Brookings Institution a Leading Propagandist for U.S. Invasions

Eric Zuesse

 

On September 17th, the neoconservative-neoliberal Brookings institution held a propaganda-event to pump increased sales of weapons by U.S. weapons-manufacturing firms. The event’s main speaker was Robert Kagan, who is one of the many Brookings propagandists for invasions by the United States.

Robert Kagan (he’s one of an entire family of extremist supporters of U.S. invasions, and they’re all identical in this) was one of the leading propagandists for “regime-change in Iraq.” As a principal in the far-right Project for a New American Century, he recommended an “increase of $75 billion to $100 billion” in ‘defense’-spending, so that the U.S. Government could increase the “spread of American principles of liberty and democracy” to Iraq, and ultimately to the entire world. More invasions, please! he urges.

His wife, Victoria Nuland, was President Barack Obama’s top agent overseeing the operation to plan and organize the ultimate February 2014 U.S. coup overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected President and replacing him by a rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascist whose Hitlerite regime promptly carried out ethnic cleansings to eliminate residents of the regions that had voted over 75% for the man whom Mrs. Kagan had just overthrown, so as to lock-in a nazi (i.e., racist-fascist) regime on Russia’s border, for the future of Ukraine, in order for the U.S. to become enabled ultimately to place its nuclear missiles right on Russia’s border. Mrs. Kagan had appointed that man, “Yats,” to rule; she ordered the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine to get that done, and he did it. She also ran Obama’s regime-change-in-Syria policy. (Obama even overrode her nominal boss Secretary of State John Kerry in order to impose continuation of regime-change-in-Syria.) To call this Kagan couple “bloodthirsty” would be entirely appropriate, just as was Hitler bloodthirsty. The only difference was that Hitler never pretended to favor democracy, and he hated especially Jews and their supporters, while America’s nazis spout ‘democracy’ and hate especially Russians and their supporters. It’s just a different racism, and more skillful propaganda (since it favors ‘democracy’).

Here is the event’s announcement that was posted by the Brookings Institution:

“UPCOMING EVENT: Will democracy win? The recurring battle between liberalism and its adversaries”

Monday, Sep 17th: A discussion with Brookings authors Robert Kagan and Norman Eisen

The past century has been marked by repeated proclamations of the triumph of democracy. However, they have proved premature. Today, illiberal actors have once more gained footholds on both sides of the Atlantic and across the globe. Institutions in nations regarded as pillars of democracy find themselves under siege, or worse. Two new books by Brookings scholars elucidate the past, present and future of the ongoing struggle between democracy and its opponents.

In “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World,” Robert Kagan argues for America’s role as an enforcer of peace and order throughout the world — and what is likely to happen if we withdraw and focus our attention inward. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. Kagan makes clear the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world’s worst instability in check. He explains that the historical norm has always been toward chaos — that the jungle will grow back, if we let it, and we must not let it.

In “The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House,” Eisen chronicles a century of the battle for democracy in Europe. He does so through the lives of the previous residents of the historic home where he lived as U.S. ambassador in Prague: its Jewish builder, its Wehrmacht occupier, the American envoy who fought the Cold War and the movie-star ambassador who ended it. He weaves together those lives with a fifth, his Czech-Jewish mother, a survivor of the Holocaust and Communism who was his best advisor as he fought today’s illiberals as ambassador.

On Sept. 17, Governance Studies at Brookings will host Kagan and Eisen in a conversation, moderated by NPR’s Steve Inskeep, about their books and about the cycles of democracy and illiberalism — including the current rise of illiberalism in the United States and Europe — what that means, and how to fight it. Afterward, Brookings’ Bill Galston will provide additional remarks. On a second panel, the direct descendants of Eisen’s four predecessors in the ambassador’s residence will gather for the first time ever to speak about the human costs of these cycles.

A fuller documentation of the Brookings Institution as being a PR-front for America’s weapons-makers can be found here.

The sheer evilness of Brookings was highlighted by me in a 3 February 2015 article, “Brookings Wants More Villages Firebombed In Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’”.

Brookings was established by the U.S. aristocracy during World War I as a seemingly ‘patriotic’ think-tank, which after the 1929 crash opposed strongly the policies propounded by the progressive U.S. Presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Typical of that operation was the following:

In 1934, FDR appointed Marriner Eccles to run the Fed. A “Draft of Eccles’ remarks in Boston on February 16, 1935” was titled “Can Capitalism Be Saved.” He said there: “The doctrine of the divine right of kings did not save Charles the First’s head nor will the doctrine of the sacred rights of property save capitalism. … Private enterprise today is on trial solely because it is not producing the goods it has the capacity to produce and because it is not providing a more equitable distribution of the goods it is producing.” He proposed “a three point program. First I suggest use by the government of its taxing power to lessen the inequalities of income, since I believe that maldistribution of incomes increases our susceptibility to booms and collapses. … In a recent study by the Brookings’ institution, entitled ‘America’s Capacity to Consume,’ it is stated that in 1929 one-tenth of one per cent of the families at the top received as much as 42 per cent of the families at the bottom.” He noted, this maldistribution depressed the purchasing-power with which to buy outputs of firms owned by America’s aristocrats. “The consequence is an increase in unemployment and reduction in incomes,” a downward spiral for everyone. Subsequently, Eccles’s 14-page “Memorandum for Richmond meeting-May 19, 1938,” defended his theory in detail, against “the Brookings Institution in their studies.” He referred especially to two studies in 1935, by economist Harold Glenn Moulton (the actual founder of Brookings and a Rockefeller man); and, Eccles’s closing 3 pages asserted that Moulton’s analyses erred because their proposed solution was based upon Say’s law, which Eccles noted had already proven to be false. Eccles said that, “It is, of course, essential that the economy have at all times an adequate supply of private capital,” but that Moulton’s proposal for more “private capital” simply could not work during such an era. (Brookings’ website in 2006 headlined about the Institution’s history, “The Depression: Voice of Opposition,” and explained summarily: “Moulton and his staff believed New Deal legislation was designed ‘to substitute centralized authority for what is left of free enterprise.’” They worshipped at the “free enterprise” altar.) But unlike Keynes, Eccles focused on wealth and maldistribution, rather than on income and savings. He was actually the greatest macroeconomist, a “post-Keynesian” even before Keynes. FDR gradually became a “Keynesian,” after the super-“Keynesian” Eccles invented, not just “Keynesianism,” but the New Deal itself, which FDR endorsed, at first gradually, then fully (starting in 1938).

But, actually, the first super-“Keynesian” wasn’t even Eccles; it was FDR himself, who said, in his campaign speech for the Presidency, his commencement address at Oglethorpe University, his “Address at Oglethorpe University,” May 22, 1932:

“…our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink. We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend this capital at home and abroad. I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer. Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”

Perhaps Eccles got it from that speech.

The Brookings Institution was established in 1916 by a ‘philanthropist’, Robert S. Brookings, as a way to avoid taxes, but he didn’t much care about what it would do; and so his pro-U.S.-empire friends selected the scholars who would be funded by it. As was stated in the 1 August 2009 article, “Robert S. Brookings: The Man, the Vision and the Institution”:

As the nation’s oldest and most prestigious “think tank,” the Brookings Institution played a multidimensional role in the public policy process. Robert S. Brookings, the capitalist who founded the institution in the aftermath of World War I, played little role in the subsequent history of the institution. Instead, the less reform-minded professional social scientists who staffed the organization shaped the character of the institution. In their defense of the market economy, Brookings economists emerged as leading opponents of the new liberal state.

Liberalism at that time thus included imperialism — American imperialism. They do it not only for the weapons-manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, but for the mining and other resource-extraction firms such as Exxon/Mobil in order to provide them lower prices to pay for the resources they extract from the conquered countries. Ever since the time of U.S. President Truman, U.S. foreign policies have been fully controlled by America’s aristocracy, not at all by the U.S. public.

This is how America’s top think-tank came to include not only neoliberalism but neoconservatism, even before the popular media (owned by the same aristocracy) had the words “neoliberalism” and “neoconservatism” in their vocabularies.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

 

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