America - Going or Already Gone?

In the 2006 motion picture V for Vendetta, Great Britain has apparently survived a global upheaval mostly intact albeit an Orwellian right-wing dictatorship. Little is known of the fate of the United States except for a glimpse offered during the TV monologue of the state-sanctioned talking head Lewis Prothero who notes:

“So I read that the former United States is so desperate for medical supplies that they have allegedly sent several containers filled with wheat and tobacco. A gesture, they said, of good will. You wanna know what I think? Well, you're listening to my show, so I will assume you do... I think it's high time we let the colonies know what we really think of them. I think its payback time for a little tea party they threw for us a few hundred years ago. I say we go down to those docks tonight and dump that crap where everything from the Ulcered Sphincter of Arse-erica belongs! Who's with me? Who's bloody with me?”

The imagery of an impoverished and desperate America ironically laced with references to the original ‘tea party” seem apocalyptically too close for comfort as America’s unresolved battle to raise the national debt ceiling now looms barely 72 hours from this writing. But many economists are now saying the simple fact that our fractured political system allowed the debate to reach this far has already resulted in irreparable damage. According to some, the global community can no longer look at the United States as somehow above the storms that have frequently rocked lesser nations and all but destroyed others.

The grand promise embodied in that notion which came to be known as The American Dream was rooted in the infallible assurance that each new generation of Americans would live in a better, stronger and greater nation than the one their parents were born into. Today, most would argue that it takes not only blind idealism but an unrealistic degree of optimism to truly believe that this historical dynamic will survive or even if in fact it has survived. Have we reached the tipping point where the salvation of a legacy of national greatness can still be achieved or has the tipping point occurred? Has our center of gravity shifted so far over the abyss of mediocrity that no force in the universe exists to save us from the fall described by the fictional Prothero?

To answer that question, NEWSNAC requested interviews with several leading historians who also have occasionally shared the label of ‘futurist.” Most declined, one accepted but did request anonymity. We have assigned him the simple name Lewis in honor of the character from “V”. The nearly verbatim content of that interview follows.

NEWSNAC: I think our readers may wonder why someone like you, a historian, author, and lecturer would feel the need to have anonymity on the subject of the downfall of America? Can you speak to that?

LEWIS: Well (laughs) until such time as it all really goes to shit I have to earn a living and doing what I do is very much like politics. I may speak at five separate events in one week and if you were to get all five groups in one room there’d probably be one huge fist-fight.

No, seriously, I discuss this topic all the time but I’m always careful to leave a kind of Hitchcock ending like in the Birds when you don’t know what happened and perhaps…just perhaps…somebody catches the hail Mary pass as the clock hits zero and the underdog wins…or maybe the birds ate everybody on earth and that was that,

NEWSNAC: So first, has America lost all that made it great?

LEWIS: Without question, yes. I was a kid in eight-grade back in the mid 60’s when the Gemini missions were happening and it was so exciting. We’d all smuggle transistor radios into school and hide them in our shirts so we could listen to Chris Craft’s reports from Mission Control. I remember one day, I think it was when we were doing the first space walk, and everyone was so excited. It happened on the same day that they sold the old US Savings Stamps in School. You could but stamps for a nickel and then when you’d filled up a book you could trade it in for a bond. I remember Mr. Holt our Social Studies teacher doing this long lecture on how buying those stamps paid for that space walk. I gave up lunch that day and bought Saving Stamps so I could feel like I was part of it. And I always remember that was the first place I heard the term “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.” I kept thinking back to that day last week when the manned space program ended and all the debate on the debt ceiling. It was like finding out there was no Santa, no Easter Bunny and no Tooth Fairy all at once…except in this case, I knew that at one time, they all had existed. It’s like they were killed in a place crash or something.

NEWSNAC: So was it the space program that made America great.

LEWIS No, no, that’s the big picture point people always miss. The space program was one of hundreds of examples of where we, America, solved a problem. We weren’t the first in space but we really did some things after we got there, like repeatedly go to the moon and back and the Russians never even tried. We built the Panama Canal and the first railroad that spanned a continent. We split the atom and invented the telegraph, telephone, airplanes, light bulb, movies and computers. We clearly won every war we fought until Vietnam. You can read countless history books and you can’t find something where America said “we’re going to do this” and then we got frustrated and gave up.

Our politics never got in the way either and even the rancor in Washington today is nothing. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1786, Benjamin Franklin and a few other delegates were quietly trying to lobby for amendments to bar Jewish immigration, some even wanted to bar Catholics. There’s plenty of documented history of threats of violence, drunkenness, and delegates having to be rounded up from some of Philadelphia’s more distinguished whorehouses. The popular romantic notion that our so-called Founding Fathers were a collection of pious conservative Christians devoted to democratic principles is total revisionist bullshit! Some wanted to go right back to a monarchy and have Washington crowed the first king for godsake!

What made us great was very simple, whether you were a pilgrim landing in Virginia in the early 1600’s or an immigrant Italian or Irish landing on Ellis Island in the early 20^th century, you mostly came with just the clothes on your back but with a wide expanse of opportunity. The first thing everyone had to do was take responsibility for their own survival and use their wits, be creative be inventive. When a person does that for so long, then even after they get a little comfortable those same energies would drive them and that’s what made us a nation of problem solvers and that’s what made us great.

NEWSNAC: So when or where did we go wrong?

LEWIS Well, now you’ve touched the nerve of why I’m not comfortable having my true identity known if I’m going to be perfectly honest and flatly answer that question. We went wrong in 1980 with the Presidency or Ronald Reagan. To some degree, the current crisis is part of the on-going legacy myth of Reagan’s trickle-down tax-cut economic theory which has been shown to be totally disproven. Remember when Bush-41 was running against him in the Republican Primaries he called it ‘voodoo economics.” Tax cuts don’t stimulate job growth, it’s just the opposite. If you have a business and you hire people and pay them a salary or buy new equipment, you don’t pay taxes on that money! You only pay taxes on what you want to keep, so tax cuts for the rich don’t make them hire people, it just lets them buy bigger houses, bigger yachts and take more high-priced vacations. But it wasn’t tax cuts that really killed us, it was when Reagan said we needed to convert America to a “Service Based Economy” This is what I call, “Coconut Economics.” See 1980 was the beginning of the real exodus of traditional good-paying American manufacturing jobs to countries like Korea, Japan, China and Mexico. Big business loved it because labor costs plummeted and profits soared, Reagan loved it because he hated unions, even though he’d been the President of the actors union at one time…and a Democrat.

NEWSNAC: So why do you call a service based economy Coconut Economics?

LEWIS Ok, let’s start with the simplest example of how wealth grows. Every American household exports work in the form of the jobs of the working adults living there and the value received for those exports is measured by the dollars in the paychecks they receive. Equally, every American home imports goods and services like the electricity, the mortgage, groceries, clothing, etc. As long as the value of your exports, your labor, exceeds the value of your imports, expenses, your wealth has to grow. When you grow your wealth you can use it to do other things like add a pool or an addition to your home.

Here’s where we get into the coconuts. Let’s say you and I move to an island where there are just the two of us and we establish a sovereign nation. This island has two things, coconuts and sand dollars. Now some days I don’t feel like collecting coconuts so I pay you some sand dollars to collect them for me. Some days it’s the other way. So we have this nice little service based economy with a back and forth of sand dollars. But once a month, there’s a cruise ship that stops by the island and both of us decide there are things on the cruise ship we’d like to buy..but they don’t accept sand dollars. So we decide to start making little souvenirs from the coconuts and selling them to the tourist on the cruise ship to get hard currency we can use to spend on things we want to buy from the store on the cruise ship. As time goes buy we get really successful and before long we’re both sitting on a pile of dollars. But then something happens. We got lazy and tired of all this work of making these trinkets out of coconuts so we decide to go back to a simple service based economy. Once a month you’ll come over and cut my hair and once a month I’ll cut yours and then once a month we’ll both go to the cruise ship and buy our goodies from the store using the money, the wealth we amassed. It works fine for awhile but eventually, with a service based economy, we wind up right back with nothing but sand dollars and coconuts.

See, the only way to build wealth is to win in the import/export game. When America was first settled, long before it was even a nation, it was all about the exports, tobacco, cotton and lumber. Then, as the industrial revolution kicked in we not only exported our vast array of raw commodities but our labors. Then, as we added invention we also exported cars, and planes and locomotives and all kinds of technology. We built wealth because we had more of what the world needed from us than of what we needed from the world. The entire premise of a service based economy in a global marketplace is flawed because the only way to build wealth is by exporting a raw material, like OPEC, cheap labor, like China or technology, like Japan.

Look at the story of MBNA, a small specialty credit card operation started in a Delaware supermarket in the early 1980’s. It eventually built several sprawling business campuses around Wilmington, DE including the total remaking of several whole city blocks in the downtown. A few years back it was purchased by Bank of America and most of those “service based economy” jobs shipped to India.

Japan was the epicenter of cheap labor for many years until their economy imploded in the late 1990’s and now it’s moved to China. China will take a little longer to mature than Japan because the population is much larger but eventually the people there will want all the trappings of successful middle-class and the global manufacturing center will move elsewhere, like Indonesia or South America. Who knows, eventually things may get so bad here in America that it eventually finds its way back here, but it won’t be the America that existed when it left.

It probably won’t be, or I hope it won’t be Lewis Prothero’s “Ulcered Sphincter of Arse-erica” but it’s gone too far down the road to ever come back to what it was. Whether we default or don’t default is academic at this point, it’s kind of like the first time you and your wife actually have a conversation about divorce, regardless of what comes afterwards, things are forever changed from that point forward simply because the topic came up.

Inadvertent disclosure reveals possible pre-invasion Iraq secret operation..but why?

Long before the world heard the name Osama bin Laden there was another name which was often associated with terrorist activity around the world – Abu Nidal.

Nidal was born in 1937 in what was then still Palestinian Jaffa. Like bin Laden, his father was a wealthy businessman. Nidal was the child of one of his father’s 13 wives but one who the family shunned after the father died because she was a 16 year-old household servant at the time of her marriage.

Nidal’s father died in 1945 and the family property was lost in 1948 when Israel came into existence. Nidal, (whose real name was Sabri Khalil al-Banna) became politically active in the 1960’s. But his as yet, non-violent activism, caused him to leave Saudi Arabia and eventually settle in the West Bank town of Nablus. When Israel captured the West Bank during the 1967 War, Nidal again fled and his political activism and his personality became darker and violent.

Nadal would eventually rise to prominence in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s “Fatah” branch. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s he was directly or indirectly linked to numerous attacks from the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre to eventually, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, but Nidal’s rage was not exclusively focused on western or Israeli interests. His Fatah cell would eventually breakaway from the PLO and even claim credit for killing a PLO representative. The cell would ultimately become so radically independent that it was referred to simply as ANO (Abu Nidal Organization). By the mid 1980’s Nidal was forced into exile in Libya, hiding from not only Israeli and American agents but from Jordanian efforts to extradite him to face a death sentence in Jordan.

In the wake of western attacks and sanctions arising from the Pam AM 103 bombing, Libyan leader Gaddafi felt Nidal’s presence in his country was too great a liability. Already deemed persona non-grata throughout the Arab middle east, Nidal finally found refuge under the protection of Saddam Hussein and would spend the remainder of his life in a Baghdad apartment until his death on or around August 16, 2002.

The events surrounding Nidal’s death are a confusing and contradictory weave encompassing everything from suicide to assassination to a pitched gun battle with Iraq security forces motivated by a belief that Nidal may have been conspiring to assist the United States in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Some reports state that documents found in Nidal’s apartment after his death indicate he was engaged in finding links between Hussein and bin Laden. These various accounts of how Nidal died are summarized on several Internet sites.

On May 6, 2011, in the wake of the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed former National Security Advisory and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her reaction to the Bin Laden story. As his last question, Cooper inquired, “Was there ever a moment over the years -- you know, there were a time -- I remember an article in "The Washington Post" I think in 2003 and 2004, saying that the trail had gone stone cold -- was there ever a time where you felt we may not get this guy?"

Rice replied, "Oh, no, I always felt we would get him. I didn't know when. And I rememberwhen we killed a terrorist, Abu Nidal, and you know what, that was some 20 years after. And so, I thought, we'll stay after this." (Emphasis Added) (Video)

To date, Rice’s comment has gone totally ignored by both CNN and other news media who were alerted to the apparent revelation that the National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush at the time of Nidal’s death had stated flatly, “when we killed a terrorist, Abu Nidal, and you know what, that was some 20 years after.”

First, the perspective offered of “some 20 years later” seems to preclude a simple misstatement by Rice and appears to be a clear recall of an event that occurred “some 20 years,” (23 to be exact) after the bombing of Pan Am 103. But why, if as stated in various news reports and by some mainstream publications including Jane’s Defense Weekly, would we kill Nidal if he was assisting the US in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and in particular with finding justifications for that invasion? Why would Saddam’s security forces allow suspicion to fall on them when if, as Rice seems to indicate, Nidal was killed by a secret American hit team? The abiding question of whose side Nidal was on at the time of his death opens the door to whose side was he loyal to in previous years. Were Nidal and his group, like Bin Laden and Al Qaeda - at some time in the past in collaboration with western intelligence? According to a number of published reports in Great Britain, mostly ignored in the US, the answer would seem to be yes.

The link between Nidal, the CIA and Britain’s MI5 is woven into the much larger scandal involving BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was shuttered in 1991 but not before establishing a documented legacy of corruption, money laundering and fraud on a massive scale. Its list of documented clients ranged from Columbian drug cartels to Col. Oliver North who maintained accounts there in order to funnel money for arms purchases by the Nicaraguan Contras.

Although officially barred from operating in the United States, BCCI investors were able to purchase Washington based Financial General Bankshares which was morphed into First American Bankshares and was shown for all purposes to function as a US based branch for BCCI.

A lengthy investigation conducted in Great Britain following the collapse of BCCI indicated that Nidal was actively engaged in money and arms trafficking deals, some which may have been directly or indirectly involving the CIA or MI5. One of the most intriguing elements of the BCCI story involves another mysterious suicide death – the case of American author Danny Casolaroin Martinsburg, West Virginia in August of 1991. Casolaro reportedly was on the verge of releasing a political nuclear bomb squarely in the lap of President George H. Bush. Casolaro had developed and reportedly nearly completed documentation of a conspiracy linking the scandals of Inslaw, October Surprise, BCCI and Iran/Contra. He had dubbed the expose ‘The Spider’ and had traveled to Martinsburg to reportedly met a source who had promised to provide the keystone needed to complete the puzzle.

Rice’s apparent revelation would appear to offer some added validity to statements which have been made at various times by critics of George H Bush’s invasion in 2003 and the illusive “weapons of mass destruction” justification. Those critics have proposed that Bush’s father chose not to finish off Saddam Hussein following the successful retaking of Kuwait from the Iraqi Army in 1991 because Hussein had information showing American involvement with and occasional collaboration with terrorists and despots, including Saddam himself. It has been offered that the younger President Bush launched the war in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against his father by Hussein during a visit to Kuwait in April of 1993 shortly after Bush had left office. President Clinton subsequently authorized a Tomahawk cruise missile attack against the Iraqi Security Force’s headquarters in Baghdad in retaliation for that attempt.. Some have offered that W Bush felt that as long as Hussein was alive and in power, he posed a lethal threat to the legacy of Bush’s father because of information he could reveal about American involvement in the same scandals which formed the backbone of Casolaro’s investigation.

But what threat did Nidal pose? By 2002 he was a terrorist has-been living in constant fear of the Jordanians and under the protection of a regime that had little history of truly helping the Palestinian cause.

Why, at a time when nearly every available resource was supposedly hunting for 911 mastermind Osama bin Laden, would we risk a ‘hit’ team’ on Nidal? If, as Rice’s comment implies, we had the ability to assassinate protected persons within Iraq months prior to our invasion, then why not go after someone critical in the Hussein Regime?

The answer keeps coming back to what Nidal knew and was doing not in 2002, but in 1990-91 when George H Bush was President.

Today’s generation of investigative reporters are either too young to appreciate the implications of Casolaro’s ‘Spider’ or perhaps are old enough and cautious enough to remember it and chose not to revisit it for obvious reasons.

We offer these words in the sincere hope that someday the American news media will again be smart enough and brave enough to ask the truly hard questions…and not relent until they have the truthful answers.