Don’t look here! Look there!
By Peter Ewart
Monday, December 07, 2009 03:44 AM
By Peter Ewart
Don’t look here! Look there! So goes the art of the magician whose aim is to distract the audience while performing the trick. But it is also the art of the unscrupulous politician who wishes to steer people away from focusing on the reality unfolding right before their eyes.
U.S. President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan on December 1st is a classical example of this deception. “It is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan,” he said. “The security of the United States and the safety of the American people [are] at stake.”
Thus Afghanistan, one of the poorest and most desperate countries in the world, whose infrastructure is terribly broken, whose people have a life expectancy of just 44 years, and who have suffered from catastrophic foreign occupation and civil war for thirty years, is now a “clear and present danger” to the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.
Obama’s words almost exactly mirror those of George W. Bush back in 2003 when he was whipping up hysteria about Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction,” and the “urgent need” to invade that unfortunate country. (It is interesting to note that none of the 9/11 hijackers were either Afghanis or Iraqis).
Obama’s words also echo those of a well-known American T.V. evangelist who has claimed that 40,000 Afghan “suicide bombers” are on their way to the U.S. to wreak havoc on the country. Of course, this T.V. evangelist has not explained how these 40,000 crazed Afghani farmers, most of whom would speak no English, are going to get to North America from their landlocked Asian country (which is 8.000 miles or so away). Perhaps by rowboat across the Pacific ocean? Or a fleet of surfboards?
In any case, the bogeyman of Afghanistan (and, if Afghanistan quiets down, then Pakistan or Iran) serves definite purposes at this time for the political and financial elites of the U.S., Britain, Canada and other countries.
In the last several years, the big banks and other financial institutions, through their insatiable greed, triggered a financial crisis that quickly morphed into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Instead of frog marching the heads of these financial institutions off to jail, the U.S. Congress, its pockets stuffed with bribes, opened up the public treasury to them, bailing them out to the tune of trillions of dollars. To a greater or lesser extent, other governments around the world followed suit.
To their credit, the American people opposed this massive bailout, as did people around the world. Nonetheless, the bailout was railroaded through.
And here we are a year later. At a time when many banks, such as Goldman Sachs and others, are predicting huge profits, the people in the U.S. and other countries are facing a bleak future. Millions of jobs have been lost. Houses foreclosed on. Pensions and bank accounts depleted. And massive cuts to health, education and social services are looming.
What we are witnessing is probably one of the greatest shifts of wealth between the “haves” and the “have nots” in human history. There is deep discontent about this injustice, and it is brewing hotter everyday.
The political and financial elite is acutely aware of this simmering anger. So much so that Alice Schroeder, former managing director at the Morgan Stanley bank, has reported in an article on Bloomberg.com that Goldman Sachs bankers on Wall Street are now arming themselves with guns “to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”
Then we have President Obama’s smoke and mirrors about Afghanistan. The elites know that one of the easiest ways to distract the attention of the populace away from domestic problems is to raise the bogeyman of terrorism and war. It is a time honored tool.
Of course, the main reason why the U.S. has troops in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East is because it has definite geo-political and strategic interests in that region. But an endless and vague “war on terrorism” there and at home also serves as a convenient diversion to distract the population away from the embezzlement and robbery of the country’s wealth and resources by its own elites.
In this crucial period, we need to keep our eyes on the ball, whether this be the various levels of government right here in North America or the boardrooms of the corporate and financial elite.
And we especially need to do so when these elites tell us: “Don’t look here! Look there!”
Peter Ewart is a writer and columnist based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
Previous Story - Next Story
Email
Print
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Del.icio.usReturn to Home
Posted by: diplomat on December 7 2009 8:15 AM
Do you have some proof for this statement? Seriously, it's called "libel" if you don't. Maybe I should forward a link to some email addresses down south.