Subscribe to EIR Online

This article appears in the December 21, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Bernie’s Geek Act Begins:
Keep the Sand Out of Your Eyes

[Print version of this article]

Gage Skidmore
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders
CC/Marc Lozano
Yanis Varoufakis

Dec. 15—Vaudeville began sometime around the 1880s, but it was really in the decade of the buildup to The Great War that it became the leading “rage” in American entertainment.

That is the association that immediately comes to mind when contemplating the new “politico-duo” of Sen. Bernie Sanders and his sidekick, no-longer resident Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. As they play out their media-promoted “plot” to create the “Progressive International” (PI), one quickly finds out that the real intent behind their play-acting routine is, in fact, not to help the poor and disadvantaged worldwide, as they claim, but rather to revive the pro-Nazi designs of Britain’s pre-eminent economic wizard, Lord John Maynard Keynes. Studying the interactions between the two, one cannot help but wonder: have Abbott and Costello, or perhaps a new version of the Marx Brothers, suddenly reincarnated themselves, this time with the evil intention of using the cloak of the “entirely absurd” to finally drive you, me and the rest of humanity, quickly, into a terrible New Dark Age?

Such speculation does not mean to suggest that the comedians of former times had evil intentions: rather, Bernie “Mr. Sandman” Sanders, and his Very Flakey side-kick Varoufakis—politically joined with the blessing of the artificially intelligent MIT icon Noam Chomsky—intend now, while you laugh yourself into a coma, to lure you, as if in a dream state, into allowing the implementation worldwide of Adolf Hitler’s mass extermination policies as the truly final solution to all of your gripes and ills.

To grasp what is unfolding, one can benefit from hearing in the recesses of one’s mind, the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche: learn to self-consciously correct what you often mis-experience, as “sense deception.” Don’t just look at the characters presented to you in the forms allowed by the certified media. Develop your insight to recognize the actual assembly of actors upon the stage. See and smell in that setting the poison-breathed presence of the ghosts of the dead, who shadow the political figureheads that wander across your path, the only seemingly living.

The Progressively Insane Go International

While the similarity of his last name may merely be a coincidence, Bernie well plays the role of the mythical Mr. Sandman. That nasty mythological creature is the guy who throws sand into your eyes, to lure you into sleep, and while you are no longer conscious, deceives you.

To get a clear sense of Sandman’s effect, as you watch some of the recent videos of Bernie and Yanis, you might also watch on the Internet the 1958 Chordettes recording, “Mr. Sandman, Bring me a dream!”

In this case, the outcome were definitely, if not derailed, a nightmare.

Without question, the Bernie/Yanis duo is a combination doomed from day one, even more pathetic than the recent meteoric demise of the New Age egomaniac President Emmanuel Macron of France. In a series of non-credible action, overlapping the U.S. mid-term elections, the Sandman-Flakey pair assembled interviews, articles, web events, and forums, culminating in a Dec. 1 “glamour” gathering of liberal Democrats at the Sanders Institute in Vermont to create the Progressive International. Like the Mr. Sandman in the Chordettes recording, this new formation promises to “give you a dream,” solving all worldwide problems by their commitment to re-distribute the money wealth greedily hoarded by a super-powerful combination of mean people. Swirling raised fists, the PI promises to tame Capitalism, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and all the “strongmen” governing Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Poland, creating an “international New Deal” under the fairy dust of Green Economy.

In their ravings as to what they will do, never is there a mention of specific economic development projects or physical plans of production that will benefit the under-privileged. Akin to their idol, Keynes, economics, for the duo, means “playing” with money, a habit called “monetarism” that more than once has unleashed deadly forces worldwide, wreaking effects as destructive as war.

Here is how a highly reliable, well-connected source, close to the Greek situation, described Varoufakis: “I met Varoufakis. Was not very impressed, although he claimed to support Glass-Steagall . . . I was told he is a narcissist, which is clear . . . A scion of a relatively rich family,” educated primarily in London, “who married into one of the richest families in Greece . . . has broken all ties” with the Greek government. His “credibility in Greece . . . is extremely low and his chances of being elected are close to below zero. He is in fact running in the European elections in Germany! At least Bernie has a following.”

When the Greek government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras aggressively acted to coordinate economic policy with China, and thereby to use Chinese investment in Greek port and rail facilities to escape the murderous financial theft policies imposed on their population by the monetarist dictatorship known as the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), Varoufakis quit the government. He severed his connections to Tsipras and chose to have no link with a policy that had at least created a line of defense for the Greek population against devastating declines in life expectancy, rises in death rates (including suicides), and the collapse of education, all traceable to the insanity of the Brussels insistence upon “budgetary discipline.”

John Maynard Keynes, in 1939.

The Ghost of Keynes

There is nothing fundamentally serious in anything the Bernie/Yanis show is offering. On one level, it is a poorly acted routine spilling out from the financially powerful and coordinated enemies of President Donald Trump, who at this point—in order to undermine Trump’s stated desire for economic and strategic cooperation with Russia and China—want to constantly repeat the kind of circus theater that the U.S. electorate came to hate during the so-called Kavanaugh hearing.

CC/El Borde
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Now added to the ghastly mixture are the antics of the hyper wanna-be cheerleader Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who takes great pleasure in participating in sit-ins in other Congressmen’s offices. To build her image, Ocasio-Cortez has shifted from her role as booster of Bernie, to wanting to now push him out to pasture, suggesting that competitive formations to the PI are already being contemplated. It is an old intelligence-operation trick that when running a political front, the best way to make it look real is to create a “counter” to that front, creating a false platform for seizing control over what is and is not debated in government.

Thus, were it not for the “ghostly” reality that there is, nonetheless, an actual real-life intention behind these shenanigans, one would prefer to pretend that Mr. Sandman and his Flakey friend were just a badly written stage act that could be ignored. Unfortunately, however, this duo is very much a product of the “Game Theory” approach to economics, which Varoufakis studied while schooled in London. There is a real-life agenda behind this political version of “theater of the absurd.”

What that element turns out to be is clearly identified in the Sept. 13 article by Varoufakis in the London Guardian, under the headline “Our New International Movement Will Fight Rising Fascism and Globalists.” Typically, the underlying intention of his flakey agenda turns out to be 180 degrees opposite to what he purports. Describing the PI, he writes:

“Even more ambitiously” than its list of other promises “our Progressive International must propose an International Monetary Clearing Union, of the type John Maynard Keynes suggested during the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, including well-designed restrictions on capital movements. By rebalancing wages, trade and finance at a global scale, both involuntary migration and involuntary unemployment will recede, thus ending the moral panic over the human right to move freely about the world.” Asked to comment, Bernie then appends: “Yanis Varoufakis is exactly right.”

Harry S Truman Library
Walther Funk at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1946.

It is no secret that the Lord Maynard Keynes design of the Clearing Union was consciously adapted from a 1942 blueprint worked out for the benefit of Adolf Hitler by his Central Bank head at that time, one Walther Funk. The link between Keynes and this proposal to Hitler has often been cited by angry opponents of policies of the European Central Bank and the European Union as the detested, but nonetheless actual “model” for the failures of the European economic integration structures of the postwar period.

The Funk proposal was a classic monetarist mapping system designed for Adolf Hitler, to illustrate the best cost-saving procedures for managing the vast terrain of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, where slave labor, raw materials looting, wage cutting, budget reductions, and even programs of working starving “useless eaters” to death allowed Hitler to pay for his war machine.

Keynes and the Nazi Walther Funk

Funk was the lower-level successor to the London-linked Hjalmar Schacht, who fell out of favor with the German government in 1939 when Hitler went to war. His underling, Funk, continued Schacht’s policies, which as Lyndon LaRouche has often emphasized, were the devastating proof that monetarist policies, with a stroke of a pen, can murder even more people than conventional war fighting weapons.

Illustrating how well known is the link between Funk’s design and Keynes’ mindset, in 1998, New Yorker correspondent John Cassidy published a review of the growing esteem that came to be showered upon Lord Keynes as soon as the world financial system began to shake and tremble with the emerging shakeout of the derivatives market and the collapse of the super-hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. Cassidy noted:

When Hitler invaded Poland, Keynes was fifty-six and he didn’t see himself playing a large part in the war effort. Gradually, though, he found himself being sucked into official circles . . . In February 1940, he published an influential pamphlet entitled “How to Pay for the War” . . . A few months later, Harold Nicolson, of the Ministry of Information, asked Keynes to draft a propaganda response to a German proposal from Walther Funk, the President of the Reichsbank, calling for a “New Order” in Europe, based on free trade, fixed exchange rates and strict capital controls. Keynes eventually complied, but he also wrote privately to Nicolson, saying, “If Funk’s plan is taken at face value, it is excellent and just what we ourselves ought to be thinking of doing.” This exercise got him reflecting on postwar economic arrangements, . . . [Later] Keynes set down his thoughts in a paper entitled “Proposals for an international Currency Union.”

It is in that document that Keynes proposed that governments introduce a global system of what we now call “helicopter money,” named the Bancor, a disastrous, hyper-inflationary gimmick recently cited by the Bernie/Yanis duo.

Notably, Lord Keynes also praised the Nazi regime in 1936, in the embarrassing introduction to the German-language translation of his “General Theory” text, in which he preens that it was in precisely a “totalitarian state,” such as that created by Hitler, that his financial designs would work best. For decades, British academics have published essays claiming that the German translation of Keynes’ introduction for that edition was inaccurate, but no original English manuscript exists to determine whether that were true, and Keynes never undertook any effort to clarify the so-called “error.”

From the onset of Lyndon LaRouche’s public life as an economic forecaster and economist, LaRouche has addressed the demonic implications and underlying murderous axioms of all of the British Liberal doctrines of economy, going back to Adam Smith and the 18th century Haileybury School.

With long experience based on colonial management, all of the monetarist economists, with Keynes and Schacht at the top of the list, knew that the consequence of the financial system overseeing the Nazi occupation of the Eastern European territories would be mass genocide. LaRouche’s insistence on this point became the central feature of his famous 1971 debate with British Liberal economist Abba Lerner, who blurted out to a shocked audience, in defense of monetarism, “Had the German Social Democrats been willing to take the right measures, Hitler would not have been necessary.” Following that outburst, top intelligence operatives grouped around the Congress for Cultural Freedom ordered that no economist should ever again debate LaRouche in public.

There is no way that Bernie and Yanis—both of whom are always ready to boast that they descend from families that experienced fascist persecution in the 1930s—are uninformed of these basic realities. Obsessed with the view that economy is nothing more than re-dividing the worldwide hoard of money; afraid of the people who control such hoards, both exhibit that particular kind of moral and intellectual cowardice reflected in the line “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” It is not rational thought, it is that “little me” fear of established, downright evil political power, which causes some to go so far as to delude themselves about whose cause they are actually serving.

Ring the bell: It’s time to get the cane and end this silly show.

Back to top

clear
clear
clear