedy before him, was perceived as a threat by these
powerful interests, because he was working to reduce conflict.

James W. Douglass
in his documented book, JFK and the Unspeakable, attributes the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the CIA, Joint Chiefs
of Staff, and Secret Service. Douglas reports that these powerful
government institutions were concerned by KennedyÂ’s refusal
to approve Operation Northwoods, to back the CIAÂ’s invasion
of Cuba, and to confront the Soviets militarily over the Cuban missile
crisis and by KennedyÂ’s plans to end US military intervention
in Vietnam. JFK also told his brother Robert that after his re-election
he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.

The right-wing
view that Kennedy was too soft to stand up to communism was intensified
when it was learned that Kennedy was working with Nikita Khrushchev
through back channels to defuse the Cold War. In his “A
Strategy of Peace” speech (June 1963), Kennedy announced
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the suspension of atmospheric nuclear
testing.

“What
kind of a peace do we seek?,” Kennedy asked. “Not a Pax
Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
With his words and deeds, President Kennedy made himself into a
threat against the interests of the military/security complex.

There was enough
suspicion of JFKÂ’s assassination that yet another president
assassinated by another “unhinged lone gunman” might raise
more eyebrows. Nixon was disliked by the media, which made him a
good candidate for political assassination. The Watergate burglary
provided the opportunity. The Washington Post did the job
with reports of “Deep Throat” meeting with reporters in
spooky underground parking lots after midnight. Little, if any,
information of consequence was contained in these reports. Instead,
the newspaperÂ’s reporting transferred the spooky danger of
the deserted parking garages to Nixon and an aura of evil was attached
to Nixon that eroded his support.

It is interesting
that it is only presidents who work to reduce conflict who become
targets for assassination. ReaganÂ’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was
strong enough to fool the left-wing, but the military-security complex
knew of ReaganÂ’s intention to end the Cold War. The CIA, formerly
headed by ReaganÂ’s vice president, opposed ReaganÂ’s plan
to put the pressure of an arms race on the creaking Soviet economy.
The CIA argued that the centrally planned Soviet economy allowed
the Kremlin to control investment and that the Communist Party could
allocate whatever percentage of Soviet GDP to the military as was
needed to win the arms race. In other words, the CIA argued that
the US would lose the arms race if Reagan raised the stakes as a
means of bringing the Soviets to negotiate the end of the Cold War.
Did the CIA really believe this, or was the military/security complex
trying to keep the profitable Cold War stalemate going?

Washington
cannot exist without conflict. Now that the “Muslim threat”
is wearing thin, Washington is stirring up a conflict with China.
Washington is sticking its nose into every dispute China has with
its neighbors and building up its military presence in the Asian-Pacific.
As I wrote in my previous column, a China threat is being created
as a long-term threat to take the place of the former Soviet threat.

Moving on to
another topic, americans are told that education is the answer to
unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every
after.

As RT recently
reported, the truth is that more than half of recent US university
graduates are unemployed or very underemployed. So much for the
mantra that “education is the answer.”

“Education
is the answer” serves the colleges and universities who want
the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans.
It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the
main cause of unemployment.

Education is
not the answer when high value-added, high wage manufacturing and
professional service jobs, such as software engineering, are moved
offshore in order to enhance short-term profits for shareholders
and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs, while domestic employment
and purchasing power are destroyed. Unless American university graduates
can emigrate to China and India, there is no one to employ them.
Yet, we still hear the call to run up student loan debts beyond
the ability of salaries to repay the loans.

Professional
tradable service employment in the US is so scarce that the University
of Florida has abolished its computer science department. As few
of the graduates can find employment, the university has reallocated
the departmentÂ’s budget to football, a paying sport.

Americans plugged
into the Matrix are programmed to believe that they have correct
information provided by a varied and “independent media.”
In fact the media is owned by 5 or 6 mega-media companies run by
corporate advertising executives and Washington.

Recently, Bloomberg
gave us the report that “Japan, Denmark and Switzerland are
among the countries to rally this week to [IMF chief] LagardeÂ’s
call for a bigger lending capacity beyond the current $380 billion
to shield the world economy against any deepening of EuropeÂ’s
debt turmoil.”

This Bloomberg
report is nonsensical. The loans are not shielding the world economy.
The loans are shielding the private banks from their own mistakes
at the expense of the world economy. The Bloomberg report shows
how completely the Western media is involved in forcing ordinary
peoples to subsidize private bankers. It could not be more clear;
yet, there is no embarrassment at Bloomberg for serving as the bankersÂ’
propagandist.

Indeed, there
is only honor. Serving the Matrix is where lie the rewards. Those
who oppose the Matrix are the outcasts whose efforts might, as in
the film, save the race of humans from the domination of evil, or
else, if they lose, confine the outcasts to prosecution and death.

Across
every front Americans are fed lies. The official media line is that
the Japanese Fukushima nuclear threat from the earthquake and aftermath
is well contained and over. However, the fact of the matter appears
to be that an amazing radioactive inventory of both spent and unused
fuel rods is in damaged cooling pools that could suffer collapse
at any time (especially if there is another earthquake), thus releasing
enormous radioactivity (reference link).
This possibility presents a greater threat than the initial molten
cores of the reactors themselves. Michael
Chossudovsky points out that the media is yet to acknowledge
the widespread contamination resulting from the Fukushima disaster,
and there may be worse to come.

But who cares?
Back to the Matrix and the “reality show.”

May
5, 2012

Paul
Craig Roberts [send
him mail], a
former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases
of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book,

The
Tyranny of Good Intentions,
co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how
americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random
House. Visit his website.

Copyright
© 2012 Paul
Craig Roberts

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