Webster Tarpley On the Depression of the 1990s

The third chapter of Tarpley's book, Synthetic Terror, is clearly drawn from his days as a LaRouchie. As discussed in numerous posts on FactNet.org, LaRouche was constantly selling "doom and gloom":

Ah, housing and Larouche, a real winning combination. A track record like every other prediction of economic collapse.

In the 1970's we would warn people of a Rockefeller take over and tell people to sell their houses and give the money to the US Labor Party before everything collapses.

Now, you know how it is; you can always predict that bad times are around the corner because the corner has not arrived yet. Tarpley tries to do something quite a bit harder; he tries to convince people that the 1990s were the bad old days.

This of course will come as news to anybody who was alive those days. The US economy purred on all cylinders during the 1990s by any measure. The economy added almost 20 million jobs during the decade. The stock market soared, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketing from 2,750 to 10,800.

But of course, to Tarpley, the US economy spent the entire decade teetering on the brink of collapse, a situation that Tarpley blames on Globalization. He does bring in some legitimate concerns (like the Russian financial crisis of 1998) which did have some impact on the economy, but which turned out to be like a blemish on Jessica Simpson; overall still pretty darn good.

Then he gets into the dollar debate. Is the greenback about to implode in faster than free fall speed? Tarpley sure believes it. We are led to assume that the OPEC nations are all headed to the Euro; that has not happened. He compares the US economy to Weimar, Germany. I know I haven't yet headed out to the market with a wheelbarrow full of money the way the Germans did back then. Even more bizarre, Tarpley claims that the "neocons" are actually pushing this comparison. Brooks' Law states that when somebody who's not a neocon uses the word in a sentence, you can usually bet that the rest of the sentence will be false, and this is no exception. I have yet to hear a prominent neocon (say Bill Kristol) compare the US economy to the Weimar Republic.

Then we get into Tarpley's analysis of the 1998 Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski/Impeachment imbroglio. Tarpley describes it as a "coup" attempt, which may win him some brief fans among the Clinton defenders. However, he goes on to claim that the Navy brass were considering deposing Clinton and replacing him with Ross Perot, a notion that is sheer tinfoil hattery.

It just goes on and on, with Tarpley giving his unique take on Kosovo, and the Neocons war of words with China. And absolutely nothing in here seems to have anything to do with the events of 9-11.

Now I see why people tell me to debunk Synthetic Terror. It's because there's almost nothing there that ties to 9-11 so that at the end of reading another chapter, I've done nothing to debunk the Deniers.