World Affairs Brief

July 19, 2002

World Affairs Brief, July 19, 2002 Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief http://www.JoelSkousen.com.

GOVERNMENT REACTS TO CRITICISM OF "TIPS"

Stunned by the universal outpouring of public outrage from the ACLU on the left and Internet commentators on the right, the Bush administration is quickly moving to downplay its Citizen Corps initiative, which was designed to create a million snitches out of private and public workers in 10 cities who regularly visit people's homes. Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge indignantly whined, "the last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans." He's playing the artful liar, engaging in Owellian doublespeak. Euphemistically, the program carries the acronym TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), but it's a civilian informant program just the same. Is there anything that can't be justified under the aegis of terror? Apparently there is--for now. American's are reacting very negatively to this idea, but it doesn't mean the administration will back down. They will just implement it through the back door, just like the 'know your neighbor' rules for turning banks into snitches.

The "quote heard round the world" that has generated so much heat for the administration is by Ritt Goldstein, an American ex-patriot on the Left living in Sweden. Some time ago, he became a threat to the government by demanding accountability for the crimes of federal law enforcement agents. The anonymous threats he received forced him to seek asylum in Europe. Goldstein pulled no punches when he announced, "The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report 'suspicious activity.' It is his comparison to the Stasi that has raised a firestorm of protest and defensive reaction from the Bush administration.

The government is apparently very sensitive to being compared to the dreaded Stasi. As Amanda Bowen relates, "Stasi was the secret police force of the East German government, active from 1950-1989 at the height of the Cold War. Their primary objective? Spying on the East German people. At the apex of their power, they had one informant for every 66 residents. If you add in the part-time snoops, the number becomes shocking--one for every 6.5 residents. The Stasi infiltrated every aspect of society. There was at least one informant in every apartment building. Schools and offices were packed to the gills with spies. Telephone lines were tapped and all mail was inspected. The Stasi even recruited clergy of all denominations and peppered their confessionals and offices with listening devices. They compiled records on six million East Germans, roughly 1/3 of the population. Torture was considered an acceptable way of obtaining information."

Goldstein drew his conclusion from official website of Citizen Corps, where the government boldly announced it was recruiting 1 million personnel in 10 US cities. Taking the 10 largest cities in the US, with a combined population of nearly 24 million people, this would amount to one informant for every 24 residents--a much higher percentage than that of the Stasi. Within a day of the verbal attack, Citizen Corps had removed the specific numbers from its official site. The phrase "1 million" was changed to the more general "millions" and all mention of the 10 cities (none of which were ever specifically detailed) has been eliminated. Here is the way it reads now: "Operation TIPS will be a national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity. The program will involve the millions of American workers [postal workers, utility workers, repairmen, installers, etc.] who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places. ...Operation TIPS is scheduled to be launched in late summer or early fall 2002. The goal of the program is to establish a reliable and comprehensive national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related, activity." [Source: www.citizencorps.gov/tips.html]

When WorldNetDaily pursued the issue with the Justice Department, the government spokesman refused to identify himself and was backpedaling furiously. That's how embarrassed the Bush administration is over this one--embarrassed, but NOT repentant! Jon Dougherty, writing for WND in an article under the heading, Police State, USA, recalled the spokesman's attempt to downplay the program: "The Bush administration says information published this week regarding a new government informant program was 'premature' and that officials are nowhere near ready to implement it. ·. 'All of the stuff that got out was so premature it was ridiculous,' he [the spokesman] said. 'The program is still in development.'" The official, according to WND, also downplayed the time frame for implementation mentioned on the official website [late summer or early fall 2002], emphasizing that the program was not yet ready. That is probably the only true thing he said.

"This [TIPS] is an unprecedented level of government spying on citizens. But such spying has a long pedigree, which helps to make the new initiative seem almost innocuous...In public schools, students are invited to place anonymous calls and rat on other students, while teachers and counselors are encouraged to report 'anti-social' tendencies to the police. At work, employers require workers to report on other workers, hire detectives to spy on workers and question neighbors on workers' private lives. Neighbors are asked to call the police if they suspect someone's child is crying too much [resulting in anonymous reports of child abuse, against which there is little defense--as the accused (the parent) is not allowed to confront the accuser]. Hospital workers are asked to inform the police about the drug habits of patients. [Bankers are required to report on people suspected of dealing in cash transactions. Postal workers are required to report people who buy too many money orders--how many is "too many?"] The IRS wants to know what you think of your neighbor's new Lexus, etc.[and dispenses rewards to those whose snitching results in a tax evasion conviction].

TIPS will create new governmental files on citizens, useful for harassment and abuse, and not much else. [Those files may be used to stop you from leaving the country someday on a vacation flight--with no way to challenge the information or prove your innocence.] It will increase the paranoia and suspiciousness of American society, driving it one step closer to George Orwell's dystopia. That is a high price to pay for pretending to increase our safety [safety from terrorism is only a pretense--the real agenda is the monitoring and destruction of the government's future domestic opposition]. It is a suicidal response to the terrorist suicide attack on September 11."


THE COLLAPSING STOCK MARKET: GOVERNMENT "PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM" WORKING OVERTIME

Now that an estimated 60 percent of US households own stock, more Americans than ever are at risk from this manipulation. Most Americans have still not sold their collapsing technology stocks, in hopes of a rebound. Even though the value is gone from many stocks, the full impact has yet to hit the markets. One thing is certain--there is a broadening lack of confidence in stocks that could plunge the nation into a really deep recession.

The Fed has used up most of its options; interest rates cuts, legislative bailouts, and old-fashioned presidential cheerleading aren't working any more. "You don't have too much room to go before you're at zero," said Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., at the Banking Committee meeting on Tuesday. The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates 11 times in a row, leaving the federal funds rate at 1.75 percent--the lowest in almost 40 years.

While media financial analysts futilely tout the impact of a few positive earnings reports, bad news keeps flowing in. Yesterday, chip maker giant Intel announced another round of layoffs and cutbacks, as did other profitable companies in the high tech sector. Every week it is getting harder to believe the establishment's pronouncements about the recession being over. There still is a lot of excess money floating around in the economy as the Fed keeps pumping up the money supply. But with a falling dollar, the US is finding itself hard pressed to attract the normal round of foreign buyers for US debt instruments and stock shares. The US relies on foreign investment to soak up about 1/3 of US debt. This means that the confidence game must be preserved at all costs. But America's corporate world is now highly suspect on the international stage. It's going to take more than a quick fix by Congress to restore foreign confidence and trust in US accounting practices.

But there is a much more sinister aspect to this story, a tale of government intervention which goes far beyond Federal Reserve rate cuts and confidence-boosting speeches. Today's financial markets are largely manipulated, in a variety of ways. In the first place, as the world is now discovering, large international corporations have long engaged in fraudulent accounting practices to hide debt and overstate earnings--not to mention evade taxes. Secondly, the markets are falsely primed and propped up by injections of fiat money and credit through the Federal Reserve. A true honest money economy would not have allowed the kind of rapid 'miracle' growth the US experienced in the 90's. Third, the markets are also manipulated directly. Have you ever noticed that the general market for normal stocks has been declining or stagnant for more than two years, and yet the leading indicator stock averages rise and fall with tremendous swings? Why does the high priced DJIA rise in price when the stocks of which it is composed are flat or falling?

This is an indication of intervention by government in the markets--focusing on the key indicators only. The markets run as much on crowd psychology as they do on economic expectations. The government has long since learned that it is usually sufficient to make the DJIA or the S&P 500 stock averages appear as if they are beginning to rise, and the general public will fund the rest of the upswing, jumping on the bandwagon. Much of the direct manipulation of index stocks is done by intervening in the futures markets on large volumes, highly leveraged. Many of these trades take place after the markets have closed--so it's clear that the Powers That Be don't play by the same rules you and I have to follow.

In reality, the press was already in on the fix. Clear back in February of 1997, Brett D. Fromson, a Washington Post Staff Writer, had written the first major media story on the Plunge Protection Team, in an article of the same name. The government had obviously leaked the story to the Post in order to prepare the markets to look to government help when the next crisis arose. The article mentioned nothing about the government's lack of authority to fix the markets, and no one with any authority uttered a word of protest. It appears that what we are dealing with is more than just a fix in the stock market. Clearly the Powers That Be are trying to stave off a collapse, for now. Whether or not they can, given the market's tremendous downward inertia, remains to be seen.