http://www.presstv.ir/detail/214164.html
<http://www.presstv.ir/detail/214164.html> *US rich dragging society into poverty * Tue Dec 6, 2011 4:24PM An interview with Jeff Gates, author of the book "Guilt by Association" A political author says that the wealthy “one percent” of the world is hiding important educational information from the bottom “99 percent”, so the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Press TV has interviewed Jeff Gates, author of the book “Guilt by Association”, who further explains this issue. Following is a transcript of the interview. *Press TV:* Let's look at the movements there in California, the Occupy movement, of course in Los Angeles, in Oakland. Let's talk about that. Do you think that they are progressing? Are they gaining momentum? Do you see a sort of waning by the protesters that have been involved in these demonstrations? *Gates:* I think it helps to remember the origins of this movement. It really began with what we call a “Mame” - a “Mame” in analogous to a “Jane”. It's a way of starting an idea and trying to find a way to make it replicate in the consciousness of the public. And the guy who kicked it off, a guy named Kalle Lasn has a magazine called *Adbusters*,and it's subtitled “The Journal of the Mental Environment.” And so you're really waging war in a mental environment against forces that divided this country and other countries between the 1 percent and the 99 percent - it's not unique to the US. This is pretty much a worldwide phenomenon. So I think we're too quick to judge the immediate circumstances of there not being a political agenda, there not being a concrete location for this to spread. This is spreading through the field of consciousness both here and abroad. People notice something is intuitively wrong. And in the same way that the Civil Rights movement resulted in legislation, this will in time manifest into something more concrete. But it's important to remember this is what we call a “Mame” - an idea or a behavior that spreads from person to person in that mental environment. So shedding this down is going to be very difficult because people know when they're right something is fundamentally wrong. *Press TV:* Let's look at what you've just said, Mr. Gates. You said that people know that there is something fundamentally wrong, but how does that go from that point of the scenario that they know something is wrong and exactly what they need to do to correct it? *Gates:* Well, what we have here is a system called the 'mindset warfare'. In the same way that those who took us to war in Iraq on false intelligence and sold us what was called the “clash of civilizations”, we now have a clash between the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent. What you do when you are waging war on that battlefield is you come into that field loudly and with confidence, and you get people to know what the real facts are and they will coalesce around that. We've had an extraordinary concentration of wealth that's based pretty much around 1980, and people don't know quite how it happened. They're not financially sophisticated. They know Wall Street is a clear nexus of all this in the same way that the city of London is - all other places. So they don't have sophistication to deconstruct this and say 'ok, who did what to whom?' They just know that something is fundamentally wrong and they're absolutely correct. *Press TV:* You're in California now, in the United States - do you think that what we have seen leading up to 2011, when you talk about the sophistication of the American people, do you feel that there has been a sort of 'on purpose' lack of political education towards the American people? - Because there seems to be opinions in other parts of the world. Do you think that this has been intentional? *Gates:* I served seven years as council to the Senate Finance Committee, and I had a book in 2000 called “Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street”, and to give you an idea of just one statistic from that: wealth of the Forbes 400, which is a very small percentage of the one percent, from 1998 to 2000 their average wealth increased 1.9 million dollars per person per day. Their wealth went up 240,000 dollars per hour. That will give you an idea. People don't know how that came about. They need to begin to understand that. That was legislated into play. Those dynamics were legislated into play and it cut across both of our political parties in the US. It cuts across the political parties in the UK and elsewhere. This is a form of mindset warfare. It's embedded in what we call a consensus model in places in part from New York to Chicago and elsewhere, and in very similar rates to the problem that your speaker from Paris identified. We've got a mindset that has now been branded the 'Washington consensus', so it makes the United States look as though it is the guilty party in spreading this mindset worldwide. That's why it's called guilt by association. It's a very difficult problem to solve because the problem is that with which you've been educated to do your scene. It's literally that with which you have framed your world so you have people not knowing that they are embraced in a mindset, a framework. They are freely embracing that framework that systematically undermines their freedom. So it's very hard to point at one particular person, or at one smoke-filled room full of rich industrialists up to no good. This has been embedded in a mindset in the same way that the clash of civilizations was embedded in a mindset to take us to war. *Press TV:* You're talking about an increase of, you said 240,000 dollars per hour, which is absolutely staggering. How could this happen without the people even having that information? *Gates:* Well, they don't know. They don't have the financial sophistication. We enacted a tax bill in 1981 under a so called 'fiscal conservative' under Ronald Reagan. I was tax council at the time for the finance committee, so I saw it up close and personal. We doubled the federal debt in the United States in one year, in one committee, and injected an enormous amount of deficit-finance cash flow into the private sector. And we shipped it from what we call demand-side economics to supply-side economics. That's mindset warfare. It is reframing the problem and getting the result from the perspective of financial sophisticates. The result was absolutely foreseeable. You could model this, no problem at all. But the American public is only given a sound bite: demand side/supply side. We faced stagflation that dates right back to when the US embassy was taken over in Iran - Jimmy Carter was tossed out and Ronald Reagan was brought in, in part because of that takeover embassy in Tehran. That set in motion all these forces that are still ongoing - that model has been spread worldwide. And to come back to your speaker in Paris, you might ask him about this. If you saw the so-called privatization in Russia when they went from a sort of Marxist mindset to a Washington consensus mindset, they created this very small oligarchy. In the initial rounds of creating the oligarchy, in the top seven, seven qualified for the Israeli citizenship. *Press TV:* What role do you see the education system, in general, playing in all of this, as our guest just talked about in France? *Gates:* I think that's well put. I think what we have is an education challenge. People simply do not know. Robert Gates, our former Pentagon Secretary, had an interesting phrase he coined early on in his tenure, he said "When you're waging unconventional warfare, the most troubling combatant is what you call the 'people in between'”. That's a great phrase - ethnicity free. If you have a system of governors based on informed choice, what you do is you put your operatives between the populace and the facts that they require for informed choice. So when we were getting ready to go to war in the United States, the operatives who took us to war were overwhelmingly pro-Israelis, they put their people in those in between spaces. If I turned on the Cable News Network, CNN, and I picked up Wolf Blitzer not knowing that he'd been an employee of the Israeli lobby or he'd been an editor of the Middle East report, that he'd written a sympathetic book on Jonathan Pollard the Israeli spy. If I picked up the New York Times, I got Judith Miller on the front page peddling the lies of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who sold us the nonsense on Iraqi WMDs. So you place the people in between. If I'm trying to get educated on how finance works, no matter what school I go to in the US or anywhere abroad now, it's all the same Chicago-model Washington consensus - there is no framework in which you can get yourself educated to begin to see this problem. And that's how the problem becomes that with which you do your seeing. It is absolutely an education challenge. Your speaker in Paris is absolutely on point. VG/SC/JG/GMA/JR
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