tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55111042146933083372024-02-19T08:42:16.999-08:00WahyusamputraWahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.comBlogger287125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-83332906131883598422013-12-01T14:15:00.000-08:002013-12-01T14:15:35.775-08:00Congratulations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Congratulations, American citizens, you are about to never hear about a plan from Commander Hanson, our best qualified climatology expert, to construct a workable economy out of the present shambles.<br />
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The Hanson plan [Yes, Virginia, the government can always create vast sums of cash, without even a pen stroke] is to pay to every citizen the sum of $1,000 [one thousand dollars] to put their finances back on a sound footing. The plan has remarks that warm the cockles of the heart, such as ‘Not even a cent of the money will go to the government…’ <br />
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Since all government actions take place in great secrecy, there is no way to know what consideration the Hanson plan has received; deep frying the planet to protect corporation profits remains the only visible option. <br />
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See: Soil at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/21<br />
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-43545953611716889752013-10-07T21:50:00.001-07:002013-10-07T21:50:36.505-07:00The next Wall Street crash<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"></div><br />
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/07/is-homeland-security-preparing-for-the-next-wall-street-collapse<br />
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October 07, 2013 The Last Desperate Thrashings of a Dinosaur<br />
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Is Homeland Security Preparing for the Next Wall Street Collapse? by ELLEN BROWN<br />
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Reports are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a massive, covert military buildup. An article in the Associated Press in February confirmed an open purchase order by DHS for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. According to an op-ed in Forbes, that’s enough to sustain an Iraq-sized war for over twenty years. DHS has also acquired heavily armored tanks, which have been seen roaming the streets. <br />
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Evidently somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest. The question is, why?<br />
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Recently revealed statements by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the height of the banking crisis in October 2008 could give some insights into that question. An article on BBC News on September 21, 2013, drew from an explosive autobiography called Power Trip by Brown’s spin doctor Damian McBride, who said the prime minister was worried that law and order could collapse during the financial crisis. McBride quoted Brown as saying:<br />
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If the banks are shutting their doors, and the cash points aren’t working, and people go to Tesco [a grocery chain] and their cards aren’t being accepted, the whole thing will just explode.<br />
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If you can’t buy food or petrol or medicine for your kids, people will just start breaking the windows and helping themselves.<br />
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And as soon as people see that on TV, that’s the end, because everyone will think that’s OK now, that’s just what we all have to do. It’ll be anarchy. That’s what could happen tomorrow.<br />
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How to deal with that threat? Brown said, “We’d have to think: do we have curfews, do we put the Army on the streets, how do we get order back?”<br />
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McBride wrote in his book Power Trip, “It was extraordinary to see Gordon so totally gripped by the danger of what he was about to do, but equally convinced that decisive action had to be taken immediately.” He compared the threat to the Cuban Missile Crisis.<br />
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Fear of this threat was echoed in September 2008 by US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who reportedly warned that the US government might have to resort to martial law if Wall Street were not bailed out from the credit collapse.<br />
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In both countries, martial law was avoided when their legislatures succumbed to pressure and bailed out the banks. But many pundits are saying that another collapse is imminent; and this time, governments may not be so willing to step up to the plate.<br />
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<b>The Next Time WILL Be Different </b><br />
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What triggered the 2008 crisis was a run, not in the conventional banking system, but in the “shadow” banking system, a collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but are unregulated. They include hedge funds, money market funds, credit investment funds, exchange-traded funds, private equity funds, securities broker dealers, securitization and finance companies. Investment banks and commercial banks may also conduct much of their business in the shadows of this unregulated system<br />
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The shadow financial casino has only grown larger since 2008; and in the next Lehman-style collapse, government bailouts may not be available. According to President Obama in his remarks on the Dodd-Frank Act on July 15, 2010, “Because of this reform, . . . there will be no more taxpayer funded bailouts – period.”<br />
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Governments in Europe are also shying away from further bailouts. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) in Switzerland has therefore required the systemically risky banks to devise “living wills” setting forth what they will do in the event of insolvency. The template established by the FSB requires them to “bail in” their creditors; and depositors, it turns out, are the largest class of bank creditor. (For fuller discussion, see my earlier article here.)<br />
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When depositors cannot access their bank accounts to get money for food for the kids, they could well start breaking store windows and helping themselves. Worse, they might plot to overthrow the financier-controlled government. Witness Greece, where increasing disillusionment with the ability of the government to rescue the citizens from the worst depression since 1929 has precipitated riots and threats of violent overthrow.<br />
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Fear of that result could explain the massive, government-authorized spying on American citizens, the domestic use of drones, and the elimination of due process and of “posse comitatus” (the federal law prohibiting the military from enforcing “law and order” on non-federal property). Constitutional protections are being thrown out the window in favor of protecting the elite class in power.<br />
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<b>The Looming Debt Ceiling Crisis </b><br />
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The next crisis on the agenda appears to be the October 17th deadline for agreeing on a federal budget or risking default on the government’s loans. It may only be a coincidence, but two large-scale drills are scheduled to take place the same day, the “Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drill” and the “Quantum Dawn 2 Cyber Attack Bank Drill.” According to a Bloomberg news clip on the bank drill, the attacks being prepared for are from hackers, state-sponsored espionage, and organized crime (financial fraud). One interviewee stated, “You might experience that your online banking is down . . . . You might experience that you can’t log in.” It sounds like a dress rehearsal for the Great American Bail-in.<br />
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Ominous as all this is, it has a bright side. Bail-ins and martial law can be seen as the last desperate thrashings of a dinosaur. The exploitative financial scheme responsible for turning millions out of their jobs and their homes has reached the end of the line. Crisis in the current scheme means opportunity for those more sustainable solutions waiting in the wings.<br />
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Other countries faced with a collapse in their debt-based borrowed currencies have survived and thrived by issuing their own. When the dollar-pegged currency collapsed in Argentina in 2001, the national government returned to issuing its own pesos; municipal governments paid with “debt-canceling bonds” that circulated as currency; and neighborhoods traded with community currencies. After the German currency collapsed in the 1920s, the government turned the economy around in the 1930s by issuing “MEFO” bills that circulated as currency. When England ran out of gold in 1914, the government issued “Bradbury pounds” similar to the Greenbacks issued by Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War.<br />
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Today our government could avoid the debt ceiling crisis by doing something similar: it could simply mint some trillion dollar coins and deposit them in an account. That alternative could be pursued by the Administration immediately, without going to Congress or changing the law, as discussed in my earlier article here. It need not be inflationary, since Congress could still spend only what it passed in its budget. And if Congress did expand its budget for infrastructure and job creation, that would actually be good for the economy, since hoarding cash and paying down loans have significantly shrunk the circulating money supply.<br />
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<b>Peer-to-peer Trading and Public Banks </b><br />
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At the local level, we need to set up an alternative system that provides safety for depositors, funds small and medium-sized businesses, and serves the needs of the community.<br />
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Much progress has already been made on that front in the peer-to-peer economy. In a September 27th article titled “Peer-to-Peer Economy Thrives as Activists Vacate the System,” Eric Blair reports that the Occupy Movement is engaged in a peaceful revolution in which people are abandoning the established system in favor of a “sharing economy.” Trading occurs between individuals, without taxes, regulations or licenses, and in some cases without government-issued currency.<br />
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Peer-to-peer trading happens largely on the Internet, where customer reviews rather than regulation keep sellers honest. It started with eBay and Craigslist and has grown exponentially since. Bitcoin is a private currency outside the prying eyes of regulators. Software is being devised that circumvents NSA spying. Bank loans are being shunned in favor of crowdfunding. Local food co-ops are also a form of opting out of the corporate-government system.<br />
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Peer-to-peer trading works for local exchange, but we also need a way to protect our dollars, both public and private. We need dollars to pay at least some of our bills, and businesses need them to acquire raw materials. We also need a way to protect our public revenues, which are currently deposited and invested in Wall Street banks that have heavy derivatives exposure.<br />
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To meet those needs, we can set up publicly-owned banks on the model of the Bank of North Dakota, currently our only state-owned depository bank. The BND is mandated by law to receive all the state’s deposits and to serve the public interest. Ideally, every state would have one of these “mini-Feds.” Counties and cities could have them as well. For more information, see http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.<br />
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Preparations for martial law have been reported for decades, and it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully, we can sidestep that danger by moving into a saner, more sustainable system that makes military action against American citizens unnecessary.<br />
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Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 200-plus blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.</div>Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-61734771863171979042013-09-30T12:53:00.000-07:002013-09-30T12:53:01.024-07:00Dilip Hiro<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175753/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro%2C_the_mystery_of_washington%27s_waning_global_power/#more<br />
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Dilip Hiro, The Mystery of Washington's Waning Global Power Posted by Dilip Hiro at 3:53pm, September 29, 2013.<br />
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Among the curious spectacles of our moment, the strangeness of the Obama presidency hasn’t gotten its full due. After decades in which “the imperial presidency” was increasingly in the spotlight, after two terms of George W. Bush in which a literal cult of executive power -- or to use the term of that moment, “the unitary executive” -- took hold in the White House, and without any obvious diminution in the literal powers of the presidency, Barack Obama has managed to look like a bystander at his own funeral.<br />
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If I had to summarize these years, I would say that he entered the phone booth dressed as Superman and came out as Clark Kent. Today, TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author most recently of the invaluable A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East, points out that, as far as Obama’s foreign (and war) policy, it’s almost as if, when the American president speaks, no one in the Greater Middle East -- not even our closest allies or client states -- is listening. And true as it may be for that region, it seems, bizarrely enough, no less true in Washington where the president’s recent attempts to intervene in the Syrian civil war were rejected both by Congress (though without a final vote on the subject) and by the American people via opinion polls. <br />
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It should be puzzling just how little power the present executive is actually capable of wielding. He can go to the U.N. or Kansas City and make speeches (that themselves often enough implicitly cast him as a kind of interested observer of his own presidency), but nothing much that he says in Washington seems any longer to be seriously attended to. In the foreign policy arena, he is surrounded by a secretary of defense who ducks for cover, a secretary of state who wanders the world blowing off steam, and a national security advisor and U.N. ambassador who seem like blundering neophytes and whose basic ideological stance (in favor of American -- aka “humanitarian” -- interventions globally) has been rejected in this country by almost any constituency imaginable. <br />
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Unlike previous presidents, he evidently has no one -- no Brent Scowcroft, Jim Baker, or even Henry Kissinger -- capable of working the corridors of power skillfully or bringing a policy home.<br />
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Domestically, who ever heard of a presidency already into its second term that, according to just about all observers, has only one significant achievement -- Obamacare (whatever you think of it) -- and clearly hasn’t a hope in hell of getting a second one? Just as he’s done in Syria, Obama will now be watching relatively helplessly as Republicans in Congress threaten to shut the government down and not raise the debt ceiling -- and whatever happens, who expects him to be the key player in that onrushing spectacle? America’s waning power in the Greater Middle East is more than matched by Obama’s waned power in this country. In our lifetime, we’ve never seen a president -- not even the impeached Clinton -- so drained of power or influence. It’s a puzzle wrapped in an enigma swaddled by a pretzel. Go figure. Tom<br />
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A World in Which No One Is Listening to the Planet’s Sole Superpower The Greater Middle East’s Greatest Rebuff to Uncle Sam By Dilip Hiro<br />
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What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known -- repeatedly -- and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East.<br />
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In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America’s waning power in that region. In the aptly named “arc of instability,” the lands from the Chinese border to northern Africa that President George W. Bush and his neocon acolytes dreamed of thoroughly pacifying, turmoil is on the rise. Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world’s last superpower. The list of defiant figures -- from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians -- is lengthening.<br />
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The signs of this loss of clout have been legion in recent years. In August 2011, for instance, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ignored Obama’s unambiguous call for him “to step aside.” Nothing happened even after an unnamed senior administration official insisted, “We are certain Assad is on the way out.” As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.<br />
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Similarly, in March 2010, Obama personally delivered a half-hour-long chewing out of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a politician Washington installed in office, on the corruption and administrative ineptitude of his government. It was coupled with a warning that, if he failed to act, a cut in U.S. aid would follow. Instead, the next month the Obama administration gave him the red carpet treatment on a visit to Washington with scarcely a whisper about the graft and ill-governance that continues to this day.<br />
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In May 2009, during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama demanded a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem. In the tussle that followed, the sole superpower lost out and settlement expansion continued.<br />
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These are among the many examples of America’s slumping authority in the Greater Middle East, a process well underway even before Obama entered the Oval Office in January 2009. It had, for years, been increasingly apparent that Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with several lesser campaigns in the Global War on Terror, were doomed. In his inaugural address, Obama swore that the United States was now “ready to lead the world.” It was a prediction that would be proven disastrously wrong in the Greater Middle East.<br />
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Afghanistan and Pakistan<br />
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Invaded and occupied Afghanistan was to be the starting point for phase two in the triumphant singular supremacy of Uncle Sam. The first phase had ended in December 1991 with the titanic collapse of its partner in a MAD -- that is, mutually assured destruction -- world, the Soviet Union. A decade later, Washington was poised to banish assorted “terror” constellations from nearly 80 countries and to bring about regime change for the “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). Having defeated the “Evil Empire” of the Soviets, Washington couldn’t have felt more confident when it came to achieving this comparatively modest aim.<br />
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Priority was initially given to sometime ally and client state Pakistan, the main player in creating the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s. Much to the chagrin of policymakers in Washington, however, the rulers of Pakistan, military and civilian, turned out to be masters at squeezing the most out of the United States (which found itself inescapably dependent on their country to prosecute its Afghan war), while delivering the least in return.<br />
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Today, the crumbling economy of Pakistan is in such a dire state that its government can keep going only by receiving handouts from the U.S. and regular rollover loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since the IMF arrangement is subject to Washington’s say-so, it seemed logical that the Obama administration could bend Islamabad to its diktats. Yet Pakistani leaders seldom let a chance pass to highlight American diplomatic impotence, if only to garner some respect from their own citizens, most of whom harbor an unfavorable view of the U.S.<br />
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A case in point has been the daredevil actions of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder-leader of the Lashkar-e Taiba (Army of the Pure, or LeT), listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations following its involvement in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which killed 166 people, including six Americans. In April 2012, the State Department announced a $10 million reward for information leading to Saeed’s arrest and conviction. The bearded 62-year-old militant leader promptly called a press conference and declared, “I am here. America should give that reward money to me.”<br />
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He continues to operate from a fortified compound in Lahore, the capital of Punjab. “I move about like an ordinary person -- that’s my style,” he told the New York Times’s Declan Walsh in February. He addresses large rallies throughout the country and is a much sought-after guest on Pakistani TV. According to intelligence officials based in the country, the militants of his organization participate in attacks on NATO forces and Indian diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan.<br />
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In August, when Saeed led a widely publicized parade on the nation’s Independence Day, protected by local police, all that a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad could helplessly say was: “We remain concerned about the movements and activities of this person. We encourage the government of Pakistan to enforce sanctions against this person.”<br />
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Far more worrisome for Washington was the critical role that the al Qaeda-affiliated Pakistani Taliban, also listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, played in determining the outcome of the country’s general election in May. It threatened to attack the public rallies and candidates of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) because its membership was open to non-Muslims. This tied the party’s hands in a predominantly rural society where, in the absence of reliable opinion polls, the size and frequency of public rallies is considered a crucial indicator of party strength. The outcome: a landslide victory by the opposition Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif, which drastically reduced the strength of the PPP in the National Assembly. <br />
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In mid-September, Prime Minister Sharif returned the favor by securing an all-party consensus in the National Assembly to negotiate peace with the Pakistani Taliban without conditions. Militant leaders then raised the stakes by insisting that his government first devise a policy to halt the ongoing U.S. drone campaign against them in the country’s tribal borderlands.<br />
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This compelled the Sharif government to announce that it would raise the issue of the American drone campaign at the United Nations General Assembly. Its move is likely to coincide with a report by Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, on U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia to be presented to the General Assembly in October. Emmerson has already described Washington’s drone campaign as a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty.<br />
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In addition, ignoring Washington’s reported disapproval, Sharif’s government has started releasing Afghan Taliban prisoners -- one of them “of high value” in the lexicon of the White House -- from its jails to facilitate what it calls “reconciliation” in Afghanistan. As yet, however, there is no sign that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban (widely believed to be under surreptitious Pakistani protection), is ready to negotiate with the government of Karzai whom he regularly denounces as an American puppet. <br />
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In early August, in his annual Eid al Fitr (Festival of Breaking the Fast) message, Omar was unmistakably hawkish. “As to the deceiving drama under the name of elections 2014, our pious people will not tire themselves out, nor will they participate in it,” he said. He then called for continued struggle against U.S.-led NATO troops and their Afghan allies, and urged Kabul's security forces to direct their guns at foreign solders, government officials, and Afghans cooperating with the U.S.-led troops.<br />
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Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been pressuring Karzai to sign an agreement that, among other things, would allow the Pentagon to maintain a significant “footprint” in Afghanistan under the rubric of “training Afghan forces” after the withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO combat troops by December 2014. So far, despite his dependence on Washington for his political survival, Karzai has been playing hardball.<br />
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In this, Washington is heading down a familiar path. In Iraq, both the Bush and Obama administrations tried to reach an agreement with a government the U.S. had helped install to leave behind 10,000-20,000 military trainers and special operations troops. It failed when the pro-Tehran, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki doggedly refused.<br />
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These days, despite the repeated U.S. complaints and requests, the Maliki government continues to allow Iranian arms to be sent overland and through its air space to the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. In late August, during the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, Iraq even declared that it wouldn’t allow its airspace to be used for military strikes on Syria.<br />
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The Diminishing “Coalition of the Willing”<br />
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In a controversial New York Times op-ed on September 11th, Russian President Putin wrote of President Obama’s plan to launch a military strike against Damascus, “It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts has become commonplace for the United States... Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan, ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” <br />
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Only days earlier, however, President Obama had failed to form a “coalition of the willing” on the Syrian issue at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, managing to rally only 10 members. Those who opposed military strikes against Syria without a U.N. Security Council mandate included the five-strong BRICS powers -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- along with Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and Argentina.<br />
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A week earlier, the British parliament defeated a motion to join a U.S.-led operation against Syria. With the British “poodle” slipping Washington’s leash -- an unprecedented act in recent memory -- Obama was lost.<br />
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In desperation, he turned to Congress, where, thousands of miles from the Greater Middle East, only a minority tuned in. Responding to the overwhelming sentiments of their constituents and opinion polls showing that remarkably few Americans believed an attack on Syria in national interest, the lawmakers started lining up to give Obama a resounding thumbs-down. It was only then, after an offhand remark by his Secretary of State John Kerry was taken up by Moscow, that Obama went on television and accepted the outlines of Putin’s proposed plan for Syria’s chemical weapons.<br />
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A Landmark Deal Underscores U.S. Decline<br />
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Undoubtedly, the Syrian deal struck in Geneva between Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov favored the Kremlin. It put any American attack firmly on the back burner. It brought the U.N. Security Council, earlier skirted by the Obama White House, center-stage as the primary agency to implement and supervise the deal. In the process, it underscored the continuing influence of Russia as a permanent member of the Council with a veto. Moscow also managed to spare the Assad regime the degradation of its military capabilities that would have resulted from the Pentagon’s strikes. In so doing, it enabled the Syrian leader to maintain the current battlefield superiority of his forces. Overall, the Syrian rebels and Washington were unmitigated losers.<br />
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Among other losers were Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan. On the opposite side of the equation were Iran and the military rulers of Egypt, albeit for diametrically contrary reasons. For Tehran, a Syria governed by Assad, a member of the Alawi sub-sect within Shiite Islam, is a linchpin in the axis of resistance against Israel. For the generals in Cairo, the demon is the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Syrian branch is the foremost foe of Assad.<br />
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Having overthrown Muhammad Morsi, the first democratically elected ruler in Egypt’s long history, the generals are now busily attempting to eradicate the Brotherhood itself, the oldest political party in the region. Following their July 3rd coup, they were reassured when Obama, though perturbed by their actions, meticulously avoided using that word "coup," which would have resulted in a suspension of aid as mandated by the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act. In contrast, his administration did suspend aid to the African state of Mali in March 2012 when, in a bloodless coup, the military toppled democratically elected President Amadou Toure.<br />
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If Obama was having second thoughts on his Egyptian policy, “marathon phone calls” from Jerusalem evidently ensured that no significant action would be taken against the military junta.<br />
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Israel’s prime minister and foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defense minister Moshe Yaalon, and national security adviser Yaakov Amidror engaged their American counterparts -- Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and Susan Rice -- in telephone conversations urging them not to freeze the $1.3 billion in military aid to the post-Morsi regime.<br />
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To the delight of the generals in Cairo, Israel’s lobbying continued unabated in Washington. Among others, Michael B. Oren, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, argued forcefully for an uninterrupted flow of U.S. aid. “Israel has been waging an almost desperate diplomatic battle in Washington,” wrote Alex Fishman, a leading Israeli columnist, in Yediot Aharonot on August 25. That was just 10 days after Egypt’s Interior Ministry troops had massacred nearly 1,000 Brotherhood supporters while clearing two protest sites in Cairo where pro-Morsi partisans had been staging peaceful open air sit-ins. Obama responded by saying, “Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back.” But all he did was to cancel an upcoming annual joint military exercise with Egypt.<br />
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The evident impotence of Washington before yet another client state with an economy in freefall was highlighted by the revelation that since the ouster of Morsi, Secretary of Defense Hagel had 15 telephone conversations with Egyptian Defense Minister General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, the coup leader, pleading with him to “change course” -- but in vain -- a repeat of Washington’s experience with Karzai, the Pakistani leaders, and Assad.<br />
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The threat that Washington might cut-off its military aid to Egypt was promptly countered by its long-standing ally in the region: Saudi Arabia. In a gesture of undisguised defiance of U.S. wishes, Saudi foreign minister Saud al Faisal pledged publicly that his country would fill any financial gaps left if the U.S. and the European Union withdrew aid to Cairo. With Riyadh’s budget surplus of $103 billion last year, his words carried weight.<br />
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Within a week of the coup in Cairo, the three oil-rich states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates -- each dependent on the Pentagon for its external security -- poured $12 billion into the bankrupt Egyptian treasury. In this way, these autocratic monarchies encouraged the military junta to defy Washington’s pleas for a return to democracy.<br />
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Launching a blitz of jingoistic propaganda and pumping up Egyptian xenophobia, the generals have gone beyond thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam. They have even concocted wild theories about how Washington has colluded with the Muslim Brotherhood. These are now being assiduously peddled through the state-controlled media and its compliant private sector counterpart.<br />
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In late August, for instance, the state-owned newspaper, Al Ahram, citing “security sources,” published a sensational front-page story by its editor-in-chief Abdel Nasser Salama. It claimed the authorities had foiled a plot involving U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, Brotherhood leader Kharat El Shater (by then under arrest), “37 terrorists,” and 200 Gaza-based jihadists to infiltrate the Sinai Peninsula through clandestine tunnels between the two territories, and create chaos. This was to be a preamble to isolating Upper Egypt and declaring it independent of Cairo. In response, Ambassador Patterson did no more than send a note of protest to Salama. Such stories have become grist for the Egyptian rumor mill and are transforming fantasies into facts in the popular psyche.<br />
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At the turn of the century, who could have imagined that barely a decade later an official mouthpiece for an emergent military dictator in Egypt, a client state of Uncle Sam for a quarter of a century, would have the audacity to malign Washington in this way while its generous aid package continued to flow in uninterrupted? If you need a marker for the waning of American power in the Greater Middle East, look no further.<br />
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Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, has written 34 books, including After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. His latest book is A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East (Interlink Publishing Group).<br />
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Copyright 2013 Dilip Hiro<br />
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</div>Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-14558773703116692642013-09-11T11:52:00.001-07:002013-09-11T11:52:12.325-07:00Making the world safe for Banksters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Making the World Safe for Banksters by ELLEN BROWN<br />
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In an August 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-game’ Memo,” Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.<br />
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The “end-game” would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and “usury” – charging rent for the “use” of money – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks don’t need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.<br />
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Bank deregulation proceeded according to plan, and the government-sanctioned and -nurtured derivatives business mushroomed into a $700-plus trillion pyramid scheme. Highly leveraged, completely unregulated, and dangerously unsustainable, it collapsed in 2008 when investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, taking a large segment of the global economy with it. The countries that managed to escape were those sustained by public banking models outside the international banking net.<br />
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These countries were not all Islamic. Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—which house forty percent of the global population. They also escaped the 2008 credit crisis, but they at least made a show of conforming to Western banking rules. This was not true of the “rogue” Islamic nations, where usury was forbidden by Islamic teaching. To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the crosshairs of the powerful US military.<br />
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Here is some data in support of that thesis.<br />
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<b>The End-game Memo </b><br />
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In his August 22nd article, Greg Palast posted a screenshot of a 1997 memo from Timothy Geithner, then Assistant Secretary of International Affairs under Robert Rubin, to Larry Summers, then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner referred in the memo to the “end-game of WTO financial services negotiations” and urged Summers to touch base with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan Bank, for whom private phone numbers were provided.<br />
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The game then in play was the deregulation of banks so that they could gamble in the lucrative new field of derivatives. To pull this off required, first, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 Act that imposed a firewall between investment banking and depository banking in order to protect depositors’ funds from bank gambling. But the plan required more than just deregulating US banks. Banking controls had to be eliminated globally so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws. The “endgame” was to achieve this global deregulation through an obscure addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization, called the Financial Services Agreement. Palast wrote:<br />
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Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in “bads” – toxic assets like financial derivatives.<br />
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Until the bankers’ re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives “products.”<br />
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And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.<br />
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The job of turning the FSA into the bankers’ battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organization.<br />
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WTO members were induced to sign the agreement by threatening their access to global markets if they refused; and they all did sign, except Brazil. Brazil was then threatened with an embargo; but its resistance paid off, since it alone among Western nations survived and thrived during the 2007-2009 crisis. As for the others:<br />
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The new FSA pulled the lid off the Pandora’s box of worldwide derivatives trade. Among the notorious transactions legalized: Goldman Sachs (where Treasury Secretary Rubin had been Co-Chairman) worked a secret euro-derivatives swap with Greece which, ultimately, destroyed that nation. Ecuador, its own banking sector de-regulated and demolished, exploded into riots. Argentina had to sell off its oil companies (to the Spanish) and water systems (to Enron) while its teachers hunted for food in garbage cans. Then, Bankers Gone Wild in the Eurozone dove head-first into derivatives pools without knowing how to swim–and the continent is now being sold off in tiny, cheap pieces to Germany.<br />
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<b>The Holdouts </b><br />
<br />
That was the fate of countries in the WTO, but Palast did not discuss those that were not in that organization at all, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. These seven countries were named by U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.) in a 2007 “Democracy Now” interview as the new “rogue states” being targeted for take down after September 11, 2001. He said that about 10 days after 9-11, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.<br />
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What did these countries have in common? Besides being Islamic, they were not members either of the WTO or of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland. Other countries later identified as “rogue states” that were also not members of the BIS included North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan.<br />
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The body regulating banks today is called the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and it is housed in the BIS in Switzerland. In 2009, the heads of the G20 nations agreed to be bound by rules imposed by the FSB, ostensibly to prevent another global banking crisis. Its regulations are not merely advisory but are binding, and they can make or break not just banks but whole nations. This was first demonstrated in 1989, when the Basel I Accord raised capital requirements a mere 2%, from 6% to 8%. The result was to force a drastic reduction in lending by major Japanese banks, which were then the world’s largest and most powerful creditors. They were undercapitalized, however, relative to other banks. The Japanese economy sank along with its banks and has yet to fully recover.<br />
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Among other game-changing regulations in play under the FSB are Basel III and the new bail-in rules. Basel III is slated to impose crippling capital requirements on public, cooperative and community banks, coercing their sale to large multinational banks. <br />
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The “bail-in” template was first tested in Cyprus and follows regulations imposed by the FSB in 2011. Too-big-to-fail banks are required to draft “living wills” setting forth how they will avoid insolvency in the absence of government bailouts. The FSB solution is to “bail in” creditors – including depositors – turning deposits into bank stock, effectively confiscating them.<br />
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<b>The Public Bank Alternative </b><br />
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Countries laboring under the yoke of an extractive private banking system are being forced into “structural adjustment” and austerity by their unrepayable debt. But some countries have managed to escape. In the Middle East, these are the targeted “rogue nations.” Their state-owned banks can issue the credit of the state on behalf of the state, leveraging public funds for public use without paying a massive tribute to private middlemen. Generous state funding allows them to provide generously for their people.<br />
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Like Libya and Iraq before they were embroiled in war, Syria provides free education at all levels and free medical care. It also provides subsidized housing for everyone (although some of this has been compromised by adoption of an IMF structural adjustment program in 2006 and the presence of about 2 million Iraqi and Palestinian refugees). Iran too provides nearly free higher education and primary health care.<br />
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Like Libya and Iraq before takedown, Syria and Iran have state-owned central banks that issue the national currency and are under government control. Whether these countries will succeed in maintaining their financial sovereignty in the face of enormous economic, political and military pressure remains to be seen.<br />
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As for Larry Summers, after proceeding through the revolving door to head Citigroup, he became State Senator Barack Obama’s key campaign benefactor. He played a key role in the banking deregulation that brought on the current crisis, causing millions of US citizens to lose their jobs and their homes. Yet Summers is President Obama’s first choice to replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman. Why? He has proven he can manipulate the system to make the world safe for Wall Street; and in an upside-down world in which bankers rule, that seems to be the name of the game.<br />
<br />
Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com, http://PublicBankSolution.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.<br />
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-10268317749280815382013-07-07T12:22:00.000-07:002013-07-07T12:22:04.979-07:00'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne' - Chaucer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"In my craft, or sullen art, <br />
Exercised in the still night<br />
When only the moon rages<br />
And the lovers are abed, <br />
With all their griefs in their arms, <br />
<br />
I labour by singing light<br />
Not for ambition, or bread,<br />
Or the strut and trade of charms<br />
On the ivory stages,<br />
But for the common wages<br />
Of their most secret heart.<br />
<br />
Not for the proud man, <br />
Apart from the raging moon,<br />
I write on these spindrift pages, <br />
Nor for the towering dead <br />
With their nightingales and psalms,<br />
<br />
But for the lovers, <br />
Their arms round the griefs of the ages,<br />
Who pay no praise, or wages,<br />
Nor heed my craft, or art.'<br />
<br />
Dylan Thomas</div>
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-62608854572304483412013-06-05T06:04:00.000-07:002013-06-05T06:04:34.114-07:00The Lightning Bolt of Compassion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">A brief ‘Prayer that Spontaneously Fulfils All Wishes’ (Sampa Lhundrupma) byTerton Jalu Dorje (Do Khyentse)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">EMAHO!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">O Guru Rinpoche, in your glory you embody Buddha, Dharma and Sangha,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Lama, Yidam and Khandro and all the Sugatas,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The sole refuge of beings who are without protection in this Dark Age.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Your compassion is as swift as lightning To treng Tsal<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Maha Guru – wrathful Padma Heruka, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">With fervent longing and devotion we pray to you:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Avert enemies, dons, obstructing forces, obstacle-makers, curses and spells,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Bring all negative forces, Gyalpo, Senmo and Jungpo demons under your subjugation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Grant your blessings so that all our wishes be spontaneously fulfilled.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-63604153418881806252013-05-20T11:31:00.000-07:002013-05-24T08:33:20.673-07:00Nama Amida Butsu<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Always the silences push their searching<br />
Whose eye the least star or flower is.<br />
Always, locked and singing in the bone, <br />
Shine the clean eyes of the tiger and the rose.<br />
Stars only are driven through your hands.<br />
The eyes of my people are always upon you.<br />
<br />
How like a woman the earth is, <br />
And how like a man the slim green shoots, <br />
How proud.<br />
Without the breaking of the earth and water<br />
There would be no shoots,<br />
Without the breaking of the shoots, no earth, <br />
But while they break, how the eyes of the tiger shine, <br />
Lilies locked and singing in the bone.<br />
The eyes of my people are always upon you.<br />
<br />
The brilliant horses of the morning shake their clammy harness,<br />
I see them stamp their shining feet on the crystal floor of morning.<br />
Bone, star, and lily locked and singing,<br />
The armies of light hurl their lances on the green land.<br />
The eyes of my people are always upon you.<br />
<br /></div>
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-77045357618321754942013-04-18T16:25:00.003-07:002013-04-18T16:25:48.481-07:00News is bad for you<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://boingboing.net/2013/04/17/news-is-bad-for-you-an.html">http://boingboing.net/2013/04/17/news-is-bad-for-you-an.html</a><br />
<br />
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether<br />
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The Guardian, Friday 12 April 2013 15.00 EDT <br />
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Out of the 10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli. <br />
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In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.<br />
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<strong>News misleads</strong>. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.<br />
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We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.<br />
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<strong>News is irrelevant</strong>. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.<br />
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<strong>News has no explanatory power</strong>. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case.<br />
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<strong>News is toxic to your body</strong>. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.<br />
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<strong>News increases cognitive errors</strong>. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that "make sense" – even if they don't correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, "The market moved because of X" or "the company went bankrupt because of Y" is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of "explaining" the world.<br />
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<strong>News inhibits thinking</strong>. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.<br />
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<strong>News works like a drug</strong>. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It's not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It's because the physical structure of their brains has changed.<br />
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<strong>News wastes time</strong>. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?<br />
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<strong>News makes us passive</strong>. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.<br />
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<strong>News kills creativity</strong>. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don't.<br />
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Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.<br />
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I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it.<br />
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This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk<br />
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</div>
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-38830086173916068482013-04-11T05:52:00.000-07:002013-04-11T05:52:42.064-07:00Winner takes all<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">“Far from giving you a blueprint for your rise to the top, these routines will probably cause you to reconsider the whole idea of becoming CEO of a major communications conglomerate. For the most part, it sounds horrible. There is no respite at the top of the greasy pole, no finish line at the end of the rat race – it's just more of the same. What's the point of being rich and successful if you have to get up before dawn every day to answer 500 emails? There are so many other options open to you: wage slave, failed artist, cowboy plumber, petty thief, local weirdo. The money isn't good, but the hours are very attractive.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Guardian, 4/2/13</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">As demonstrated in the Cyprus situation, where the solution, of simply seizing everyone's bank accounts, in the national interest, of course, of course, has now been admitted to be the long planned blueprint for future action. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, (Finance Minister), is surely only one of many to be licking his lips at the prospect.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">The main bludgeon being used is that Derivatives, (Bank gambles on future movements) and their associated Credit Default Swaps have super priority over all other creditors; they take what the banks demand as their cut (all of it) and all other creditors, (like the poor slobs who put their money in the bank) count as 'unsecured creditors' and get - you guessed it - nothing, except shares in the new bank.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">The following is a short excerpt from a piece by Ellen Brown in CounterPunch of April 10, 2013 on possible alternative actions:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><strong>Putting the Brakes on the Wall Street End Game </strong></span><br />
<br />
<br />
Besides eliminating the super-priority of derivatives, here are some other ways to block the Wall Street asset grab:<br />
<br />
(1) Restore the Glass-Steagall Act separating depository banking from investment banking. Support Marcy Kaptur’s H.R. 129.<br />
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(2) Break up the giant derivatives banks. Support Bernie Sanders’ “too big to jail” legislation.<br />
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(3) Alternatively, nationalize the TBTFs, as advised in the New York Times by Gar Alperovitz. If taxpayer bailouts to save the TBTFs are unacceptable, depositor bailouts are even more unacceptable.<br />
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(4) Make derivatives illegal, as they were between 1936 and 1982 under the Commodities Exchange Act. They can be unwound by simply netting them out, declaring them null and void. As noted by Paul Craig Roberts, “the only major effect of closing out or netting all the swaps (mostly over-the-counter contracts between counter-parties) would be to take $230 trillion of leveraged risk out of the financial system.”<br />
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(5) Support the Harkin-Whitehouse bill to impose a financial transactions tax on Wall Street trading. Among other uses, a tax on all trades might supplement the FDIC insurance fund to cover another derivatives disaster.<br />
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(5) Establish postal savings banks as government-guaranteed depositories for individual savings. Many countries have public savings banks, which became particularly popular after savings in private banks were wiped out in the banking crisis of the late 1990s.<br />
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(6) Establish publicly-owned banks to be depositories of public monies, following the lead of North Dakota, the only state to completely escape the 2008 banking crisis. North Dakota does not keep its revenues in Wall Street banks but deposits them in the state-owned Bank of North Dakota by law. The bank has a mandate to serve the public, and it does not gamble in derivatives.<br />
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Ellen Brown on Counterpunch, Winner Takes All, April 10, 2013<br />
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ELLEN BROWN is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private banking oligarchy has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are <a href="http://webofdebt.com/">http://WebofDebt.com</a>,<br />
<a href="http://ellenbrown.com/">http://EllenBrown.com</a>, and <a href="http://publicbankinginstitute.org/">http://PublicBankingInstitute.org</a>.<br />
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-70389659320811024522013-03-24T19:20:00.002-07:002013-03-24T19:47:27.765-07:00Angela Merkel - the view from Italy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Angela Merkel's desk is dominated by a portrait of Catherine II, the great German tsarina who began a written correspondence with Voltaire. Every now and then, even the German chancellor takes a break from economic relations and political advisors and gives herself some time to reflect. To this end, she occasionally brings together a few writers and academics, specialising in radically different disciplines and simply listens. Last summer, during one of these dinners, she was asked how long she would carry on demanding sacrifices from Greece. "As long as the bags under Papandreou's eyes are smaller than mine," she replied.<br />
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Regularly crowned the most powerful woman in the world in international surveys, Merkel is aware that, after her rapid ascent to become not only the first female chancellor, but also the youngest in German history, the euro crisis will be her most critical test. It is that which will determine whether Helmut Kohl's former pupil is worthy of a place in the history books, and whether or not it is adorned with flattering adjectives.<br />
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However, the future of the single currency also depends on whether Germany can maintain its leadership role in Europe. Inevitably, it has provoked distrust in the rest of the continent: in which the chancellor's costly dilly-dallying during the debt crisis, led to remarks about a third world war in the British press. Even the new stability agreement, which has been subject to rigorous German accounting, incites fears that Europe is strangling its own growth potential.<br />
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In 1990, it was Kohl who discovered the woman he called "the girl". Then a 36-year-old physics researcher, she had grown up behind the iron curtain, wore enormous skirts and sported the haircut of a medieval knight. Within a few months the chancellor had catapulted her to the top of federal politics. There, she soon showed herself to have a great capacity for diplomacy and to be an unusually fast learner. As the daughter of a protestant minister, she took advantage of the fact that parties such as the CDU/CSU were almost entirely dominated by men who underestimated her.<br />
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It is common knowledge that, on her road to victory, she even pushed aside her mentor in 2000, when she called upon the party – then crushed by allegations it had obtained illicit funds – to liberate itself from the "Father of Reunification". But from 2005, when she took over the top job, Merkel has shown herself capable of being at the helm of a country that, since its entry into the euro, has lost the only symbol of power granted to it since the second world war: the deutschmark.<br />
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The chancellor's habit of letting reason triumph over visionary impulses and Kohl-type breakaways is clear to see. It may possibly owe something to the after-effects of a motor problem in her legs, which forced her since childhood to plan the smallest of manoeuvres in advance. And, as she has herself declared, the experience of living under a communist dictatorship in East Germany has above all taught her to distrust everyone. This distrust, in turn, has fed into her proverbial caution and pragmatic approach towards European politics.<br />
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A positive side to this pragmatism is shown in her attitude towards the European Central Bank and its extraordinary transactions – which more orthodox Germans continue to brand a violation of the treaties. The chancellor, however, is well aware it continues to be the only bulwark against an escalation of the crisis.<br />
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And when Axel Weber, a candidate for the German presidency, unexpectedly withdrew from the contest in protest against the bank's new functions, Merkel backed the installation of the Italian Mario Draghi as its new head.<br />
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The accession of the other "super Mario" – Monti, in Italy, which has served to bring that country more closely into the fold – has proved something of a relief for Merkel. Even the former head of the EU's antitrust body recently admitted that Merkel's mission is to "make Italians more similar to Germans". Who knows if she will succeed. And, above all, who knows if the Germans will then like us more.<br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/25/angela-merkel-italy-profile<br />
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-50727834575210282222013-03-11T07:43:00.000-07:002013-04-09T10:57:16.279-07:00Some little known facts about women<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For Internationsl Women's Day<br />
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Women are half of world population, and put in two thirds of the working hours.<br />
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Women receive ten per cent of the wages and salaries, and own less than one per cent of the property.</div>
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-15145727561408580552013-03-04T20:16:00.001-08:002013-04-09T10:56:08.624-07:00Notes from oblivion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>Notes from oblivion</b><br />
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Well, ‘Death sentence’ is putting it rather harshly, I guess, tho’ it happens to be quite true; kinder to say that human civilization has been found wanting as an appropriate steward and is therefore gently removed by the judge from whom there is no appeal, Mother Earth herself. <br />
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<b>Feel any better</b>?<br />
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No one owns the earth, she is too old. She owns us. From her we come, and to her we return.<br />
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Meanwhile, a little comparative sociology, or study of cultures, might be appropriate. <br />
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I pray to Mercury, god of thieves, also known as Hermes Psychopompos, conductor of the dead. All prayers are answered but sometimes the answer is No.<br />
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The streams of methane bubbles erupting copiously off the Siberian Peninsula in Russia, and also in the western European Arctic, as the permafrost melts, where all this methane has been frozen for thousands of years, do signal an important shift in stewardship, however. We really didn’t cut it, with all those circuses and no bread.<br />
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Hermes? Mercury? What’s that got to do with the price of fish? <br />
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Well, it’s pretty simple, actually. Thor, the thunderer, Zeus, Jupiter, the lord of hosts, they’re all models of the Thug, a fearsome figure in warm and comfortable climes where the living is easy and the women plentiful. Living in the frozen North is very different.<br />
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To understand the difference read a short story by Jack London, written with all his usual skill, ‘To light a fire.’ It’s only a few pages. <br />
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Once you’ve done that, you know without thinking about it why Hermes is now that speeding figure in winged helmet and winged sandals delivering long stemmed roses for Valentine’s Day. And why Odin himself, an old one eyed guy in a slouch hat, and Vili (Thought) and Ve (Memory) rule our icy world. <br />
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The Thug is no use in the frozen North, a permanent liability, in fact. But the guy who knows a thing or two, has some special knowledge, aha, yes!<br />
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[It’s worth mentioning, perhaps, that Uncle Sam might wonder if a white hat after all those black hats might not be a great idea. <br />
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Generations of schoolboys know, from lighting each others farts, that methane is highly flammable. Throw in Halliburton, and KBR, (and Red Whatsisname who put out the burning oilwells in Iraq)under a declared state of emergency, and start the factories mass producing flame throwers. With any luck the ascending streams of bubbles of methane could catch fire, the flames rising ever higher to burn the methane off. <br />
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A possibility, but not a very strong likelihood.]<br />
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Northerners, Scandinavians and such, tend to be scornful of Thor, the Thug, his defeat in the wrestling match against the old woman in the hall of the ice giants seen as the fate of the arrogant. That the old woman turned out to be old age, which nothing and no one defeats, is not really relevant. <br />
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But did not the poet say we must learn to laugh and to grow roses in the black stones of the meeting halls? Why not long stemmed at $25 a pop for Valentine’s? Life affirming, and they look good. <br />
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‘C’est toi, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.’<br />
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The Buddha does not strike one as a very bright guy compared to, say, Thomas Aquinas. The main reaction to any of his really illuminating statements is to clutch one’s forehead and say “My God! He’s right! It’s obvious! How come I never noticed that?” The answer is that like everybody else you didn’t start with an ingrained experience of normality, but got dropped straight into this sewer where you spend the rest of your days. <br />
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A reasonable example is his instruction to spend a year without opening your mouth, just doing your chores. At the end of the year, said the blessed Siddhartha Gautama, “You will know that there is nothing to ask, and there is no one to answer.” Indeed.<br />
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The Turks, much feared for their savagery in battle, are responsible, by the way, for a number of things we now see as distinguishing marks of Islam. Mohammed (PBUH), a junior member of a good merchant family, started life as a program manager for a company owned by a woman rather older than he was, who eventually proposed marriage to him, and he accepted. This should warn us his world was not what we’d now call Islamic.<br />
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It was the Ottoman Turks who had the custom of “hareem,” and the sultan used to wander in, when fancy took him, to the separate palace where he kept all his nookie guarded by large guys with important items of equipment removed. He might actually tell one to report for duty that night, an almost unbearable honor, but probably he’d look at a few with interest and exchange a few words. Persons thus honored got to wear a badge saying “smiled at by the sultan” and the others had to kiss their butts and make their tea and so forth.<br />
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These Turkish customs became the model of correct behavior during the hundreds of years the sultans were the head of Islam, right down to the remote and dusty province at the extreme limit of their empire called Arabia. Those in between not quite wealthy enough to afford a separate establishment and eunuchs for guards tended to adopt the Syrian habit of sticking a bag over their head if they went out, and forbidding by law contact with any male except relatives. <br />
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Still, most life went on inside, of course, and the typical Damascus house, all blank stone walls from the outside, looks terrific on the inside, all fountains, and gardens, and balconies.<br />
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Your typical bedu would be convinced you were deranged if you suggested any such thing to him, of course. “Who the hell’s going to look after the goats?” If you think the women spend all day inside the tent painting their toe nails while the lads get the work done and haul in the tucker for them, you’ve never been in a large family. </div>
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-44142344099274903232012-12-08T04:00:00.000-08:002013-03-04T15:01:44.873-08:00Envoi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"></div><br />
"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. <br />
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You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. <br />
Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time.<br />
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They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today." --Lawrence M. Krauss<br />
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</div>Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-55680339645169320102012-11-17T20:19:00.000-08:002012-11-17T20:19:45.835-08:00Arc of a diver, effortlessly...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"></div><br />
“Arc of a diver, effortlessly... ”<br />
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Old age, said General de Gaulle, had nothing good to be said about it. The catalogue of disasters and humiliations waiting for you at the end of your rainbow arc across the light is even more detailed in the Bible: "When your are young you will gird your loins and go wherever you want, but when you are old another shall gird your loins and take you where you would not go." "Praise therefore your creator in the days of your youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when you will say 'I have no pleasure in them.'"<br />
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(Pretty grim, huh? What advice can we offer? Only that in the Ballad of John and Yoko, "Last night the wife said Oh boy when you're dead You don't take nothing with you but your soul." <br />
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Keep your soul in good shape, all else is shadows, and it's the only thing to go with you when you go, like a suitcase packed and ready.)<br />
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Not only do the old revert to being like babies in many ways, they also return to the animal nature and outlook of young babies. They become more sensitive to weather, to air, to other living beings in the largely unknown jungle around them. The whole process might be described as a multi colored rainbow over the light of the fire as we come out of the darkness, fly a short time across the light, and then plunge back into the darkness, with the first ten per cent and the last ten per cent of the rainbow being mirror images in reverse of each other. <br />
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The immediate question that arises in contemplating this spectacle of human existence is "Is there any point, any reason, any logic, any purpose, to this process? What's the point of the whole thing?" Well, for those like Buddhists who think the purpose of your existence (in the process of achieving, as the Lotus Sutra says, "To enjoy yourself at ease," which is why you were born) is exactly that the trials and tribulations and battles of this life are the purpose of your existence, they are what build your character, making you what you are, leading you on the path of Buddhahood. Enjoy it! say the Buddhists. <br />
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“In the "Ongi Kuden" (Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings), the Daishonin says, "One should regard meeting obstacles as true peace and comfort" (Gosho Zenshu, p. 750). You may wonder how encountering obstacles could be a source of peace and comfort. But the truth of the matter is that through struggling against and overcoming difficulties, we can transform our destiny and attain Buddhahood. Confronting adversity, therefore, represents peace and comfort.” (President Ikeda's Guidance for Aug 14.)<br />
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Indeed Buddhists tend to be much happier confronting adversity. (For those who think of Buddhists as wimpy tree huggers, remember all the martial arts were invented by Buddhist monks forbidden to carry weapons by the local warlords. The martial arts remain. The warlords are long forgotten. So it goes.)<br />
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“The German author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) writes that the more one matures, the younger one grows. And certainly there are many people who, as they age, become increasingly vigorous and energetic, more broad-minded and tolerant, living with a greater sense of freedom and assurance. It is important to remember that aging and growing old are not necessarily the same thing.” (President Ikeda’s Guidance.)<br />
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So when the body is shoveled back into the waiting arms of Mother Earth, the corpse of the enlightened one is somehow better quality cardboard than other corpses? Pretty much, yeah. ("Heads of the characters hammer through daisies, And Death shall have no dominion." Dylan Thomas.) <br />
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The Buddhist would consider this a triviality compared to what you got done, whether you dust your hands and say “Well, that was an interesting life,” at the end of it. What do you want? We come and we go. Do your best while you’re here.<br />
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The author of the words to "Amazing Grace" is established, but the melody was written by a guy who was the master of a slave ship to the Americas, and the source of the tune, the melody, is just stated to be "Unknown." The chances that he actually used the tunes from the Africans in the hold become overwhelming if you watch a really good black singer (think Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, Muddy Waters,) to sixty thousand black men of the Promise Keepers in a stadium and the entire audience humming and moaning the melody with the singer.<br />
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So the only question, the only area where anyone has any choice, is what you do with this body for the short time you’re driving it?. Correct. Try to do stuff that’s beneficial to your soul, and build up your psychic bank account. <br />
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The reference to the Bible in the first paragraph signaled “Christian.” The Koran would have signaled “Moslem.” Buddhists don’t really have a “Holy Book,” just scads of writings, and are more concerned with the people who are Buddhists, and what they achieve, than in holy books. Some Buddhists, usually gurus, or teachers, rather than ordinary folks, preserve, literally embalm the living body, by switching slowly to a diet consisting entirely of the bark of a certain tree, and their mummified bodies, usually in caves, are still being found and put on National Geographic TV documentaries. For what? I dunno. Sort of a memorial for the local people, to remind them of the teachings, and maybe reassure them that there are beneficent beings around, and they’re still there looking after them?<br />
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“Life is the fool of hope, till one last morning<br />
Sweeps all our schemes away, without a warning.”<br />
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“The soul of the dead man comes next to the realm of the wrathful deities. If he fears them they will attack him and he must seek for rebirth. But if he knows the wrathful deities as coming from himself, they cannot harm him, and he may proceed peacefully on his way.” <br />
Bardo of Rebirth, Tibetan Book of the Dead<br />
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-68577311989310906592012-10-27T15:17:00.000-07:002012-10-29T22:56:10.026-07:00Walpurgisnacht<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Christmas Eve, the e’en of Christmas, is December 24. November 1 is All Saints Day, and according to an old German superstition, on the eve of All Saints Day, the powers of darkness, the headless horseman and others, are given one last chance to riot. This is Hallows eve, or Hallowe’en. <br />
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All Saints Day, All Hallows, is calm and peaceful. The night before, October 31, the dark hour before the dawn when the evil powers are allowed one last time of liberty, is Walpurgisnacht.<br />
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<br />
Jane’s Fighting Ships<br />
<br />
<br />
The three inventions that drove the engine of the western industrial revolution, gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and the movable type printing press, were all three Chinese inventions; we’ve been stealing ideas from them since the year dot! <br />
<br />
(If you add that China now owns the wages and salaries of our yet to be born U.S. great grandchildren, and that the Chinese citizen has enjoyed a doubling of income every ten years over the last thirty years, that supplies the outcome of the financial attacks on China.)<br />
<br />
Among the resources of the British Royal Navy is Jane’s Fighting Ships, a record of all the world’s military vessels, their tonnage, weapons carried, home port, current location, and so forth.<br />
<br />
At approximately the same age as the USA, of about 236 years, Jane’s Fighting Ships has a record of accuracy not challenged by the US military, whose pronouncements too often, alas, are not very accurate.<br />
<br />
<br />
The British yellow, i.e. popular, press has already had loads of harmless fun at the expense of the know-it-all Americans, over the last couple of years, with the Chinese capability for silent running, on their batteries, a capability not available to any US or NATO nation, allowing a submarine to surface ‘coincidentally’ inside the screen surrounding a fleet, with several capital ships clearly in their sights. The Chinese laugh it off as ‘coincidence.’<br />
<br />
Some few months ago, dear me, over a year, a Chinese Song class submarine, arrived just off the coast of California close to Los Angeles. It fired one ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) of which it carries a dozen, back to a prepared site in Western China.<br />
<br />
It does not require in depth military knowledge or experience to notice that the ICBMs could equally well reach New York or Tampa, FL. <br />
<br />
Jane’s Fighting Ships kindly tracked the progress of the submarine from its home port to Los Angeles. Check their web site.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the Pakistanis, who have a border with China, are less and less likely to take the side of the bombers of their womenfolk gathering sticks for firewood, [it does little to endear one] and much more likely to side with their powerful neighbor; that much seems obvious.<br />
<br />
Water<br />
<br />
<br />
At Antarctica, yes, the opposite pole from the Arctic, down past New Zealand, lies around twenty per cent, one fifth, of all the fresh water on earth, in the form of massive ice sheets. That’s quite a lot of fresh water, by anybody’s reckoning. The Antarctic ice sheet shows distinct signs of breaking up, however. Two massive chunks, each twice the size of Manhattan, broke off a few days ago, a week ago? And the experts (cough) are unanimous that the entire Antarctic ice sheet will disappear, i.e., melt, within a single year, though they are not willing to specify which year.<br />
<br />
The news out of Durban, which was reported in this country as, "There is no news out of Durban," is that the Antarctic Ice Mass is due to come apart within the next few years, and change the sea level by 80-100 feet within a single year. Here are a few city elevations for comparison: <br />
<br />
Washington, D.C., elev. 72'<br />
<br />
New York City, elev. 26'<br />
<br />
Boston, MA, elev. 13'<br />
<br />
Miami, FL, elev. 7'<br />
<br />
Houston, TX, elev. 52'<br />
<br />
New Orleans, LA, elev. 3'<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Shanghai, China, elev. 17'<br />
<br />
Mumbai, India, elev. 33-49'<br />
<br />
Bangkok, Thailand, elev. 7'<br />
<br />
Singapore, elev. < 49'<br />
<br />
Hong Kong, China, elev. sea level<br />
<br />
Dubai, U.A.E., elev. 25'<br />
<br />
Reassuring that Washington, DC will be around longer than any one else? All of Hong Kong goes under right away; that’ll save Mr. Xi Jinping a few problems! <br />
<br />
('Don’t worry about the Sacred Mother. She is a living entity. She will take care of herself. She has but to shrug and things will be righted.')<br />
<br />
The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership.)<br />
<br />
<br />
The Trans Pacific Partnership has been developed in secret by the Obama administration over the last two years; the secrecy was necessary, explained one spokesman, because the plan openly differs from the declared aims of the Obama administration. <br />
<br />
Briefly the plan invites countries to join the scheme, which will openly hand control of every country’s economy to the corporations, who will be able to impose huge fines on countries that put them to the unnecessary trouble of dealing with anti pollution regulations, for example.<br />
<br />
‘Ah, a form of world government,’ someone says. Well, not really, because the rights of individual sovereign countries, to write legislation controlling, or preventing, air or water pollution, for example, will no longer exist. <br />
<br />
(The USA may of course have claimed exemption from the strict implementation of the TPP; who knows? But as it stands the USA has no more right than any other – previously sovereign – country from making any regulation the corporations decide against, the true masters of everything, it turns out, at least in the imaginings of their own hearts. There will be no appeal. )<br />
<br />
Now the claims of terrorist penetration emanating from Washington have become steadily more ludicrous, almost all FBI ‘sting’ operations, but at the same time the demands that this claptrap is accepted and implemented ASAP have become steadily more menacing, and are now in the terminal ‘Agree or we’ll kill you’ stage. <br />
<br />
See ‘Right to kill anyone, anywhere’ below:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/02-10">http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/02-10</a><br />
<br />
Published on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 by Common Dreams Judge: Obama Administration Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone<br />
<br />
Stay issued on Tuesday afternoon deals blow to civil liberties - Common Dreams staff <br />
<br />
On Tuesday afternoon an appeals court stopped an order blocking indefinite detention, siding with the Obama administration's right to indefinitely detain terror suspects.<br />
<br />
First, in its memorandum of law in support of its motion, the government clarifies unequivocally that, 'based on their stated activities,' plaintiffs, 'journalists and activists[,] . . . are in no danger whatsoever of ever being captured and detained by the U.S. military.'<br />
<br />
Second, on its face, the statute does not affect the existing rights of United States citizens or other individuals arrested in the United States. See NDAA § 1021(e) ('Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.').<br />
<br />
Third, the language of the district court's injunction appears to go beyond NDAA § 1021 itself and to limit the government's authority under the Authorization for Use of Military Force...<br />
<br />
Last month U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest declared the law unconstitutional, giving what Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, described as "an unqualified victory for the public." <br />
<br />
But the victory was short lived. The Hill notes that "the Obama administration responded with an emergency motion to stay the injunction, arguing that the court ruling 'threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an active military conflict.'"<br />
<br />
The ruling today extends that temporary stay.<br />
<br />
Note: A claim (French pretendre, to claim) is not the same as established ownership; anyone can claim anything. Under President Bush, the USA claimed ‘ownership of space,’ including one assumes the moon and stars, indeed the entire universe. <br />
<br />
Smoking Helps Protect Against Lung Cancer by Joe Vialls<br />
<br />
<br />
Every year, thousands of medical doctors and other members of the "Anti-Smoking Inquisition" spend billions of dollars perpetuating what has unquestionably become the most misleading though successful social engineering scam in history. With the encouragement of most western governments, these Orwellian lobbyists pursue smokers with a fanatical zeal that completely overshadows the ridiculous American alcohol prohibition debacle, which started in 1919 and lasted until 1933.<br />
<br />
Nowadays we look back on American prohibition with justifiable astonishment.<br />
<br />
Is it really true that an entire nation allowed itself to be denied a beer or scotch by a tiny group of tambourine-bashing fanatics? Sadly, yes it is, despite a total lack of evidence that alcohol causes serious harm to humans, unless consumed in truly large quantities. Alas, the safety of alcohol was of no interest to the tambourine-bashers, for whom control over others was the one and only true goal. Americans were visibly “sinning” by enjoying themselves having a few alcoholic drinks, and the puritans interceded on behalf of God to make them all feel miserable again.<br />
<br />
Although there is no direct link between alcohol and tobacco, the history of American prohibition is important, because it helps us understand how a tiny number of zealots managed to control the behavior and lives of tens of millions of people.<br />
<br />
Nowadays exactly the same thing is happening to smokers, though this time it is at the hands of government zealots and ignorant medical practitioners rather than tambourine-bashing religious fanatics.<br />
<br />
Certain governments know that their past actions are directly responsible for causing most of the lung and skin cancers in the world today, so they go to extreme lengths in trying to deflect responsibility and thus financial liability away from themselves, and onto harmless organic tobacco instead.<br />
<br />
As we will find later in this report, humble organic tobacco has never hurt anyone, and in certain ways can justifiably claim to provide startling health protection.<br />
<br />
Not all governments around the world share the same problem.<br />
<br />
Japan and Greece have the highest numbers of adult cigarette smokers in the world, but the lowest incidence of lung cancer.<br />
<br />
In direct contrast to this, America, Australia, Russia, and some South Pacific island groups have the lowest numbers of adult cigarette smokers in the world, but the highest incidence of lung cancer.<br />
<br />
This is clue number-one in unraveling the absurd but entrenched western medical lie that "smoking causes lung cancer".<br />
<br />
The first European contact with tobacco was in 1492, when Columbus and fellow explorer Rodriguo de Jerez saw natives smoking in Cuba. That very same day, de Jerez took his first puff and found it very relaxing, just as the locals had assured him it would be. This was an important occasion, because Rodriguo de Jerez discovered what the Cubans and native Americans had known for many centuries: that cigar and cigarette smoking is not only relaxing, it also cures coughs and other minor ailments.<br />
<br />
When he returned home, Rodriguo de Jerez proudly lit a cigar in the street, and was promptly arrested and imprisoned for three years by the horrified Spanish Inquisition. De Jerez thus became the first victim of the anti-smoking lobbies. In less than a century, smoking became a much enjoyed and accepted social habit throughout Europe, with thousands of tons of tobacco being imported from the colonies to meet the increasing demand. A growing number of writers praised tobacco as a universal remedy for mankind’s ills.<br />
<br />
By the early 20th Century almost one in every two people smoked, but the incidence of lung cancer remained so low that it was almost not-measurable.<br />
<br />
Then something extraordinary happened on July 16, 1945: a terrifying cataclysmic event that would eventually cause western governments to distort the perception of smoking forever.<br />
<br />
As K. Greisen recalls:<br />
<br />
"When the intensity of the light had diminished, I put away the glass and looked toward the tower directly. At about this time I noticed a blue color surrounding the smoke cloud. Then someone shouted that we should observe the shock wave traveling along the ground. The appearance of this was a brightly lighted circular area, near the ground, slowly spreading out towards us. The color was yellow.<br />
<br />
The permanence of the smoke cloud was one thing that surprised me.<br />
<br />
After the first rapid explosion, the lower part of the cloud seemed to assume a fixed shape and to remain hanging motionless in the air. The upper part meanwhile continued to rise, so that after a few minutes it was at least five miles high. It slowly assumed a zigzag shape because of the changing wind velocity at different altitudes. The smoke had pierced a cloud early in its ascent, and seemed to be completely unaffected by the cloud. "<br />
<br />
This was the notorious "Trinity Test", the first dirty nuclear weapon to be detonated in the atmosphere.<br />
<br />
A six-kilogram sphere of plutonium, compressed to super criticality by explosive lenses, Trinity exploded over New Mexico with a force equal to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.<br />
<br />
Within seconds, billions of deadly radioactive particles were sucked into the atmosphere to an altitude of six miles, where high-speed jet streams could circulate them far and wide. The American Government knew about the radiation in advance, was well aware of its lethal effects on humans, but bluntly ordered the test with a complete disregard for health and welfare.<br />
<br />
In law, this was culpable gross negligence, but the American Government did not care.<br />
<br />
Sooner or later, one way or the other, they would find another culprit for any long-term effects suffered by Americans and other citizens in local and more remote areas.<br />
<br />
Get this:<br />
<br />
If a single microscopic radioactive fallout particle lands on your skin at the beach, you get skin cancer.<br />
<br />
Inhale a single particle of the same lethal muck, and death from lung cancer becomes inevitable, unless you happen to be an exceptionally lucky cigarette smoker.<br />
<br />
The solid microscopic radioactive particle buries itself deep in the lung tissue, completely overwhelms the body’s limited reserves of vitamin B17, and causes rampant uncontrollable cell multiplication.<br />
<br />
How can we be absolutely sure that radioactive fallout particles really cause lung cancer every time a subject is internally exposed?<br />
<br />
For real scientists, as opposed to medical quacks and government propagandists, this is not a problem. For any theory to be accepted scientifically, it must first be proven in accordance with rigorous requirements universally agreed by scientists.<br />
<br />
First the suspect radioactive agent must be isolated, then used in properly controlled laboratory experiments to produce the claimed result, i.e. lung cancer in mammals. Scientists have ruthlessly sacrificed tens of thousands of mice and rats in this way over the years, deliberately subjecting their lungs to radioactive matter. The documented scientific results of these various experiments are identical. Every mouse or rat obediently contracts lung cancer, and every mouse or rat then dies.<br />
<br />
Theory has thus been converted to hard scientific fact under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. The suspect agent (radioactive matter) caused the claimed result (lung cancer) when inhaled by mammals.<br />
<br />
The overall magnitude of lung cancer risk to humans from atmospheric radioactive fallout cannot be overstated.<br />
<br />
Before Russia, Britain and America outlawed atmospheric testing on August 5, 1963, more than 4,200 kilograms of plutonium had been discharged into the atmosphere.<br />
<br />
Because we know that less than one microgram (millionth of a single gram) of inhaled plutonium causes terminal lung cancer in a human, we therefore know that your friendly government has lofted 4,200,000,000 (4.2 Billion) lethal doses into the atmosphere, with particle radioactive half-life a minimum of 50,000 years.<br />
<br />
Frightening?<br />
<br />
Unfortunately it gets worse. The plutonium mentioned above exists in the actual nuclear weapon before detonation, but by far the greatest number of deadly radioactive particles are those derived from common dirt or sand sucked up from the ground, and irradiated while travelling vertically through the weapon’s fireball.<br />
<br />
These particles form by far the largest part of the "smoke" in any photo of an atmospheric nuclear detonation. In most cases several tons of material are sucked up and permanently irradiated in transit, but let us be incredibly conservative and claim that only 1,000 kilograms of surface material is sucked up by each individual atmospheric nuclear test. Before being banned by Russia, Britain, and America, a total of 711 atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted, thereby creating 711,000 kilograms of deadly microscopic radioactive particles, to which must be added the original 4,200 kilograms from the weapons themselves, for a gross though very conservative total of 715,200 kilograms.<br />
<br />
There are more than a million lethal doses per kilogram, meaning that your governments have contaminated your atmosphere with more than 715,000,000,000 [715 Billion] such doses, enough to cause lung or skin cancer 117 times in every man, woman and child on earth. Before you ask, no, the radioactive particles do not just "fade away", at least not in your lifetime or that of your children and grandchildren.<br />
<br />
With a half-life of 50,000 years or longer, these countless trillions of deadly government-manufactured radioactive particles are essentially with you forever.<br />
<br />
Circulated around the world by powerful jet streams, these particles are deposited at random, though in higher concentrations within a couple of thousand miles of the original test sites. A simple wind or other surface disturbance is all that is needed to stir them up again and create enhanced dangers for those in the vicinity. The once-innocent activity of playfully kicking sand around on the beach in summer could nowadays easily translate to suicide, if you happen to stir up a few radioactive particles that could stick to your skin or be inhaled into your lungs.<br />
<br />
Stop poking fun at Michael Jackson when he appears at your local airport wearing a surgical mask over his nose and mouth. He may look eccentric, but Michael will almost certainly outlive most of us. Twelve years after the cataclysmic Trinity test, it became obvious to western governments that things were getting completely out of control, with a 1957 British Medical Research Council report stating that global "deaths from lung cancer have more than doubled during the period 1945 to 1955", though no explanation was offered.<br />
<br />
During the same ten-year period, cancer deaths in the immediate proximity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up threefold.<br />
<br />
By the end of official atmospheric testing in 1963, the incidence of lung cancer in the Pacific Islands had increased fivefold since 1945.<br />
<br />
Having screwed your environment completely for 50,000 years, it was time for "big government" to start taking heavy diversionary action. How could people be proved to be causing themselves to contract lung cancer, i.e. be said to be guilty of a self inflicted injury for which government could never be blamed or sued?<br />
<br />
The only obvious substance that people inhaled into their lungs, apart from air, was tobacco smoke, so the government boot was put in. Poorly qualified medical "researchers" suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with massive government grants all aimed at achieving the same end-result: "Prove that smoking causes lung cancer".<br />
<br />
Real scientists (especially some notable nuclear physicists) smiled grimly at the early pathetic efforts of the fledgling anti-smoking lobby, and lured them into the deadliest trap of all.<br />
<br />
The quasi-medical researchers were invited to prove their false claims under exactly the same rigid scientific rules that were used when proving that radioactive particles cause lung cancer in mammals. Remember, for any theory to be accepted scientifically, it must first be proven in accordance with rigorous requirements universally agreed by scientists.<br />
<br />
First the suspect agent (tobacco smoke) must be isolated, and then used in properly controlled laboratory experiments to produce the claimed result, i.e. lung cancer in mammals. Despite exposing literally tens of thousands of especially vulnerable mice and rats to the equivalent of 200 cigarettes per day for years on end, "medical science" has never once managed to induce lung cancer in any mouse or rat.<br />
<br />
Yes, you did read that correctly.<br />
<br />
For more than forty years, hundreds of thousands of medical doctors have been deliberately lying to you. The real scientists had the quasi medical researchers by the throat, because "pairing" the deadly radioactive particle experiment with the benign tobacco smoke experiment, proved conclusively for all time that smoking cannot under any circumstances cause lung cancer.<br />
<br />
And further, in one large "accidental" experiment they were never allowed to publish, the real scientists proved with startling clarity that smoking actually helps to protect against lung cancer. All mice and rats are used one-time-only in a specific experiment, and then destroyed. In this way researchers ensure that the results of whatever substance they are testing cannot be accidentally "contaminated" by the real or imagined effects of another substance.<br />
<br />
Then one day as if by magic, a few thousand mice from the smoking experiment "accidentally" found their way into the radioactive particle experiment, which in the past had killed every single one of its unfortunate test subjects. But this time, completely against the odds, sixty percent of the smoking mice survived exposure to the radioactive particles.<br />
<br />
The only variable was their prior exposure to copious quantities of tobacco smoke.<br />
<br />
'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Vishnu, Bhagavad-Gita<br />
<br />
Government pressure was immediately brought to bear and the facts suppressed, but this did not completely silence the real scientists.<br />
<br />
Tongue in cheek perhaps, Professor Schrauzer, President of the International Association of Bio-Inorganic Chemists, testified before a U.S. congressional committee in 1982 that it had long been well known to scientists that certain constituents of tobacco smoke act as anti-carcinogens (anti-cancer agents) in test animals.<br />
<br />
He continued that when known carcinogens (cancer causing substances) are applied to the animals, the application of constituents of cigarette smoke counter them. <br />
<br />
Nor did Professor Schrauzer stop there. He further testified on oath to the committee that "no ingredient of cigarette smoke has been shown to cause human lung cancer", adding that "no-one has been able to produce lung cancer in laboratory animals from smoking."<br />
<br />
It was a neat answer to a rather perplexing problem. If government blocks publication of your scientific paper, take the alternate route and put the essential facts on the written congressional record! Predictably, this hard truth drove the government and quasi medical "researchers" into a frenzy of rage. By 1982 they had actually started to believe their own ridiculous propaganda, and were not to be silenced by eminent members of the scientific establishment.<br />
<br />
Quite suddenly they switched the blame to other "secret" ingredients put into cigarettes by the tobacco companies. "Yes, that must be it!" they clamored eagerly, until a handful of scientists got on the phone and pointed out that these same "secret" ingredients had been included in the mice experiments, and had therefore also been proved incapable of causing lung cancer.<br />
<br />
Things were looking desperate for government and the medical community overall.<br />
<br />
Since the anti-smoking funding had started in the early sixties, tens of thousands of medical doctors had passed through medical school, where they had been taught that smoking causes lung cancer.<br />
<br />
Most believed the lie, but cracks were starting to appear in the paintwork. Even the dullest of straight "C" doctors could not really make the data correlate, and when they queried it were told not to ask stupid questions.<br />
<br />
"Smoking causes lung cancer" converted to a creed, a quasi religious belief mechanism where blind faith became a substitute for proof. Even blind faith needs a system of positive reinforcement, which in this case became the advertising agencies and the media.<br />
<br />
Suddenly the television screens were flooded with images of terribly blackened "smoker’s lungs", with the accompanying mantra that you will die in horrible agony if you don’t quit now.<br />
<br />
It was all pathetic rubbish of course.<br />
<br />
On the mortuary slab the lungs of a smoker and non-smoker look an identical pink, and the only way a forensic pathologist can tell you might have been a smoker, is if he finds heavy stains of nicotine on your fingers, a packet of Camels or Marlboro in your coat pocket, or if one of your relatives unwisely admits on the record that you once smoked the demon weed.<br />
<br />
The black lungs?<br />
<br />
From a coal miner, who throughout his working life breathed in copious quantities of microscopic black coal dust particles.<br />
<br />
Just like radioactive particles they get caught deep in the tissue of the lungs and stay there forever.<br />
<br />
If you worked down the coal mines for twenty or more years without a face mask, your lungs will probably look like this on the slab.<br />
<br />
Many people ask exactly how it is that those smoking mice were protected from deadly radioactive particles, and even more are asking why real figures nowadays are showing far more non-smokers dying from lung cancer than smokers.<br />
<br />
Professor Sterling of the Simon Fraser University in Canada is perhaps closest to the truth, where he uses research papers to reason that smoking promotes the formation of a thin mucous layer in the lungs, "which forms a protective layer stopping any cancer-carrying particles from entering the lung tissue." This is probably as close as we can get to the truth at present, and it does make perfect scientific sense.<br />
<br />
Deadly radioactive particles inhaled by a smoker would initially be trapped by the mucous layer, and then be ejected from the body before they could enter the tissue. All of this may be a bit depressing for non-smokers, but there are probably one or two things you can do to minimize the risks as far as possible.<br />
<br />
Rather than shy away from smokers in your local pub or club, get as close as you can and breathe in their expensive second-hand smoke.<br />
<br />
Go on, don’t be shy, suck in a few giant breaths. Or perhaps you could smoke one cigarette or small cigar after each meal, just three a day to build up a thin boundary mucous layer."<br />
<br />
More research info:<br />
<br />
Yale Research on lung cancer:<br />
<br />
"...A similar result was obtained by Feinstein, in a study conducted at the Yale University School of Medicine, and published in September, 1986, in the Archives of Internal Medicine 26 . Researchers at Yale obtained records on 3,286 adults who had died between 1971 and 1982. 153 of these patients were found, upon autopsy, to have died of lung cancer. The researchers then went back and obtained the death certificates for these 153 patients and attempted to obtain information about their smoking habits. For 13 patients, adequate smoking information was not available, so they were thrown out of the survey. The researchers reported, however, that out of these 13 patients, seven had been correctly diagnosed as having lung cancer during life, but 6 had not.<br />
<br />
Working with the remaining 140 cases, it turned out that there were 37 "surprise" cases of lung cancer, i.e., cases which had not been correctly diagnosed during life. 57% of these cases involved non-smokers; 30% involved moderate smokers; but only 16% involved heavy smokers. The researchers concluded that there was a detection bias; that doctors were very ready to diagnose lung cancer in a smoker; very reluctant to make the diagnosis in a non-smoker."<br />
<br />
I know, these above not to be all documented and referenced facts as you and I would like to see. But there is enough information above to make your brain "look" at reality, at least for the time being, in a different way.<br />
<br />
Dismissing every non-standard view of reality is antiquated as burning Giordano Bruno or Galileo as they ventured to differ in their views of how things really were.<br />
<br />
So, the goal here, is not to uncover a conspiracy against us by world governments, but to question and challenge the assumed view we have on this reality issue from a radically different angle.<br />
<br />
Exercising your brain and questioning your sacred and deepest mental views on reality, is always healthy. The more so, if you are trying to understand, anticipate and possibly change the future to come.<br />
<br />
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/02-10<br />
<br />
<br />
Published on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 by Common Dreams Judge: Obama Administration Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone<br />
<br />
Stay issued on Tuesday afternoon deals blow to civil liberties - Common Dreams staff <br />
<br />
On Tuesday afternoon an appeals court stopped an order blocking indefinite detention, siding with the Obama adminstration's right to indefinitely detain terror suspects.<br />
<br />
First, in its memorandum of law in support of its motion, the government clarifies unequivocally that, 'based on their stated activities,' plaintiffs, 'journalists and activists[,] . . . are in no danger whatsoever of ever being captured and detained by the U.S. military.'<br />
<br />
Second, on its face, the statute does not affect the existing rights of United States citizens or other individuals arrested in the United States. See NDAA § 1021(e) ('Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.').<br />
<br />
Third, the language of the district court's injunction appears to go beyond NDAA § 1021 itself and to limit the government's authority under the Authorization for Use of Military Force...<br />
<br />
Last month U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest declared the law unconstitutional, giving what Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, described as "an unqualified victory for the public." <br />
<br />
But the victory was short lived. The Hill notes that "the Obama administration responded with an emergency motion to stay the injunction, arguing that the court ruling 'threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an active military conflict.'"<br />
<br />
The ruling today extends that temporary stay.<br />
<br />
<br />There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”<br />
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This too will pass</div>
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-78404578767268446042012-07-28T19:09:00.001-07:002012-07-28T19:09:19.462-07:00Abolishing warhttp://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2012/07/14/abolishing-war-one-last-step/<br />
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Abolishing War: One Last Step By: David Swanson Saturday July 14, 2012 7:30 pm Remarks delivered at Peacestock 2012<br />
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I want to thank Bill Habedank for inviting me here and everyone who’s been involved in setting up this wonderful event, which ought to be replicated all over this country. Almost our entire population claims to favor peace. At least three quarters of us favor getting the U.S. military out of Afghanistan and ending that particular war, which by the way isn’t ending. When carefully surveyed and shown what the federal budget is, a large majority of U.S. residents favors cutting huge amounts of money out of the military and putting it to better use.<br />
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But those doing anything about peace as part of a peace movement are a tiny fraction of a percent of the country. I have been lucky enough to see some of my cousins from this part of the country on this trip, and one of them referred to me as her famous cousin who speaks at events and writes books. There are others here much more famous than I within our little movement. But I’m willing to bet at least 99% of the country has never heard of any of us. Maybe the wonderful Coleen Rowley who made it onto the cover of Time Magazine. Maybe a few others.<br />
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Thank you also to Veterans For Peace for being the best peace organization I know of, and to its president Leah Bolger for being here. Leah and I and some others here were occupying Washington, D.C., last fall, and I’ve just now finally had criminal charges that were brought against me for speaking in a public hearing in the U.S. Senate dropped this week, just in time to hang out with the good people of Peacestock, which brings a certain risk of arrest in itself. Raise your hand if you’re an undercover law enforcement officer.<br />
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That’s all right. But please pay attention, because I’m going to be talking about some laws that are going unenforced. When I say our movement is small, I don’t mean it’s entirely without influence. And it was much bigger back in 2005 and 2006, when those who oppose wars had, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, those who oppose Republican wars. There is a big gap, however, between those who oppose all wars, and those who oppose particular wars, be it for partisan or other reasons. President Obama used to oppose dumb wars. We came to find out he favors imbecilic wars, because there are more syllables involved. The thing is, people who oppose particular wars don’t usually put as much energy into it as people who oppose all war. Perhaps they’re hoping that a bad war will evolve into a good war, perhaps by escalating it, perhaps by electing a different president — or maybe they just have other priorities.<br />
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The title for my remarks today is “Abolishing War: One Last Step.” I’m willing to bet that even we in the peace movement are fairly unaware of some of the previous steps. In St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a house listed as a National Historic Landmark because Frank Kellogg lived there. There’s also a Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul. But Kellogg’s grave is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Frank Kellogg had a long career, but there is one thing he did, and only one thing he did that made his house historic, named a boulevard for him, and put his ashes in the National Cathedral. I’m willing to bet most people living near St. Paul don’t have the slightest idea what it was. Do you? Raise your hand if you know. And please don’t say he invented corn flakes.<br />
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Well, this is not a typical crowd. All the children are above average here. And yet, some of us don’t know.<br />
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Frank Kellogg was a pudgy, five-foot-six, Republican lawyer with a glass eye and hands that shook. He was not one to turn down a drink, prohibition or no prohibition, and he was best known for his fiery temper and the use of language that the FCC would not have tolerated. Kellogg was 70 years old in 1927. He’d been a trust buster. He’d been president of the American Bar Association. He’d been a U.S. senator from the great state of Minnesota. He’d voted in favor of entering World War I and against the League of Nations, but in support of pulling U.S. troops out of Russia.<br />
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Come 1927, when Kellogg was 70 years old, he was the U.S. Secretary of State. During his tenure, the U.S. Marines went into Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and Kellogg threatened Mexico with war in the interest of U.S. corporations. Kellogg lacked any big following of supporters among the people or the elites. H.L. Mencken called him –quote — a “doddering political hack from the cow country.” I apologize to all the cows around here. Kellogg himself had unkind words for others. In 1927, he called the French a bunch of bleep bleep fools. But Kellogg added that those he hated most were the bleepity bleep bleep pacifists.<br />
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In 1928, Kellogg worked night and day to do exactly what the pacifists told him to do. He brought most of the powerful nations of the world together and created a treaty banning all use of war. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, known as the Kellogg-Briand pact. (The vote was 85-1, with the 1 being a senator from Wisconsin who apparently wanted a stronger treaty, but who was censured by the Wisconsin legislature for his vote.) Briand was the French foreign minister, with whom Kellogg had worked on the treaty.<br />
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Frank Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Briand already had one. This was in the pre-World War II days when the Nobel Committee still paid some attention to the requirements of Alfred Nobel’s will, including that recipients of the prize have worked for the abolition or reduction of standing armies. Quick, can you name the last Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had worked to abolish standing armies? I think there have only been a handful in recent years who would have even stood for the idea, even in theory, much less have worked to advance it in reality.<br />
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Most groups, clubs, projects, etc., that promote peace today propose finding peace in our hearts. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s remark: I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. Well, I don’t want to achieve peace through my heart. I want to achieve peace through ending war and abolishing armies.<br />
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Left to his own devices, Frank Kellogg would have had nothing to do with peace. But in 1927 there was a major peace movement in this country, united around an idea pushed by a Chicago lawyer named Salmon Oliver Levinson. The movement was called the Outlawry Movement, and the goal was to outlaw war. As slavery and blood feuds and dueling had been abolished, so would war be. And the first step would be stigmatizing war as no longer legal. Remember, war was not against the law. Nobody was prosecuted for World War I or any other war, because war making was not a crime. Particular atrocities could be crimes, but not war itself. Levinson opposed what we might call anachronistically the NATO model of banning war, in which the primary tool for preventing war is, of course, war. There were isolationist strains in the U.S. peace movement after the disaster of World War I that echo in some of today’s libertarians. Agreeing with various allies to all go to war if one of them went to war was not a recipe for peace. The Outlawrists’ plan was to make war illegal, to establish written international law and courts for settling international disputes, and to move world culture beyond acceptance of war.<br />
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Duelling had been done away with, said Levinson, and not just aggressive duelling. We didn’t keep defensive duelling around. We set the whole barbaric procedure behind us. Thus must it be with war. The Outlawrists did not distinguish good or just wars from bad or unjust wars, any more than we distinguish just cases of rape, good uses of slavery, or humanitarian cases of genocide. War was the most evil thing created, and arranging to end war by means of war left everyone preparing for more war. So, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced all war.<br />
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There’s a song from 1950 — maybe we can sing it later — that begins “Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men….” That scene had actually happened on August 27, 1928, with the signing of the Peace Pact. It was probably the biggest news story that year. This is not secret CIA history I’m describing. Raise your hand if you’re with the CIA. Well, thank you for coming anyway. No, this is forgotten history, intentionally buried history. Frank Goetz, who may be here, and others are pushing to have August 27th made a holiday.<br />
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After the Pact was signed, nations stopped recognizing claims of war, gains of territory made through war. Wars were prevented and halted. The world turned against the horror of war, at least war among wealthy nations. Colonizing poor nations was still very much acceptable. And when World War II happened, Roosevelt directed that the Kellogg Briand Pact be used to prosecute the Germans and the Japanese for the brand new crime of making war. And they were thus prosecuted. And the rich nations never went to war with each other again, at least not yet. Europe, amazingly, finally stopped attacking itself. But the common interpretation became the bizarre notion that Kellogg-Briand had been erased by its failure to prevent World War II. Imagine setting up a legal ban on anything else, and then tossing it into the trash the first time it was violated, and while simultaneously enforcing it. I suppose the Ten Commandments, by that logic, must have been erased by being violated quite some time back now. After World War II the Peace Pact was twisted to prosecute aggressive war, rather than simply war, and it was imposed as victor’s justice. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as written, remained on the books, as it remains on the U.S. State Department’s website. Ssh. Don’t tell Hillary.<br />
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This week Ralph Nader published a list of 11 books that he thinks everyone should read, and one of them was my book “When the World Outlawed War,” which tells this story. It’s probably the shortest on the list, too, so you can read it tonight and only have 10 books left to go.<br />
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World War II was the worst event that has occurred on planet earth, but trends away from war and violence observable in recent centuries continued. New institutions and cultural habits reinforced this. But legally, the U.N. Charter took a step back from Kellogg-Briand by sanctioning wars if they are defensive or U.N.-approved. An example of a defensive war would be the 2003 attack on the impoverished unarmed nation of Iraq thousands of miles from our shores. An example of a UN-approved war would be the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of its government. The UN had authorized a cease-fire, and NATO decided that was the same thing as authorizing bombing of the capital until the president was killed. In other words, the two loopholes opened up by the UN Charter have permitted unlimited warmaking and erased from our culture the idea that war is a crime.<br />
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The Geneva Conventions played their part as well, by establishing the idea that wars could be legal if conducted in a particular manner. The Conventions of 1949 look absurd today, as they distinguish participants in war from civilians. Wars today are not fought on distant battlefields, but in inhabited towns. Should those who fight back really lose legal protection? The Conventions do outline permissible conduct for occupying armies, but they require that the occupiers care for the occupied population much better than our governments care for their own populations back home. Of course, nobody takes seriously the idea of complying with this. Governments are permitted to kill huge numbers of civilians, but the killing has to be an accidental, even though foreseeable, byproduct of an effort to kill even bigger numbers of non-civilians or to accomplish some other military objective, such as gaining control over the civilians and non-civilians alike, should they manage to remain alive. Under this rigorous legal standard, José Luis Moreno Ocampo, prosecutor for the ICC — or what I like to call the ICCA, the International Criminal Court for Africans — found the U.S. slaughter of Iraqis to be legal, regardless of the fact that the United Nations had found the invasion of Iraq itself, the greater purpose at stake, to be illegal. The Catholic Church no longer sells indulgences, I suspect because it just can’t compete with the United Nations.<br />
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And if the Geneva Conventions weren’t bad enough, we created the CIA and NATO. While the world has turned against war, the United States has created a war-based economy with huge permanent standing armies standing in our own and most other countries around the globe. We’ve empowered a military industrial complex beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmares. In the 1920s war could be blamed on Europe. Now opposing war is almost treasonous. We’ve given presidents such powers that the Declaration of Independence would have to be three times as long if we were to attempt a new overthrow of tyranny. We’ve legalized election bribery, concentrated almost all our wealth in a very few hands, and in most cases swallowed whole the obvious lie that activism can have no impact. We face collapse of representative government, of civil liberties, of our natural environment, of our culture. We face nuclear apocalypse, weapons proliferation, and a vicious cycle of countering terrorism with precisely the policies that produce terrorism.<br />
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Last fall I helped organize a conference of experts on various areas of damage being done by the military industrial complex, resulting in the book, “The Military Industrial Complex at 50.” We concluded that this monster, guarded by patriotism, McCarthyism, and financial corruption, is the number one opponent of most campaigns for things decent and good, certainly of campaigns against poverty, for education, against homelessness, for civil rights, against environmental destruction, for peace and prosperity. It’s not a coincidence that the United States spends several times the next approaching country on the military while trailing a great many countries in measures of education, health, security, and happiness. If every movement that should rightfully be targeting the military industrial complex were to do so, it would fall. We would convert, retrain, retool, and prosper. But it’s difficult for narrow interests to act on the big picture. Why should the ACLU oppose the military funding that produces the drone strikes and torture cells, when it can oppose the drone strikes and torture cells indefinitely? Why should the Sierra Club oppose the single largest consumer of oil when it can oppose institutions completely lacking flags and hero-worship?<br />
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When we tried to impeach or prosecute Bush or Cheney, well, two things. First, one of the best activists we had was Daniel Fearn who is now doing poorly in a hospital in Minneapolis. I bet a bunch of you know him. I hope you’ll visit him. Can we all applaud the great work that Daniel Fearn did?<br />
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Second, when we tried to impeach Bush and Cheney, we were often told we hated those men or acted on partisan interests, and I always replied that if Bush was not punished for his crimes, the next president would do worse. It wouldn’t matter whether the next president was black or white, male or female, Republican or Democratic. It would only matter whether power still corrupted and whether absolute power still corrupted absolutely. As it turns out, nothing has happened to change that rule. The illicit abuses of Bush are now open and official policy. We’re spied on without warrants and can be locked up without charges, tortured without consequences, and sent to war without Congress. Our president keeps a list of nominees for being murdered. It includes Americans and non-Americans, children and adults. He works his way down the list. He says it costs him not a moment’s worry. He jokes about it to the White House Press Corpse, and they laugh it up. And we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and our souls ripped out registering voters for him because we don’t want to risk having a racist put in charge of our national program of murdering dark skinned Muslims. Even while peace activists have their homes raided by the FBI. Sometimes when we speak out we’re told that we must be in the pay of the Mitt Romney campaign. The irony of the you’re-trying-to-help-Romney-win response to criticism of our current government is that if Romney does win then the people using that line will themselves start objecting to presidential abuses, but it will be too late.<br />
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Meanwhile, the U.S. military is bigger than ever, in more nations than ever, more privatized than ever, more profitable than ever, more secretive than ever, more at odds with more of the world than ever, and more recklessly than we’ve seen in decades antagonizing both Russia and China for no good reason whatsoever. I don’t consider the fact that Russian fossil fuels with which to destroy our atmosphere will become more readily available as our destroyed atmosphere melts the ice a good reason. Nor do I consider the fact that China owns our grandchildren’s unearned wages a good reason. We just discovered how large a part the U.S. is playing in destroying the nation of Mali when three U.S. Special Forces troops drove off a bridge, killing themselves and three prostitutes. Have you ever wondered what makes special forces special? The only thing I can see that makes them special is that someone whispers in their ears: “You don’t have to obey any laws.” But that’s becoming less and less special in Washington these days.<br />
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just over in Laos helping to expand the U.S. Asian presence, but — as Fred Branfman pointed out — not seriously attempting to pick up the 80 million cluster bombs the U.S. left in Laos where they continue to kill and maim. Clinton opposes signing the Cluster Bomb Treaty, even though 111 countries have signed it, and cluster bombs serve very little humanitarian purpose, unless you count blowing the legs off children as humanitarian.<br />
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Alliant Tech Systems, which as moved to Virginia but is also still here in Minnesota, makes money off cluster bombs. It could make that money off something decent if it chose.<br />
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Clinton met a young man in Laos whose hand she couldn’t shake. Phongsavath Souliyalat lost both his hands and his eyesight when a friend handed him a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday while walking home from school. These bombs have killed 20,000 farmers and their children since the bombing ended in 1973. Clinton is lobbying other nations against the treaty banning cluster bombs. The United States has used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and as recently as June 7, 2010, when we used them to kill 35 women and children in Yemen. A journalist reported on that horror, and Obama ordered the president of Yemen to lock him up, calling into question why Obama doesn’t order other people in Yemen locked up rather than killing them and whoever’s too close to them with missiles.<br />
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In Laos this week Clinton said, “We have to do more. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.” But she’s not investing a fraction in bomb clean up of what she’s putting into a new embassy in Laos. The lesson of 1927 is that what she does next was not determined by the genes she was born with. Clinton could be Kissinger or she could be Kellogg, depending on what we do. Kellogg, after all, would never have been Kellogg if peace activists hadn’t forced him to.<br />
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We have a harder task today, I admit. We’re up against the military industrial complex, and we’re up against the idea of humanitarian war.<br />
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Humanitarian war makes as much sense as a benevolent hurricane or a charitable looting. Humanitarian war is based on the following premises:<br />
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1. There are evil things happening in the world.<br />
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2. We can do nothing or we can bomb people. There are no other options.<br />
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The conclusion, of course, is that we must bomb people. But the second premise is faulty. Nonviolent assaults on tyranny are far more successful and long-lasting than violent ones. Even more effective is refraining from funding and empowering the tyrants for decades prior to switching sides, or what is called “intervening.” Turning to violence amounts to deciding that the times have gotten tough and we must therefore resort to a less effective tool much less likely to succeed. That many want to do so suggests other motivations, some of them not very flattering. The same is suggested by blatant inconsistency. In Bahrain we send over our top cops to lead the skull-cracking. In Syria we aid murderous terrorists and child soldiers in the name of human rights, working with such models of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. By “we” I mean, of course, the regime in Washington. Governments are beyond reproach, and regimes can be overthrown, so we should probably call them all regimes. Washington is quite open about wanting to overthrow the Syrian government or regime because of its ties to the Iranian government or regime. It is much less forthcoming, however, about how doing so would work out any better than Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Philippines, and so on.<br />
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That wars must be marketed as humanitarian is a sign of progress. That we fall for it is a sign of embarrassing weakness. The war propagandist is the world’s second oldest profession, and the humanitarian lie is not entirely new. But it works in concert with other common war lies, some of which used to be more dominant. I tried to collect them all in my book “War Is A Lie.” A few major themes are:<br />
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First, that only war will address the incredible evil of the chosen enemy, almost always an enemy made more evil by racism and other forms or bigotry and distancing.<br />
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Second, that war is a form of defense, even if we provoked the enemy’s attack, even if the enemy hasn’t attacked, even if the enemy is incapable of attacking, even if the enemy hasn’t yet thought to develop the capacity to attack. We’re one step ahead, that’s how smart we are.<br />
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Third, that war is a generous sacrifice, the noblest deed imaginable, something so beautiful it ought to be multiplied a thousand fold, and so we only go to war as an absolute last resort in order to benefit the evil dark people who need to be wiped off the face of the earth.<br />
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It doesn’t matter if the reasons for war conflict. It doesn’t matter if they change through the course of a war. If an individual believes that the war makers mean well — these being the same politicians that nobody would trust as far as they could throw them on any other topic, and if he believes that warriors are heroes who must be cheered for no matter what they do, and if he takes some vicarious pleasure in the primitive notion that lashing out makes him safe, then it doesn’t much matter what the pretense is. Let some back war as philanthropy and others as enlightened genocide, as long as enough of them back it or tolerate it, it will get started. And once started, it must be continued for the sake of the soldiers doing most of the killing and a little bit of the dying.<br />
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In Afghanistan, the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. Continuing a war so that our troops will not have been killing themselves in vain brings a new level of blindness to the question of what types of destructive madness are simply and unavoidably in vain. Of course, U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to spread democracy, while the vast majority of U.S. residents oppose keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the casus belli has been assassinated and given a proper Muslim sea burial, according to our president, who occasionally brags about such killings while refusing to officially say whether they exist. He has said, however, that we’re leaving Afghanistan, and the primary way in which we’re leaving is, oddly enough, by staying, at least for the next two and a half years, after which we’re staying in an unspecified smaller way for another 10 years. Then we’ll see.<br />
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Will the third poorest nation in the world be able to keep fighting off our loving embrace, night raids, and drone strikes for 12.5 more years? It will if we keep paying for it. Imagine how many of that last 25 percent of Americans would turn against this war if they knew they were paying for both sides of it while their schools and fire stations and ecosystems collapse. A report by the congressional Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, found that $360 million per year was being handed over by the Pentagon to insurgent groups or their warlord front men for the safe passage of truck convoys carrying US military supplies, from one trucking contract alone. We’re paying for permission to drive down roads without being shot at. What a war! Imagine if the British had thought of that in 1776. Maybe we could still be colonies.<br />
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We don’t need to abandon Afghans, or Libyans, or Syrians, or for that matter Bahrainis or Saudis. But effective financial aid and reparations would support nonviolence and independence. As Ralph Lopez has been pointing out, there are good examples of humanitarian programs in Afghanistan that could be built on. Most foreign aid, however, is a scam, with 40 to 50 percent never reaching Afghanistan. Aid profiteers rival war profiteers in their greed, while 60 percent of Afghan children are in various stages of starvation and 23 froze to death last winter outside Kabul. And half the so-called aid money has gone to training soldiers and police. I remember the late Richard Holbrooke telling Congress that civilian operations in Afghanistan were subordinate to the military. That dooms them to failure, and Afghans to suffering.<br />
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I went to Afghanistan last year with Kathy Kelly and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I met there a man named Hakim who has organized a group called Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Last week I heard from Kathy that he wanted to visit the United States but had been denied a visa. So, Voices and Global Exchange and Fellowship of Reconciliation and the group I work for RootsAction.org flooded the State Department with emails and calls. And they reversed their decision and gave Hakim a visa. He’ll be here soon. Sometimes our voice is loud enough. Other times it’s just one tiny little whisper short and we imagine it’s nowhere close.<br />
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Our voice was loud in 2005 and 2006. It was loud enough to prevent an attack on Iran in 2007. We’ve been helping to hold off an attack on Iran for years, since our 1953 overthrow of its government and our aid to Iraq in killing Iranians in the 1980s. Now we hear that Iran may have nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons facilities, or nuclear weapons program capabilities, and Iran was behind 9-11, and Iran is criminally threatening to put up a fight if attacked again, plus Iran hired a Mexican drug gang to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. and then called it off just to make us look bad for catching them. There’s no limit to the Iranians’ evil, which is why we should take an action that the war proponents themselves say would fail on its own terms. Bombing Iran would do no more than the murderous sanctions already in place or the assassinations of scientists already committed to overthrow the government. And for the U.S. to allow Israel to attack Iran would only fool people in a single nation: ours. Iran would strike back at U.S. troops, and it would be a U.S. war by day two.<br />
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War is not just reserved for poor nations now, but it has — in other ways — changed almost beyond recognition. Mostly the elderly and children die in wars now, mostly civilians. The wars happen where they live. Almost entirely non-Americans die in U.S. wars. Sometimes the U.S. warriors are seated in air-conditioned offices in the United States. Drones are better than armies, someone told me recently, because with drones nobody gets killed. Imagine the terror produced by the buzzing of a drone over your house night and day, able to take your life and the lives of your loved ones at any moment. But don’t bother to protest. You’re nobody. You’re not listed in the war casualty reports in U.S. newspapers. When drones kill, nobody dies, and you — you 95 percent of humanity — you are nobody. Harold Koh says that bombing houses is neither a war nor hostilities, under the War Powers Act. Unless Americans are under the bombs, they are not hostile bombs. Perhaps they are friendly bombs, or bombs that are good for people whether they know it or not.<br />
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The military now wants to give medals to drone pilots. I picture them as bronzed joy sticks. I actually think there’s something unfair about this idea. I think our brave drones themselves should be getting the medals. They show the absolute least hesitation to kill. Or what about the ants fighting in my back yard? They sacrifice their lives and abandon their comrades with complete efficiency. If we’re handing out medals for desk jobs, what about the guys who pay the protection fees on Afghan roads? Or the guy who catches Petraeus when he faints in Congressional hearings? Why should some people get medals and others not? “War will exist,” wrote John F. Kennedy, “until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” Therefore, I say, scrap all the medals except for those who refuse to fight.<br />
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The key, I think, to getting to that distant day when resisters are honored and warriors are not, is that we stop justifying or ignoring mass-murder. The deaths of 95 percent of the victims of our wars are the most closely guarded secret. The deaths of so-called civilians, of those not understood to be fighting back in defense of their homes, of those not male or fighting age. (Fighting-age males are posthumously declared combatants whenever our government kills them). This is the most forbidden information, because it brings down the war machine. The war machine depends for its existence on being something other than murder on a larger scale, even as it strives to reduce itself to exactly murder on a recognizable scale. Our sacred troops are the war machine’s best defense, since whatever they do must be brave and therefore good. And yet some of those troops are the gravest threat, not only because they can refuse to fight, or can speak out in opposition, but because some of them persist in producing videos and photos of themselves posing with, mutilating, and urinating on the bodies of people they kill.<br />
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And then we’re told to be outraged by the urination. But when you get outraged that someone has peed on the body of a man they just murdered, what does that convey about your attitude toward the murder itself? Surely most of us would object more to being killed than to being peed on after we’re dead.<br />
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The forbidden thought is that all killing is regrettable, immoral, and criminal. This is the thought of which Lockheed Martin, David Petraeus, General Electric, Buck McKeon, and your neighbors are frightened.<br />
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It’s all right to call a war a failure and the failure a SNAFU and incompetence the order of the day. The military money machine can generate even more money out of that. It could have done better with another trillion or two to spend.<br />
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It’s all right to point out the injustice, hypocrisy, and shame in our society’s treatment of veterans after they’ve served their war-making purpose. People can devote their time and energy to bake sales for veterans’ needs. That only furthers the acceptance of war in many minds, while a few are awakened. And the Pentagon can shift to fighting its wars with robots.<br />
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It’s all right to point out the economic trade-offs at stake, the standard of living we could have if we gave up some bombers and some billionaires. I make this point all the time. A few will understand, but the military industrial complex will counter by calling itself a jobs program and threatening congress members with unemployment in their districts.<br />
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What is not all right is finding out that our wars are one-sided slaughters of helpless families, and that over a million Iraqis lie dead in a devastated society where the first question any mother asks in areas poisoned by our weapons is “Is it normal?”<br />
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Veterans For Peace put out a statement last week in response to a United Nations communication to the U.S. government expressing concerns about our country’s treatment of children in war. Included were concerns about the recruitment of children into the U.S. military, the U.S. killing of children in Afghanistan, the U.S. detention and torture of children labeled “combatants,” and the provision of weapons by the United States to other nations employing child soldiers. I suspect it is the senseless killing of children abroad that will ultimately sway the most minds, but recruitment — or at least the cost of it — if an issue that is gaining traction.<br />
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Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota has won bipartisan support and passed through the Armed Services Committee a measure blocking the military from spending $80 million on sponsoring NASCAR drivers. We have a campaign at RootsAction.org to keep that measure in the bill. The U.S. Army says a third of its recruits come from motorsports sponsorships. Recruitment stations at racetracks help. But how does the Army measure the impact on our culture of sponsoring race cars? Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whom the National Guard has paid $136 million over the past five years to put a National Guard sticker on his race car and wear the logo on his uniform, predictably opposes cutting the funding, as do the biggest recipients of weapons money in Congress, none of whom have agreed to plaster their bodies with the logos of their sponsors. Military race cars have been featured in music videos, movies, and the shelves of toy stores. How can something so pervasive be measured? Well, we do know this: the total cost of advertising and recruitment per recruit is so much that we could have taken that money and simply given that young person and a bunch of his friends jobs doing something productive.<br />
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Those of us over on the left tend to think of cuts as bad and spending as good. For libertarians, cuts are good and spending is bad. This conveniently erases from the discussion the question of WHAT cuts and WHICH spending. We need to stop shouting “Jobs Not Cuts” and start shouting “Jobs Not Wars.” The U.S. military is so well funded, that it could be cut by half, remain far and away the best funded military in the world, and fund with those cuts every program any progressive group has ever dared to dream of for clean energy, education, housing, etc., and quite a few programs nobody has yet dared to dream. Or we on the left could make a deal with libertarians: we work together. We cut a half trillion out of the Pentagon — and I mean each year, not “over 10 years” as they like to say — and we put a quarter trillion into tax cuts and a quarter trillion into useful spending.<br />
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A massive urgent program, or what people unthinkingly like to call “a war,” is needed right now to prevent catastrophic climate change. Another is needed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power. Another is needed to pull government out of the hands of plutocracy. And these aren’t movements aimed at making life a little bit better. Jeremy Brecher wrote recently of the need for a human preservation movement. This is what we need, a survival movement, part of which will be the full abolition of war.<br />
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The Occupy movement is a good start at bringing important issues together. But of course we need to carry with us into the occupy movement the distinctly minority understanding that war can and must be completely eliminated. We can learn from the Outlawry movement. It was moral, educational, non-electoral, and long-term with no expectation of succeeding even in a generation, and no trigger to collapse into despair if it didn’t.<br />
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We need to recognize that war is not in our genes. It’s a relatively new creation, sporadically present and absent in various societies, avoided when we choose and not otherwise. It’s not created by mystical forces of history or population or resource shortages or testosterone. It’s created by a culture’s tolerance for it, or tolerance for an unrepresentative government that engages in it. That’s our situation. War is a creation of the 1 percent that recruits members of the 99 percent to support it, as well as to do the dirty parts. War and the weapons barons and the oil oligarchs and the Wall Street banksters and the corporate media and the big business lobbies and the crowd of court jesters and sycophants in Washington who claim to be our government: they look more powerful than they are. They’re afraid of their own shadows. Six years ago they were secretly telling each other to end the wars before we gained more strength. Instead we switched parties and went home, while they breathed a sigh of relief. Yet, now, again they are scared of everything we do. They’re spying on every word, comprehending little. What they understand is resistance. Frank Kellogg never understood the Outlawry of War, but he didn’t have to. He just had to do what the people demanded. There are more of us in any small town than there are of them in the whole country. We need to realize our strength.<br />
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“And these words shall then become,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,<br />
“Like Oppression’s thundered doom<br />
“Ringing through each heart and brain,<br />
“Heard again – again – again -<br />
“Rise like Lions after slumber<br />
“In unvanquishable number -<br />
“Shake your chains to earth like dew<br />
“Which in sleep had fallen on you -<br />
“Ye are many – they are few.”<br />
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Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-77878797537400615612012-07-28T19:05:00.001-07:002012-07-28T19:05:35.143-07:00Abolishing war<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2012/07/14/abolishing-war-one-last-step/<br />
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Abolishing War: One Last Step By: David Swanson Saturday July 14, 2012 7:30 pm Remarks delivered at Peacestock 2012<br />
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I want to thank Bill Habedank for inviting me here and everyone who’s been involved in setting up this wonderful event, which ought to be replicated all over this country. Almost our entire population claims to favor peace. At least three quarters of us favor getting the U.S. military out of Afghanistan and ending that particular war, which by the way isn’t ending. When carefully surveyed and shown what the federal budget is, a large majority of U.S. residents favors cutting huge amounts of money out of the military and putting it to better use.<br />
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But those doing anything about peace as part of a peace movement are a tiny fraction of a percent of the country. I have been lucky enough to see some of my cousins from this part of the country on this trip, and one of them referred to me as her famous cousin who speaks at events and writes books. There are others here much more famous than I within our little movement. But I’m willing to bet at least 99% of the country has never heard of any of us. Maybe the wonderful Coleen Rowley who made it onto the cover of Time Magazine. Maybe a few others.<br />
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Thank you also to Veterans For Peace for being the best peace organization I know of, and to its president Leah Bolger for being here. Leah and I and some others here were occupying Washington, D.C., last fall, and I’ve just now finally had criminal charges that were brought against me for speaking in a public hearing in the U.S. Senate dropped this week, just in time to hang out with the good people of Peacestock, which brings a certain risk of arrest in itself. Raise your hand if you’re an undercover law enforcement officer.<br />
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That’s all right. But please pay attention, because I’m going to be talking about some laws that are going unenforced. When I say our movement is small, I don’t mean it’s entirely without influence. And it was much bigger back in 2005 and 2006, when those who oppose wars had, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, those who oppose Republican wars. There is a big gap, however, between those who oppose all wars, and those who oppose particular wars, be it for partisan or other reasons. President Obama used to oppose dumb wars. We came to find out he favors imbecilic wars, because there are more syllables involved. The thing is, people who oppose particular wars don’t usually put as much energy into it as people who oppose all war. Perhaps they’re hoping that a bad war will evolve into a good war, perhaps by escalating it, perhaps by electing a different president — or maybe they just have other priorities.<br />
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The title for my remarks today is “Abolishing War: One Last Step.” I’m willing to bet that even we in the peace movement are fairly unaware of some of the previous steps. In St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a house listed as a National Historic Landmark because Frank Kellogg lived there. There’s also a Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul. But Kellogg’s grave is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Frank Kellogg had a long career, but there is one thing he did, and only one thing he did that made his house historic, named a boulevard for him, and put his ashes in the National Cathedral. I’m willing to bet most people living near St. Paul don’t have the slightest idea what it was. Do you? Raise your hand if you know. And please don’t say he invented corn flakes.<br />
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Well, this is not a typical crowd. All the children are above average here. And yet, some of us don’t know.<br />
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Frank Kellogg was a pudgy, five-foot-six, Republican lawyer with a glass eye and hands that shook. He was not one to turn down a drink, prohibition or no prohibition, and he was best known for his fiery temper and the use of language that the FCC would not have tolerated. Kellogg was 70 years old in 1927. He’d been a trust buster. He’d been president of the American Bar Association. He’d been a U.S. senator from the great state of Minnesota. He’d voted in favor of entering World War I and against the League of Nations, but in support of pulling U.S. troops out of Russia.<br />
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Come 1927, when Kellogg was 70 years old, he was the U.S. Secretary of State. During his tenure, the U.S. Marines went into Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and Kellogg threatened Mexico with war in the interest of U.S. corporations. Kellogg lacked any big following of supporters among the people or the elites. H.L. Mencken called him –quote — a “doddering political hack from the cow country.” I apologize to all the cows around here. Kellogg himself had unkind words for others. In 1927, he called the French a bunch of bleep bleep fools. But Kellogg added that those he hated most were the bleepity bleep bleep pacifists.<br />
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In 1928, Kellogg worked night and day to do exactly what the pacifists told him to do. He brought most of the powerful nations of the world together and created a treaty banning all use of war. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, known as the Kellogg-Briand pact. (The vote was 85-1, with the 1 being a senator from Wisconsin who apparently wanted a stronger treaty, but who was censured by the Wisconsin legislature for his vote.) Briand was the French foreign minister, with whom Kellogg had worked on the treaty.<br />
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Frank Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Briand already had one. This was in the pre-World War II days when the Nobel Committee still paid some attention to the requirements of Alfred Nobel’s will, including that recipients of the prize have worked for the abolition or reduction of standing armies. Quick, can you name the last Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had worked to abolish standing armies? I think there have only been a handful in recent years who would have even stood for the idea, even in theory, much less have worked to advance it in reality.<br />
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Most groups, clubs, projects, etc., that promote peace today propose finding peace in our hearts. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s remark: I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. Well, I don’t want to achieve peace through my heart. I want to achieve peace through ending war and abolishing armies.<br />
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Left to his own devices, Frank Kellogg would have had nothing to do with peace. But in 1927 there was a major peace movement in this country, united around an idea pushed by a Chicago lawyer named Salmon Oliver Levinson. The movement was called the Outlawry Movement, and the goal was to outlaw war. As slavery and blood feuds and dueling had been abolished, so would war be. And the first step would be stigmatizing war as no longer legal. Remember, war was not against the law. Nobody was prosecuted for World War I or any other war, because war making was not a crime. Particular atrocities could be crimes, but not war itself. Levinson opposed what we might call anachronistically the NATO model of banning war, in which the primary tool for preventing war is, of course, war. There were isolationist strains in the U.S. peace movement after the disaster of World War I that echo in some of today’s libertarians. Agreeing with various allies to all go to war if one of them went to war was not a recipe for peace. The Outlawrists’ plan was to make war illegal, to establish written international law and courts for settling international disputes, and to move world culture beyond acceptance of war.<br />
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Duelling had been done away with, said Levinson, and not just aggressive duelling. We didn’t keep defensive duelling around. We set the whole barbaric procedure behind us. Thus must it be with war. The Outlawrists did not distinguish good or just wars from bad or unjust wars, any more than we distinguish just cases of rape, good uses of slavery, or humanitarian cases of genocide. War was the most evil thing created, and arranging to end war by means of war left everyone preparing for more war. So, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced all war.<br />
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There’s a song from 1950 — maybe we can sing it later — that begins “Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men….” That scene had actually happened on August 27, 1928, with the signing of the Peace Pact. It was probably the biggest news story that year. This is not secret CIA history I’m describing. Raise your hand if you’re with the CIA. Well, thank you for coming anyway. No, this is forgotten history, intentionally buried history. Frank Goetz, who may be here, and others are pushing to have August 27th made a holiday.<br />
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After the Pact was signed, nations stopped recognizing claims of war, gains of territory made through war. Wars were prevented and halted. The world turned against the horror of war, at least war among wealthy nations. Colonizing poor nations was still very much acceptable. And when World War II happened, Roosevelt directed that the Kellogg Briand Pact be used to prosecute the Germans and the Japanese for the brand new crime of making war. And they were thus prosecuted. And the rich nations never went to war with each other again, at least not yet. Europe, amazingly, finally stopped attacking itself. But the common interpretation became the bizarre notion that Kellogg-Briand had been erased by its failure to prevent World War II. Imagine setting up a legal ban on anything else, and then tossing it into the trash the first time it was violated, and while simultaneously enforcing it. I suppose the Ten Commandments, by that logic, must have been erased by being violated quite some time back now. After World War II the Peace Pact was twisted to prosecute aggressive war, rather than simply war, and it was imposed as victor’s justice. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as written, remained on the books, as it remains on the U.S. State Department’s website. Ssh. Don’t tell Hillary.<br />
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This week Ralph Nader published a list of 11 books that he thinks everyone should read, and one of them was my book “When the World Outlawed War,” which tells this story. It’s probably the shortest on the list, too, so you can read it tonight and only have 10 books left to go.<br />
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World War II was the worst event that has occurred on planet earth, but trends away from war and violence observable in recent centuries continued. New institutions and cultural habits reinforced this. But legally, the U.N. Charter took a step back from Kellogg-Briand by sanctioning wars if they are defensive or U.N.-approved. An example of a defensive war would be the 2003 attack on the impoverished unarmed nation of Iraq thousands of miles from our shores. An example of a UN-approved war would be the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of its government. The UN had authorized a cease-fire, and NATO decided that was the same thing as authorizing bombing of the capital until the president was killed. In other words, the two loopholes opened up by the UN Charter have permitted unlimited warmaking and erased from our culture the idea that war is a crime.<br />
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The Geneva Conventions played their part as well, by establishing the idea that wars could be legal if conducted in a particular manner. The Conventions of 1949 look absurd today, as they distinguish participants in war from civilians. Wars today are not fought on distant battlefields, but in inhabited towns. Should those who fight back really lose legal protection? The Conventions do outline permissible conduct for occupying armies, but they require that the occupiers care for the occupied population much better than our governments care for their own populations back home. Of course, nobody takes seriously the idea of complying with this. Governments are permitted to kill huge numbers of civilians, but the killing has to be an accidental, even though foreseeable, byproduct of an effort to kill even bigger numbers of non-civilians or to accomplish some other military objective, such as gaining control over the civilians and non-civilians alike, should they manage to remain alive. Under this rigorous legal standard, José Luis Moreno Ocampo, prosecutor for the ICC — or what I like to call the ICCA, the International Criminal Court for Africans — found the U.S. slaughter of Iraqis to be legal, regardless of the fact that the United Nations had found the invasion of Iraq itself, the greater purpose at stake, to be illegal. The Catholic Church no longer sells indulgences, I suspect because it just can’t compete with the United Nations.<br />
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And if the Geneva Conventions weren’t bad enough, we created the CIA and NATO. While the world has turned against war, the United States has created a war-based economy with huge permanent standing armies standing in our own and most other countries around the globe. We’ve empowered a military industrial complex beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmares. In the 1920s war could be blamed on Europe. Now opposing war is almost treasonous. We’ve given presidents such powers that the Declaration of Independence would have to be three times as long if we were to attempt a new overthrow of tyranny. We’ve legalized election bribery, concentrated almost all our wealth in a very few hands, and in most cases swallowed whole the obvious lie that activism can have no impact. We face collapse of representative government, of civil liberties, of our natural environment, of our culture. We face nuclear apocalypse, weapons proliferation, and a vicious cycle of countering terrorism with precisely the policies that produce terrorism.<br />
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Last fall I helped organize a conference of experts on various areas of damage being done by the military industrial complex, resulting in the book, “The Military Industrial Complex at 50.” We concluded that this monster, guarded by patriotism, McCarthyism, and financial corruption, is the number one opponent of most campaigns for things decent and good, certainly of campaigns against poverty, for education, against homelessness, for civil rights, against environmental destruction, for peace and prosperity. It’s not a coincidence that the United States spends several times the next approaching country on the military while trailing a great many countries in measures of education, health, security, and happiness. If every movement that should rightfully be targeting the military industrial complex were to do so, it would fall. We would convert, retrain, retool, and prosper. But it’s difficult for narrow interests to act on the big picture. Why should the ACLU oppose the military funding that produces the drone strikes and torture cells, when it can oppose the drone strikes and torture cells indefinitely? Why should the Sierra Club oppose the single largest consumer of oil when it can oppose institutions completely lacking flags and hero-worship?<br />
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When we tried to impeach or prosecute Bush or Cheney, well, two things. First, one of the best activists we had was Daniel Fearn who is now doing poorly in a hospital in Minneapolis. I bet a bunch of you know him. I hope you’ll visit him. Can we all applaud the great work that Daniel Fearn did?<br />
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Second, when we tried to impeach Bush and Cheney, we were often told we hated those men or acted on partisan interests, and I always replied that if Bush was not punished for his crimes, the next president would do worse. It wouldn’t matter whether the next president was black or white, male or female, Republican or Democratic. It would only matter whether power still corrupted and whether absolute power still corrupted absolutely. As it turns out, nothing has happened to change that rule. The illicit abuses of Bush are now open and official policy. We’re spied on without warrants and can be locked up without charges, tortured without consequences, and sent to war without Congress. Our president keeps a list of nominees for being murdered. It includes Americans and non-Americans, children and adults. He works his way down the list. He says it costs him not a moment’s worry. He jokes about it to the White House Press Corpse, and they laugh it up. And we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and our souls ripped out registering voters for him because we don’t want to risk having a racist put in charge of our national program of murdering dark skinned Muslims. Even while peace activists have their homes raided by the FBI. Sometimes when we speak out we’re told that we must be in the pay of the Mitt Romney campaign. The irony of the you’re-trying-to-help-Romney-win response to criticism of our current government is that if Romney does win then the people using that line will themselves start objecting to presidential abuses, but it will be too late.<br />
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Meanwhile, the U.S. military is bigger than ever, in more nations than ever, more privatized than ever, more profitable than ever, more secretive than ever, more at odds with more of the world than ever, and more recklessly than we’ve seen in decades antagonizing both Russia and China for no good reason whatsoever. I don’t consider the fact that Russian fossil fuels with which to destroy our atmosphere will become more readily available as our destroyed atmosphere melts the ice a good reason. Nor do I consider the fact that China owns our grandchildren’s unearned wages a good reason. We just discovered how large a part the U.S. is playing in destroying the nation of Mali when three U.S. Special Forces troops drove off a bridge, killing themselves and three prostitutes. Have you ever wondered what makes special forces special? The only thing I can see that makes them special is that someone whispers in their ears: “You don’t have to obey any laws.” But that’s becoming less and less special in Washington these days.<br />
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just over in Laos helping to expand the U.S. Asian presence, but — as Fred Branfman pointed out — not seriously attempting to pick up the 80 million cluster bombs the U.S. left in Laos where they continue to kill and maim. Clinton opposes signing the Cluster Bomb Treaty, even though 111 countries have signed it, and cluster bombs serve very little humanitarian purpose, unless you count blowing the legs off children as humanitarian.<br />
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Alliant Tech Systems, which has moved to Virginia but is also still here in Minnesota, makes money off cluster bombs. It could make that money off something decent if it chose.<br />
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Clinton met a young man in Laos whose hand she couldn’t shake. Phongsavath Souliyalat lost both his hands and his eyesight when a friend handed him a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday while walking home from school. These bombs have killed 20,000 farmers and their children since the bombing ended in 1973. Clinton is lobbying other nations against the treaty banning cluster bombs. The United States has used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and as recently as June 7, 2010, when we used them to kill 35 women and children in Yemen. A journalist reported on that horror, and Obama ordered the president of Yemen to lock him up, calling into question why Obama doesn’t order other people in Yemen locked up rather than killing them and whoever’s too close to them with missiles.<br />
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In Laos this week Clinton said, “We have to do more. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.” But she’s not investing a fraction in bomb clean up of what she’s putting into a new embassy in Laos. The lesson of 1927 is that what she does next was not determined by the genes she was born with. Clinton could be Kissinger or she could be Kellogg, depending on what we do. Kellogg, after all, would never have been Kellogg if peace activists hadn’t forced him to.<br />
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We have a harder task today, I admit. We’re up against the military industrial complex, and we’re up against the idea of humanitarian war.<br />
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Humanitarian war makes as much sense as a benevolent hurricane or a charitable looting. Humanitarian war is based on the following premises:<br />
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1. There are evil things happening in the world.<br />
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2. We can do nothing or we can bomb people. There are no other options.<br />
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The conclusion, of course, is that we must bomb people. But the second premise is faulty. Nonviolent assaults on tyranny are far more successful and long-lasting than violent ones. Even more effective is refraining from funding and empowering the tyrants for decades prior to switching sides, or what is called “intervening.” Turning to violence amounts to deciding that the times have gotten tough and we must therefore resort to a less effective tool much less likely to succeed. That many want to do so suggests other motivations, some of them not very flattering. The same is suggested by blatant inconsistency. In Bahrain we send over our top cops to lead the skull-cracking. In Syria we aid murderous terrorists and child soldiers in the name of human rights, working with such models of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. By “we” I mean, of course, the regime in Washington. Governments are beyond reproach, and regimes can be overthrown, so we should probably call them all regimes. Washington is quite open about wanting to overthrow the Syrian government or regime because of its ties to the Iranian government or regime. It is much less forthcoming, however, about how doing so would work out any better than Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Philippines, and so on.<br />
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That wars must be marketed as humanitarian is a sign of progress. That we fall for it is a sign of embarrassing weakness. The war propagandist is the world’s second oldest profession, and the humanitarian lie is not entirely new. But it works in concert with other common war lies, some of which used to be more dominant. I tried to collect them all in my book “War Is A Lie.” A few major themes are:<br />
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First, that only war will address the incredible evil of the chosen enemy, almost always an enemy made more evil by racism and other forms or bigotry and distancing.<br />
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Second, that war is a form of defense, even if we provoked the enemy’s attack, even if the enemy hasn’t attacked, even if the enemy is incapable of attacking, even if the enemy hasn’t yet thought to develop the capacity to attack. We’re one step ahead, that’s how smart we are.<br />
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Third, that war is a generous sacrifice, the noblest deed imaginable, something so beautiful it ought to be multiplied a thousand fold, and so we only go to war as an absolute last resort in order to benefit the evil dark people who need to be wiped off the face of the earth.<br />
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It doesn’t matter if the reasons for war conflict. It doesn’t matter if they change through the course of a war. If an individual believes that the war makers mean well — these being the same politicians that nobody would trust as far as they could throw them on any other topic, and if he believes that warriors are heroes who must be cheered for no matter what they do, and if he takes some vicarious pleasure in the primitive notion that lashing out makes him safe, then it doesn’t much matter what the pretense is. Let some back war as philanthropy and others as enlightened genocide, as long as enough of them back it or tolerate it, it will get started. And once started, it must be continued for the sake of the soldiers doing most of the killing and a little bit of the dying.<br />
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In Afghanistan, the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. Continuing a war so that our troops will not have been killing themselves in vain brings a new level of blindness to the question of what types of destructive madness are simply and unavoidably in vain. Of course, U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to spread democracy, while the vast majority of U.S. residents oppose keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the casus belli has been assassinated and given a proper Muslim sea burial, according to our president, who occasionally brags about such killings while refusing to officially say whether they exist. He has said, however, that we’re leaving Afghanistan, and the primary way in which we’re leaving is, oddly enough, by staying, at least for the next two and a half years, after which we’re staying in an unspecified smaller way for another 10 years. Then we’ll see.<br />
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Will the third poorest nation in the world be able to keep fighting off our loving embrace, night raids, and drone strikes for 12.5 more years? It will if we keep paying for it. Imagine how many of that last 25 percent of Americans would turn against this war if they knew they were paying for both sides of it while their schools and fire stations and ecosystems collapse. A report by the congressional Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, found that $360 million per year was being handed over by the Pentagon to insurgent groups or their warlord front men for the safe passage of truck convoys carrying US military supplies, from one trucking contract alone. We’re paying for permission to drive down roads without being shot at. What a war! Imagine if the British had thought of that in 1776. Maybe we could still be colonies.<br />
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We don’t need to abandon Afghans, or Libyans, or Syrians, or for that matter Bahrainis or Saudis. But effective financial aid and reparations would support nonviolence and independence. As Ralph Lopez has been pointing out, there are good examples of humanitarian programs in Afghanistan that could be built on. Most foreign aid, however, is a scam, with 40 to 50 percent never reaching Afghanistan. Aid profiteers rival war profiteers in their greed, while 60 percent of Afghan children are in various stages of starvation and 23 froze to death last winter outside Kabul. And half the so-called aid money has gone to training soldiers and police. I remember the late Richard Holbrooke telling Congress that civilian operations in Afghanistan were subordinate to the military. That dooms them to failure, and Afghans to suffering.<br />
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I went to Afghanistan last year with Kathy Kelly and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I met there a man named Hakim who has organized a group called Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Last week I heard from Kathy that he wanted to visit the United States but had been denied a visa. So, Voices and Global Exchange and Fellowship of Reconciliation and the group I work for RootsAction.org flooded the State Department with emails and calls. And they reversed their decision and gave Hakim a visa. He’ll be here soon. Sometimes our voice is loud enough. Other times it’s just one tiny little whisper short and we imagine it’s nowhere close.<br />
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Our voice was loud in 2005 and 2006. It was loud enough to prevent an attack on Iran in 2007. We’ve been helping to hold off an attack on Iran for years, since our 1953 overthrow of its government and our aid to Iraq in killing Iranians in the 1980s. Now we hear that Iran may have nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons facilities, or nuclear weapons program capabilities, and Iran was behind 9-11, and Iran is criminally threatening to put up a fight if attacked again, plus Iran hired a Mexican drug gang to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. and then called it off just to make us look bad for catching them. There’s no limit to the Iranians’ evil, which is why we should take an action that the war proponents themselves say would fail on its own terms. Bombing Iran would do no more than the murderous sanctions already in place or the assassinations of scientists already committed to overthrow the government. And for the U.S. to allow Israel to attack Iran would only fool people in a single nation: ours. Iran would strike back at U.S. troops, and it would be a U.S. war by day two.<br />
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War is not just reserved for poor nations now, but it has — in other ways — changed almost beyond recognition. Mostly the elderly and children die in wars now, mostly civilians. The wars happen where they live. Almost entirely non-Americans die in U.S. wars. Sometimes the U.S. warriors are seated in air-conditioned offices in the United States. Drones are better than armies, someone told me recently, because with drones nobody gets killed. Imagine the terror produced by the buzzing of a drone over your house night and day, able to take your life and the lives of your loved ones at any moment. But don’t bother to protest. You’re nobody. You’re not listed in the war casualty reports in U.S. newspapers. When drones kill, nobody dies, and you — you 95 percent of humanity — you are nobody. Harold Koh says that bombing houses is neither a war nor hostilities, under the War Powers Act. Unless Americans are under the bombs, they are not hostile bombs. Perhaps they are friendly bombs, or bombs that are good for people whether they know it or not.<br />
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The military now wants to give medals to drone pilots. I picture them as bronzed joy sticks. I actually think there’s something unfair about this idea. I think our brave drones themselves should be getting the medals. They show the absolute least hesitation to kill. Or what about the ants fighting in my back yard? They sacrifice their lives and abandon their comrades with complete efficiency. If we’re handing out medals for desk jobs, what about the guys who pay the protection fees on Afghan roads? Or the guy who catches Petraeus when he faints in Congressional hearings? Why should some people get medals and others not? “War will exist,” wrote John F. Kennedy, “until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” Therefore, I say, scrap all the medals except for those who refuse to fight.<br />
<br />
The key, I think, to getting to that distant day when resisters are honored and warriors are not, is that we stop justifying or ignoring mass-murder. The deaths of 95 percent of the victims of our wars are the most closely guarded secret. The deaths of so-called civilians, of those not understood to be fighting back in defense of their homes, of those not male or fighting age. (Fighting-age males are posthumously declared combatants whenever our government kills them). This is the most forbidden information, because it brings down the war machine. The war machine depends for its existence on being something other than murder on a larger scale, even as it strives to reduce itself to exactly murder on a recognizable scale. Our sacred troops are the war machine’s best defense, since whatever they do must be brave and therefore good. And yet some of those troops are the gravest threat, not only because they can refuse to fight, or can speak out in opposition, but because some of them persist in producing videos and photos of themselves posing with, mutilating, and urinating on the bodies of people they kill.<br />
<br />
And then we’re told to be outraged by the urination. But when you get outraged that someone has peed on the body of a man they just murdered, what does that convey about your attitude toward the murder itself? Surely most of us would object more to being killed than to being peed on after we’re dead.<br />
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The forbidden thought is that all killing is regrettable, immoral, and criminal. This is the thought of which Lockheed Martin, David Petraeus, General Electric, Buck McKeon, and your neighbors are frightened.<br />
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It’s all right to call a war a failure and the failure a SNAFU and incompetence the order of the day. The military money machine can generate even more money out of that. It could have done better with another trillion or two to spend.<br />
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It’s all right to point out the injustice, hypocrisy, and shame in our society’s treatment of veterans after they’ve served their war-making purpose. People can devote their time and energy to bake sales for veterans’ needs. That only furthers the acceptance of war in many minds, while a few are awakened. And the Pentagon can shift to fighting its wars with robots.<br />
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It’s all right to point out the economic trade-offs at stake, the standard of living we could have if we gave up some bombers and some billionaires. I make this point all the time. A few will understand, but the military industrial complex will counter by calling itself a jobs program and threatening congress members with unemployment in their districts.<br />
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What is not all right is finding out that our wars are one-sided slaughters of helpless families, and that over a million Iraqis lie dead in a devastated society where the first question any mother asks in areas poisoned by our weapons is “Is it normal?”<br />
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Veterans For Peace put out a statement last week in response to a United Nations communication to the U.S. government expressing concerns about our country’s treatment of children in war. Included were concerns about the recruitment of children into the U.S. military, the U.S. killing of children in Afghanistan, the U.S. detention and torture of children labeled “combatants,” and the provision of weapons by the United States to other nations employing child soldiers. I suspect it is the senseless killing of children abroad that will ultimately sway the most minds, but recruitment — or at least the cost of it — is an issue that is gaining traction.<br />
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Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota has won bipartisan support and passed through the Armed Services Committee a measure blocking the military from spending $80 million on sponsoring NASCAR drivers. We have a campaign at RootsAction.org to keep that measure in the bill. The U.S. Army says a third of its recruits come from motorsports sponsorships. Recruitment stations at racetracks help. But how does the Army measure the impact on our culture of sponsoring race cars? Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whom the National Guard has paid $136 million over the past five years to put a National Guard sticker on his race car and wear the logo on his uniform, predictably opposes cutting the funding, as do the biggest recipients of weapons money in Congress, none of whom have agreed to plaster their bodies with the logos of their sponsors. Military race cars have been featured in music videos, movies, and the shelves of toy stores. How can something so pervasive be measured? Well, we do know this: the total cost of advertising and recruitment per recruit is so much that we could have taken that money and simply given that young person and a bunch of his friends jobs doing something productive.<br />
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Those of us over on the left tend to think of cuts as bad and spending as good. For libertarians, cuts are good and spending is bad. This conveniently erases from the discussion the question of WHAT cuts and WHICH spending. We need to stop shouting “Jobs Not Cuts” and start shouting “Jobs Not Wars.” The U.S. military is so well funded, that it could be cut by half, remain far and away the best funded military in the world, and fund with those cuts every program any progressive group has ever dared to dream of for clean energy, education, housing, etc., and quite a few programs nobody has yet dared to dream. Or we on the left could make a deal with libertarians: we work together. We cut a half trillion out of the Pentagon — and I mean each year, not “over 10 years” as they like to say — and we put a quarter trillion into tax cuts and a quarter trillion into useful spending.<br />
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A massive urgent program, or what people unthinkingly like to call “a war,” is needed right now to prevent catastrophic climate change. Another is needed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power. Another is needed to pull government out of the hands of plutocracy. And these aren’t movements aimed at making life a little bit better. Jeremy Brecher wrote recently of the need for a human preservation movement. This is what we need, a survival movement, part of which will be the full abolition of war.<br />
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The Occupy movement is a good start at bringing important issues together. But of course we need to carry with us into the occupy movement the distinctly minority understanding that war can and must be completely eliminated. We can learn from the Outlawry movement. It was moral, educational, non-electoral, and long-term with no expectation of succeeding even in a generation, and no trigger to collapse into despair if it didn’t.<br />
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We need to recognize that war is not in our genes. It’s a relatively new creation, sporadically present and absent in various societies, avoided when we choose and not otherwise. It’s not created by mystical forces of history or population or resource shortages or testosterone. It’s created by a culture’s tolerance for it, or tolerance for an unrepresentative government that engages in it. That’s our situation. War is a creation of the 1 percent that recruits members of the 99 percent to support it, as well as to do the dirty parts. War and the weapons barons and the oil oligarchs and the Wall Street banksters and the corporate media and the big business lobbies and the crowd of court jesters and sycophants in Washington who claim to be our government: they look more powerful than they are. They’re afraid of their own shadows. Six years ago they were secretly telling each other to end the wars before we gained more strength. Instead we switched parties and went home, while they breathed a sigh of relief. Yet, now, again they are scared of everything we do. They’re spying on every word, comprehending little. What they understand is resistance. Frank Kellogg never understood the Outlawry of War, but he didn’t have to. He just had to do what the people demanded. There are more of us in any small town than there are of them in the whole country. We need to realize our strength.<br />
<br />
“And these words shall then become,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,<br />
“Like Oppression’s thundered doom<br />
“Ringing through each heart and brain,<br />
“Heard again – again – again -<br />
“Rise like Lions after slumber<br />
“In unvanquishable number -<br />
“Shake your chains to earth like dew<br />
“Which in sleep had fallen on you -<br />
“Ye are many – they are few.”<br />
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<br /></div>
Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-7214187913606382992012-04-30T11:58:00.000-07:002012-04-30T11:58:59.212-07:00Tomorrow'Bitter taste has iron and the bite of swords <br />
Is cruel and cold when you come to it.<br />
God help you then if your glees falter.'Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-87657322841604525882012-04-23T22:39:00.000-07:002012-04-23T22:39:21.971-07:00Unz sidebar - Melamine and Vioxxhttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/chinese-melamine-and-american-vioxx-a-comparison/<br />
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Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison By Ron Unz | April 18, 2012<br />
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Main article: “China’s Rise, America’s Fall“<br />
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In contrasting China and America, pundits often cite our free and independent media as one of our greatest strengths, together with the tremendous importance which our society places upon individual American lives. For us, a single wrongful death can sometimes provoke weeks of massive media coverage and galvanize the nation into corrective action, while life remains cheap in China, a far poorer land of over a billion people, ruled by a ruthless Communist Party eager to bury its mistakes. But an examination of two of the greatest public-health scandals of the last few years casts serious doubt on this widespread belief.<br />
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First, consider the details of the Chinese infant formula scandal of 2008. Unscrupulous businessmen had discovered they could save money by greatly diluting their milk products, then adding a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies throughout China had suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy hospitalization for kidney stones. Six died. A wave of popular outrage swept past the controlled media roadblocks and initial government excuses, and soon put enormous pressure on Chinese officials to take forceful action against the wrongdoers.<br />
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China’s leaders may not be democratically elected, but they pay close attention to strong popular sentiment. Once pressed, they quickly launched a national police investigation which led to a series of arrests and uncovered evidence that this widespread system of food adulteration had been protected by bribe-taking government officials. Long prison sentences were freely handed out and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were eventually tried and executed for their role, measures that gradually assuaged popular anger. Indeed, the former head of the Chinese FDA had been executed for corruption in late 2007 under similar circumstances.<br />
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Throughout these events, American media coverage was extensive, with numerous front-page stories in our leading newspapers. Journalists discovered that similar methods of dangerous chemical adulteration had been used to produce Chinese pet food for export, and many family dogs in America had suffered or died as a result. With heavy coverage on talk radio and cable news shows, phrases such as “Chinese baby formula” or “Chinese pet food” became angry slurs, and there was talk of banning whole categories of imports from a country whose product safety standards were obviously so far below those found in Western societies. The legitimate concerns of ordinary Americans were fanned by local media coverage that sometimes bordered on the hysterical.<br />
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However, the American media reaction had been quite different during an earlier health scandal much closer to home.<br />
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In September 2004, Merck, one of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies, suddenly announced that it was voluntarily recalling Vioxx, its popular anti-pain medication widely used to treat arthritis-related ailments. This abrupt recall came just days after Merck discovered that a top medical journal was about to publish a massive study by an FDA investigator indicating that the drug in question greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market.<br />
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Within weeks of the recall, journalists discovered that Merck had found strong evidence of the potentially fatal side-effects of this drug even before its initial 1999 introduction, but had ignored these worrisome indicators and avoided additional testing, while suppressing the concerns of its own scientists. Boosted by a television advertising budget averaging a hundred million dollars per year, Vioxx soon became one of Merck’s most lucrative products, generating over $2 billion in yearly revenue. Merck had also secretly ghostwritten dozens of the published research studies emphasizing the beneficial aspects of the drug and encouraging doctors to widely prescribe it, thus transforming science into marketing support. Twenty-five million Americans were eventually prescribed Vioxx as an aspirin-substitute thought to produce fewer complications.<br />
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Although the Vioxx scandal certainly did generate several days of newspaper headlines and intermittently returned to the front pages as the resulting lawsuits gradually moved through our judicial system, the coverage still seemed scanty relative to the number of estimated fatalities, which matched America’s total losses in the Vietnam War. In fact, the media coverage often seemed considerably less than that later accorded to the Chinese infant food scandal, which had caused just a handful of deaths on the other side of the world.<br />
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The circumstances of this case were exceptionally egregious, with many tens of thousands of American deaths due to the sale of a highly lucrative but sometimes fatal drug, whose harmful effects had long been known to its manufacturer. But there is no sign that criminal charges were ever considered.<br />
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A massive class-action lawsuit dragged its way through the courts for years, eventually being settled for $4.85 billion in 2007, with almost half the money going to the trial lawyers. Merck shareholders also paid large sums to settle various other lawsuits and government penalties and cover the heavy legal costs of fighting all of these cases. But the loss of continuing Vioxx sales represented the greatest financial penalty of all, which provides a disturbing insight into the cost-benefit calculations behind the company’s original cover-up. When the scandal broke, Merck’s stock price collapsed, and there was a widespread belief that the company could not possibly survive, especially after evidence of a deliberate corporate conspiracy surfaced. Instead, Merck’s stock price eventually reached new heights in 2008 and today is just 15 percent below where it stood just before the disaster.<br />
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Furthermore, individuals make decisions rather than corporate entities, and none of the individuals behind Merck’s deadly decisions apparently suffered any serious consequences. The year after the scandal unfolded, Merck’s long-time CEO resigned and was replaced by one of his top lieutenants, but he retained the $50 million in financial compensation he had received over the previous five years, compensation greatly boosted by lucrative Vioxx sales. Senior FDA officials apologized for their lack of effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. American media conglomerates quietly mourned their loss of heavy Vioxx advertising, but continued selling the same airtime to Merck and its rivals for the marketing of other, replacement drugs, while their investigative arms soon focused on the horrors of tainted Chinese infant food and the endemic corruption of Chinese society.<br />
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This story of serious corporate malfeasance largely forgiven and forgotten by government and media is depressing enough, but it leaves out a crucial factual detail that seems to have almost totally escaped public notice. The year after Vioxx had been pulled from the market, the New York Times and other major media outlets published a minor news item, generally buried near the bottom of their back pages, which noted that American death rates had suddenly undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline.<br />
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The headline of the short article that ran in the April 19, 2005 edition of USA Today was typical: “USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.” During that one year, American deaths had fallen by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation’s population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly “surprised” and “scratching [their] heads” over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.<br />
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On April 24, 2005, the New York Times ran another of its long stories about the continuing Vioxx controversy, disclosing that Merck officials had knowingly concealed evidence that their drug greatly increased the risk of heart-related fatalities. But the Times journalist made no mention of the seemingly inexplicable drop in national mortality rates that had occurred once the drug was taken off the market, although the news had been reported in his own paper just a few days earlier.<br />
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A cursory examination of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offers some intriguing clues to this mystery. We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn. Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population. The FDA studies had proven that use of Vioxx led to deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes, and these were exactly the factors driving the changes in national mortality rates.<br />
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The impact of these shifts was not small. After a decade of remaining roughly constant, the overall American death rate began a substantial decline in 2004, soon falling by approximately 5 percent, despite the continued aging of the population. This drop corresponds to roughly 100,000 fewer deaths per year. The age-adjusted decline in death rates was considerably greater.<br />
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Patterns of cause and effect cannot easily be proven. But if we hypothesize a direct connection between the recall of a class of very popular drugs proven to cause fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses with an immediate drop in the national rate of fatal heart attacks and other deadly illnesses, then the statistical implications are quite serious. Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx, a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility. A recent Wall Street Journal column even called for relaxing FDA restrictions aimed at avoiding “rare adverse events,” which had been imposed after the discovery of “unanticipated side effects of high-profile drugs like Vioxx.”<br />
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There are obvious mitigating differences between these two national responses. The Chinese victims were children, and their sufferings from kidney stones and other ailments were directly linked to the harmful compounds that they had ingested. By contrast, the American victims were almost all elderly, and there was no means of determining whether a particular heart attack had been caused by Vioxx or other factors; the evidence implicating the drug was purely statistical, across millions of patients. Furthermore, since most of the victims were anyway nearing the end of their lives, the result was more an acceleration of the inevitable rather than cutting short an entire young life, and sudden fatal heart attacks are hardly the most unpleasant forms of death.<br />
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But against these important factors we must consider the raw numbers involved. American journalists seemed to focus more attention on a half-dozen fatalities in China than they did on the premature deaths of as many as 500,000 of their fellow American citizens.<br />
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The inescapable conclusion is that in today’s world and in the opinion of our own media, American lives are quite cheap, unlike those in China.<br />
<br />Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-57924768895226370172012-04-22T21:31:00.000-07:002012-07-13T18:03:53.783-07:00China's rise, America's fall<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibN1-A9r4h0685Y5dSWfBHysKcusBA6XZxk8m8pzhC-gxVCX81Ld_z09Q4r5q-t-k00tPz7W9VV-JnXppSeFAhgJZARcsV8I6RqhJvA9hFQlyLuvgKKopOWfIXdaidGbhNF0F7izt05kU/s1600/Pudong+-+Shanghai.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="197" width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibN1-A9r4h0685Y5dSWfBHysKcusBA6XZxk8m8pzhC-gxVCX81Ld_z09Q4r5q-t-k00tPz7W9VV-JnXppSeFAhgJZARcsV8I6RqhJvA9hFQlyLuvgKKopOWfIXdaidGbhNF0F7izt05kU/s200/Pudong+-+Shanghai.JPG" /></a></div><br />
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http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/chinas-rise-americas-fall/<br />
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China’s Rise, America’s Fall Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”?<br />
By Ron Unz | April 18, 2012<br />
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The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,” yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.”<br />
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But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.<br />
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Yet do the facts about China and America really warrant this conclusion?<br />
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<b>China Shakes the World</b><br />
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By the late 1970s, three decades of Communist central planning had managed to increase China’s production at a respectable rate, but with tremendous fits and starts, and often at a terrible cost: 35 million or more Chinese had starved to death during the disastrous 1959–1961 famine caused by Mao’s forced industrialization policy of the Great Leap Forward.<br />
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China’s population had also grown very rapidly during this period, so the typical standard of living had improved only slightly, perhaps 2 percent per year between 1958 and 1978, and this from an extremely low base. Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in 1980 had an income 60–70 percent below that , the vast majority of China’s newly created economic wealth has flowed to ordinary Chinese workers, who have moved from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles in just a single generation. While median American incomes have been stagnant for almost forty years, those in China have nearly doubled every decade, with the real wages of workers outside the farm-sector rising about 150 percent over the last ten years alone. The Chinese of 1980 were desperately poor compared to Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Kenyans; but today, they are several times wealthier, representing more than a tenfold shift in relative income.<br />
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A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million. And although India is often paired with China in the Western media, a large fraction of Indians have actually grown poorer over time. The bottom half of India’s still rapidly growing population has seen its daily caloric intake steadily decline for the last 30 years, with half of all children under five now being malnourished.<br />
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China’s economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America’s real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.<br />
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Over the last decade alone, China quadrupled its industrial output, which is now comparable to that of the U.S. In the crucial sector of automobiles, China raised its production ninefold, from 2 million cars in 2000 to 18 million in 2010, a figure now greater than the combined totals for America and Japan. China accounted for fully 85 percent of the total world increase in auto manufacturing during that decade.<br />
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It is true that many of China’s highest-tech exports are more apparent than real. Nearly all Apple’s iPhones and iPads come from China, but this is largely due to the use of cheap Chinese labor for final assembly, with just 4 percent of the value added in those world-leading items being Chinese. This distorts Chinese trade statistics, leading to unnecessary friction. However, some high-tech China exports are indeed fully Chinese, notably those of Huawei, which now ranks alongside Sweden’s Ericsson as one of the world’s two leading telecommunications manufacturers, while once powerful North American competitors such Lucent-Alcatel and Nortel have fallen into steep decline or even bankruptcy. And although America originally pioneered the Human Genome Project, the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) today probably stands as the world leader in that enormously important emerging scientific field.<br />
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China’s recent rise should hardly surprise us. For most of the last 3,000 years, China together with the Mediterranean world and its adjoining European peninsula have constituted the two greatest world centers of technological and economic progress. During the 13th century, Marco Polo traveled from his native Venice to the Chinese Empire and described the latter as vastly wealthier and more advanced than any European country. As late as the 18th century, many leading European philosophers such as Voltaire often looked to Chinese society as an intellectual exemplar, while both the British and the Prussians used the Chinese mandarinate as their model for establishing a meritocratic civil service based on competitive examinations.<br />
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Even a century ago, near the nadir of China’s later weakness and decay, some of America’s foremost public intellectuals, such as Edward A. Ross and Lothrop Stoddard, boldly predicted the forthcoming restoration of the Chinese nation to global influence, the former with equanimity and the latter with serious concern. Indeed, Stoddard argued that only three major inventions effectively separated the world of classical antiquity from that of 18th-century Europe—gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and the printing press. All three seem to have first appeared in China, though for various social, political, and ideological reasons, none were properly implemented.<br />
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Does China’s rise necessarily imply America’s decline? Not at all: human economic progress is not a zero-sum game. Under the right circumstances, the rapid development of one large country should tend to improve living standards for the rest of the world.<br />
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This is most obvious for those nations whose economic strengths directly complement those of a growing China. Massive industrial expansion clearly requires a similar increase in raw-material consumption, and China is now the world’s largest producer and user of electricity, concrete, steel, and many other basic materials, with its iron-ore imports surging by a factor of ten between 2000 and 2011. This has driven huge increases in the costs of most commodities; for example, copper’s world price rose more than eightfold during the last decade. As a direct consequence, these years have generally been very good ones for the economies of countries that heavily rely upon the export of natural resources—Australia, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa.<br />
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Meanwhile, as China’s growth gradually doubles total world industrial production, the resulting “China price” reduces the cost of manufactured goods, making them much more easily affordable to everyone, and thereby greatly increases the global standard of living. While this process may negatively impact those particular industries and countries directly competing with China, it provides enormous opportunities as well, not merely to the aforementioned raw-material suppliers but also to countries like Germany, whose advanced equipment and machine tools have found a huge Chinese market, thereby helping to reduce German unemployment to the lowest level in 20 years.<br />
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And as ordinary Chinese grow wealthier, they provide a larger market as well for the goods and services of leading Western companies, ranging from fast-food chains to consumer products to luxury goods. Chinese workers not only assemble Apple’s iPhones and iPads, but are also very eager to purchase them, and China has now become that company’s second largest market, with nearly all of the extravagant profit margins flowing back to its American owners and employees. In 2011 General Motors sold more cars in China than in the U.S., and that rapidly growing market became a crucial factor in the survival of an iconic American corporation. China has become the third largest market in the world for McDonald’s, and the main driver of global profits for the American parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC.<br />
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<b>Social Costs of a Rapid Rise</b><br />
<br />
Transforming a country in little more than a single generation from a land of nearly a billion peasants to one of nearly a billion city-dwellers is no easy task, and such a breakneck pace of industrial and economic development inevitably leads to substantial social costs. Chinese urban pollution is among the worst in the world, and traffic is rapidly heading toward that same point. China now contains the second largest number of billionaires after America, together with more than a million dollar-millionaires, and although many of these individuals came by their fortunes honestly, many others did not. Official corruption is a leading source of popular resentment against the various levels of Chinese government, ranging from local village councils to the highest officials in Beijing.<br />
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But we must maintain a proper sense of proportion. As someone who grew up in Los Angeles when it still had the most notorious smog in America, I recognize that such trends can be reversed with time and money, and indeed the Chinese government has expressed intense interest in the emerging technology of non-polluting electric cars. Rapidly growing national wealth can be deployed to solve many problems.<br />
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Similarly, plutocrats who grow rich through friends in high places or even outright corruption are easier to tolerate when a rising tide is rapidly lifting all boats. Ordinary Chinese workers have increased their real income by well over 1,000 percent in recent decades, while the corresponding figure for most American workers has been close to zero. If typical American wages were doubling every decade, there would be far less anger in our own society directed against the “One Percent.” Indeed, under the standard GINI index used to measure wealth inequality, China’s score is not particularly high, being roughly the same as that of the United States, though certainly indicating greater inequality than most of the social democracies of Western Europe.<br />
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Many American pundits and politicians still focus their attention on the tragic Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, during which hundreds of determined Chinese protesters were massacred by government troops. But although that event loomed very large at the time, in hindsight it generated merely a blip in the upward trajectory of China’s development and today seems virtually forgotten among ordinary Chinese, whose real incomes have increased several-fold in the quarter century since then.<br />
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Much of the Tiananmen protest had been driven by popular outrage at government corruption, and certainly there have been additional major scandals in recent years, often heavily splashed across the pages of America’s leading newspapers. But a closer examination paints a more nuanced picture, especially when contrasted with America’s own situation.<br />
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For example, over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined. Unfortunately, this project also involved considerable corruption, as was widely reported in the world media, which estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars had been misappropriated through bribery and graft. This scandal eventually led to the arrest or removal of numerous government officials, notably including China’s powerful Railways Minister.<br />
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Obviously such serious corruption would seem horrifying in a country with the pristine standards of a Sweden or a Norway. But based on the published accounts, it appears that the funds diverted amounted to perhaps as little as 0.2 percent of the total, with the remaining 99.8 percent generally spent as intended. So serious corruption notwithstanding, the project succeeded and China does indeed now possess the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail, constructed almost entirely in the last five or six years.<br />
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Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China’s high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America’s does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year, and although an occasional disaster—such as the 2011 crash in Weizhou, which killed 40 passengers—is tragic, it is hardly unexpected. After all, America’s aging low-speed trains are not exempt from similar calamities, as we saw in the 2008 Chatsworth crash that killed 25 in California.<br />
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For many years Western journalists regularly reported that the dismantling of China’s old Maoist system of government-guaranteed healthcare had led to serious social stresses, forcing ordinary workers to save an unreasonable fraction of their salaries to pay for medical treatment if they or their families became ill. But over the last couple of years, the government has taken major steps to reduce this problem by establishing a national healthcare insurance system whose coverage now extends to 95 percent or so of the total population, a far better ratio than is found in wealthy America and at a tiny fraction of the cost.Once again, competent leaders with access to growing national wealth can effectively solve these sorts of major social problems.<br />
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Although Chinese cities have negligible crime and are almost entirely free of the horrible slums found in many rapidly urbanizing Third World countries, housing for ordinary workers is often quite inadequate. But national concerns over rising unemployment due to the global recession gave the government a perfect opportunity late last year to announce a bold plan to construct over 35 million modern new government apartments, which would then be provided to ordinary workers on a subsidized basis.<br />
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All of this follows the pattern of Lee Kwan Yew’s mixed-development model, combining state socialism and free enterprise, which raised Singapore’s people from the desperate, abject poverty of 1945 to a standard of living now considerably higher than that of most Europeans or Americans, including a per capita GDP almost $12,000 above that of the United States. Obviously, implementing such a program for the world’s largest population and on a continental scale is far more challenging than doing so in a tiny city-state with a population of a few million and inherited British colonial institutions, but so far China has done very well in confounding its skeptics.<br />
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<b>America’s Economic Decline</b><br />
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These facts do not provide much evidence for the thesis in Why Nations Fail that China’s leaders constitute a self-serving and venal “extractive” elite. Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country<br />
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Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy piomen had joined the labor force. Nearly one-fifth of young men age 25–34 are still living with their parents, while the wealth of all households headed by those younger than 35 is 68 percent lower today than it was in 1984.<br />
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The total outstanding amount of non-dischargeable student-loan debt has crossed the trillion-dollar mark, now surpassing the combined total of credit-card and auto-loan debt—and with a quarter of all student-loan payers now delinquent, there are worrisome indicators that much of it will remain a permanent burden, reducing many millions to long-term debt peonage. A huge swath of America’s younger generation seems completely impoverished, and likely to remain so.<br />
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International trade statistics, meanwhile, demonstrate that although Apple and Google are doing quite well, our overall economy is not. For many years now our largest goods export has been government IOUs, whose dollar value has sometimes been greater than that of the next ten categories combined. At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, the rest of the world will lose its appetite for this non-functional product, and our currency will collapse, together with our standard of living. Similar Cassandra-like warnings were issued for years about the housing bubble or the profligacy of the Greek government, and were proven false year after year until one day they suddenly became true.<br />
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Ironically enough, there is actually one major category in which American expansion still easily tops that of China, both today and for the indefinite future: population growth. The rate of America’s demographic increase passed that of China over 20 years ago and has been greater every year since, sometimes by as much as a factor of two. According to standard projections, China’s population in 2050 will be almost exactly what it was in 2000, with the country having achieved the population stability typical of advanced, prosperous societies. But during that same half-century, the number of America’s inhabitants will have grown by almost 50 percent, a rate totally unprecedented in the developed world and actually greater than that found in numerous Third World countries such as Colombia, Algeria, Thailand, Mexico, or Indonesia. A combination of very rapid population growth and doubtful prospects for equally rapid economic growth does not bode well for the likely quality of the 2050 American Dream.<br />
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China rises while America falls, but are there major causal connections between these two concurrent trends now reshaping the future of our world? Not that I can see. American politicians and pundits are naturally fearful of taking on the fierce special interest groups that dominate their political universe, so they often seek an external scapegoat to explicate the misery of their constituents, sometimes choosing to focus on China. But this is merely political theater for the ignorant and the gullible.<br />
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Various studies have suggested that China’s currency may be substantially undervalued, but even if the frequent demands of Paul Krugman and others were met and the yuan rapidly appreciated another 15 or 20 percent, few industrial jobs would return to American shores, while working-class Americans might pay much more for their basic necessities. And if China opened wide its borders to more American movies or financial services, the multimillionaires of Hollywood and Wall Street might grow even richer, but ordinary Americans would see little benefit. It is always easier for a nation to point an accusing finger at foreigners rather than honestly admit that almost all its terrible problems are essentially self-inflicted.<br />
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<b>Decay of Constitutional Democracy</b><br />
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The central theme of Why Nations Fail is that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries. If most Americans have experienced virtually no economic gains for decades, perhaps we should cast our gaze at these factors in our own society.<br />
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Our elites boast about the greatness of our constitutional democracy, the wondrous human rights we enjoy, the freedom and rule of law that have long made America a light unto the nations of the world and a spiritual draw for oppressed peoples everywhere, including China itself. But are these claims actually correct? They often stack up very strangely when they appear in the opinion pages of our major newspapers, coming just after the news reporting, whose facts tell a very different story.<br />
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Just last year, the Obama administration initiated a massive months-long bombing campaign against the duly recognized government of Libya on “humanitarian” grounds, then argued with a straight face that a military effort comprising hundreds of bombing sorties and over a billion dollars in combat costs did not actually constitute “warfare,” and hence was completely exempt from the established provisions of the Congressional War Powers Act. A few months later, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the president power to permanently imprison without trial or charges any American whom he classifies as a national-security threat based on his own judgment and secret evidence. When we consider that American society has experienced virtually no domestic terrorism during the past decade, we must wonder how long our remaining constitutional liberties would survive if we were facing frequent real-life attacks by an actual terrorist underground, such as had been the case for many years with the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the Red Brigades in Italy.<br />
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Most recently, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have claimed the inherent right of an American president to summarily execute anyone anywhere in the world, American citizen or not, whom White House advisors have privately decided was a “bad person.” While it is certainly true that major world governments have occasionally assassinated their political enemies abroad, I have never before heard these dark deeds publicly proclaimed as legitimate and aboveboard. Certainly if the governments of Russia or China, let alone Iran, declared their inherent right to kill anyone anywhere in the world whom they didn’t like, our media pundits would immediately blast these statements as proof of their total criminal insanity.<br />
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These are very strange notions of the “rule of law” for the administration of a president who had once served as top editor of the Harvard Law Review and who was routinely flattered in his political campaigns by being described as a “constitutional scholar.”<br />
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Many of these negative ideological trends have been absorbed and accepted by the popular culture and much of the American public. Over the last decade one of the highest-rated shows on American television was “24”, created by Joel Surnow and chronicling Kiefer Sutherland as a patriotic but ruthless Secret Service agent, with each episode constituting a single hour of his desperate efforts to thwart terrorist plots and safeguard our national security. Numerous episodes featured our hero torturing suspected evildoers in order to extract the information necessary to save innocent lives, with the entire series representing a popular weekly glorification of graphic government torture on behalf of the greater good.<br />
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Now soft-headed protestations to the contrary, most governments around the world have at least occasionally practiced torture, especially when combating popular insurgencies, and some of the more brutal regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, even professionalized the process. But such dark deeds done in secret were always vigorously denied in public, and the popular films and other media of Stalin’s Soviet Union invariably featured pure-hearted workers and peasants bravely doing their honorable and patriotic duty for the Motherland, rather than the terrible torments beinn political system; we remain a democracy rather than a dictatorship. But does our current system actually possess the central feature of a true democracy, namely a high degree of popular influence over major government policies? Here the evidence seems more ambiguous.<br />
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Consider the pattern of the last decade. With two ruinous wars and a financial collapse to his record, George W. Bush was widely regarded as one of the most disastrous presidents in American history, and at times his public approval numbers sank to the lowest levels ever measured. The sweeping victory of his successor, Barack Obama, represented more a repudiation of Bush and his policies than anything else, and leading political activists, left and right alike, characterized Obama as Bush’s absolute antithesis, both in background and in ideology. This sentiment was certainly shared abroad, with Obama being selected for the Nobel Peace Prize just months after entering office, based on the widespread assumption that he was certain to reverse most of the policies of his detested predecessor and restore America to sanity.<br />
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Yet almost none of these reversals took place. Instead, the continuity of administration policy has been so complete and so obvious that many critics now routinely speak of the Bush/Obama administration.<br />
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The harsh violations of constitutional principles and civil liberties which Bush pioneered following the 9/11 attacks have only further intensified under Obama, the heralded Harvard constitutional scholar and ardent civil libertarian, and this has occurred without the excuse of any major new terrorist attacks. During his Democratic primary campaign, Obama promised that he would move to end Bush’s futile Iraq War immediately upon taking office, but instead large American forces remained in place for years until heavy pressure from the Iraqi government finally forced their removal; meanwhile, America’s occupation army in Afghanistan actually tripled in size. The government bailout of the hated financial manipulators of Wall Street, begun under Bush, continued apace under Obama, with no serious attempts at either government prosecution or drastic reform. Americans are still mostly suffering through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but Wall Street profits and multimillion-dollar bonuses soon returned to record levels.<br />
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In particular, the continuity of top officials has been remarkable. As Bush’s second defense secretary, Robert Gates had been responsible for the ongoing management of America’s foreign wars and military occupations since 2006; Obama kept him on, and he continued to play the same role in the new administration. Similarly, Timothy Geithner had been one of Bush’s most senior financial appointments, playing a crucial role in the widely unpopular financial bailout of Wall Street; Obama promoted him to Treasury secretary and authorized continuation of those same policies. Ben Bernanke had been appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Bush and was reappointed by Obama. Bush wars and bailouts became Obama wars and bailouts. The American public voted for an anti-Bush, but got Bush’s third term instead.<br />
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During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists routinely characterized our democracy as a sham, with the American public merely selecting which of the two intertwined branches of their single political party should alternate in office, while the actual underlying policies remained essentially unchanged, being decided and implemented by the same corrupt ruling class. This accusation may have been mostly false at the time it was made but seems disturbingly accurate today.<br />
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When times are hard and government policies are widely unpopular, but voters are only offered a choice between the rival slick marketing campaigns of Coke and Pepsi, cynicism can reach extreme proportions. Over the last year, surveys have shown that the public non-approval of Congress—representing Washington’s political establishment—has ranged as high as 90–95 percent, which is completely unprecedented.<br />
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But if our government policies are so broadly unpopular, why are we unable to change them through the sacred power of American household. And even now the direct ongoing costs of our Afghanistan War still run $120 billion per year, many times the size of Afghanistan’s total GDP. Meanwhile, during these same years the international price of oil has risen from $25 to $125 per barrel—partly as a consequence of these past military disruptions and growing fears of future ones—thereby imposing gigantic economic costs upon our society.<br />
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And we suffer other costs as well. A recent New York Times story described the morale-building visit of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to our forces in Afghanistan and noted that all American troops had been required to surrender their weapons before attending his speech and none were allowed to remain armed in his vicinity. Such a command decision seems almost unprecedented in American history and does not reflect well upon the perceived state of our military morale.<br />
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Future historians may eventually regard these two failed wars, fought for entirely irrational reasons, as the proximate cause of America’s financial and political collapse, representing the historical bookend to our World War II victory, which originally established American global dominance.<br />
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<b>Our Extractive Elites</b><br />
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When parasitic elites govern a society along “extractive” lines, a central feature is the massive upward flow of extracted wealth, regardless of any contrary laws or regulations. Certainly America has experienced an enormous growth of officially tolerated corruption as our political system has increasingly consolidated into a one-party state controlled by a unified media-plutocracy.<br />
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Consider the late 2011 collapse of MF Global, a midsize but highly reputable brokerage firm. Although this debacle was far smaller than the Lehman bankruptcy or the Enron fraud, it effectively illustrates the incestuous activities of America’s overlapping elites. Just a year earlier, Jon Corzine had been installed as CEO, following his terms as Democratic governor and U.S. senator from New Jersey and his previous career as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Perhaps no other American had such a combination of stellar political and financial credentials on his resume. Soon after taking the reins, Corzine decided to boost his company’s profits by betting its entire capital and more against the possibility that any European countries might default on their national debts. When he lost that bet, his multi-billion-dollar firm tumbled into bankruptcy.<br />
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At this point, the story moves from a commonplace tale of Wall Street arrogance and greed into something out of the Twilight Zone, or perhaps Monty Python. The major newspapers began reporting that customer funds, eventually said to total $1.6 billion, had mysteriously disappeared during the collapse, and no one could determine what had become of them, a very strange claim in our age of massively computerized financial records. Weeks and eventually months passed, tens of millions of dollars were spent on armies of investigators and forensic accountants, but all those customer funds stayed “missing,” while the elite media covered this bizarre situation in the most gingerly possible fashion. As an example, a front page Wall Street Journal story on February 23, 2012 suggested that after so many months, there seemed little likelihood that the disappeared customer funds might ever reappear, but also emphasized that absolutely no one was being accused of any wrongdoing. Presumably the journalists were suggesting that the $1.6 billion dollars of customer money had simply walked out the door on its own two feet.<br />
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Stories like this give the lie to the endless boasts of our politicians and business pundits that America’s financial system is the most transparent and least corrupt in today’s world. Certainly America is not unique in the existence of long-term corporate fraud, as was recently shown in the fall of Japan’s Olympus Corporation following the discovery of more than a billion dollars in long-hidden investment losses. But when we consider the largest corporate collapses of the last decade that were substantially due to fraud, nearly all the names are American: WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Adelphia. And this list leaves out all the American financial institutions destroyed by the financial meltdown—such as Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia—and the many trillions of dollars in American homeowner equity and top-rated MBS securities which evaporated during that process. Meanwhile, the largest and longest Ponzi Scheme in world history, that of Bernie Madoff, had survived for decades under the very nose of the SEC, despite a long series of detailed warnings and complaints. The second largest such fraud, that of Allen R. Stanford, also bears the label “Made in the USA.”<br />
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Some of the sources of Chinese success and American decay are not entirely mysterious. As it happens, the typical professional background of a member of China’s political elite is engineering; they were taught to build things. Meanwhile, a remarkable fraction of America’s political leadership class attended law school, where they were trained to argue effectively and to manipulate. Thus, we should not be greatly surprised that while China’s leaders tend to build, America’s leaders seem to prefer endless manipulation, whether of words, money, or people.<br />
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How corrupt is the American society fashioned by our current ruling elites? That question is perhaps more ambiguous than it might seem. According to the standard world rankings produced by Transparency International, the United States is a reasonably clean country, with corruption being considerably higher than in the nations of Northern Europe or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, but much lower than in most of the rest of the world, including China.<br />
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But I suspect that this one-dimensional metric fails to capture some of the central anomalies of America’s current social dilemma. Unlike the situation in many Third World countries, American teachers and tax inspectors very rarely solicit bribes, and there is little overlap in personnel between our local police and the criminals whom they pursue. Most ordinary Americans are generally honest. So by these basic measures of day-to-day corruption, America is quite clean, not too different from Germany or Japan.<br />
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By contrast, local village authorities in China have a notorious tendency to seize public land and sell it to real estate developers for huge personal profits. This sort of daily misbehavior has produced an annual Chinese total of up to 90,000 so-called “mass incidents”—public strikes, protests, or riots—usually directed against corrupt local officials or businessmen.<br />
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However, although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.<br />
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Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. On a day-to-day basis, little would change, with Swedish traffic policemen and building inspectors performing their duties with the same sort of incorruptible efficiency as before, and I suspect that Sweden’s Transparency International rankings would scarcely decline. But meanwhile, a large fraction of Sweden’s accumulated national wealth might gradually be stolen and transferred to secret Cayman Islands bank accounts, or invested in Latin American drug cartels, and eventually the entire plundered economy would collapse.<br />
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Ordinary Americans who work hard and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and their families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage. The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top of our society, among the One Percent, or more likely the 0.1 percent.<br />
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Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political institutions and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated. Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is quite remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.<br />
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<b>Sidebar Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison</b><br />
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A similar dangerous reticence may afflict most of our media, which appears much more eager to focus on self-inflicted disasters in foreign countries than on those here at home. Presented below is a companion case-study, “Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison,” in which I point out that while the American media a few years ago joined its Chinese counterparts in devoting enormous coverage to the deaths of a few Chinese children from tainted infant formula, it paid relatively little attention to a somewhat similar domestic public-health disaster that killed many tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans.<br />
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A society’s media and academic organs constitute the sensory apparatus and central nervous system of its body politic, and if the information these provide is seriously misleading, looming dangers may fester and grow. A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task. But America’s own societal information system is vastly more skilled and experienced in shaping reality to meet the needs of business and government leaders, and this very success does tremendous damage to our country.<br />
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Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. Certainly the cheering coliseum crowds of the Roman Empire favored their bread and circuses over the difficult and dangerous tasks that their ancestors had undertaken during Rome’s rise to world greatness. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.<br />
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But if so, then we must admit that Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.<br />
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Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative and founder of Unz.org.<br />
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<br />Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-86549607911611143992012-04-08T06:21:00.000-07:002012-04-08T06:21:06.578-07:00'There are wicked men sitting in the seats of judgement.'http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/27/how-the-new-american-empire-really-works/<br />
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March 27, 2012 185Why the Wars Will Not End How the New American Empire Really Works<br />
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS<br />
Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.<br />
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The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.<br />
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In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources.<br />
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Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.<br />
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America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?<br />
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The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.<br />
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The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.<br />
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In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.<br />
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This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.<br />
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Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.<br />
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This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.<br />
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It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the American empire.<br />
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PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached through his website <br />
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Title from Linton Kwesi Johnson of Brixton, EnglandWahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-23043413350312768022012-03-22T15:45:00.001-07:002012-03-22T15:45:45.952-07:00Walking eagle and the Russian landingOne of the brighter commentators pointed out before Conservative Prime Minister Cameron assumed power in the UK that the new government would be forced into actions that 'would make the Tories unelectable for a generation,' and that appears inevitable, a silver lining and the most likely scenario.<br />
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The regular pronouncements by the Mullahs that nuclear weapons are hateful to God, like many of their statements, an underlining of the obvious, is never going to get any air time in the US, I fear. Even the blogosphere avoids it. Too confrontational, I suppose; it wouldn’t be very bright to call a liar a fellow who's announced he has the right to kill you at his discretion.<br />
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The Russians have achieved their centuries old dream of a warm water port, escaping from the network of missile bases the US had built around them, (all aimed at 'rogue states' like Iran, ca va sans dire, of course, of course.) A number of their warships were docked at the Syrian port of Tartous, somewhat north of Lebanon, together with the Iranian ships that recently sailed through the Suez Canal. <br />
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Recently discovered, though it has been headline stuff for some time, but only in Arabic and Russian language spaces, is that large numbers of Russian troops were on board the warships, and that these have been landed in Syria. 'Military advisors,' of course, the Russians have got the hang of properly 'kulturny' language by now, but leaving Senator McCain and his ilk in the US very far behind the curve. They'll have to make do with Kofi Annan. <br />
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Add that to the South Stream pipeline, leaving the US favored Nabucco pipeline nowhere, and a massively anchored rear end back in Asia with their Chinese allies, and it's looking pretty good for them.<br />
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On a recent trip to the United States, Barack Obama took David Cameron to a Native Indian American gathering.<br />
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He spoke for almost an hour on his plans for a Carbon Trading Tax for the UK, America and Europe.<br />
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At the conclusion of his speech, the crowd presented him with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name –<br />
Walking Eagle.<br />
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A very chuffed David Cameron then departed in his motorcade, waving to the crowds.<br />
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A news reporter later asked the traditional Chief of the Indians how they came to select the new name given to the P.M.<br />
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He explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.<br />
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This is the gentleman, as far as my gleanings from the other side of the Atlantic have been able to gather, who has so far privatized the NHS, (the national health service), the prisons, even the police, in an effort to do everything possible to imitate the USA. I freely confess I am not one of his fans.<br />
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My point is that the inhabitants of the 'Islands of the Blessed' as the British Isles were known in the ancient world, can not escape the effect of events in the outside world. That is more especially so in the case of a ruler (Walking Eagle) who is openly trying to make the country a carbon copy of all the failed systems plaguing the USA. <br />
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Since the main policy drive of the USA is the anti-Iran initiative, slavishly imitated by Walking Eagle, and the aim is repeat in that country what was achieved in Libya, the complete destruction of a country that gave all its citizens free healthcare, free education, free study abroad, something westerners can only dream of, it seems reasonable to mention some of the Iranian statements, such as that nuclear weapons are hateful to God, that will never be allowed to see the light of day by Walking Eagle or his US model, and also to highlight some of the political realities of Syria, perhaps a target even before Iran. (At least I didn't raise the role of the Bank for International Settlements, or its tentacles the IMF and World Bank.)<br />
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As the trees say in the Lord of the Rings, anything worth saying is worth saying at enormous length. <br />
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Boring I may be, but brief I ain't.<br />Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-24211630709982300562012-03-09T01:15:00.000-08:002012-05-08T23:26:40.208-07:00Schickelgrubr of the Thousand YearsI can remember listening to the speeches of Herr Schickelgrubr (he didn’t change his name to that of his stepfather, Hitler, until after the trip to Liverpool.)<br />
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The speeches were full of what Chaucer would call ‘high sentence,’ i.e., noble sentiments, on the nobility and heroism of the great German people, which did duty to explain unfortunate events such as the loss of an entire army at Stalingrad, now Kaliningrad, I believe. Skulls of German soldiers are still dug up around the area, and the top sections serve as ashtrays in fashionable dentists’ waiting rooms.<br />
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The Volk, the people, figured prominently in Herr Schickelgrubr’s speeches, (tho’ not the Volkswagen, or people’s car, the Beetle, as far as I remember, so tightly engineered you have to open a window before you can close the door, nor the spaghetti tangle of highways he invented that now exist everywhere.) <br />
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We were on the other side, of course, but there was no way of avoiding the speeches, any more than the pronouncements of Howdy Doody can be evaded in the contemporary USA. I remain thankful for the early experience in regularly indulging death penalty offenses such as listening to the BBC; it made later events familiar, or déjà vu as Americans like to say, without worrying too much. ‘We owe God a death’ as Prince Hal pointed out.<br />
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One of Herr Schickelgrubr’s themes was the establishment of the Thousand Year Empire, [das Tausend Jaehrige Reich] which he referred to regularly. In many respects, this shows similarities to the American Century, a boast rather than a fact. <br />
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Very recently discovered, a few years ago, is the fact that Herr Schickelgrubr’s full sister, Anna Schickelgrubr, his only known blood relative, was kept safe in a sanatorium throughout WW2. No doubt she received the best possible care, and the discovery was on the whole chalked up to his credit. To keep safe your sister, who may not be capable of living in the outside world, was understandable.<br />
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So much for Schickelgrubr. Apart from nightmare moments when the possibilities of cloning are considered, he is safely dead. <br />
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What of the living, and what in particular of these United States?<br />
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It is always a difficult task to winnow out the truth in any situation where one authority controls all the news media, or infotainment as it is now called. It appears, however, that the ruler of the USA did sign into law a regulation allowing him to end the life of any US citizen at his sole discretion at the time of the local 2011/2012 New Year. <br />
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(If this were not so, why would the US Attorney General spend quite so much time and effort justifying, by various subterfuges, the right of the ruler to end any citizen’s life at his sole discretion?) <br />
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This Attorney General was the legal advisor of a company found to have paid the FARC to bump off union organizers and civil rights activists that were obstructing the company, making him a person not perhaps suitable to be Attorney General. <br />
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This may well tempt some to give up the unequal struggle: ‘Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.’<br />
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The better informed however will point to HB 1160<br />
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/02/28/ndaa-nullification-passes-virginia-senate-by-a-veto-proof-39-1-vote/<br />
which records the vote by the Virginia Senate to refuse all implementation of that federal law, and forbid all co-operation with federal authorities trying to impose it, allowing the better informed to respond with, ‘Blessed are they who reside in Virginia, for they shall not be imposed upon.’ From the Senate it goes to the House, who have already approved the bill by 96-4.<br />
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No doubt the struggle between states and the federal authorities will continue, but a number of states are considering similar legislation; in Washington State, the bill is full non-compliance. <br />Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-57549698006596083252012-03-04T19:03:00.000-08:002012-03-04T19:03:27.587-08:00What will happenWhen all those troops being withdrawn arrive back in the States?<br />
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Well, for them, ‘Killing people is kinda fun,’ as a number of them have admitted, indeed just the real life version of computer games they’ve played for years.<br />
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Their first targets are likely to be the Latinos already being rounded up en masse in southern states for possibly being illegal immigrants, but they’re not likely to stop there.<br />
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You were not heard to complain when your Latino neighbors were being rounded up, and so it’s fair to assume you’re OK with the system.<br />
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They rather enjoy hunting down these two legs, two arms, torso and head types for sport, as you know, and then pissing on the corpses. (Who were they? Who cares, not important.) <br />
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They’re unlikely to restrict themselves to Latinos, however, and the legal framework is in place.<br />
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Something to look forward to among the tornadoes, floods, and drought. <br />Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5511104214693308337.post-16593448169767461192012-03-01T02:36:00.000-08:002012-03-01T02:36:29.812-08:00The Queen, gawd bless 'er,in her diamond jubilee speech recommended the practice of neighbourliness, a quality easier found in the USA than in Britain.<br />
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This is probably because Americans have had uniformly shitty governments ever since the birth of their state 236 years ago, and have therefore had to fend pretty much for themselves and look after each other, much as the Norsemen did in ancient times.<br />
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(The original draft of the US constitution stipulated as inalienable rights, life, liberty, and property. The last item was regarded as too dangerous, - crucially in the case of women, ownership of their own bodies - by the eighteenth century white male land and slave owners writing the document, and the more vague life liberty and the pursuit of happiness was substituted. As one of them put it, it might be used to encourage populist pressures for equal distribution of property, and other wicked schemes. The constitution was quite deliberately framed to protect and institutionalize rule by and for the rich in perpetuity.) <br />
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The Havamal, the tenth century Norse document, for example recommends staying on good terms with your neighbour. In case of a fire, they 'will rush out to help in their nightshirts, while kinsmen dawdle over their equipment,' your kinsmen always being miles away, while your neighbours would like to keep the flames from getting to their own houses.<br />
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The Vikings did have a weakness for wandering off to see if they couldn't pick up a bit of something further afield; indeed, that's what the word 'viking,' or 'raiding,' means, and why it was applied to the Norsemen. <br />
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It seems doubtful, however, that a few yards of embroidered cloth, a gold ring or two, and whatever else they could carry off was worth all that trouble and danger, not to mention wounds, and so one must conclude the Norsemen probably did it because they enjoyed it. Arguably Americans suffer from a similar urge.<br />
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So Rudyard Kipling asked, in the Spear Song of the Danish women:<br />
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"What is woman that you forsake her<br />
And the hearth and the home acre<br />
To go with the old grey widow maker?"<br />Wahyusamputrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14113407940308381597noreply@blogger.com1