Just because you don't want to be known as a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean some conspirators aren't out to get you.

The first time I heard the ironic truism "Just because you know you're paranoid doesn't mean someone out there isn't out to get you" it fell from the lips of my third-level supervisor who was quipping to someone else within my earshot. Nowadays, the mainstream media constantly runs articles leading us to believe that only Muslim terrorists are out to get us and that any "conspiracy theorists" who think differently are paranoid kooks.

But what if the most dangerous terrorists are actually powerful global corporations and rogue groups within our government who have been responsible not only for the 9/11 attacks but all sorts of other nasty things ...like staging a pandemic?

According to a neighbor of ours down here in San Carlos who watches nothing but Mexican TV every night, two months before the first case of H1N1 swine flu was reported in March of 2009 as having been contracted by a 5-year-old boy in the tiny town of La Gloria, down wind of the larger pig-raising town of Xaltepec, about half way between the coast of the State of Veracruz and the City of Puebla, Mexican TV extensively covered the opening of a "billion dollar" plant for manufacturing vaccines located some place "between Puebla and Veracruz."

The company name is AstraZeneca. Wikipedia tells much about AstraZeneca, but nothing about a new vaccine plant in Mexico. An AstraZeneca web site gives the address of its Mexican Operations as Lomas Verdes, Naucalpan on the western outskirts of Mexico City.  So there seems to be no public record of the exact location of the "billion dollar" plant that Mexican TV was picking up on months before -- and after -- the appearance and rapid spread of swine flu 2009 H1N1.

By June 2009 this new virus was declared a "phase 6" pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) by arbitrarily changing the rule to mean essentially any new disease that may spread around the world irregardless of its communicability or mortality rate. In fact, by that time data from the southern hemisphere had shown that the new swine flu has a lower mortality rate and complications rate than the annual flu.

But by falsely raising the alarm to phase 6, WHO was able to act on the authority granted to it by the UN to command that the entire world be vaccinated -- an edict that would grant the world's pharmaceutical industry a multi-billion-dollar windfall by guaranteeing big-time buyers of their untestested -- and unneeded -- vaccines comprising most of the developed countries of the world. I've extensively chronicaled this history in an earlier post.

Would it be too paranoid to believe that the global pharmaceutical industry in collusion with the WHO would spread a virus to make us sick (and an an unpredictable number of us dead) in order to boost their profits by many billions of dollars? Or are you totally unable to believe anyone would do such a dastardly thing ...even when they clearly have the motive, means, and opportunity?

Personally, I subscribe to this quote attributed to Edmund Burke:

“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”

Does anyone remember that the 1918 pandemic flu virus was resurrected in 2005?  Well, it was ...with the help of the body of an infected woman exhumed from the Alaska permafrost.

Flash forward to last month:

Below I reproduce parts of a "News of the Week" article appearing in the 26 March 2010 issue of the prestigious magazine Science. For easier reading and better focus on my point, I have suppressed in my redacted version below (1) many highly technical portions of the article that are neutral to the case I'm suggesting, (2) comments by researchers in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry, and (3) some scientists' counter-intutive speculations to the effect that maybe evolution really can run backwards.

For anyone wishing to read the entire article, I've made it available for downloading here.

Please study the included figure at least until you come to understand what it is that I'm thinking.

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www.sciencemag.org   SCIENCE   VOL 327   26 March 2010

SWINE FLU PANDEMIC

What’s Old Is New: 1918 Virus Matches 2009 H1N1 Strain

The “novel” H1N1 swine influenza virus that last year caused the first human pandemic in 4 decades has one feature that is hardly novel: Its surface protein, hemagglutinin (HA) — which spikes cells and starts an infection — closely matches the HA in the H1N1 virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic. Separated by 91 years, the two strains of the highly mutable virus ought to be vastly different. This newfound similarity answers many mysteries about the 2009 pandemic, including why it largely spared the elderly. The new findings from different research groups also suggest intriguing explanations for how the 1918 influenza virus has evolved since it swept across the globe in several waves, killing more than 50 million people by the winter of 1919. And the investigators are proposing provocative—some say far-fetched—vaccination strategies to preempt future pandemics.
...
One study published 24 March in Science Translational Medicine shows that even though nearly a century separates the widespread circulation of the two viruses in humans, mice given a vaccine against the 1918 strain produced antibodies that “neutralized” the novel 2009 strain. When the team flipped the experiment and used a 2009 pandemic vaccine in mice, the immune response stopped the 1918 virus. “We kind of did a double take,” says virologist Gary Nabel, head of the Vaccine Research Center at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, and the lead researcher on the project.
...
When Nabel, Terrence Tumpey of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, and their co-workers focused on the amino acids in a discrete region of the HA tip that plays a critical role in binding to cells, they discovered a 95% similarity between the old and new pandemic strains. Comparisons between seasonal and the pandemic strains in this region found less than 70% similarity.
...

...“The closest related structure that we have to the current 2009 swine flu is the 1918 structure,” says [structural biologist Ian Wilson of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California], who also analyzed sequences from many other influenza viruses that have circulated in humans between those two pandemics.

"The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government." Paul Craig Roberts

Truth Has Fallen and Has Taken Liberty With It

By Paul Craig Roberts

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."  George Orwell

March 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating big pharma’s role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which climate scientists, financed by Wall Street and corporations anxious to get their mitts on “cap and trade” and by a U.N. agency anxious to redistribute income from rich to poor countries, concocted a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 percent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.