Word War II: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction

A Skeptic’s Guide to American History

Episode 19 Misconceptions and Myths About World War II

Mark Stoler PhD

Film Review

I found this lecture, in which Stoler purports to challenge prevailing myths about World War II, extremely disappointing. It’s been well-established since 1943 (when George Seldes published Facts and Fascism) that numerous Wall Street corporations funded the rearmament of the Third Reich, enabling Hitler to launch World War II. Charles Higham also covers this in depth in his 1983 book Trading with the Enemy.

Instead Stoler makes the blanket statement that war was inevitable because Hitler refused to be “appeased” by Britain’s appeasement strategy. This also turns out to be untrue, based on evidence Peter Padfield explores in his 2013 book  Hess, Hitler and Churchill: the real turning point of the Second World War. The book spells out how Hitler offered Britain a secret peace deal, in which which Germany would withdraw from Western Europe prior to invading the Soviet Union. And how Churchill rejected the offer.

Stoler does address the common myth that the US singlehandedly won World War II for the Allies. Although the US contributed two-thirds of the Allies’ munitions and military equipment, they only contributed 25% of the troops and suffered the lowest number of casualties (killed and wounded). US casualties totaled 418,500 and British 449,800. In contrast, Russian casualties were between 25 and 29 million. Russia also inflicted 93% of the casualties experienced by the German military.

However he disputes the so-called “conspiracy theory” that President Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Robert Stinnett has clearly documented that US intelligence had decrypted various Japanese military and diplomatic cables delineating the the exact time and date of the Pearl attack and transmitted them not only to Roosevelt, but to key members of his cabinet and top military leaders, including US Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall.**

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*See also https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_Hitler.pdf)

**See https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/12/06/pearl-harbor-roosevelt-knew/

The film can be viewed free at Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/world-war-ii-misconceptions-and-myths

 

Money Bots: How the Performance and Value of Wall Street Corporations Became Irrelevant.

Money Bots: The Truth Behind High Frequency Trading

Al Jazeera (2021)

Film Review

With high frequency trading, the performance and value of a company becomes irrelevant – all that matters is competing trades faster than anyone else. With money bots, many stocks are held only a few seconds before being resold.

This documentary concerns the trading “bots” that are programmed to carry out complex high frequency stock trades without any human input. The bots are triggered when conventional traders (eg pension funds) issue large orders. Because they can consummate trades much faster, the bots buy the desired stocks and then sell them to the pension funds at a higher price. Because high frequency trading is totally unregulated, this is perfectly legal.

At times high frequency trading can have real time effects on the whole market, as in May 2010, when high frequency trading caused several stocks on the Mercantile Exchange to crash before the entire exchange was shut down. A second “flash crash” occurred in February 2018, when trading bots caused the Dow Jones to lose 1500 points in a few hours (the highest percentage loss in history)

The most interesting part of the film concerns the computer scientists who developed the algorithms (1991) allowing money bots to instantly capitalize on large orders submitted by human traders. The bots were based on an app they originally developed to predict the outcome of black jack and roulette games.

In all cases, success in high frequency trading depends more on location (as close as possible to the designated exchange) and access to the highest speed networks than on true predictive ability. According to whistleblowers interviewed in the film, the most successful high frequency traders have employed “cheats” of some type.

The film can be viewed free at https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/movies/money-bots-the-truth-behind-high-frequency-trading-featured-documentary/vi-AAKbJXL

Boris Yeltsin and the Soviet Collapse

Press TV Presents Boris Yeltsin

Press TV (2016)

Film Review

This fascinating Press TV documentary has been produced largely in response to the 2015 opening of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg. The film focuses on the deep corruption and cronyism behind the 50% GDP under Yeltsin. In essence, Yeltsin allowed Russian oligarchs and gangsters and Wall Street capitalists to reduce Russia, over the space of eight years, from a first world to a third world economy.

Russia totally lost major sectors of its economy, including its aviation industry. In 1991, Russia had the second largest aviation industry in the world (second only to the US). It also lost most of its skilled scientists, engineers and IT specialists as economic collapse led 11 million people to migrate to the West.

Yeltsin then handed over any state industries that remained intact to friends and family members for a tiny fraction of their value. As these oligarchs accumulated more and more wealth and power, they opened the door for Wall Street interests to loot the country’s valuable mineral resources. This forced the government to borrow from the World Bank and IMF simply to avoid collapse. In turn, the latter forced Yeltsin to eliminate or privatize any public services that remained.

The filmmakers examine in detail the 1993 military coup Yeltsin launched against the Duma when widespread protests led to an attempt to impeach him. The coup killed over 1,000 protesters and civil servants. They also look at the CIA-assisted electoral fraud that enabled Yeltsin to be re-elected in 1996 with an 8% popularity rating.

In 1999 massive unpopularity forced Yeltsin to resign in favor of Putin (see The Real Boris: Yeltsin Democratic Reformer or Brutal Dictator)

The film can be viewed free at http://presstvdoc.com/post/14873

The Privatization of Childhood

Class War: The Privatization of Childhood

By Megan Erikson

Verso Press (2015)

Book Review

Megan Erikson’s 2015 book provides an elegant class analysis of the current push by Wall Street and Silicon Valley to privatize US education via voucher programs and private publicly-funded charter schools. Class War provides an in-depth examination of the dismaying effects of systematic privatization on the teachers and low income students who struggle on in brutally underfunded public schools.

Erikson’s basic premise is that the current purpose of the US educational system isn’t to educate but to permanently entrench social class divisions by sorting students into winners and losers.

For me the three basic points Class War puts across are

1. US public schools are increasingly run like prisons, complete with metal detectors, cops, surveillance, attack dogs and random sweeps,
2. Teachers are unfairly blamed for severe social problems that are beyond their control. Five decades of research conclusively concludes that classroom education accounts for less than 30% of a child’s education success and teacher performance only 7.5%. Achievement levels relate much more closely to exposure to complex language, access to medical care and a “healthy” home environment that provides access to books and challenging games.
3. Claims by the CATO Institute and other conservative that increased federal education funding* won’t help are dead wrong. Research consistently shows that increasing the funding level per student**and reducing class size,*** increasing teacher pay, and providing better instructional materials (many New York City public schools fail to provide a textbook for every child) all improve achievement levels.

Erikson points to the irony of neoliberal billionaire reformers (like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg) calling for an increase class sizes in public schools (currently 40 students per teacher in New York City, while they send their own kids to exclusive private school with class sizes of 10-16. Likewise Silicon Valley executives push for early access to tablets and laptops in public schools, while sending their own kids to Waldorf schools that ban classroom computer access prior to age 13.

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*In most industrialized countries, 50% of funding comes from national government. In the US the federal share is only 10-15%. This means most public school are mainly reliant on local property taxes for funding. This translate into major financial problems in poor districts.

**In public school districts with high funding levels per student, results on global achievement tests are equal to those of high performing countries like Japan and Hong Kong.

***In most European countries, administrators reduce class size to increase achievement in students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In the US, the exact opposite occurs.

 

The History of the 20th Century: BBC Propaganda at Its Best

History of the World Episode 8 – Age of Extremes

BBC (2018)

Film Review

This final episode is almost pure BBC propaganda and contains a large number of jingoist assertions that are totally unsupported by historical record.  Age of Extremes covers the rise of Hitler (while neglecting to mention the support he received from Wall Street and German corporations); the founding of the first birth control clinic in Britain by feminist Margaret Sanger and the “sexual revolution” brought about by the birth control pill in the 1960s; Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for Indian independence; the US invention and deployment of the atomic bomb; the murderous Chinese Cultural Revolution that started in 1967;  the capitalist reforms instigated by Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s; the fall of the Berlin Wall (allegedly ending the Cold War) in 1989; and the defeat of world chess champion Gary Kasparov by IBM computer Deep Blue.

Among the more nauseating claims made:

• That the US developed and deployed nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because that was the only way to force the Japanese government to surrender (“Japanese civilians would pay for their leaders’ refusal to surrender”).  Declassified records reveal Japan was attempting to surrender in July 1945 but Truman refused, owing to his determination to intimidate the Soviets by deploying atomic weapons. The deliberate targeting of Japanese civilians (more than 300,000 died within days of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings) was a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
• That Artificial Intelligence will be as significant for mankind as the agricultural and the industrial revolution
• That modern day humans live longer, healthier lives than their ancestors.*
• That despite “altered climate” and mass extinctions “humans have always overcome challenges we are face with and prospered.”**

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*This may be true of a few extremely wealthy individuals, but many people of my generation are dying earlier than their parents owing to an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, disease, drug/alcohol addiction, and suicide (US numbers have been high enough to reduce average life expectancy).

**It’s obvious the filmmakers have never read Collapse by Gerard Diamond

The Seamy Side of Wall Street: An Insider’s View

Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

by Michael Lewis

WW Norton (1989)

Book Review

Like many of Lewis’s post-collapse books, this early memoir is simultaneously funny and educational. As with The Big Short and The Flash Boys (see Wall Street: More Deeply Corrupt than We Thought), my favorite aspect was the colorful personalities of the investment bankers Lewis worked with at Saloman Brothers between 1985-1988.

Like Lewis’s more recent books, Liar’s Poker teaches us a lot about the seamy side of Wall Street and investment banking.

Theoretically Saloman Brothers specialized in selling bonds, ie corporate bonds to finance corporate debt, Treasury bonds to finance federal debt and in their latter years mortgage bonds (bonds that enabled savings and loan associations to raise money to finance mortgages). In reality Saloman Brothers made most of their money “trading” mortgage bonds, ie encouraging investors to speculate in purchasing bonds in the hope their value would increase.

As Lewis describes it, he worked in a totally immoral environment in which traders routinely screwed over their clients to increase Saloman profits and their personal bonuses.

The chapter I found most enlightening concerns the role of the Federal Reserve in the collapse of the savings and loan industry in the late eighties.

I also enjoyed the chapter about junk bond* king Michael Milken. Despite Lewis’s obvious admiration for Milken, the latter would be indicted in 1990 for insider trading and racketeering. In return for testifying against former colleagues, the junk bond king was allowed to plead guilty to securities and reporting violations. Sentenced to ten years in federal prison, he only served two.

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*Junk bonds are bonds issued by corporations determined to be high credit risks (unlike to repay their debts) by credit rating agencies, such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor.

 

Wall Street: Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

The Wall Street Code

VPRO (2013)

Film Review

While the rest of us are busting our ass to earn an honest living, Wall Street traders are running around thinking up new ways to rip us off. And laughing all the way to the bank. I love the way they refer to ordinary investors with pension funds or retirement accounts as “dumb money.”

The Wall Street Code is all about whistleblower Haim Bodek and his discovery of a secret algorithm used by high frequency traders to rip off mutual and pension funds (aka “dumb money”).

As of 2013, when this documentary was made, 70% of Wall street trading was automated and 50% occurred within milliseconds. When large volume trades are made, they always drive the share price up. This means there’s a distinct advantage in getting your order in before a large volume trade by a pension or mutual fund.

Badek discovered a secret algorithm that alerted unscrupulous traders to large volume trades before they were made public and help them jump to the front of the queue (and purchase stocks before the share price started to rise).

Michael Lewis writes about a similar scam in his 2015 book Flash Boys. The book concerns whistleblower Brad Katsuyama’s discovery that high frequency traders were secretly exploiting minute differences in the speed of electronic transmissions (see Wall Street More Deeply Corrupt than We Thought).

Bodek believes that Lewis seriously underestimates the serious amount of fraud occurring on Wall Street. Bodek’s persistence has resulted in the prosecution of the New York Stock Exchange by the Security and Exchange Commission – resulting in unprecedented fines being imposed.

See http://blog.themistrading.com/2018/03/the-return-of-haim-bodek/

Inside the Banker’s Brain: The Physiology of Greed

In Search of the Banker’s Brain

Directed by Jos de Putter (2013)

Film Review

In Search of the Banker’s Brain is about the biochemical changes associated with greed. Inspired by a Dutch blogger who investigated the “banker culture” that led to the 2008 global economic collapse, it paints a troubling picture about our willingness to place the welfare of the global economy in the hands of 25-year-old ruthless macho hyper-competitive psychopaths.

In addition to several former investment bankers, the film also features a Dutch psychologist who treats Wall Street bankers and a former trader turned neuropsychologist who investigates how greed affects the brain. He begins by describing the rigged reward system that rewards traders to take enormous risks with other peoples’ money – they get massive bonuses if they’re successful and no consequences at all if they fail.

In response, they begin to crave risk, which feels just like a narcotic when it floods their brain with adrenaline and cortisol. They become cunning like heroin addicts looking for their next fix and show traits (loss of conscience and scruples) virtually indistinguishable from psychopaths in a prison environment.

Like psychopaths, they also tend to burn out around age 40, which is when they are at high risk for “econocide.”*

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* Term coined by psychologists term for banker suicide.

 

The Lost Science of Money – Wars Are Won By Bankers, Not Armies

The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money – The Story of Power

by Stephen Zarlinga

American Monetary Institute (2002)

Book Review

This book, by co-author of Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s HR 2990 to abolish the Federal Reserve (see HR2990: Historic Bill to Abolish the Federal Reserve), is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. At 775 pages, the lowest price I could find for a used copy was $225 from Alibris. Fortunately it’s also available in PDF format at The Lost Science of Money

It’s clear from Zarlenga’s extensive documentation and footnotes that the research for this book took decades. He essentially rewrites western history dating back to the ancient Sumerians. His goal is to expose and correct all the distortions and myths introduced into official history historians in the pay of merchants and bankers. Both are fiercely committed to perpetuating our current global monetary system in which private central banks create and control the money supply.

Among many others, two of the myths Zarlenga explodes are that the Roman Empire collapsed due to barbarian invasion (he demonstrates very convincingly that Rome collapsed due to a debasement of their currency) and the often repeated claim that excessive government printing of money was responsible for the deadly inflation in the early years of the Third Reich – as Zarlenga points out, it was actually the privately owned central Reichsbank that issued the money and created the inflation.

The Concept of “True Money,”

Zarlenga begins by establishing a clear difference between “true money,” which he defines as money with a fixed value set by law and “commodity money,” in which private merchants and banks issue and control the value of money. In the rare historical periods where governments have issued and controlled money by law, the result has been long periods of political stability and flourishing industry and culture.

The Romans enjoyed the longest continuous period (200 years) of monetary stability. Roman leaders maintained control of their money by prohibiting silver and gold coinage for domestic use – issuing fixed value copper and bronze coinage instead. In this way they prevented foreign merchants from capturing control of their money supply and manipulating the value of their currency.

He Who Controls the Money Controls the World

Zarlenga carefully traces how after the fall of the Roman Empire, control of western money shifted from Constantinople (after the 4^th Crusade which sacked Constantinople – see link), to Venice, to Portuguese traders in Antwerp (after they opened the trade route around the southern tip of Africa), to Amsterdam (following the civil war splitting the Netherlands into Holland and Belgium), to London (after the Dutch prince William of Orange seized the English throne). In each case, control of the money supply was far more important than military strength in consolidating political control.

Zarlinga also clarifies, though careful research, the historical role played by the Knights Templar and Jewish merchants and money lenders in the development of global monetary centers.

The Dutch Usurper Who Chartered the Bank of England

One of the sections that interested me most concerned the founding of the Bank off England – which set the global standard for all private central banks – in 1694. Previously I hadn’t realized that the Bank of England was started by a Dutch king (William of Orange), who usurped the English throne from James II. Nor that his purpose for chartering the Bank of England was to advance the interest of the Dutch merchants and bankers who initially controlled it.

“True Money” in the Americas

I also enjoyed the detailed section outlining the history of government issued money in the US. Again Zarlenga presents extensive and convincing evidence that it was the ability of colonial governors to issue their own money that enabled commerce and industry in the 13 original colonies, as well as enabling them to organize a successful war of independence against England.

Zarlenga also describes in detail the battle Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and their allies fought against the creation of a privately controlled central bank, as well as the immense popularity of the Greenback Congress issued during the Civil War – and the immense national uprising (the populist movement) launched at the end of the 19^th century to save them.

The Federal Reserve Engineers the Great Depression

Obviously the book wouldn’t be complete without a chapter on the criminal conspiracy that lead to the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the Federal Reserve’s role in engineering the Great Depression 26 years later, and Roosevelt’s prolonged battle with Wall Street to implement the New Deal recovery.

Hidden History: The War on Terror

Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

by Michael Ruppert

New Society Publishers (2004)

Book Review

I recently picked up Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon for the first time in nearly 13 years. I’ve always admired Ruppert, who killed himself in April 2014. It was after hearing him present early evidence (in May 2002) about the role of Bush insiders in 9-11 that I made a decision to close my psychiatric practice and move to New Zealand.

In re-reading Rupert’s 617-page encyclopedia of Peak Oil, CIA narcotics trafficking and the foreign policy/intelligence background to the mother of all false flag operations, I’m totally amazed about the amount of evidence he had already collected in 2004. Nearly all his conclusions have been corroborated by other investigators. At the same time many of his findings, particularly regarding Clinton’s role in supporting the Taliban’s rise to power, don’t receive nearly enough attention in the 9-11 Truth community.

Ruppert links Clinton’s decision to put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan to the oil exploration he facilitated in the Caspian Sea basin by declaring war on Yugoslavia. Both Enron (see The Greedy Bastards who Gave us Enron and Bankrupted California) and Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s oil company) had deep commitments in Caspian Sea and Central Asian oil and gas companies. Both companies needed pipelines across Afghanistan to transport oil and gas to energy-hungry Pakistan, India and China. Building and maintaining said pipelines was totally impossible in a country that, following Soviet withdrawal, had become a failed state of feuding warlords.

According to Ruppert, in was Clinton’s intent to “pacify” Afghanistan by putting the totalitarian Taliban regime in power. Ruppert’s evidence for these assertions comes mainly from Congressional hearings called by Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacker to challenge Clinton’s support for the Taliban. Ruppert also describes the two years (1999-2000) of 6+2 meetings (to plan the pipelines) between Taliban representatives, and the US, Russia, Pakistan, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

The Clinton administration suddenly reversed their position on the Taliban in 1999, after the results of exploratory Caspian Sea oil drilling revealed the limited deposits were too small to be commercially viable.

Ruppert goes on to present substantial evidence that the decision to go to war against the Taliban was made during the Clinton presidency – he first imposed economic sanctions against them in July 1999. Ruppert maintains this related less to the oil and gas lobby than to the banking/finance lobby, which had become addicted to drug profits from Afghan opium production. Following Soviet withdrawal, the CIA had worked with opium warlords to concentrate world opium production in Afghanistan. The loss of billions dollars of money laundering profits threatened to wreak major havoc with Wall Street and the US economy.

Ruppert, a five year veteran of the LAPD narcotics squad, devotes several chapters of Crossing the Rubicon to the CIA’s historic role in narcotics trafficking and the role of all major US banks and brokerage hoses in money laundering.

Ruppert also makes a strong case that planning for 9-11 began during the Clinton administration and that National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and NATO commander Wesley Clarke were party to the planning.