Wahyusamputra

Elegy

2012-01-29T16:58:00.000-08:00

Elegy for Mary Rose, aged two hours

Poor girl, peregrine of all worlds now,
The black wind drove you through our world
So quickly, you found with us no shelter
From the storm that darkened all your day.

Migrant broken on the autumn gale,
You did not stay to watch the bloody birth,
Nor heard the tires of the black saloon.

She was so young, who will teach her
What the dead should do?

She went through our lighted rooms so fast,
I had no chance to tell her
I know no more than she does.

II

Beauty’s flame and beauty’s light
Flower in a summer night
Never they but always we
Carefully, guardedly

Hoard the riot, cage the gem,
Desperately clutching them.
The smallest part is all we see
Of beauty’s prodigality.

Beauty’s children go in haste;
Who are you to call it waste?
Without your glances runs the rose
Circling in its own repose.

She will not show what made her be
Woman’s generosity.
She’s member now of that tall nation
That do not need my admiration.

Ninedragonwall

2012-01-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

EndoftheYearoftheHare

2012-01-16T01:50:00.000-08:00

Not the Year of the Rabbit, squire.There are some big differences. See the Hodja and the Hare.

Well, we’re only a week from the official end of the Year of the Hare, which began on February 14, 2011. The Year of the Dragon starts on January 23, 2012.

For those interested in looking back, the Hare has lived up to its promise of vast changes at great speed, demonstrating the characteristic Power, Beauty, Danger predicted for it, if you think back to February.

For those interested in looking forward, here is Philip Giraldi, an ex CIA analyst, on the coming war with Iran, if current hostilities are carried through.

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/01/11/what-war-with-iran-might-look-like/

Meanwhile, ‘A December news release from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control warned of the dangers of Campylobacter jejuni bacteria infections on a sheep ranch, but apparently only among workers who used an old-style (19th century) method of castrating the animals. CDC strongly urged that workers stop biting off the sheep's genitals and instead use modern tools. [Wall Street Journal, 12-8-2011]’

NewYearResolutions

2011-12-27T03:38:00.000-08:00

Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.): “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished...The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be...”

“The Sage says: ‘I take no action, yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves...’”

Chuang Tzu (369-286 B.C.): “I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under the restraints that the ruler would impose. I would never take any official service, and thereby I will [be free] to satisfy my own purposes.”

“There has been such thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind [with success].” The world “does simply not need governing; in fact, it should not be governed.”

Pao Ching-yen (4th century A.D.): “Where knights and hosts could not be assembled, there was no warfare afield...Ideas of using power for advantage had not yet burgeoned. Disaster and disorder did not occur...People munched their food and disported themselves; they were carefree and contented.”

Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145-90 B.C.): “Each man has only to be left to utilize his own abilities and exert his strength to obtain what he wishes...When each person works away at his own occupation and delights in his own business, then like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow ceaseless day and night without being summoned, and the people will produce commodities without having been asked.”

Jesus

2011-12-19T13:13:00.000-08:00

Newsoftheobvious

2011-12-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

President Obama’s revelation that he has asked Iran nicely to hand back the super secret US drone is an embarrassing climb down, but we are not dealing with sane people. The attack on the sleeping Pakistani soldiers was meant to soften up the Pakistanis, and it had predictably the opposite effect. The civilian government is holding the hand of the military, who have ordered all aircraft penetrating their borders to be shot down. The chances that Pakistan would renege on China, its main support, with whom it has a border, to switch allegiance to the crumbling US were always zero. But we are not dealing with sane people here.

That the drone program had a self replicating worm affecting it is fairly old news, (See http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2011/11/roughbeast.html comment posted at Hallowe’en) and that’s without counting the fifty or so countries working on their own drone programs, by theft, gift, or imitation; Pakistan is merely the first to install a drone station on one of its naval vessels. That the worm is, as feared, capable of allowing the drone itself to be controlled by others than those sending it is the new news that has now been illustrated beyond argument.

It does blow a large and visible hole in the attempts to box in Iran, however. Any day now the news will leak out to the US press that the Pathans (Pashtuns) are the largest tribal group on earth, artificially obstructed from any presence in the military, half of whom live in Pakistan, and half in Afghanistan. The border between them, the Durand line, drawn by a nineteenth century British administrator, which runs through the infamous Khyber Pass and some of the toughest terrain on the planet, has never been of the slightest interest to them; they have always ignored it.

Thetrap

2011-12-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

A very neat formula:

There are world wide around three billion adults ready and willing to work, but, owing for example to mechanization of agriculture, only about 1.2 billion jobs that really need to be done.

What do we do about the missing 1.8 billion we don't really have work for?

Resources available, food, housing and such are adequate to provide for the entire world population. Are those who work willing to let those who don't, live for free?

No. Not on my dime! There's the real problem, at least the first half of the real problem.

In theory of course, if you're content with what you do, why insist on being able to control others? If you're not, get out and do something else.

(Voltaire put it rather neatly "The comfort of the rich demands an ample supply of the poor.")

The second half of the problem is commercial and financial. Who is going to buy the mountains of goods and services the corporations hold in their inventories?

(Debt is a form of currency, and the 1.8 billion can be, and often are, forced into selling their children, their bodies, and their internal organs, but this only buys time, pushing the problem into the future, while the rich enjoy the comforts Voltaire describes. Militarized oppression can hold them down, but the debt slaves still have no money to buy the inventories.)

Just saying.

Alone

2011-11-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

You have limited time; I'll keep it short:

Have you noticed you're now not the only one (mostly) living in a single person household, not in your social life, but without significant other?

The single person household has been the fastest increasing type over the last few decades. In many countries (Japan, Germany, Russia) they are not even reaching replacement level, with enough new births to keep the population stable. (These are by far the leaders in the world, not the followers.) China achieves the same result, of the single child family and the generation of the 'little emperors,' by decree.

Two can live as cheaply as one was always a dubious proposition, especially when likely to become three.

Does that mean the disappearance of the nuclear family? Not at all, but the strains on them are more severe; they can not control the demands made on them, which will increase over time. In cases where the resources remain stagnant, where the offspring fail to provide new resources, they may collapse.

A mystical shift to less reproduction? I think so. (Why mystical? We know all about the mechanics of reproduction, and we know nothing else.)

More mobile, in better fighting trim, richer, better equipped, well networked.

Increasingly clearly those able to give help, not those in need of help.

Just a thought.

Roughbeast

2011-11-14T02:41:00.000-08:00

Three quarters of the way thru the Chinese Year of the Hare, that began on February 14, 2011. Amazed yet at how fast the world has changed in a mere nine months? A powerful kick in those hind legs, too.

“What rough beast, its hour come at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” said W.B. Yeats

“…the centre cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Thecolonel

2011-10-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, October 17, 2011, Colonel Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi, leader of the largest tribe in Libya, was found by the Benghazi rebels in his home town of Sirte.

The colonel climbed out of his car and waved to the rebels, saying “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.” The rebels, however, shot the colonel, first in the legs to disable him, and then sodomized the dead or dying man with a large stick before killing him together with his son Mutassim. The colonel’s last words are reported to have been, “What did I ever do to you? Don’t you know what you’re doing is wrong? Don’t you know the difference between right and wrong?”

These events took place after an eight month assault on the desert nation of some five million people by the combined military forces of the USA, the UK, France, and Italy.

Colonel Qadhafi had ruled Libya for over forty years. He had given its entire population a standard of living rated the best in Africa by the UN, and which neither the USA, in its two hundred and thirty five year history, nor any other developed western nation, had ever been able to equal.

The colonel’s corpse was publicly exhibited in a freezer in a supermarket until Monday, October 24, 2011 before being buried in a secret desert location at dawn on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 to avoid its becoming a shrine, a likely eventuality if the location is ever discovered.

Saif Al-Islam Qadhafi, the colonel’s son, is said to be approaching the borders of Niger, with Touaregs to guide him through and look after him.

Howdy Doody and his cronies can be left to worry about twenty thousand missile launchers, each capable of taking down an airliner, and no back yard without its own tank.

Moneytrust

2011-10-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

The above cartoon was published in 1912, to predict the effect of creating the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, created in 1913, a corporation created by the major banks and staffed by their representatives and appointees.

The cartoon appeared many years before the establishment of the unitary presidency; AUMF, the authorization for the use of military force; the creation of the state of Israel; liquid war; drone warfare, or the surveillance state, but its predicted results are readily visible. “Not only do they run the banks, they run the institutions that regulate the banks.”

Whoppers

2011-10-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2011/10/the-seven-biggest-economic-lies/

Here’s a short (2 minute 30 second) effort to rebut the seven biggest whoppers now being told by those who want to take America backwards. The major points:

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False. From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don’t believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.)

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. Wrong again. It means fewer government workers – everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. Untrue. With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They’ll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. Wrong. Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Don’t believe it. Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7. It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax. Wrong. There’s nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton.

Gothicgraphics

2011-10-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

New map of the world

Both from Revolution not on TV

USbusinessupdate

2011-10-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

http://revolutionnotontv.blog.co.uk/2011/10/07/from-uncle-frank-11979903/

It’s raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 1000 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to choose one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 1000 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the 1000 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower. The pig grower takes the 1000 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel. The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 1000 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit. The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 1000 Euro note to the same hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 1000 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 1000 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States is doing business today !!

LateLibya

2011-09-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero090711]

The decorum was striking. Where Iraqis stripped the villas of Saddam’s family bare of their last teaspoons, Libyans respectfully filed past the dining room table laid with crockery for twelve, as if visiting a preserved historic manor on a Sunday afternoon. A packet of corn flakes stood open and untouched on the kitchen counter. Twenty minutes before the Ramadan breakfast, local volunteers declared it was closing time, and ushered the public out one room at a time. A grandmother furtively scooped a pair of pink baby booties from the nursery into the folds of her dress when she spied the wardens turning their backs.

The victorious militiamen lording over ‘Aisha’s father’s lair in Bab al-‘Aziziyya, by contrast, presided over mayhem and rampant looting. Its walls have been gutted, torched and covered with jubilant graffiti. Cars drove home laden with medical equipment pillaged from the compound’s hospital. Gunners pumped their anti-aircraft and machine guns, the latter held with one hand over their heads. A militia’s ambulance wailed rebel paeans.

/snip/

For now, the tide seems to be with Tripoli’s people. In an effort to dislodge the militiamen, they have backed efforts to stand up the interim government slowly transferring its seat of power to Tripoli. They have welcomed its message of national reconciliation and preservation of all but the thin upper crust of the Qaddafi regime as the fastest route to resume normality and civilian rule, and forestall the militarization and protection rackets that filled Benghazi’s vacuum when the Qaddafi regime vanished there. The continued leadership of ‘Abd al-Jalil, who until the February uprising was Qaddafi’s justice minister, and Jibril, who headed Qaddafi’s state-run economic think tank in Tripoli, has calmed fears among the city’s bureaucrats and merchants of a root-and-branch upheaval that would sweep them aside. At the NTC’s invitation, they thronged to celebrations and morning prayers on the first day of ‘Id al-Fitr to replace the militiamen in Martyrs Square. Souq al-Jum‘a’s elders, who had allowed 4,000 Misrata militiamen to pitch camp in such sites as the new branch of LTT, the internet company owned by the eldest of Qaddafi’s sons, Muhammad, signaled that their hospitality had its limits and asked them to leave.

/snip/

There is much to be hopeful about. Tripolitania lacks an entrenched martial tradition. The cult of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, the warrior-priest who led the rebellion against Italian imperialism, flourishes across eastern Libya, but never really seeped west. Nor did the colonel’s caprice entirely smother the capital’s cosmopolitan spirit. For all his brutality, his propagandists celebrated his “civilian” accomplishments -- the Green Book and the Great Manmade River -- not his few military intrigues, which largely failed. His disastrous 1980s invasion of Chad was erased from the official narrative, and the army sidelined as a potential, and sometimes actual, fifth column.

Moreover, as the social space least contaminated by the colonel, the capital’s mosques have played a key role in rapid restoration of order. From the first nights of victory, preachers broadcast calls for militiamen to stop firing in the air and register looted weapons with the local NTC office. In many districts, the local mosque has become the local seat of government, as well as the source of water and, thanks to plentiful alms collection, welfare.

/snip/

And the risk remains that Libya’s militarization will rub off on civilian life, leading Libyans to pursue their various goals by force of arms. Post-Qaddafi, weapons are everywhere. Berber peasants stash tanks in their farmyards. Beneath an overpass in al-Zawiya, high-school children rotate the turrets of the tanks they have commandeered. No sooner had the colonel fled than Tripoli’s population scavenged the arms depots for self-defense. More hardware and missiles lie for the taking across the coastal plains. On the grounds of Bab al-‘Aziziyya, Tripolitanian fathers excitedly photograph their young daughters carrying rebel guns. Six months ago, the Misratan fighters terrorizing Tripolitanians were themselves mere civilians -- engineers, tradesmen, students and jobless youths -- until conflict turned them into battle-hardened fighters. The danger is that, having resorted to violence, the revolution might continue as it started.

/snip/

Already Misrata’s command has refused to submit to Belhadj’s writ. And after five months of de facto independence, Berbers in the Nafusa Mountains are standing up their own force and cultural symbols. Unlike the Misratans, most of the Berber irregulars who swept into Tripoli quickly went home, but only after replenishing their arsenals with loot from the arms depots. “If we don’t keep some men and guns for ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to fend off a counterattack,” explained Nadir Muqadama, the town’s military spokesman.

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero090711]

Megrahi

2011-09-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

It was reported that the trigger found by the US teams several weeks/months after the explosion was of the type favoured in Libyan- not Palestinian-made bombs, thereby ruling out the Abu Nidal/Iranian scenario.

But apparently an honest Swiss arms factory worker, plagued by his conscience, a couple of years back finally lodged a sworn statement that just after the accident he had been approached by the CIA who requested a sample timer (of the Libyan type) to help with their investigations, which he duly supplied. It was this very timer, recognisable to him in the court photos, that was then 'discovered' on the accident scene.

Had the Scottish judiciary re-opened the case, this testimony was the 'smoking gun' that would have reversed the conviction - and into the bargain humiliated the Scottish justice system for their ineptitude and possible complicity in the original trial. Hence the essential pre-condition for letting fall-guy Megrahi out was that he dropped his appeal - an act misconstrued by the media as further proof of his 'guilt'. Allegedly.

TheMegrahicase

2011-09-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

The person invariably referred to as the Lockerbie bomber in all reports of the tightly controlled US media is certainly entirely innocent of that particular attack.

What happened is as follows:

An American warship, the USS Vincennes, brought down an Iranian civil airliner killing all of the hundreds of passengers aboard. Far from any criticism, the crew were awarded US Congressional medals of honor for their efforts.

The Persians have never been noted for their forgiving nature, and usually take the view that a bloody nose for an attacker discourages repetition, and put out a contract for a tit for tat. The contract was taken up by Abu Nidal, one of many shadowy Palestinian groups, and successfully carried out.

When the US airliner came down over Lockerbie in Scotland, US teams flew in immediately and isolated the entire area. They came up with a small electronic part, said to be the trigger of the explosion that brought down the plane, but the shady past of leaders of the effort forces some skepticism.

In the court case that followed the only witness against Megrahi, a Maltese shopkeeper, was unable to identify Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi, who was sitting in the court, as the man who bought stuff from him in his shop in Malta.

The Maltese shopkeeper, the only evidence against Megrahi, was paid many millions of US dollars for his testimony.

If the proposed re-examination of the case against Megrahi had gone ahead, there seems no doubt that the case against him would have fallen apart.

Megrahi’s exact physical state, whether he is at death’s door or in good health, is irrelevant.

Anyotherbusines

2011-08-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

Any other business?

1. Money

A clear stream of sparkling nourishing revenue can be generated by the stroke of a pen. With a bloated Wall Street nervously sitting on mountains of cash, awaiting outcomes, the time is perfect for a say 1% (one per cent) tax on all financial transactions. Gordon Brown’s Tobin Tax would make a good start.

2. Jobs

America’s creaking decrepit infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, sewers, piping needs to be replaced and very soon.

The workforce is waiting in large numbers and is currently very cheaply available, as are construction materials.

Rescuing and patching America’s neglected infrastructure will provide very large numbers of jobs for those sections of the population that most need it.

3. Debt

Among the most valuable gifts of God are intelligent women.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com.

Her article on the national debt, http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2011/04/cheneygotsomethingright.html shows how the national debt can be treated as a public utility, reversing the thrust of the debt, and producing a simple straightforward solution to the entire debt crisis and the kabuki (Symbolic Japanese drama) of the debt ceiling battle. Make it a public utility!

Any other business?

Any questions?

There being none….

Yepaysyermoneyanyetakesyerchoice

2011-08-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

August 14, 2011 is halfway thru the Year of the Hare, which started on February 14, 2011, St. Valentine’s Day, you may remember, three days before the Benghazi rebellion kicked off on February 17, 2011, and the US downgrade from AAA to AA+ by S&P, the ratings agency, took place on August 5, 2011. Can’t say the old Hare isn’t moving the shanks around, and we’re only halfway through!
Below are some of the various views currently offered, the scenes to be seen:

The Iranian clergy have issued a fatwa (religious ruling) against nuclear weapons, calling them "offensive to God".

The European Union's Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2010 states that in 2009 there were "294 failed, foiled, or successfully executed attacks" in six European countries….
…Islamists? They were behind a grand total of one attack. Yes, one. Out of 294 attacks. In a population of half a billion people.
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/TE-SAT%202010.pdf

However, I was pleased to learn that side-stream smoke [passive smoking] has 4000 chemicals, 60 of which are known to cause cancer. I am told that most organically grown vegetables contain only 3925 chemicals, of which only 53 are known to cause cancer.

At some point in the future, for example, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the US navy’s billion dollar battleships sunk off the coast of Vietnam by cheap Chinese missiles.
Read more: The Great Correction...5 years On, Part III http://dailyreckoning.com/the-great-correction-5-years-on-part-iii/#ixzz1UJLtn7uW

Heorte sceal the cenre... the ure maegen lytlath
Heart shall be keener... as our strength lessens - Anglo Saxon

We owe God a death - Prince Hal, Henry V

“It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes” Stalin

“Representation is a denial of democracy.” The Green Book, Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi
“The poor people line up to throw their votes into the ballot box, like pieces of rubbish into the trash can.” Mu’ammar Qadhafi, The Green Book

Today's a good day to die - Cherokee saying

Are you gonna believe me, or your lying eyes? – Groucho Marx

And get rid of your politicians, for God’s sake, like Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, the war profiteer as government, the richest man in the senate, probably, with most of his wealth invested in military support companies, - highly profitable – stoking troubles from his perch on the Foreign Relations board, showing up regularly at Karzai’s shoulder, no mayhem is useless if it makes an extra buck for Kerry! The guy does not belong in decent company.

They are calling thee from the high pillars of the throne of God. I know not what hath befallen thee in this dungheap. - Hafiz

“Whatever can be imagined can be achieved.” Angela Palmer, the Oxford Ghost Forest lady.

A More Reputable Career: Thomas Heathfield was a well-paid banking consultant with a promising career in Maidenhead, England, but gave it up this year to move to South Africa and endure rigorous training as a "sangoma" ("witch doctor"). After five months of studying siSwati language, sleeping in the bush, hunting for animal parts, vomiting up goats' blood and learning native dances, Heathfield, 32, was given a new name, Gogo Mndawe, and is now qualified to read bones and prescribe herbal cures (among the skills expected of sangomas by the roughly 50 percent of South Africa's population that reveres them). He admitted concern about his acceptance as a white man calling out African spirits, "but when (the people) see (me) dance, perhaps those questions go away." [Daily Telegraph (London), 7-2-2011]

What goes around comes around, it’s only money, easy come, easy go, and worse things happen at sea. Investors lose a trillion dollars in one day By Steve Hargreaves August 8, 2011: 5:39 PM ET

Of the fifty countries developing drones, by the way, the Pakistanis have scored a first by installing an operational drone launcher on one of their navy ships.

************************************************

#40 Hsien, Deliverance, of the I Ching or Book of Changes.

above CHEN THE AROUSING, THUNDER

below K’AN THE ABYSMAL WATER

Here the movement goes out of the sphere of danger. The obstacle has been removed; the difficulties are being resolved. Deliverance is not yet achieved; it is just in its beginning, and the hexagram represents its various stages.

THE JUDGEMENT
DELIVERANCE The southwest furthers.
If there is no longer anything where one has to go,
Return brings good fortune.
If there is still something where one has to go,
Hastening brings good fortune.

This refers to a time in which tensions and complications begin to be eased. At such times we ought to make our way back to ordinary conditions as soon as possible; this is the meaning of “the southwest.” These periods of sudden change have great importance. Just as rain relieves atmospheric tension, making all the buds burst open, so a time of deliverance from burdensome pressure has a liberating and stimulating effect on life. One thing is important, however: in such times we must not overdo our triumph. The point is not to push on farther than is necessary. Returning to the regular order of life as soon as deliverance is achieved brings good fortune. If there are any residual matters that ought to be attended to, it should be done as quickly as possible, so that a clean sweep is made and no retardations occur.

THE IMAGE
Thunder and rain set in:
The image of DELIVERANCE.
Thus the superior man pardons mistakes
And forgives misdeeds.

A thunderstorm has the effect of clearing the air; the superior man produces a similar effect when dealing with mistakes and sins of men that induce a condition of tension. Through clarity he brings deliverance. However, when failings come to light, he does not dwell on them; he simply passes over mistakes, the unintentional transgressions, just as thunder dies away. He forgives misdeeds, the intentional transgressions, just as water washes everything clean.

NatodebacleinLibya

2011-07-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/
Weekend Edition July 15 - 17, 2011

NATO's Debacle in Libya By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

After three and a half months of bombing and arms supply to various rebel factions, NATO's failure in its efforts to promote "regime change" in Libya is now glaring.

Obviously NATO's commanders are still hoping that a lucky bomb may kill Gaddafi, but to date the staying power has been with the Libyan leader, whereas it is the relevant NATO powers who are fighting among themselves.

The reports from Istanbul of the deliberations of NATO’s Contact Group have a surreal quality, as Secretary of State Clinton and British foreign minister Hague gravely re-emphasize their commitment to regime change and the strengthening of ties to the Transitional Council in Benghazi, while the humiliation of the entire NATO expedition is entering the history books as an advertisement of the dangers of political fantasy in the service of “humanitarian interventionism”, appalling intelligence work, illusions about bombing and air power, and some of the worst press coverage in living memory.

Take British prime minister David Cameron. He can thank Rupert Murdoch, even the wretched Andy Coulson for one ironic blessing. His appalling misjudgment and obstinacy in hiring former News of the world editor Coulson has so dominated British headlines these past days that an equally staggering misjudgment in the international theater is escaping well-merited ridicule and rebuke.

When Cameron vied with French president Sarkozy in early March in heading the charge against Qaddafi, no murmur of caution seems to have disturbed the blithe mood of confidence in Downing St. It was as though Blair’s blunders and miscalculations in Iraq, endlessly disinterred in subsequent years, had never been.

Cameron, like Sarkozy, Clinton and Obama presumably had intelligence assessments of the situation in Libya Did any of them say that Gaddafi might be a tougher nut to crack than the presidents of Tunisia or Egypt, might even command some popular support in Tripoli and western Libya, historically at odds with Benghazi and the eastern region? If they did, did they pay any attention?

The Western press, along with al-Jazeera, was no help. The early charges of Gaddafi committing “genocide” against his own people or ordering mass rapes were based on unverified rumor or propaganda bulletins from Benghazi and have now been decisively discredited by reputable organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Any pretensions the International Criminal Court might have had to judicial impartiality has been undermined by the ICC’s role as NATO’s creature, rushing out indictments of Gaddafi and his closest associates whenever NATO’s propaganda agenda has demanded it.

The journalists in Benghazi became cheerleaders for what was from the start plainly a disorganized rabble of disparate factions. The journalists in Tripoli were reluctant to file copy which might be deemed by their editors as “soft” on Gaddafi, a devil figure in the West for most of his four decades in power. America’s pwogwessives exulted that at last they had on their hands a “just war” and could cheer on NATO’s bombardiers with a clear conscience and entertain fantasies about the revolutionary purity of the rebels.

All history shows that the dropping of thousands of bombs and missiles, with whatever supposed standards of “pin point accuracy”, never elicits the enthusiastic support of civilians on the receiving end, even if a certificate of humanitarian assistance and merciful intent is stamped on every projectile. Recent pro-government rallies in Tripoli have been vast. Libya has a population of about six million, with four million in Tripoli. Gaddafi barrels around the city in an open jeep. Large amounts of AK-47s have been distributed to civilian defense committees. Were they all compelled to demonstrate by Gaddafi’s enforcers? It seems unlikely.

This last week the western press excitedly relayed the news that a handful of prisoners were denouncing Gaddafi. Well, if you were a prisoner with rebel guns pointed at your head, would you proclaim your fidelity to the prime target of their fury, or murmur that you had been dragooned into unwilling service? Isn’t this an item from Journalism 101. Are they “black mercenaries” or Libyans from the south who happen to be black and members of Gaddafi’s militias?

Another pointer to NATO’s misjudgments has been the heavy-handed dismissal of charges from African, Russian and even leaders of NATO countries such as Germany that the mandates of two UN security council resolutions passed in February and then March 17 – protection of civilian populations – were being brazenly distorted in favor of efforts to kill Gaddafi and install the ramshackle “provisional government” in Benghazi – a shady bunch from the getgo.

In early March, Sarkozy, languishing in the polls, believed the counsel of “new philosopher” Bernard-Henri Lévy, after the latter’s March 6 excursion to Benghazi, that Libya and its oil were up for grabs. On March 11 Sarkozy took the precipitate step of recognizing the Benghazi gang as the legitimate government of Libya and awaited Gaddafi’s collapse with a confident heart.

In a hilarious inside account of the NATO debacle, Vincent Jauvert of Le Nouvel Observateur has recently disclosed that French intelligence services assured Sarkozy and foreign minister Juppe “from the first [air] strike, thousands of soldiers would defect from Gaddafi.” They also predicted that the rebels would move quickly to Sirte, the hometown of the Qaddafi and force him to flee the country. This was triumphantly and erroneously trumpeted by the NATO powers which even proclaimed that he had flown to Venezuela. By all means opt for the Big Lie as a propaganda ploy, but not if it is inevitably going to be discredited 24 hours later.

“We underestimated al-Gaddafi ,” one French officer told Jauvert. “He was preparing for forty-one years for an invasion. We did not imagine he would adapt as quickly. No one expects, for example, to transport its troops and missile batteries, Gaddafi will go out and buy hundreds of Toyota pick-ups in Niger and Mali. It is a stroke of genius: the trucks are identical to those used by the rebels. NATO is paralyzed. It delays its strikes. Before bombing the vehicles, drivers need to be sure they are whose forces are Gaddafi’s. ‘We asked the rebels to a particular signal on the roof of their pickup truck, said a soldier, but we were never sure. They are so disorganized...’"

When collapse did not arrive on schedule the French government breezily confirmed earlier this month it was shipping and air-dropping arms supplies to Libyan rebel groups. We can safely assume Britain has its own clandestine operations in train, though the capture of the SAS/MI6 unit by Libyan farmers was not an inspiring augury.

The NATO coalition is now falling apart, though disclosure of this development has been muted to non-existent in the US press. French defense minister Gerard Longuet gave an interview at the end of last week to a French tv station saying that military action against Libya has failed, and it is time for diplomacy: “We must now sit around a table. We will stop bombing as soon as the Libyans start talking to one another and the military on both sides go back to their bases.’ Longuet suggested that Gaddafi might be able to remain in Libya, ‘in another room of the palace, with another title’.”

If Longuet’s startling remarks were for local consumption on the eve of an Assembly vote, it clearly came as a shock to Cameron and Secretary of State Clinton. To heighten the impression of a civil war in NATO Cameron and Clinton rushed out statements asserting the ongoing goal of regime change, and that Gaddafi’s departure was a sine qua non, as demanded by the Benghazi gang.

But Berlusconi, his country the objective of tens of thousands of refugees from the fighting and from economic dislocation in Libya is now saying he was against the whole NATO adventure from the start. He may decline to renew in the fall current basing agreements in Italy for the NATO intervening powers. Germany has always been unenthusiastic. Initially, France and Britain nourished hopes of close military liaison but that soon collapsed for all the usual reasons -- inertia, suspicion, and simple incompetence.

Sarkozy’s suspicions of Germany and Turkey were apparently so intense, according to Le Nouvel Observateur, that he called for the sidelining of the Turkish and German officers present in the command structure of NATO, on the grounds that they could undermine the war given Berlin and Ankara’s distaste for the whole exercise. Normal guidelines dictate that when the supreme commander of NATO, an American general and his No. 2, a Briton, are on leave, the No. 3, is to be a German. Sarkozy had this sequence nixed.

Obama has been playing a double game, reflective of domestic pressures and political priorities. At the start, the rush to the UN Security Council was very much Secretary of State Clinton’s initiative. In political stature early to mid-February Obama was at his nadir. There was growing talk of a one-term presidency. Clinton rushed into what she perceived as a tempting vacuum, perhaps even began to entertain some hopes of accelerating Obama’s decline and proffering herself as a potential contender in 2012. Obama, still fighting the “wimp” label, swiftly endorsed the NATO mission and defied challenges as to its constitutional propriety. Clinton soon thereafter announced she was not particularly interested in staying in national politics after 2012.

In terms of equipment the US has been crucial. According to one French general cited by Le Nouvel Observateur, “33 of 41 tanker aircraft used in the operation are American, most of the AWACS as well, all the drones as well, as 100 per cent of anti-radar missile and laser guidance kits for bombs. And that's not all. The main means of command and control of NATO as the huge bandwidth for transmitting all the data is American.” The Director of Military Intelligence, General Didier Bolelli, revealed that over 80 per cent of the targets assigned to the French pilots in Libya was designated by U.S.! "They give us just enough so that we do not figure we were breaking," says one diplomat.

Those whose memories stretch back to the Suez debacle of 1956 might recall that Eisenhower simply ordered the British, French and Israeli forces to abandon the effort to overthrow Nasser. We could well be seeing a less overt rerun of that conclusive demonstration of post World War II US dominance, with the Obama administration making the point that any effort at asserting European primacy in the Mediterranean region is doomed to failure.

Before his retirement Defense Secretary Gates took the opportunity to twist the knife in a speech in Brussels: “The mightiest military alliance in history, is …into an operation against a poorly-armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.” He said ominously, “future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”

Even if Obama is in fact wholeheartedly for regime change in Libya the political temperature here does not favor the sort of escalation – hugely costly and much against the public mood - required in the wake of the failure of the bombing campaign.

There’s no evidence that Labor’s leader, Ed Miliband, lion-like in his eagerness to seize the reins of the anti-Murdoch bandwagon, has the political agility to toast Cameron for the Libyan farce. By disposition he’s probably keener on “humanitarian interventions” than Cameron and can only reproach him for not trying hard enough.

In sum, we on the left should rejoice that a simple colonial smash and grab is currently in a shambles, with serious long-term consequences for NATO’s credibility and pretenses to respect for international law. The kangaroo cage known as the International Criminal Court has been even further discredited, another cause for joy.

What next? The air is thick with speculations about a brokered settlement, salted with hopeful bleats from the Americans and British that Gaddafi is on the verge of collapse, that he is running out of fuel, that the rebels are tightening the noose around Tripoli, that the Russians re brokering some sort of a face-saving deal. It seems a better bet to recognize that after four and a half months, NATO and the interventionists are being humiliated. Throw in the humiliation of Rupert Murdoch and we can legitimately raise our champagne glasses even higher.

Note:
“Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say. If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the U.S. government. http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2003/s033103.html
Update on Libya:
"George Bush, Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Guardian etc etc the usual hacks in this matter, make freedom sound like a threat and democracy sound like a punishment.

"Also I don't see any reports of the following:

"1 -- That on Sunday 7/10/11 France calling on NATO to immediately stop its counterproductive and counterintuitive bombing, as more countries witness public demonstrations against NATO’s actions in Libya. French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said in Paris that it was time for Qaddafi loyalists, which France acknowledges have been rapidly increasing in number, and Libyan rebels “to sit around a table to reach a political compromise” because, he said, “there was no solution with force."
or

"2- On 9 July 2011, NATO claimed its aircraft carried out another “precision strike on a pro-Qaddafi missile firing position near Tawurgha, south of Misrata. According to its media office, “NATO intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were conducted over a period of time to ascertain the military use of the site. It was confirmed as being used to launch indiscriminate attacks on Libyan civilians in the area and a staging area by pro-Qaddafi villagers, including planning attacks on rebel forces near the port and city of Misrata.” The next morning, 7/10/11, local inhabitants denied that the farm had any military activity on the property and an examination of the farm buildings failed to discover any.

"or 3
On May 13, 2011, a peace delegation of Muslim religious leaders having arrived in Brega to seek dialogue with fellow Sheikhs from the east of Libya, was bombed at 1 a.m. in their guesthouse by two US MK 82 bombs. Eleven of the Sheikhs were killed instantly and 14 were seriously injured. NATO claimed the building housed a “Command and Control Center.” All witnesses and the hotel owner have vehemently denied this claim.

"or 4
On June 6, 2011, at 2:30 a.m. the central administrative complex of the Higher Committee for Children in central Tripoli, two blocks from this observer’s hotel, was bombed with a total of 12 bombs/rockets. The complex housed the National Downs Syndrome center including its records and vital statistics office, the Crippled Women’s Foundation, the Crippled Children Center, and the National Diabetic Research Center.

"or
5. On June 16, 2011 at 5 a.m. NATO bombed a private hotel in central Tripoli, killing three people and destroying a restaurant and Shisha smoking bar.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/14/libya-gaddafi-troops-demoralised-prisoners-of-war/Comments

Qadhafi

2011-05-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi – the Q indicates a velar K, a guttural far back in the throat, as the dh indicates a velar d, not the ordinary friendly d, but one far back in the throat; they’re helpful indications how his name is pronounced. – with a band of fellow army officers seized power in Libya.

The US had a large airforce base, Wheelus, in the country, whose armaments could have dealt with any small country, but they did nothing at all during the coup. After the usual round of wild claims that they must have been behind it had subsided, it has been generally recognized that the US had no part in the coup, either for or against. See note 1.

Mu’ammar’s first act on attaining power was typical and in a sense defined him. Tripoli was surrounded at the time by the ring of favellas or shanty towns that many cities in the world have; Qadhafi built a whole series of modern furnished apartments, moved the shanty town dwellers into them, and then destroyed the shanty towns. It is unlikely to be forgotten.

Mu’ammar’s own instinct was against it, but his friend Gemal Abdel Nasser of Egypt persuaded him, probably correctly, that it was necessary to create a cult of personality, simply for personal protection. His personal life remained stubbornly individualistic however, with his army tent in his army camp.

Arabic is a very big language, and the term for the minaret of the mosque, Jami’, the gatherer, the crowd creator, was extended by Qadhafi not merely to Joumhouria, a republic, but to Jamahiriya, the technically correct category for the state of Libya, meaning the masses, or “mass-dom” as one official named it.

Qadhafi may be, and often is, regarded as an amiable nut, but he is at least quite consistent. The masses are exactly who he regards as important and worthy of service, which is merely what all governments are supposed to believe, of course, but very few of them have provided their masses with free state of the art healthcare, free state of the art education, and a $50,000 (fifty thousand US dollar) state loan if they get married. Indeed, none of them, to be brutally frank about it, with the exception of Libya, which is why Libya is ranked #1 in Africa for standard of living by the UN.

Ellen Brown’s detailed and very factual description of Libya can be found at
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html

Also at http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2011/04/libya.html

Note I. - Some very individualistic events took place around the coup, however, all rather revealing. The coup had been planned for earlier, for example, but as the day drew nigh, news swept Tripoli that Umm Kulthum was coming to hold a concert there. (To try to explain to those not literate in the Arab world that this maternal full figured lady, all of whose songs lasted for several hours and who had all her earnings paid directly to the Egyptian army was a source of crowd hysteria that made Beatlemania look rustic would take too long.) Qadhafi found himself surrounded by fellow conspirators who had become babbling idiots, capable only of repeating endlessly “Didn’t you hear? Umm Kulthum is coming to Tripoli!” “But the coup – it’s tomorrow,” one imagines Qadhafi hissing between clenched teeth, only to be met with another dollop of the great news. Qadhafi gave up, and let the current carry him, and by something not far short of a miracle, none of the preparations were discovered. The coup was successfully carried out, at a slightly later date, and the story may serve as a useful example of the SNAFU (Situation normal, all f***ed up) as against the CONSPIRACY school of thought.

Note 2.Everyone will have their own favorites, from closing barber shops – hair cutting should be done at home – to my own favorite, announcing the replacement of all Libyan ambassadors world wide by committees formed of all Libyans in the country. (Can you imagine the chaos?)

Clouds

2011-05-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/the-cloud-atlas-2285364.html?action=Gallery

New Zealand plate stack: New Zealand's Southern Alps run along almost the entire length of the country's South Island. In the bottom right of this picture you can see the peak of one of these 3,000m (9,800ft) mountains. When the wind coming from the Pacific in the west hits them, it bounces off, causing clouds to become altocumulus lenticularis, a pile of plates shaped like the lens of an eye.

The Pacific Ocean, “that vast eyeball of water, and what it watches is not our wars.” Robinson Jeffers, Shine Perishing Republic.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/the-cloud-atlas-2285364.html?action=Galleryhttp://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/the-cloud-atlas-2285364.html?action=Gallery

McEconomy

2011-05-08T21:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175389/tomgram%3A_andy_kroll%2C_welcome_to_the_mcjobs_recovery/#more

How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class By Andy Kroll

Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald's appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of "McJob" as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward, from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs), beating economists' expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?

The Rise of the McWorker

The evidence points to the latter. According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy. While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were “low-wage” (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish “recovery” are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages.

As a point of comparison, that's much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst. Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis.

The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged.

Indeed in 2010, one in four jobs added by private employers was a temporary job, which usually provides workers with few benefits and even less job security. It's not surprising that employers would first rely on temporary hires as they regained their footing after a colossal financial crisis. But this time around, companies have taken on temp workers in far greater numbers than after previous downturns. Where 26% of hires in 2010 were temporary, the figure was 11% after the early-1990s recession and only 7% after the downturn of 2001.

As many labor economists have begun to point out, we're witnessing an increasing polarization of the U.S. economy over the past three decades. More and more, we're seeing labor growth largely at opposite ends of the skills-and-wages spectrum -- among, that is, the best and the worst kinds of jobs.

At one end of job growth, you have increasing numbers of people flipping burgers, answering telephones, engaged in child care, mopping hallways, and in other low-wage lines of work. At the other end, you have increasing numbers of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and people in high-wage "creative" careers. What's disappearing is the middle, the decent-paying jobs that helped expand the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century and that, if the present lopsided recovery is any indication, are now going the way of typewriters and landline telephones.

Because the shape of the workforce increasingly looks fat on both ends and thin in the middle, economists have begun to speak of "the barbell effect," which for those clinging to a middle-class existence in bad times means a nightmare life. For one thing, the shape of the workforce now hinders America’s once vaunted upward mobility. It’s the downhill slope that’s largely available these days.

The barbell effect has also created staggering levels of income inequality of a sort not known since the decades before the Great Depression. From 1979 to 2007, for the middle class, average household income (after taxes) nudged upward from $44,100 to $55,300; by contrast, for the top 1%, average household income soared from $346,600 in 1979 to nearly $1.3 million in 2007. That is, super-rich families saw their earnings increase 11 times faster than middle-class families.

What's causing this polarization? An obvious culprit is technology. As MIT economist David Autor notes, the tasks of "organizing, storing, retrieving, and manipulating information" that humans once performed are now computerized. And when computers can't handle more basic clerical work, employers ship those jobs overseas where labor is cheaper and benefits nonexistent.

Another factor is education. In today's barbell economy, degrees and diplomas have never mattered more, which means that those with just a high school education increasingly find themselves locked into the low-wage end of the labor market with little hope for better. Worse yet, the pay gap between the well-educated and not-so-educated continues to widen: in 1979, the hourly wage of a typical college graduate was 1.5 times higher than that of a typical high-school graduate; by 2009, it was almost two times higher.

Considering, then, that the percentage of men ages 25 to 34 who have gone to college is actually decreasing, it's not surprising that wage inequality has gotten worse in the U.S. As Autor writes, advanced economies like ours "depend on their best-educated workers to develop and commercialize the innovative ideas that drive economic growth."

The distorting effects of the barbell economy aren't lost on ordinary Americans. In a recent Gallup poll, a majority of people agreed that the country was still in either a depression (29%) or a recession (26%). When sorted out by income, however, those making $75,000 or more a year are, not surprisingly, most likely to believe the economy is in neither a recession nor a depression, but growing. After all, they’re the ones most likely to have benefited from a soaring stock market and the return to profitability of both corporate America and Wall Street. In Gallup's middle-income group, by contrast, 55% of respondents claim the economy is in trouble. They're still waiting for their recovery to arrive.

The Slow Fade of Big Labor

The big-picture economic changes described by Autor and others, however, don't tell the entire story. There's a significant political component to the hollowing out of the American labor force and the impoverishment of the middle class: the slow fade of organized labor. Since the 1950s, the clout of unions in the public and private sectors has waned, their membership has dwindled, and their political influence has weakened considerably. Long gone are the days when powerful union bosses -- the AFL-CIO's George Meany or the UAW's Walter Reuther -- had the ear of just about any president.

As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has written, in the 1960s and 1970s a rift developed between big labor and the Democratic Party. Unions recoiled in disgust at what they perceived to be the "motley collection of shaggy kids, newly assertive women, and goo-goo academics" who had begun to supplant organized labor in the Party. In 1972, the influential AFL-CIO symbolically distanced itself from the Democrats by refusing to endorse their nominee for president, George McGovern.

All the while, big business was mobilizing, banding together to form massive advocacy groups such as the Business Roundtable and shaping the staid U.S. Chamber of Commerce into a ferocious lobbying machine. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party drifted rightward and toward an increasingly powerful and financially focused business community, creating the Democratic Leadership Council, an olive branch of sorts to corporate America. "It's not that the working class [had] abandoned Democrats," Drum wrote. "It's just the opposite: The Democratic Party [had] largely abandoned the working class."

The GOP, of course, has a long history of battling organized labor, and nowhere has that been clearer than in the party's recent assault on workers' rights. Swept in by a tide of Republican support in 2010, new GOP majorities in state legislatures from Wisconsin to Tennessee to New Hampshire have introduced bills meant to roll back decades' worth of collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, the last bastion of organized labor still standing (somewhat) strong.

The political calculus behind the war on public-sector unions is obvious: kneecap them and you knock out a major pillar of support for the Democratic Party. In the 2010 midterm elections, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent nearly $90 million on TV ads, phone banking, mailings, and other support for Democratic candidates. The anti-union legislation being pushed by Republicans would inflict serious damage on AFSCME and other public-sector unions by making it harder for them to retain members and weakening their clout at the bargaining table.

And as shown by the latest state to join the anti-union fray, it's not just Republicans chipping away at workers' rights anymore. In Massachusetts, a staunchly liberal state, the Democratic-led State Assembly recently voted to curb collective bargaining rights on heath-care benefits for teachers, firefighters, and a host of other public-sector employees.

Bargaining-table clout is crucial for unions, since it directly affects the wages their members take home every month. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union workers pocket on average $200 more per week than their non-union counterparts, a 28% percent difference. The benefits of union representation are even greater for women and people of color: women in unions make 34% more than their non-unionized counterparts, and Latino workers nearly 51% more.

In other words, at precisely the moment when middle-class workers need strong bargaining rights so they can fight to preserve a living wage in a barbell economy, unions around the country face the grim prospect of losing those rights.

All of which raises the questions: Is there any way to revive the American middle class and reshape income distribution in our barbell nation? Or will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped McEconomy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between?

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a firmly -- and happily -- middle-class household. His email is andykroll (at) motherjones (dot) com.

Copyright 2011 Andy Kroll

Note: “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire

Mutability

2011-05-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

Well%2C+about+three+months+down+and+nine+to+go.+How+are+you+enjoying+the+Year+of+the+Hare+so+far%3F+Hope+that+the+sheer+speed+of+changes+since+the+beginning+of+the+year+on+February+14%2C+2011+is+raising+your+hair+a+bit.+Sort+of+exhilarating+those+flying+roller+coaster+rides+on+the+crest+of+the+wave.+Learn+to+ride.+It%E2%80%99s+gonna+get+rougher.%0D%0A%0D%0AMutability%2C+or+changes%2C+comes+not+by+presidential+decree+nor+by+secret+bank+deals+%E2%80%93+it%E2%80%99s+a+built+in+condition+of+the+whole+game+%E2%80%93+you+can%E2%80%99t+even+step+into+the+same+river+twice.%0D%0A%0D%0APurchasing+a+large+estate+in+a+South+American+country+that+has+no+extradition+treaty+with+the+USA+might+surely+be+regarded+as+the+height+of+prudence.+It+ignores+mutability%2C+however.+One+day+it+may+become+a+subject+of+negotiation+between+the+US+and+the+country+of+the+large+estate%2C+on+the+subject+of+precisely+entering+into+an+extradition+treaty.%+about+it.+%28Asked+why%2C+some+wit+said%2C+%E2%80%9CThey+never+asked+about+it.%E2%80%9D%29%0D%0A%0D%0AA+very+strong+movement+is+developing+in+a+large+number+of+states+to+have+all+unions+gutted%2C+all+collective+bargaining+rights+abolished%2C+under+a+number+of+extreme+right+wing+governors+in+these+United+States.+Combined+with+the+economic+crisis%2C+-+no+money%2C+no+jobs%2C+all+prices+rising%2C+-+it+is+seen+as+the+perfect+time+to+create+a+crushingly+plutocratic+state.+The+military+will+be+crucial%2C+and+when+Blackwater+troops+are+repatriated+from+anywhere+in+the+event+%28haha%29+of+a+military+withdrawal+from+anywhere%2C+things+will+get+rougher+inside+the+USA+too.+%28We+live+in+the+lap+of+luxury%2C+always+under+the+imminent+threat+of+bankruptcy+and+homelessness%2C+but+savoring+%E2%80%9CI+dreamt+I+saw+Joe+Hill+last+night%2FAlive+as+you+and+me%2FBut+Joe+you%E2%80%99re+ten+years+dead+said+I%2FI+never+died+said+he%E2%80%9D+sung+by+Paul+Robeson%2C+delivered+free+by+my+local+radio+station.%29%0D%0A%0D%0AThat%E2%80%99s+not+to+mention+the+hyperinflation+relentlessly+rushing+down+on+all+western+countries%2C+but+particularly+the+USA%2C+from+huge+volumes+of+money+printing.+In+Germany+in+the+great+Weimar+hyperinflation%2C+farmers+had+a+bumper+harvest+that+year%2C+but+couldn%E2%80%99t+see+the+point+of+selling+the+solid+assets+in+their+granaries+and+storehouses+for+the+government%E2%80%99s+funny+money+that+halved+in+value+every+day%2C+and+so+thousands+of+Germans+starved+to+death+in+the+cities.+We+have+something+similar+to+look+forward+to%2C+and+so+do+you.%0D%0A%0D%0AThe+plans+of+the+powers+that+be+are+made+plain+in+the+proposal+by+Mr.+Chertoff%2C+head+of+Homeland+Security+and+a+dual+nationality+Israeli%2FAmerican+citizen+to+install+the+infamous+full+body+scanners+at+bus+stops+and+shopping+mall+entrances.+Mr.+Chertoff+has+a+very+large+financial+interest+in+Rapiscan%2C+the+company+making+the+scanners%2C+and+although+the+report+that+it+%E2%80%9Cstrips+your+DNA%E2%80%9D+has+never+been+explained%2C+I%E2%80%99d+really+prefer+to+leave+my+DNA+as+it+is%2C+acid+influence+an%E2%80%99+all.+Evacs+or+whatever+they+call+the+fully+operated+from+inside+a+mountain+in+Nevada+drones%2C+armed+with+hell+fire+missiles+and+able+to+be+manufactured+now+in+ridiculously+small+sizes%2C+have+just+been+given+official+permission+to+fly+not+only+over+Libya%2C+where+they+attempt+to+assassinate+Ghaddafi%2C+but+also+in+the+skies+of+the+USA%2C+mixing+with+commercial+traffic%2C+under+an+executive+order+signed+last+week.+Oh%2C+goodie%21%0D%0A%0D%0AHere+is+an+infallible+test+to+decide+terrorism+in+any+case+where+large+numbers+of+people+%28Humans+%E2%80%93+genus+homo+sapiens+hahaha%29+are+destroyed%3A%0D%0A%0D%0AIf+the+humans+are+destroyed+by+missile+strikes%2C+smart+bombs%2C+or+any+automatic+machinery%2C+it+is+the+people+killed+who+are+the+terrorists%2C+and+those+operating+the+machinery+are+innocent+victims.+This+is+especially+true+if+the+killing+machinery+is+entirely+human-free%2C+such+as+robot+drones+firing+hell+fire+missiles.%0D%0A%0D%0AIf+the+humans+are+destroyed%2C+on+the+other+hand%2C+by+other+humans%2C+who+may+also+destroy+themselves+in+the+process+as+in+the+case+of+suicide+bombers%2C+then+it+is+the+humans+destroyed+who+are+the+innocent+victims%2C+and+those+doing+the+destroying+who+are+the+terrorists.%0D%0A%0D%0ACousin+strands+of+genus+homo%2C+such+as+apes%2C+gorillas%2C+chimpanzees%2C+and+orangutans+%28orang+hutan+%3D+%E2%80%9Cpeople+of+the+trees%E2%80%9D%29+need+not+be+considered+because+although+they+have+the+necessary+two+legs%2C+two+arms%2C+and+head+configuration%2C+none+have+any+known+experience+of+manufacturing+explosives.%0D%0A%0D%0AThat%E2%80%99s+also+not+to+mention+said+he+mentioning+it+the+coming+fifty+year+increase+in+natural+disasters+as+climate+change+heats+up.+The+lead+time+of+fifty+years+means+anything+we+do+now+may+make+a+difference+to+the+earth%E2%80%99s+climate+in+fifty+years+time%2C+but+not+before+that.+The+sins+of+the+past+hundred+years+have+to+come+home+to+roost+first.+We%E2%80%99ll+mostly+be+up+to+our+butts+in+raw+sew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+and+left+large+parts+of+Europe+in+smoldering+ruins.+I%E2%80%99ve+haunted+battlefields+and+graveyards%2C+asked+a+Belgian+farmer+if+I+could+step+inside+a+wartime+concrete+bunker+that+now+houses+his+goats%2C+and+walked+through+reconstructed+trenches+and+an+underground+tunnel+which+protected+Canadian+troops+moving+their+ammunition+to+the+front+line.%0D%0A%0D%0AIn+government+archives%2C+I%E2%80%99ve+looked+at+laconic+reports+by+officers+who+survived+battles+in+which+most+of+their+troops+died%3B+I%E2%80%99ve+listened+to+recordings+of+veterans+and+talked+to+a+man+whose+labor-activist+grandfather+was+court-martialed+because+he+wrote+a+letter+to+the+Daily+Mail+complaining+that+every+British+officer+was+assigned+a+private+servant.+In+a+heartbreakingly+beautiful+tree-shaded+cemetery+full+of+British+soldiers+mowed+down+with+their+commanding+officer+%28as+he+had+predicted+they+would+be%29+by+a+single+German+machine+gun+on+the+opening+day+of+the+Battle+of+the+Somme%2C+I+found+a+comment+in+the+visitors%E2%80%99+book%3A+%E2%80%9CNever+Again.%E2%80%9D%0D%0A%0D%0AI+can%E2%80%99t+help+but+wonder%3A+Where+are+the+public+places+for+mourning+the+mounting+toll+of+today%E2%80%99s+wars%3F+Where+is+that+feeling+of+never+again%3F%0D%0A%0D%0AThe+eerie+thing+about+studying+the+First+World+War+is+the+way+you+can%E2%80%99t+help+but+be+reminded+of+today%E2%80%99s+headlines.+Consider%2C+for+example%2C+how+it+started.+High+officials+of+the+rickety+Austro-Hungarian+Empire%2C+frightened+by+ethnic+nationalism+among+Serbs+within+its+borders%2C+wanted+to+dismember+neighboring+Serbia%2C+whose+very+existence+as+an+independent+state+they+regarded+as+a+threat.+Austro-Hungarian+military+commanders+had+even+drawn+up+invasion+plans.%0D%0A%0D%0AWhen+a+20-year-old+ethnic+Serb+fired+two+fatal+shots+at+Austrian+Archduke+Franz+Ferdinand+and+his+wife+at+Sarajevo+in+the+summer+of+1914%2C+those+commanders+had+the+perfect+excuse+to+put+their+plans+into+action+--+even+though+the+killer+was+an+Austro-Hungarian+citizen+and+there+was+no+evidence+Serbia%E2%80%99s+cabinet+knew+of+his+plot.+Although+the+war+quickly+drew+in+many+other+countries%2C+its+first+shots+were+fired+by+Austro-Hungarian+gunboats+on+the+Danube+shelling+Serbia.%0D%0A%0D%0AThe+more+I+learned+about+the+war%E2%80%99s+opening%2C+the+more+I+thought+about+the+U.S.+invasion+of+Iraq.+President+George+W.+Bush+and+his+key+advisors+had+long+hungered+to+dislodge+Iraqi+dictator+Saddam+Hussein+from+power.+Like+the+archduke%E2%80%99s+assassination%2C+the+attacks+of+September+11%2C+2001%2C+gave+them+the+excuse+they+had+been+waiting+for+--+even+though+there+was+no+connection+whatsoever+between+the+hijackers%2C+mainly+Saudis%2C+and+Saddam+Hussein%E2%80%99s+regime.%0D%0A%0D%0AOther+parallels+between+World+War+I+and+today%E2%80%99s+wars+abound.+You+can+see+photographs+from+1914+of+German+soldiers+climbing+into+railway+cars+with+%E2%80%9CTo+Paris%E2%80%9D+jauntily+chalked+on+their+sides%2C+and+French+soldiers+boarding+similar+cars+labeled+%E2%80%9CTo+Berlin.%E2%80%9D%0D%0A%0D%0A%E2%80%9CYou+will+be+home%2C%E2%80%9D+Kaiser+Wilhelm+II+confidently+told+his+troops+that+August%2C+%E2%80%9Cbefore+the+leaves+have+fallen+from+the+trees.%E2%80%9D+Doesn%E2%80%99t+that+bring+to+mind+Bush+landing+on+an+aircraft+carrier+in+2003+to+declare%2C+in+front+of+a+White+House-produced+banner+reading+%E2%80%9CMission+Accomplished%2C%E2%80%9D+that+%22major+combat+operations+in+Iraq+have+ended%22%3F+A+trillion+dollars+and+tens+of+thousands+of+lives+later%2C+whatever+mission+there+may+have+been+remains+anything+but+accomplished.+Similarly%2C+in+Afghanistan%2C+where+Washington+expected+%28and+thought+it+had+achieved%29+the+most+rapid+and+decisive+of+victories%2C+the+U.S.+military+remains+mired+in+one+of+the+longest+wars+in+American+history.%0D%0A%0D%0A%3Cstrong%3EThe+Flowery+Words+of+War%3C%2Fstrong%3E%0D%0A%0D%0AAs+the+First+World+War+made+painfully+clear%2C+when+politicians+and+generals+lead+nations+into+war%2C+they+almost+invariably+assume+swift+victory%2C+and+have+a+remarkably+enduring+tendency+not+to+foresee+problems+that%2C+in+hindsight%2C+seem+obvious.+In+1914%2C+for+instance%2C+no+country+planned+for+the+other+side%E2%80%99s+machine+guns%2C+a+weapon+which+Europe%E2%80%99s+colonial+powers+had+used+for+decades+mainly+as+a+tool+for+suppressing+uppity+natives.%0D%0A%0D%0ABoth+sides+sent+huge+forces+of+cavalry+to+the+Western+Front+--+the+Germans+eight+divisions+with+40%2C000+horses.+But+the+machine+gun+and+barbed+wire+were+destined+to+end+the+days+of+glorious+cavalry+charges+forever.+As+for+plans+like+the+famous+German+one+to+defeat+the+French+in+exactly+42+days%2C+they+were+full+of+holes.+Internal+combustion+engines+were+in+their+infancy%2C+and+in+the+opening+weeks+of+the+war%2C+60%25+of+the+invading+German+army%E2%80%99s+trucks+broke+down.+This+meant+supplies+had+to+be+pulled+by+horse+and+wagon.+For+those+horses%2C+not+to+mention+all+the+useless+cavalry+chargers%2C+the+French+countryside+simply+could+not+supply+enough+feed.+Eating+unripe+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atefully+cobbled+together+into+the+British+protectorate+of+Iraq.%0D%0A%0D%0AWhen+it+comes+to+that+territory%2C+does+anyone+think+that+Washington+would+have+gotten+quite+so+righteously+worked+up+in+2003+if%2C+instead+of+massive+amounts+of+oil%2C+its+principal+export+was+turnips%3F%0D%0A%0D%0ASomeday%2C+I+have+no+doubt%2C+the+dead+from+today%E2%80%99s+wars+will+be+seen+with+a+similar+sense+of+sorrow+at+needless+loss+and+folly+as+those+millions+of+men+who+lie+in+the+cemeteries+of+France+and+Belgium+--+and+tens+of+millions+of+Americans+will+feel+a+similar+revulsion+for+the+politicians+and+generals+who+were+so+spendthrift+with+others%E2%80%99+lives.+But+here%E2%80%99s+the+question+that+haunts+me%3A+What+will+it+take+to+bring+us+to+that+point%3F%0D%0A%0D%0AAdam+Hochschild+is+the+San+Francisco-based+author+of+seven+books%2C+including+King+Leopold%E2%80%99s+Ghost.+His+new+book+To+End+All+Wars%3A+A+Story+of+Loyalty+and+Rebellion%2C+1914-1918+%28Houghton+Mifflin+Harcourt%29%2C+has+just+been+published.%0D%0A%0D%0ACopyright+2011+Adam+Hochschild%0D%0A%0D%0A*********************************%0D%0A

Spenditlikeyoustoleit

2011-05-03T02:31:00.000-07:00

http://dailyreckoning.com/spend-it-like-you-stole-it/

Spend It Like You Stole It By Bill Bonner 04/29/11 Baltimore, Maryland –

QE2 is ending in June. But globally, QE3 has already begun. As usual, Japan is the pacesetter. As temperatures rose at its Fukushima reactor so did Japan’s monetary base – at the rate of 100% per week! What happens to all this new, hot money? No one knows, exactly. But today, at The Daily Reckoning, we have advice for everyone – central planners, politicians, and householders, too: if you have money, pretend you robbed a bank.

From the point of view of a modern economist, nothing stimulates better than a bank robbery. The money leaves the cold embrace of a bank vault; soon every pimp and bartender has his pockets full. Hot money gets around.

An article in Rolling Stone Magazine provides an illustration. It explains how one Wall Street wife, and one Wall Street widow, formed a company specifically to take advantage of the US government’s spending spree known as TALF. You’d think the feds had already done enough for the Mack family. John Mack runs Morgan Stanley. Had it not been for the generous support of the US government and the Federal Reserve, he might be parking cars. Instead, the feds bailed out the entire financial sector. First, it bought up Wall Street’s bad bets at inflated prices and then lent banks money at artificially low interest rates; they were invited to lend the money back to the federal government for a sure profit.

Business was so good at Morgan Stanley that the distaff side of the Mack household apparently couldn’t resist. In June, 2009, with her friend Susan, Christy Mack set up an investment company and put in $15 million. Then, they borrowed $220 million from the government. A brave move on their part? If you think so, you are as naïve as a turnip. The fix was in; the two used the money to buy non-recourse loans at deep discount. If the loans increased in value, they would make a profit. If they fell, the government would take the losses. Much safer and more profitable than robbing banks. Two months later, Mr. Mack, perhaps with a little assistance from his blond helpmate, bought a limestone carriage house in Manhattan, with a 12-space garage for the getaway cars.

If you don’t have your own little stimulus scam going, you may want to listen up. Your dollars, pounds, euros and pesos are going to lose value. Don’t trust the government’s inflation figures. An honest measure of the “inflation rate” is available thanks to a pair of professors at MIT. Their “Billion Prices Project” (BPP) doesn’t pussyfoot around. It trolls the Internet, records prices and reveals the most accurate measure of inflation ever. This new index shows the rate of consumer price increases for the last 12 months at 3.2%. This is more than half again as much as the Labor Department’s own tally – 2.1%.

Something is dreadfully wrong. Either a billion prices are in error. Or, people who buy US treasury bonds are. They accept a real yield (based on the BPP numbers) of barely 1.2% on a 30-year dollar-denominated, inflation-sensitive Treasury bond, while the dollar sinks and its custodians actively try to drown it. And, over the last six months, according to BPP, prices have been rising nearly twice as fast – at a 6.1% annualized rate. If these figures hold, bond investors already have a built-in negative yield. The inflation figure for the last 3 months is even higher, 7.4%, about 300 basis points more than the yield on the long bond.

Treasury prices have trended higher for nearly 30 years. Could they be ready to fall now? Maybe. Inflation is not like holding up a liquor store; it’s more like a major bank heist, the product of long planning by trained professionals. Whenever the nominal amount of available money increases faster than the real goods and services that money buys, you can expect rising prices.

In America, real private-sector output reached a plateau at the end of the 20th century. In the last 10 years, it has scarcely increased at all. Total private sector GDP was $9.31 trillion in 2001. Now it is $9.72 trillion. But while real output has been flat, the output of hot “money” has not. When they are not stealing it from the taxpayers, or borrowing it with no intention to pay it back, the feds are counterfeiting it. The Fed will have “printed up” about $1.8 trillion from the end of 2008 to the end of June, 2011 – partly to finance staggering federal government deficits of nearly $4.5 trillion over the three years. This led to an increase in the GDP, almost entirely from government spending, with 79% of household income growth from government transfer payments.

Meanwhile, the US monetary base has tripled in the last 3 years. These increases are not all immediately available to households as “money;” they are mostly still in bank vaults, waiting to be liberated. Then, watch out. Dollars will be too hot to hold.

Regards, Bill Bonner for The Daily Reckoning

Read more: Spend It Like You Stole It http://dailyreckoning.com/spend-it-like-you-stole-it/#ixzz1LHOfuYQq

Cheneygotsomethingright

2011-04-29T01:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MD29Dj01.html

Cheney got something right By Ellen Brown

"Deficit terrorists" are gutting governments and forcing the privatization of public assets, all in the name of "deficit reduction". But deficits aren't actually a bad thing. In today's monetary scheme, in which most money comes from debt, debt and deficits are actually necessary to have a stable money supply. The public debt is the people's money.

Former vice president Dick Cheney famously said, "Deficits don't matter." A staunch Republican, he was arguing against raising taxes on the rich; but today Republicans seem to have forgotten this maxim. They are bent on stripping social programs, privatizing public assets, and gutting unions, all in the name of "deficit reduction".

Worse, Standard & Poor's has now taken up the hatchet. Some bloggers are calling it blackmail. This private, for-profit rating agency, with a dubious track record of its own, is dictating government policy, threatening to downgrade the government's long-held triple AAA credit rating if congress fails to deal with its deficit in sufficiently draconian fashion. The threat is a real one, as we've seen with the devastating effects of downgrades in Greece, Ireland and other struggling countries. Lowered credit ratings force up interest rates and cripple national budgets.

The biggest threat to the dollar's credit rating, however, may be the game of chicken being played with the federal debt ceiling. Nearly 70% of Americans are said to be in favor of a freeze on May 16, when the ceiling is due to be raised; and Tea Party-oriented politicians could go along with this scheme to please their constituents.

If they get what they wish for, the party could be over for the whole economy. The Chinese are dumping US Treasuries, and the Fed is backing off from its "quantitative easing" program, in which it has been buying federal securities with money simply created on its books.

When the Fed buys Treasuries, the government gets the money nearly interest-free, since the Fed rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs. When the Chinese and the Fed quit buying Treasuries, interest rates are liable to shoot up; and with a frozen debt ceiling, the government would have to default, since any interest increase on a US$14 trillion debt would be a major expenditure.

Today the Treasury is paying a very low 0.25% on securities of nine months or less, and interest on the whole debt is about 3% (a total of $414 billion on a debt of $14 trillion in 2010). Greece is paying 4.5% on its debt, and Venezuela is paying 18% - six times the 3% we're paying on ours. Interest at 18% would add $2 trillion to our tax bill. That would mean paying three times what we're paying now in personal income taxes (projected to be a total of $956 billion in 2011), just to cover the interest.

There are other alternatives. Congress could cut the military budget - but it probably won't, since this option is never even discussed. It could raise taxes on the rich, but that probably won't happen either. A third option is to slash government services. But which services? How about social security? Do you really want to see Grandma panhandling? Congress can't agree on a budget for good reason: there is no good place to cut.

Fortunately, there is a more satisfactory solution. We can sit back, relax, and concede that Cheney was right. Deficits aren't necessarily a bad thing! They don't matter, so long as they are at very low interest rates; and they can be kept at these very low rates either by maintaining our triple A credit rating or by borrowing from the Fed essentially interest-free.

The yin and yang of money

Under our current monetary scheme, debt and deficits not only don't matter but are actually necessary in order to maintain a stable money supply. The reason was explained by Marriner Eccles, governor of the Federal Reserve Board, in hearings before the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1941. Wright Patman asked Eccles how the Federal Reserve got the money to buy government bonds.
"We created it," Eccles replied.
"Out of what?"
"Out of the right to issue credit money."
"And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our government's credit?"
"That is what our money system is," Eccles replied. "If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."

That could explain why the US debt hasn't been paid off since 1835. It has just continued to grow, and the economy has grown and flourished along with it. A debt that is never paid off isn't really a debt. Financial planner Mark Pash calls it a National Monetization Account. Government bonds (or debt) are "monetized" (or turned into money). Government bonds and dollar bills are the yin and yang of the money supply, the negative and positive sides of the national balance sheet. To have a plus-1 on one side of the balance sheet, a minus-1 needs to be created on the other.

Except for coins, all of the money in the US money supply now gets into circulation as a debt to a bank (including the Federal Reserve, the central bank). But private loans zero out when they are repaid. In order to keep the money supply fairly constant, some major player has to incur debt that never gets paid back; and this role is played by the federal government.

That explains the need for a federal debt, but what about the "deficit" (the amount the debt has to increase to meet the federal budget)? Under the current monetary scheme, deficits are also necessary to avoid recessions.

Here is why. Private banks always lend at interest, so more money is always owed back than was created in the first place. In fact investors of all sorts expect more money back than they paid. That means the debt needs to be not only maintained but expanded to keep the economy functioning. When the Fed "takes away the punch bowl" by tightening credit, there is insufficient money to pay off debts; people and businesses go into default; and the economy spins into a recession or depression.

Maintaining a deficit is particularly important when the private lending market collapses, as it did in 2008 and 2009. Then debt drops off and so does the money supply. Too little money is available to buy the goods on the market, so businesses shut down and workers get laid off, further reducing demand, precipitating a recession. To reverse this deflationary cycle, the government needs to step in with additional public debt to fill the breach.

Debt and productivity

The US federal debt that is setting off alarm bells today is about 60% of gross domestic product (GDP), but it has been much higher than that. It was 120% of GDP during World War II, which turned out to be our most productive period ever. The US built the machinery and infrastructure that set the nation up to lead the world in productivity for the next half century. We, the children and grandchildren of that era, were not saddled with a crippling debt but lived quite well for the next half century. The debt-to-GDP ratio got much lower after the war, not because people sacrificed to pay back the debt, but because the country got so productive that GDP rose to meet it.

That could explain the anomaly of Japan, the global leader today in deficit spending. In a CIA Factbook list of debt to GDP ratios of 132 countries in 2010, Japan topped the list at 226%. So how has it managed to retain its status as the world's third largest economy? Its debt has not crippled its economy because:
(a) the debt is at very low interest rates; (b) it is owed to the people themselves, not to the International Monetary Fund or other foreign creditors; and
(c) the money created by the debt has been used to produce goods and services, allowing supply and demand to increase together and prices to remain stable.

The Japanese economy has been called "stagnant", but according to a review by Robert Locke, this is because the Japanese aren't aiming for growth. They are aiming for sustainability and a high standard of living. They have replaced quantity of goods with quality of life. Locke wrote in 2004:
Contrary to popular belief, Japan has been doing very well lately, despite the interests that wish to depict her as an economic mess. The illusion of her failure is used by globalists and other neo-liberals to discourage Westerners, particularly Americans, from even caring about Japan's economic policies, let alone learning from them. [And] it has been encouraged by the Japanese government as a way to get foreigners to stop pressing for changes in its neo-mercantilist trade policies.
The Japanese economy was doing very well until 1988, when the Bank for International Settlements raised bank capital requirements. The Japanese banks then tightened credit and lent only to the most creditworthy borrowers. Private debt fell off and so did the money supply, collapsing the stock market and the housing bubble. The Japanese government then started spending, and it got the money by borrowing; but it borrowed mainly from its own government-owned banks.

The largest holder of its federal debt is Japan Post Bank, a 100% government-owned commercial bank that is now the largest depository bank in the world. The Bank of Japan, the nation's government-owned central bank, also funds the government's debt. Interest rates have been lowered to nearly zero, so the debt costs the government almost nothing and can be rolled over indefinitely.

Japan's economy remains viable although its debt-to-GDP ratio is nearly four times that of the United States because the money does not leave the country to pay off foreign creditors. Rather, it is recycled into the Japanese economy. As economist Hazel Henderson points out, Japan's debt is twice its GDP only because of an anomaly in how GDP is calculated: it omits government-provided services. If they were included, Japan's GDP would be much higher and its debt to GDP ratio would be more in line with that of other countries.

Investments in education, healthcare, and social security may not count as "sales", but they improve both the standard of living of the people and national productivity. Businesses that don't have to pay for healthcare can be more profitable and competitive internationally. Families that don't have to save hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their children through college can spend on better housing, more vacations, and other consumer items.

Turning the national debt into a public utility

Locke calls the Japanese model "a capitalist economy with socialized capital markets". The national debt has been "monetized" - turned into the national money supply. The credit of the nation has been turned into a public utility.

Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, maintains that the largest US banks should be put in that category as well. At the National Association of Attorneys General conference on April 12, he said that the 2008 bank bailouts and other implicit guarantees effectively make the too-big-to-fail banks government-guaranteed enterprises, like mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He said they should be restricted to commercial banking and barred from investment banking.

"You're a public utility, for crying out loud," he said.

The direct way for the government to fund its budget would have been to simply print the money debt-free. Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the 1960s, wrote:
When our Federal Government, that has the exclusive power to create money, creates that money and then goes into the open market and borrows it and pays interest for the use of its own money, it occurs to me that that is going too far. ... [I]t is absolutely wrong for the Government to issue interest-bearing obligations. ... It is absolutely unnecessary.

But that is the system that we have. Deficits don't matter in this scheme, but the interest does. If we want to keep the interest tab very low, we need to follow the Japanese and borrow the money from ourselves through our own government-owned banks, essentially interest-free. "The full faith and credit of the United States" needs to be recognized and dispensed as a public utility.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of 11 books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com andellenbrown.com.

AgoodwordfortheChristians

2011-04-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

I am in total agreement with Tony Benn, UK political figure, that if he had his way the Salvation Army would be made the state religion, being the one and only "Christian" group that actually carries out the Christian mission. Good on yer, Tony, with you all the way.

In similar forgiving and praising vein, allow me to nominate a world head of the Christian mission, one Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Is it possible to be a total Christian believer, without any of the loony trappings of spaceships, a nationalist who believes he has witnessed the liberation of his people by Divine Grace, and be totally thankful and forgiving about the whole shabby past? Nothing to it, Mr. Tutu will do it with a joke. Alhamdulillah, rab al alameen.

Never forget the superiority of the Roman Catholic (Douai) version of Christmas message, not “Peace on earth, good will towards men” but “Peace on earth to men of good will.” If you are not one of the willing (and paid) hacks of the mighty, but a person of good will, all kinds of good things await you, and as for the servants of the evil doers, they will be cast into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yay, verily. Don’t worry about it. Look to Hexagram 40, Deliverance, of the I Ching for guidance.

People of good will don’t disagree about anything much, really. Keep the faith.

NamaAmidaButsu

2011-04-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

Why are humans born? To enjoy themselves at ease. Lotus Sutra

Avengingplanet

2011-04-16T08:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175379/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_avenging_planet/#more

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Avenging Planet Posted by Michael Klare at 7:47am, April 14, 2011.

Last Monday, Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, defended the Japanese government’s response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, insisting that the plant complex is in “a stable situation, relatively speaking.” That’s somewhat like the official description of 11,500 tons of water purposely dumped into the ocean waters off Fukushima as “low-level radioactive” or “lightly radioactive.” It is, of course, only “lightly” so in comparison to the even more radioactive water being stored at the plant in its place. But that’s the thing with descriptive words: they can leave so much to the eye of the beholder -- and the Japanese government hasn’t been significantly more eager than the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which runs the complex, to behold all that much when it comes to Fukushima.

On Tuesday, the government finally raised the Fukushima alert level on the International Nuclear Event scale from 5 to 7 -- “a major accident” -- the highest category possible, only previously used for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster (which resulted in a 15,000-square-mile “dead zone” in the Ukraine). Though government officials rushed to play down the Chernobyl comparison, a Tepco official offered this ominously bet-hedging comment: “Our concern is that the amount of leakage could eventually reach that of Chernobyl or exceed it.”

In fact, on our punch-drunk planet, we’ve never seen anything like what’s underway at Fukushima -- not one, but four adjacent nuclear reactors, three of which seem to have suffered partial meltdowns, and several containment pools for “spent” fuel (which, in terms of radioactivity, is anything but spent) in various states of distress. Meanwhile, talk about the weeks needed to bring the situation under control has faded into perilous months, years, decades, even a century of cleanup and recovery. There is speculation that some of the core of at least one reactor has already “leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of [its] containment structure” -- and every action to bring the complex under some kind of control only seems to create, or threatens to create, other unexpected problems (like that “lightly radioactive” water).

Meanwhile, amid further giant aftershocks from the 9.0 earthquake of March 11th (with possibly years more of them to come), the Japanese government has been slowly widening the 20-kilometer “evacuation zone” (recently described by a visitor as an eerie “death zone... like an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone crossed with The Day After -- an apocalyptic vision of life in the nuclear age”) around the complex. Just this week, it began warning pregnant women and children to stay out of certain areas up to 30 kilometers away from the plant. That’s not surprising, considering that in a small number of soil tests taken outside that 30-kilometer zone -- in one case 40 kilometers from Fukushima -- cesium-137 (half-life 30 years) has been found at levels that exceed those which, at Chernobyl, forced residents to move away. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who once lived in these areas (and if things get worse, beyond them) may never go home.

Whatever happens at Fukushima, could there be a more striking warning that we humans have been overreaching and that our planet has a way of offering penalties for such hubris? And keep in mind, the Japanese are hardly in this alone. After all, in the United States, at least five nuclear reactors are situated in “in earthquake-prone seismic zones,” according to a recent report, which doesn’t even include the Indian Point nuclear reactor built on an earthquake fault only 30 miles from downtown New York City, my hometown.

Perhaps, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, suggests, it’s time to recalibrate when it comes to the way we’re treating planet Earth -- before it’s too late. Tom

The Planet Strikes Back

Why We Underestimate the Earth and Overestimate Ourselves By Michael T. Klare

In his 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it’s no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of “melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name -- so he gave it that extra “a” in “Eaarth.”

The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind’s unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness.

With all due respect to McKibben’s vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim.

It’s not enough to think of Eaarth as an impotent casualty of humanity’s predations. It is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention -- defenses it is already wielding to devastating effect when it comes to human societies. And keep this in mind: we are only at the beginning of this process.

To grasp our present situation, however, it’s necessary to distinguish between naturally recurring planetary disturbances and the planetary responses to human intervention. Both need a fresh look, so let’s start with what Earth has always been capable of before we turn to the responses of Eaarth, the avenger.

Overestimating Ourselves

Our planet is a complex natural system, and like all such systems, it is continually evolving. As that happens -- as continents drift apart, as mountain ranges rise and fall, as climate patterns shift -- earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, prolonged droughts, and other natural disturbances recur, even if on an irregular and unpredictable basis.

Our predecessors on the planet were deeply aware of this reality. After all, ancient civilizations were repeatedly shaken, and in some cases shattered, by such disturbances. For example, it is widely believed that the ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean collapsed following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (also called Santorini) in the mid-second millennium BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that many other ancient civilizations were weakened or destroyed by intense earthquake activity. In Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, Stanford geophysicist Amos Nur and his co-author Dawn Burgess argue that Troy, Mycenae, ancient Jericho, Tenochtitlan, and the Hittite empire may have fallen in this manner.

Faced with recurring threats of earthquakes and volcanoes, many ancient religions personified the forces of nature as gods and goddesses and called for elaborate human rituals and sacrificial offerings to appease these powerful deities. The ancient Greek sea-god Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans), also called “Earth-Shaker,” was thought to cause earthquakes when provoked or angry.

In more recent times, thinkers have tended to scoff at such primitive notions and the gestures that went with them, suggesting instead that science and technology -- the fruits of civilization -- offer more than enough help to allow us to triumph over the Earth’s destructive forces. This shift in consciousness has been impressively documented in Clive Ponting’s 2007 volume, A New Green History of the World. Quoting from influential thinkers of the post-Medieval world, he shows how Europeans acquired a powerful conviction that humanity should and would rule nature, not the other way around. The seventeenth century French mathematician René Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that “we can… render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”

It’s possible that this growing sense of human control over nature was enhanced by a period of a few hundred years in which there may have been less than the usual number of civilization-threatening natural disturbances. Over those centuries, modern Europe and North America, the two centers of the Industrial Revolution, experienced nothing like the Thera eruption of the Minoan era -- or, for that matter, anything akin to the double whammy of the 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot-high tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th. This relative immunity from such perils was the context within which we created a highly complex, technologically sophisticated civilization that largely takes for granted human supremacy over nature on a seemingly quiescent planet.

But is this assessment accurate? Recent events, ranging from the floods that covered 20% of Pakistan and put huge swathes of Australia underwater to the drought-induced fires that burned vast areas of Russia, suggest otherwise. In the past few years, the planet has been struck by a spate of major natural disturbances, including the recent earthquake-tsunami disaster in Japan (and its many powerful aftershocks), the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the February 2010 earthquake in Chile, the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the March 2011 earthquake in Burma, and the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake-tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries, as well as a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in and around Indonesia.

If nothing else, these events remind us that the Earth is an ever-evolving natural system; that the past few hundred years are not necessarily predictive of the next few hundred; and that we may, in the last century in particular, have lulled ourselves into a sense of complacency about our planet that is ill-deserved. More important, they suggest that we may -- and I emphasize may -- be returning to an era in which the frequency of the incidence of such events is on the rise.

In this context, the folly and hubris with which we’ve treated natural forces comes strongly into focus. Take what’s happening at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex in northern Japan, where at least four nuclear reactors and their adjoining containment pools for “spent” nuclear fuel remain dangerously out of control. The designers and owners of the plant obviously did not cause the earthquake and tsunami that have created the present peril. This was a result of the planet’s natural evolution -- in this case, of the sudden movement of continental plates. But they do bear responsibility for failing to anticipate the potential for catastrophe -- for building a reactor on the site of frequent past tsunamis and assuming that a human-made concrete platform could withstand the worst that nature has to offer. Much has been said about flaws in design at the Fukushima plant and its inadequate backup systems. All this, no doubt, is vital, but the ultimate cause of the disaster was never a simple design flaw. It was hubris: an overestimation of the power of human ingenuity and an underestimation of the power of nature.

What future disasters await us as a result of such hubris? No one, at this point, can say with certainty, but the Fukushima facility is not the only reactor built near active earthquake zones, or at risk from other natural disturbances. And don’t just stop with nuclear plants. Consider, for instance, all those oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico at risk from increasingly powerful hurricanes or, if cyclones increase in power and frequency, the deep-sea ones Brazil is planning to construct up to 180 miles off its coast in the Atlantic Ocean. And with recent events in Japan in mind, who knows what damage might be inflicted by a major earthquake in California? After all, California, too, has nuclear plants sited ominously near earthquake faults.

Underestimating Eaarth

Hubris of this sort is, however, only one of the ways in which we invite the planet’s ire. Far more dangerous and provocative is our poisoning of the atmosphere with the residues of our resource consumption, especially of fossil fuels. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, total carbon emissions from all forms of energy use had already hit 21.2 billion metric tons by 1990 and are projected to rise ominously to 42.4 billion by 2035, a 100% increase in less than half a century. The more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we dump into the atmosphere, the more we alter the planet’s natural climatic systems and damage other vital ecological assets, including oceans, forests, and glaciers. These are all components of the planet’s integral makeup, and when damaged in this way, they will trigger defensive feedback mechanisms: rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and increased sea levels, among other reactions.

The notion of the Earth as a complex natural system with multiple feedback loops was first proposed by environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s and propounded in his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. (Lovelock appropriated the name of the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the personification of Mother Earth, for his version of our planet.) In this and other works, Lovelock and his collaborators argue that all biological organisms and their inorganic surroundings on the planet are closely integrated to form a complex and self-regulating system, maintaining the necessary conditions for life -- a concept they termed “the Gaia Hypothesis.” When any parts of this system are damaged or altered, they contend, the others respond by attempting to repair, or compensate for, the damage in order to restore the essential balance.

Think of our own bodies when attacked by virulent microorganisms: our temperature rises; we produce more white blood cells and other fluids, sleep a lot, and deploy other defense mechanisms. When successful, our bodies’ defenses first neutralize and eventually exterminate the invading germs. This is not a conscious act, but a natural, life-saving process.

Eaarth is now responding to humanity’s depredations in a similar way: by warming the atmosphere, taking carbon from the air and depositing it in the ocean, increasing rainfall in some areas and decreasing it elsewhere, and in other ways compensating for the massive atmospheric infusion of harmful human emissions.

But what Eaarth does to protect itself from human intervention is unlikely to prove beneficial for human societies. As the planet warms and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, inundating coastal areas, destroying cities, and flooding low-lying croplands. Drought will become endemic in many once-productive farming areas, reducing food supplies for hundreds of millions of people. Many plant and animal species that are key to human livelihoods, including various species of trees, food crops, and fish, will prove incapable of adjusting to these climate changes and so cease to exist. Humans may -- and again I emphasize that may -- prove more successful at adapting to the crisis of global warming than such species, but in the process, multitudes are likely to die of starvation, disease, and attendant warfare.

Bill McKibben is right: we no longer live on the “cozy, taken-for-granted” planet formerly known as Earth. We inhabit a new place, already changed dramatically by the intervention of humankind. But we are not acting upon a passive, impotent entity unable to defend itself against human transgression. Sad to say, we will learn to our dismay of the immense powers available to Eaarth, the Avenger.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Copyright 2011 Michael T. Klare

Libya

2011-04-14T02:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak02.html

Libya all about oil, or central banking? By Ellen Brown

Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

“I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.”

Alex Newman wrote in the New American:

“In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the "[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”

Newman quoted CNBC senior editor John Carney, who asked, “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”

Another anomaly involves the official justification for taking up arms against Libya. Supposedly it's about human rights violations, but the evidence is contradictory. According to an article on the Fox News website on February 28:
As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya's human rights record.

The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens - who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal.

Whatever might be said of Gaddafi's personal crimes, the Libyan people seem to be thriving. A delegation of medical professionals from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus wrote in an appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that after becoming acquainted with Libyan life, it was their view that in few nations did people live in such comfort:

"[Libyans] are entitled to free treatment, and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 US dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans, and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe, and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink, and are very religious."

They maintained that the international community had been misinformed about the struggle against the regime. "Tell us," they said, "who would not like such a regime?"

Even if that is just propaganda, there is no denying at least one very popular achievement of the Libyan government: it brought water to the desert by building the largest and most expensive irrigation project in history, the US$33 billion GMMR (Great Man-Made River) project. Even more than oil, water is crucial to life in Libya.

The GMMR provides 70% of the population with water for drinking and irrigation, pumping it from Libya's vast underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas 4,000 kilometers to the north. The Libyan government has done at least some things right.

Another explanation for the assault on Libya is that it is "all about oil", but that theory too is problematic. As noted in the National Journal, the country produces only about 2% of the world's oil. Saudi Arabia alone has enough spare capacity to make up for any lost production if Libyan oil were to disappear from the market. And if it's all about oil, why the rush to set up a new central bank?

Another provocative bit of data circulating on the Net is a 2007 "Democracy Now" interview of US General Wesley Clark (Ret). In it he says that about 10 days after September 11, 2001, he was told by a general that the decision had been made to go to war with Iraq. Clark was surprised and asked why. "I don't know!" was the response. "I guess they don't know what else to do!" Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that "[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar."

According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Libya - Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar", Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency.

During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries. The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Gaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.

And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:

"One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned ... Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations."

Libya not only has oil. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), its central bank has nearly 144 tonnes of gold in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS, the IMF and their rules?

All of which prompts a closer look at the BIS rules and their effect on local economies. An article on the BIS website states that central banks in the Central Bank Governance Network are supposed to have as their single or primary objective "to preserve price stability".

They are to be kept independent from government to make sure that political considerations don't interfere with this mandate. "Price stability" means maintaining a stable money supply, even if that means burdening the people with heavy foreign debts. Central banks are discouraged from increasing the money supply by printing money and using it for the benefit of the state, either directly or as loans.

In a 2002 article in Asia Times Online titled "The BIS vs national banks" Henry Liu maintained:

"BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes. National economies under financial globalization no longer serve national interests.
... FDI [foreign direct investment] denominated in foreign currencies, mostly dollars, has condemned many national economies into unbalanced development toward export, merely to make dollar-denominated interest payments to FDI, with little net benefit to the domestic economies.

He added, "Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation." The "state theory of money" refers to money created by governments rather than private banks.

The presumption of the rule against borrowing from the government's own central bank is that this will be inflationary, while borrowing existing money from foreign banks or the IMF will not. But all banks actually create the money they lend on their books, whether publicly owned or privately owned. Most new money today comes from bank loans. Borrowing it from the government's own central bank has the advantage that the loan is effectively interest-free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by an average of 50%.

And that appears to be how the Libyan system works. According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include "issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya" and "managing and issuing all state loans". Libya's wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.

That would explain where Libya gets the money to provide free education and medical care, and to issue each young couple $50,000 in interest-free state loans. It would also explain where the country found the $33 billion to build the Great Man-Made River project. Libyans are worried that North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led air strikes are coming perilously close to this pipeline, threatening another humanitarian disaster.

So is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both - and water as well. With energy, water, and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible.

Most countries don't have oil, but new technologies are being developed that could make non-oil-producing nations energy-independent, particularly if infrastructure costs are halved by borrowing from the nation's own publicly owned bank. Energy independence would free governments from the web of the international bankers, and of the need to shift production from domestic to foreign markets to service the loans.

If the Gaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors, and whether education and healthcare continue to be free.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://webofdebt.com and http://ellenbrown.com.

Note: The 2010 UN Human Development Index – which is a composite measure of health, education and income – ranked Libya 53rd in the world, and first in Africa.

13thnervousbreakdown

2011-04-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

http://dailyreckoning.com/a-world-of-leaks-and-full-disclosures/

Ireland's premier, Enda Kenny, has appeared to break down under the strain of trying to avoid bankruptcy. He called a press conference yesterday, [March 31] after Anglo-Irish Bank announced losses of more than 17 billion euros - the largest corporate loss in Irish history.

"I think this has gone on long enough. We tried in good faith to save the system from default and to avoid national humiliation. Instead, the situation just grows more humiliating with each passing week.

"It's time we called a spade a spade...and be done with it. We all know the banks are controlled by the English. And we all know English speculators were behind all of Ireland's recent property problems. They drove up prices. They lent money to Irish people. They built houses that were both ugly and unaffordable. And then, when the bottom fell out of the market, they expected Irish taxpayers to make up their losses.

"Well, that's it. That's the end. Henceforth, all banks and all bank assets are to become the property of the Republic of Ireland. Bank premises will be turned into useful resources for the people, such as pubs or pizza parlors.

"If a bank owes you money...you are out of luck. You should have known better than to put your money in a bank anyway. Everyone knows you can't trust them. Especially when the English are involved with them.

"And don't come running to me telling me that Ireland's default will trigger a wave of defaults across Europe...and possibly bring down the euro and the European Union. I don't want to hear it. It was the European Union that got us into this mess. The frogs and the krauts can go f*** themselves."

***************************

Mr. Enda Kenny is not alone in this. Most nations world wide are afflicted with an over educated and under employed surplus of young people, for whom the prospects look uniformly bleak. More than bleak. By 2015 according to expert calculations in the Guardian, every person in the UK will have debts of 77,000 (seventy seven thousand) sterling. No income, quite possibly, but lots of debt.

[The argument in the Guardian for the 77,000 sterling debt per person by 2015 runs as follows: The GB warlords will continue their efforts to match the US and the French et al in helping in various wars. Although Britain lags far behind, for example the US, (which has fired over a hundred missiles at $1 million a time in Libya to the UK's half dozen) participation in these wars is still more expensive than the UK can afford. Like the US, Britain will pay for this by cutting services previously provided to the population. The populace, to preserve its comfort level, will increasingly borrow large sums to pay for services they wish to keep. Whether this scenario plays out in this form is an open question. It is pure guesswork, and may not happen at all. People may well prefer to do without some of the services, or bodge up a home made alternative, for example. Brutal moves on the authorities themselves are also not entertained, on the Japanese Kata principle that anything never mentioned does not exist.]

Mr. Kenny is perfectly correct on Ireland's debts, which are indeed held mostly by the UK.

So go to it, lads and lasses; you have nothing to lose except mountains of unpayable debt.

Not that you’re alone. Japan’s debt has reached the interesting level of 202 percent of GDP, gross domestic product, or over twice as much as everything the entire country produces in a whole year.

That’s without counting the probable effects of its current nuclear problems. All materials that human ingenuity could devise, including wadded up newspapers, have been tried on the wide gash (about a meter) pumping out highly radioactive water to no effect. Tokyo Electric Company that owns the reactor has decided to let it all run into the ocean.

The Washington (and London) commentariat, being political appointees without necessarily having any expertise in anything whatsoever, have also distinguished themselves. Mr. Monbiot of the London Financial Times, for example, announced himself a convert to nuclear power, and no, he wasn’t being sarcastic. He meant it.

The commentariat, or western assembly of experts, have also distinguished themselves in the matter of Ms. Dilma Roussef, the new lady president of Brazil. “Ah now we’ll see a change from old Lula’s policies,” they predicted in unison. Ms. Roussef, who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime preceding that of Mr. Lula da Silva, has proved to be exactly the reverse of their predictions, however, an even tougher nut than da Silva. (Fortunately for our commentators, being entirely wrong has no effect on their employment or remuneration, since they were appointed for political loyalty. They merely continue to serve up the same fine crapola.)

The latest possibility being considered by the Brazilians is quite awe inspiring, no less than the purchase of all of the debts of Portugal, their previous colonial masters. Brazil can easily afford to do that, and it would demonstrate a generous and forgiving attitude that sets them totally apart from western nations, where the almighty power of cash continues to be worshipped.

Nice one, Ms. Roussef!

Opposites

2011-03-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

The Romantic poet John Keats defined what he called “negative capability,” the ability to make one’s own prejudices, attitudes, preferences into a blank sheet, and allow those of some other living being to fill it. He practiced this on the sparrows on his windowsill, and was able, to some extent, to see and feel what he imagined sparrows saw and felt.

In the thin layer we call the biosphere, which covers the surface of the earth from a few feet underground to a surprising distance up into the heavens, living and non-living beings exist together. The German writer Goethe was the first, to my limited knowledge, to extend negative capability to plants, a vital part of the living web for all its inhabitants.

The opposite of this capacity to see through the eyes of another is “sentimentality,” when the viewer projects all his (or her) attitudes and convictions on to the beings they are looking at, and consequently fail completely to apprehend anything at all about them.

People who dress up their dogs in little bootees for their feet, and fine jackets for their shoulders are showing a sentimental attitude. Common sense suggests that for a dog bare paws and a furry back are healthy and normal. Cats certainly wouldn’t stand for it, and will claw and bite the clothes right off, if they can, but some animals can be made to comply. The notion that little boots to keep their feet warm, for example, would improve sparrows, identifies the extreme sentimentalist.

Thenamingofnames

2011-03-18T11:19:00.000-07:00

Adam’s first duty, according to the book of Genesis in the Christian bible, was the naming of everything. This makes a lot of sense, since the name we give anything also includes our attitude to it, and how it should be dealt with, if you think about it. (The “Global War on Terror,” named by George Bush, and justifying the slaughter of more people than the Japanese nuclear meltdown has managed to stack up, is a good example. What? War. Where? Global. On who and why? Terror.)

Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase were both about to go bankrupt in October 2009. Nothing could save them. Their debts and obligations simply exceeded their assets by too large a sum. How was the situation altered in their favor? Very simple. Both were given a new category. Instead of being “Merchant banks,” (or “Investment banks,”) who arranged deals and do all the things merchant banks do, they were moved to the category of “banks,” i.e., they were to be regarded as in the same category as the Bank of America, or Barclays, and granted the capacity to accept deposits from the public and make loans and so forth, which previously no merchant banks were allowed to do. They could then participate in the three stooges’ TARP and other hot shot scams to dump all their junk on the tax payer. Problem solved. Except for the tax payer, of course.

ThedisappearanceofthescaryArab

2011-03-11T01:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175364/tomgram%3A_james_carroll%2C_where_did_all_the_fatwas_go/#more

The Disappearance of the Nightmare Arab How a Revolution of Hope Is Changing the Way Americans Look at Islam By James Carroll

Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.

For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.

The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God

For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Qaddafi’s men.

In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews” -- all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama Bin Laden -- to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance -- has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?

Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.

Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?

In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.

Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.

It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person -- as the Qu’ran says -- as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.

A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies

The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.

History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.

Because so many people have believed in themselves -- protecting one another simply by standing together -- they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).

Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake -- in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.

To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.

The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice

Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”

Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.

Scary, indeed -- but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did -- with that “we” defined as Western civilization.

Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula --- all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.

How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam -- that it was only “spread by the sword” -- was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.

Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.

“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”

No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel” -- the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.

The Revolution of Hope

The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.

Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious -- an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.

James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.

Copyright 2011 James Carroll

Remembering

2011-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Remembering Ma’az Shukair, still with us, I hope, official dealer with foreign devils at Radio Jordan’s English section, and the good advice he gave “Your microphone is your best friend. Treat it as though you love it,” which one of the foreign devils may have duly transmitted to the radio station staff they were training in another place, - but that’s another story - and my friend Faris Glubb, fellow contributor at Radio Jordan. Gobsmacked, I was, to note Faris was reading translations of Arabic poetry into modern verse (any idea how long THAT would take?) and getting paid at the time it took to read them. Well, none of us grew rich at Radio Jordan, but we had a lot of fun.

Faris was the son of Glubb Pasha, the creator of the Desert Legion. The last time I saw him was in a Beirut pub, and he obviously wanted to talk, but for some now long forgotten reason I was in a tearing hurry, and so I just said to him “We are star dust, we are golden, And we have to find our way back to the garden,” as I waved farewell. Can’t really improve on it, even now.

Ma’az’s favorite musician, George Shearing, has just died aged 91, and Ma’az would heartily agree on the problems of getting something done BEFORE you reach that peaceful state of being dead. Means a lot of really fine George Shearing is being played on the radio station, Pacifica for Jazz and Justice, that sometimes graces this niche at the heart of Mordor.

The Age of Iron

The Greek poet Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, wrote of the five ages of men, the gold, the silver, the bronze, the heroes living in the western isles, and the fifth, the iron age, his and ours.

“This is the Race of Iron. Dark is their plight.
Toil and sorrow by day are theirs, and by night
The anguish of death. And the gods afflict them, and kill
Though there’s yet a trifle of good amid manifold ill.”

Not exactly a comfortable existence. And what is likely to happen to them?

“With beautiful bodies veiled in their robes of white
Forsaking the human race for the gods, in flight,
Forbearance and Righteous Wrath depart, and leave
Evil too great to resist, and mortals who grieve.”

Not good, you might say.

“And Zeus will destroy them in turn on his chosen day
When children at birth show heads already grown grey”

And destroyed they may well be, though the precise name of the destroyer varies according to taste; if you wish to identify the heads grey at birth as already burdened with huge debts, feel free.

It is not the movers and shakers of that time that we remember. It is a certain fat balding old guy who went out whenever possible to escape from his wife and to hoist a few flagons with his mates, young guys who hung on his every word, and even wrote them all down, that we teach in our schools; the leader among them laid the basis of all western philosophy, including a good eighty per cent of Christianity, for the next three thousand years, and the nerdy second in class became the tutor of Alexander the Great, and was also the founder of all western, and most eastern, science. (His record achievement of having a technical manual, the Optics, still in use at a prestigious European university some two thousand five hundred years after his death turns textbook writers green with envy.)

Alexander had an interesting family background, certainly very different from the wholesome family life all good Americans claim and that none of them actually possess. His father was the inventor of the wedge tactic in battles as opposed to the standard straggly line, and his mother claimed a mysterious god as the true father of Alexander. (Does that remind you at all of the permanent pain in the life of Winston Churchill, that his wife had a lifelong affair with Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate, leaving Churchill free to concentrate on affairs of state since in the British Upper Classes divorce was not an option?)

Those who gloried in the description of America as the “New Rome” now have to deal with the arrival at 500 AD. You’d think one could live quite comfortably amid the accumulated loot of empire for a good few years after that empire had ended, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Franks and Gauls turned up, all kinds of riff raff, Goths and Visigoths, and made demands, and even shaggy Mongolian types, intent on plunder. Until the practice was banned, Roman citizens often sold themselves into slavery to escape the financial burdens laid on them by the state.

But while the race of iron is in control, we live in interesting times; we have no choice.

“Fifth is the race I call my own and abhor,” says Hesiod
“Oh to die, or be later born, or born before.”

The dying is no problem, under the beneficent program of Dr. Kissinger implemented by all American presidents since Carter. Just go to Afghanistan. The rest is more difficult.

http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2009/12/age-of-iron.html

Budget

2011-03-02T03:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175361/tomgram%3A_chris_hellman%2C_%241.2_trillion_for_national_security/#more

The Real U.S. National Security Budget: The Figure No One Wants You to See - By Chris Hellman

What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.

Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for “security” is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.

So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Fortunately for us, on February 14th the Obama administration officially released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request. Of course, it hasn’t been passed by Congress -- even the 2011 budget hasn’t made it through that august body yet -- but at least we have the most recent figures available for our calculations.

For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.

To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.

Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a “miscellaneous” category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds.

So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of:

$703.1 billion dollars.

Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy.

For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual “war-related fighting” costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what’s called "International Affairs" in two: that is, into an annual "base" budget as well as funding for "Overseas Contingency Operations" related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department’s contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to:

$711.8 billion.

The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called “homeland security” -- of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding which brings our total to:

$765.3 billion.

The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP).

This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of “covert operations” such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won’t have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There’s little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let’s be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on “intelligence.” Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon’s 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don’t know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In any case, add that $53.1 billion and we’re at:

$818.4 billion.

Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans’ hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we’ve reached:

$947.7 billion.

If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for “international peacekeeping” operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at:

$965.7 billion.

As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit:

$1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!)

When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.

Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:

$1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)

A country with a gross domestic product of $1.2 trillion would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ranking between Canada and Indonesia, and ahead of Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Still, don’t for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world’s “known unknowns.” Explaining the phrase this way: “That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know.” It’s a concept that couldn’t apply better to the budget he once oversaw. When it comes to U.S. national security spending, there are some relevant numbers we know are out there, even if we simply can’t calculate them.

To take one example, how much of NASA’s proposed $18.7 billion budget falls under national security spending? We know that the agency works closely with the Pentagon. NASA satellite launches often occur from the Air Force’s facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Air Force has its own satellite launch capability, but how much of that comes as a result of NASA technology and support? In dollars terms, we just don’t know.

Other “known unknowns” would include portions of the State Department budget. One assumes that at least some of its diplomatic initiatives promote our security interests. Similarly, we have no figure for the pensions of non-Pentagon federal retirees who worked on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or the Departments of Justice and Treasury. Nor do we have figures for the interest on moneys borrowed to fund veterans’ benefits, among other national security-related matters. The bill for such known unknowns could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, putting the full national security budget over the $1.3 trillion mark or even higher.

There’s a simple principle here. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. In a restaurant, a customer would be outraged to receive a check almost twice as high as the menu promised. We have no idea whether the same would be true in the world of national security spending, because Americans are never told what national security actually means at the cash register.

Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues. He is a TomDispatch regular and a frequent media commentator on military planning, policy, and budgetary issues. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Hellman explains how he arrived at his staggering numbers, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

[Note on Sources: The press release from the Office of The Director of National Intelligence disclosing the Fiscal Year 2010 $53 billion intelligence budget consists of 138 words and no details, other than that the office will disclose no details. It can be found by clicking here (.pdf file). An October 2010 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office entitled "Potential Costs of Veterans' Health Care" projects rapid cost growth for Veterans Administration services over the next decade as a result of spiraling health care costs. To read the full report, click here (.pdf file). To see all the federal agencies that contribute to homeland security funding, click here (.pdf file)]

Copyright 2011 Christopher Hellman

Featheroftruth

2011-02-28T01:22:00.000-08:00

The weighing of the heart against the feather of truth, and the coming of Anubis.

The weighing of the heart against the feather of truth

The heart of the dead man is weighed against the feather of truth. Thoth records the verdict, and Amemet, the devourer, part hippo, part lioness, and part crocodile, gets to eat the heart if it fails the test. With the heart the dead man's hope of immortality also disappears.

The coming of Anubis

The signs are: first the entrance into London of a giant replica from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun of the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the dead Anubis; and second the mummy of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun being put on display back inside of his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt.

If the ancient Egyptian prophecies are true, the sending forth by Tutankhamun from his grave the god of the dead, Anubis, does indeed presage a world destined to become one of death and destruction on a scale not seen since the last age when our earth was overturned.

Backroomstuff

2011-02-20T15:36:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Day Seventeen of the Hare Year - can't say he(or she) is not keeping their reputation for speed! - on this February 20, 2011. This Newsweek article may be of interest to those wishing to pry into how deals are done between the powers that be.

Drone strikes have been on hold for almost a month—likely due to the tension between Pakistan and the U.S. over the arrest of an American official for murder. Newsweek investigates.

At first, Taliban militants and local civilians in the Waziristan tribal badlands along Pakistan’s Afghan border thought that bad weather was responsible for the long lull in the attacks by armed Predator drones. “For the first time in months we haven’t heard any ‘buzz-buzz’ overhead for weeks,” says a physician in the town of Mir Ali, referring to the distinctive noise that turbo-prop UAVs make when circling overhead. “We thought the reason was the low, cloudy skies.”

But drone-fired missile strikes against militant targets have now been on hiatus for almost a month—and militants and locals alike are increasingly convinced that the halt is tied to a tense diplomatic standoff between Pakistan and the U.S. over American security agent Raymond Davis.

On January 27, Davis—a former Special Forces solider, now described by the U.S. as a member of the Islamabad embassy’s “administrative and technical staff—was detained by Pakistani police after he blew away two would-be robbers with his Glock semi-automatic pistol in Lahore. The drone attacks happened to cease around the same time as the arrest. Sensing a connection, the militants are rejoicing over Davis’ incarceration: “The arrest of this guy is a very positive thing for us,” says Mullah Jihad Yar, a Pakistani Taliban commander in the area. “Our forces used to be hit by attacks every other day. Now we can move more freely.”

[Photo]

There have been previous pauses in Predator strikes before—Bill Roggio’s authoritative log at www.longwarjournal.org shows two shutdowns in 2009 (of 33 and 28 days in length) and two in 2010 (of 19 and 15 days in length). In those instances, bad weather was indeed cited as the cause. But this time, the Waziri residents seem to have guessed right. Newsweek has confirmed that it’s no coincidence the ramped-up attacks ended abruptly with Davis’ arrest. A senior Pakistani official has confirmed that Davis’ case is directly connected to the freezing of the attacks, and says that Washington is afraid of further inflaming anti-American sentiment in Pakistan in the wake of the shootings. The U.S. insists that Davis fired in self-defense at the men—who reportedly flashed guns at him as they drove by on a motorcycle—and that he enjoys full diplomatic immunity. Embassy officials are pressing for him to be released immediately into American custody. The Pakistani police, meanwhile, are considering possible murder charges. This week, the Lahore court gave Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari’s beleaguered government three more weeks to decide whether Davis, who remains in jail, is indeed entitled to full diplomatic protection.

Newsweek has confirmed that it’s no coincidence the ramped-up attacks ended abruptly with Davis’ arrest

The case couldn’t be more politically sensitive for Zardari and his government, who have been steadfast allies of the U.S. in the war against Islamic extremism. Most Pakistanis are incensed by the killings and see Davis and his shoot-from-the-hip actions—just as they see the drone strikes—as a blatant symbol of U.S. arrogance and its disregard for Pakistani laws and sovereignty. Both American and Pakistani officials fear that while the case is negotiated behind the scenes, any further drone attacks could set off destabilizing street protests. “Ninety-nine percent of Pakistanis believe he’s a killer,” says a Pakistani intelligence official who declined to be named, as he is not authorized to speak to the press. “So we conveyed the message to the U.S. to stop the attacks, in order not to make a bad situation worse.”

Many Pakistanis also question why Davis, who was dressed in jeans and a checkered shirt on the night of the arrest, was driving through Lahore with a loaded pistol, extra magazines and ammunition, a GPS device, several cell phones and a telescope. The U.S. government also has its own questions about what Davis and other shadowy Americans are up to in Pakistan. According to the senior Pakistani official, the U.S. government has only a sketchy notion of what Davis and other security contractors and intelligence agents are actually doing on the ground. As a result, the CIA’s activities in Pakistan have more or less been temporarily shut down, according to the official, while a review of the agency’s activities is carried out. Hence the temporary drone freeze, since the drone program is under the direction of the CIA.

Over the past year, U.S. President Barack Obama dramatically escalated the drone strikes, more than doubling them from 45 attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal area in 2009 to some 118 last year. In the first three weeks of 2011, the CIA flew nine drone attack missions, with the final three being nearly simultaneous attacks on targets in Warizistan on January 22 in which at least 13 suspected Taliban fighters were killed. But until the Davis case is resolved, which could take a month or longer, the Taliban and al Qaeda may have the unexpected luxury of not worrying about sudden death raining down on them from the skies.

With John Barry in Washington. Ron Moreau is Newsweek's Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

Hareandhodja

2011-02-18T12:20:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the Year of the Hare, the tale of the Hodja and the hare.

The Year of the Hare started on February 3, 2011, the day after Groundhog
Day. Greetings and good wishes. [You have to admit, on this fourteenth - oops, fifteenth - day of the Year of the Hare, that the promise of dazzling speed has been very fully fulfilled.]

One day the Hodja, wandering around the countryside, had the great luck
to catch a hare. Hares were extremely, unbelievably, rare in his country.
This was the first one he'd ever seen, and the first one he'd ever heard
of anyone else seeing, either, and his excitement was immense.

Bigger than a rabbit, he muttered, hurrying home, much bigger, but a sort
of rabbit, and has the speed of the wind (it had been an extremely lucky
capture.) His mind whirled with interest in the hare he carried in his
bag, squirming and kicking occasionally, but firmly held.

"Stick this in the big trunk," he told his wife, "No, I'll do it myself,"
and he put the bag in the box. "On no account touch it," he told her,
"I'm just off to get some friends to look at it, it's amazing." And he
rambled off to fetch his mates.

Now the wife was intrigued, which was natural, and she opened the box
just a little way, which was foolish, and took out the bag, which was
disobedient, and opened it up just a little way to see what this amazing
thing was the old bugger was on about, which was disastrous. The hare
leapt out and shot through the open door at a rate that left the wife not
just breathless, but almost doubting her senses that some sort of animal
had indeed been here for her to see some millisecond ago.

The wife decided that just leaving nothing in the bag would be an
unnecessarily pessimistic ploy in the never ending brush warfare that
goes on between married couples ("Marriage is a battle to the death,
which no man of honour should avoid." G.K. Chesterton) and so she slipped
one of those tin measures, with a big metal ear, into the bag,, and
put it back in the box, and closed the box, and tried to leave everything
as she remembered it had been.

The Hodja turned up after a couple of hours with those of his mates he'd
managed to detach from the cafe, and they all gathered round the box. The
Hodja opened the box, took out the bag, and shook the measuring jug to
the floor. Everyone looked at it in silence for what seemed quite a long
time. "There are sixteen of those in a bushel," said the Hodja at last.

Women

2011-02-14T01:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175340/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_can_women_make_peace/#more

Why Peace Is the Business of Men (But Shouldn’t Be) A Modest Proposal for the Immodest Brotherhood of Big Men By Ann Jones

Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it’s time to try something entirely new and totally different. So how about putting into action, for the first time in recorded history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325?

Passed on October 31, 2000, more than a decade ago, that “landmark” resolution was hailed worldwide as a great “victory” for women and international peace and security. In a nutshell, SCR 1325 calls for women to participate equally and fully at decision-making levels in all processes of conflict resolution, peacemaking, and reconstruction. Without the active participation of women in peacemaking every step of the way, the Security Council concluded, no just and durable peace could be achieved anywhere.

“Durable” was the key word. Keep it in mind.

Most hot wars of recent memory, little and big, have been resolved or nudged into remission through what is called a power-sharing agreement. The big men from most or all of the warring parties -- and war is basically a guy thing, in case you hadn’t noticed -- shoulder in to the negotiating table and carve up a country’s or region’s military, political, and financial pie. Then they proclaim the resulting deal “peace.”

But as I learned firsthand as an aid worker in one so-called post-conflict country after another, when the men in power stop shooting at each other, they often escalate the war against civilians -- especially women and girls. It seems to be hard for men to switch off violence, once they’ve gotten the hang of it. From Liberia to Myanmar, rape, torture, mutilation, and murder continue unabated or even increase in frequency. In other words, from the standpoint of civilians, war is often not over when it’s “over,” and the “peace” is no real peace at all. Think of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the notorious “rape capital of the world,” where thousands upon thousands of women are gang-raped again and again although the country has officially been at “peace” since 2003.

In addition, power-sharing agreements among combatants tend to fray, and half of them unravel into open warfare again within a few years. Consider Liberia throughout the 1990s, Angola in 1992 and 1998, Cambodia in 1997, and Iraq in 2006-2007. At this moment, we are witnessing the breakdown of one power-sharing agreement in the Ivory Coast, and certainly the femicidal consequences of another, made in 2001, in Afghanistan.

It is this repeated recourse to war and the unrelenting abuse and neglect of civilians during fleeting episodes of “peace” that prompted the Security Council to seek the key to more durable solutions. They recognized that men at the negotiating table still jockey for power and wealth -- notably control of a country’s natural resources -- while women included at any level of negotiations commonly advocate for interests that coincide perfectly with those of civil society. Women are concerned about their children and consequently about shelter, clean water, sanitation, jobs, health care, education, and the like -- all those things that make life livable for peaceable men, women, and children anywhere.

The conclusion is self-evident. Bring women to the table in decision-making roles in equal numbers with male participants and the nature of peace negotiations changes altogether. And so does the result. Or at least that’s what the Security Council expects. We can’t be sure because in more than a decade since SCR 1325 was enacted, it has never been put to the test.

At the time, at the exhilarating dawn of a new millennium, the whole world applauded SCR 1325 as a great achievement of the United Nations, pointing the pathway to world peace. Later, when men in war-torn countries negotiated peace, often with the guidance of the U.N., they forgot all about it. Their excuse was that they had to act fast, speed being more important than justice or durability or women. At critical times like that, don’t you know, women just get in the way.

Peace? Not a Chance

My special concern is Afghanistan, and I’m impatient. I’d like a speedy conclusion, too. It’s been nine years since I started doing aid work there, and in that time several of the young Afghan women who were my colleagues and became my friends have died of illnesses they would have survived in better times under the auspices of a government that cared about the welfare of its citizens. Even its women citizens.

Yet now, whenever I present my modest proposal for the implementation of SCR 1325 to American big men -- thinkers, movers, and shakers -- who lay claim to expertise on Afghanistan, most of them strongly object. They know the theory, they say, but practice is something else again, and they are precluded from throwing their weight behind SCR 1325 by delicate considerations of “cultural relativism.” Afghanistan, they remind me, is a “traditional” culture that regards women as less than human. As Westerners, they say, we must be particularly careful to respect that view.

Yet the eagerness of Western men to defer to this “tradition” seems excessive, and their tenderness for the sentiments of bearded men who couldn’t clear airport security in Iowa City strikes me as deliberately obtuse, especially since very few of the Afghan men who actually governed Afghanistan between 1919 and 1989 would have shared their sentiments.

Afghan culture is -- and is not -- traditional. Modern ideas, including the idea of equality between the sexes, have been at the heart of internal Afghan cultural struggles for at least a century. In the 1920s, King Amanullah founded the first high school for girls and the first family court to adjudicate women’s complaints about their husbands; he proclaimed the equality of men and women, banned polygamy, cast away the burqa, and banished ultra-conservative Islamist mullahs as “bad and evil persons” who spread propaganda foreign to the moderate Sufi ideals of Afghanistan. His modern ideas cost him his crown, but Afghans still remember Amanullah and his modern, unveiled Queen Suraya for their brave endeavor to drag the country into the modern world.

Thousands of Afghan citizens have shared King Amanullah’s modern views, expressed later by successive leaders, kings and communists alike. But at least since 1979, when the United States and Saudi Arabia joined Pakistan in promoting the ideology and military skill of Islamist extremists who sought to return the country to the seventh-century world of the prophet, Afghanistan’s liberal modernists have taken flight for North America, Europe, and Australia.

Last summer in Afghanistan I talked with many progressive men and women who were running for parliament, hoping to push back against the inordinate power of the Afghan executive in the person of President Hamid Karzai. To them, he seems increasingly eager to do deals with the most extreme Islamists in opposition to all their progressive dreams for their country.

Yet in August, when President Karzai flagrantly stole the presidential election, President Obama telephoned to congratulate him and the U.S. officially pronounced the fraudulent election results “good enough.” We might ask: In this contest between entrenched Islamist extremists and progressives who favor equality and democracy, why is the United States on the wrong side? Why are we on the side of a mistaken notion of Afghan “tradition”?

Our Big Man in Kabul

In 2001, the U.S. and by extension the entire international community cast their lot with Hamid Karzai. We put him in power after one of those power-sharing conferences in Bonn, Germany, to which, by the way, only two Afghan women were invited. We paid hundreds of millions of dollars to stage two presidential elections, in 2004 and 2009, and looked the other way while Karzai’s men stuffed the ballot boxes. Now, it seems, we’re stuck with him and his misogynist “traditions,” even though a growing number of Afghanistan watchers identify the Karzai government as the single greatest problem the U.S. faces in its never-ending war.

We could have seen this coming if we had kept an eye on how President Karzai treats women. George W. Bush famously claimed to have “liberated” the women of Afghanistan, but he missed one: Hamid Karzai’s wife. Although she is a gynecologist with desperately needed skills, she is kept shut up at home. To this day, the president’s wife remains the most prominent woman in Afghanistan still living under house rules established by the Taliban. That little detail, by the way, should remind you of why you ought to care what happens to women: they are the canaries in the Afghan political coal mine.

And what has President Karzai done for the rest of the women of Afghanistan? Not a thing.

That’s the conclusion of a recent report issued by the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium (HRRAC), an association of prominent aid and independent research groups in Afghanistan, including such highly respected non-governmental organizations as Oxfam, CARE, and Save the Children. The Afghan researchers who did the study conducted extensive interviews with prominent male religious scholars, male political leaders, and female leaders locally, provincially, and nationally.

The report notes that President Karzai has supported increasingly repressive laws against women, most notoriously the “Taliban-style” Shia Personal Status Law, enacted in 2009, which not only legitimizes marital rape but “prevents women from stepping out of their homes” without their husband’s consent, in effect depriving them of the right to make any decisions about their own lives. The report points out that this law denies women even the basic freedoms guaranteed to all citizens in the Afghan Constitution, which was passed in 2004 as part of a flurry of democratic reforms marking the start of Karzai’s first term as elected president. The democratizing spasm passed and President Karzai, sworn to defend that Constitution, failed to do the job.

In fact, Karzai’s record on human rights, as the HRRAC report documents, is chiefly remarkable for what he has not done. He holds extraordinary power to make political appointments -- another indicator of the peculiar nature of this Afghan “democracy” our troops are fighting for -- and he has now had almost 10 years in office, ample time to lead even the most reluctant traditional society toward more equitable social arrangements. Yet today, but one cabinet ministry is held by a woman, the Ministry for Women’s Affairs, which incidentally is the sole government ministry that possesses only advisory powers. Karzai has appointed just one female provincial governor, and 33 men. (Is it by chance that Bamyan -- the province run by that woman -- is generally viewed as the most peaceful in the country?) To head city governments nationwide, he has named only one female mayor. And to the Supreme Court High Council he has appointed no woman at all.

Karzai’s claim that he can’t find qualified women is a flimsy -- and traditional -- excuse. Many of his highest-ranking appointees to government offices are notorious war criminals, men considered by the great majority of Afghan citizens to have disqualified themselves from public office. The failure of many of his male appointees to govern honestly and justly, or even to show up for work at all, is a rising complaint of NATO commanders who find upon delivery of “government in a box” that the box is pretty much empty.

If fully qualified women are in short supply, having been confined and deprived for years thanks to armed combat and the Taliban government, isn’t that all the more reason for a president sworn to uphold equality to act quickly to insure broad opportunities for education, training, jobs, and the like? The HRRAC report sensibly recommends “broad sociopolitical reform” to provide “education and economic opportunities for real women’s leadership.” Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, former minister of finance, former president of Kabul University, and presidential contender, spoke in favor of such a “sensible and regular process.” As he noted, however, “Our government is not a sensible government.”

Flimsy, too, is the argument that Afghanistan’s cultural traditions eliminate women from public service. Uzra Jafari, the mayor of Daikundi, reports that the city’s inhabitants did not believe a woman could be a mayor, but they soon “accepted that a woman can serve them better than a man.” “Social obstacles can be overcome,” she says, “but the main problem is the political obstacles. We have problems at the highest levels.” The problem, in other words, is President Karzai, the only person in Afghanistan who has the power to install women in political offices and yet refuses to do so. In short, the president is far more “traditional” than most of the people.

Without the support of male leadership, women leaders (and their families) become easy targets for harassment, threats, intimidation, and assassination. When such threats come from the ultra-Islamist men who dominate the Afghan parliament, they prevent women parliamentarians from uniting in support of women and, in most cases, from speaking out as individuals for women’s rights. Death threats have a remarkable silencing effect, disrupting the processes of governance, yet President Karzai has not once taken a stand against the terrorist tactics of his cronies.

The Brotherhood of Men

Let’s acknowledge that there are limits to what the West can and cannot do in the very different and more traditional culture of Afghanistan. Judging by what we have already done, it seems to be perfectly all right for the West -- aka the U.S. -- to rain bombs upon this agrarian country, with its long tradition of moderate Sufism, and impose an ultraconservative Islamist government and free market capitalism (even at the expense of indigenous agricultural markets) through the ministrations of thousands of highly paid private American “technical assistants.” But it is apparently not okay for any of those multitudinous, extravagantly paid American political and economic consultants to tweak the silken sleeve of President Karzai’s chapan and say, “Hamid, my man, you’ve gotta get some more women in here.” That would be disrespectful of Afghan traditions.

I don’t buy it. What we’re up against is not just the intractable misogyny of President Karzai and other powerful mullahs and mujahideen, but the misogyny of power brokers in Washington as well.

Take, for example, the second most popular objection I hear from American male experts on Afghanistan when I raise my modest proposal. They call this one “pragmatic” or “realistic.” Women can’t come to the negotiating table, they say, because the Taliban would never sit down with them. In fact, Taliban, “ex-Taliban,” and Taliban sympathizers sit down with women every day in the Afghan Parliament, as they have in occasional loya jirgas (deliberating assemblies) since 2001. Clearly, any Taliban who refuse altogether to talk with women disqualify themselves as peace negotiators and should have no place at the table. But what’s stunning about the view of the American male experts is that it comes down on the other side, ceding to the most extreme Taliban misogynists the right to exclude from peace deliberations half the population of the country. (Tell that to our women soldiers putting their lives on the line.)

Yet these days every so-called Afghanistan expert in Washington has a plan for the future of the country. Some seem relatively reasonable while others are certifiably delusional, but what almost all of these documents have in common is the absence of the word “women.” (There are a few tiny but notable exceptions.)

In the Loony Tunes category is former diplomat and National Security Council Deputy Robert D. Blackwill’s “Plan B in Afghanistan” appearing in Foreign Affairs, which calls for the U.S. military to flee the south, thus creating a “de facto partition” of Afghanistan and incidentally abandoning -- you guessed it -- “the women of those areas,” as well as anyone else in the south who wants “to resist the Taliban.” This scenario may call to mind images of helicopters departing the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, but Blackwill clings to his “strategy,” calling the grim fate of those left behind “a tragic consequence of local realities that are impossible for outsiders to change.”

In the relatively reasonable category is the plan of the Afghanistan Study Group: “A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan.” Its first recommendation says, “The U.S. should fast-track a peace process designed to decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-sharing balance among the principal parties.” Whoops! No mention of women there. And power sharing? We know where that’s headed. Afghanistan, the undisputed small arms capital of the world, might easily spontaneously combust into civil war.

But what becomes of women? Even Matthew Hoh, who resigned his position in 2009 as a political officer in the foreign service to protest U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and now heads the Afghanistan Study Group, can’t seem to imagine bringing women to the negotiating table. (He says he’s “working on it.”) Instead, the Study Group decides for women that “this strategy will best serve [their] interests.” It declares that “the worst thing for women is for Afghanistan to remain paralyzed in a civil war in which there evolves no organically rooted support for their social advancement.” Well, no. Actually, the worst thing for women is to have a bunch of men -- and not even Afghan men at that -- decide one more time what’s best for women.

I wonder if it’s significant that the Afghan Study Group, much like the Bonn Conference that established the Karzai government in the first place, is essentially a guy club. I count three women among 49 men and the odd “center” or “council” (also undoubtedly consisting mostly of men). When I asked Matthew Hoh why there are so few women in the Study Group, he couldn’t help laughing. He said, “This is Washington. You go to any important meeting in Washington, it’s men.”

Maybe the heady atmosphere engendered by all those gatherings of suits in close quarters was what inspired Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to abandon all discretion recently and declare that the promise of equal protection in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not extend to protecting women against sex discrimination. If states enact laws discriminating against women, he opined, such laws would not be unconstitutional. (You can be sure some legislators have gotten right to work on it.)

That opinion puts Justice Scalia cozily in bed with former Chief Justice Shinwari, President Karzai’s first appointee to head the Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, who interpreted Article 22 of the Afghan Constitution, which calls for men and women to have equal rights and responsibilities before the law, to mean that men have rights and women have responsibilities to their husbands. (Could this mean that the United States is a traditional culture, too?)

Women leaders in Afghanistan complain that their government does not see them as “human,” but merely uses them as tokens or symbols, presumably to appease those international donors who still rattle on about human rights. George W. Bush used Afghan women that way. Obama doesn’t mention them. Here in the U.S. you take your choice between cynical exploitation, utter neglect, and outright discrimination.

In Afghanistan, Karzai names a High Peace Council to negotiate with the Taliban. Sixty men. The usual suspects: warlords, Wahhabis, mujahideen, long-bearded and long in the tooth, but fighting for power to the bitter end. Thomas Ruttig of the Afghan Analysts Network reports that among them are 53 men linked to armed factions in the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s including 13 linked to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami, currently allied with the Taliban. An additional 12 members of the High Peace Council held positions in the Taliban’s Emirate government between 1996 and 2001.

Under some international pressure, Karzai belatedly added 10 women, the only members of the High Peace Council with no ties to armed militias past or present; they represent the interests of civil society, which is to say the people who might actually like to live in peace for a change and do their utmost to sustain it. The U.S. signed off on this lopsided Council. So did Hillary Clinton, a woman who, as Secretary of State, has solemnly promised again and again never to abandon the women of Afghanistan, though she never remembers to invite them to a conference where international and Afghan men decide the future of their country.

Okay, so my modest proposal doesn’t stand a chance. The deck is stacked against the participation of women, both there and here. Even I don’t expect men in power to take seriously the serious proposition that women must be equally and fully involved in peacemaking or you don’t get durable peace. Too many men, both Afghan and American, are doing very nicely thank you with the present traditional arrangements of our cultures. So, searching blindly for some eventual exit and burdened by their misbegotten notions of "peace," U.S. and NATO officials busy themselves repeatedly transporting to Kabul, at vast expense, a single high-ranking Taliban mullah to negotiate secret peace and power-sharing deals with President Karzai. American officials tout these man-to-man negotiations as evidence that U.S. strategy is finally working, until the “mullah” turns out to be an imposter playing a profitable little joke on the powers that be. Afghan women, who already suffer the effects of rising Taliban power, are not laughing.

Consider this. We’re not just talking about women’s rights here. Women’s rights are human rights. Women exercising their human rights are simply women engaging in those things that men the world over take for granted: going to school, going to work, walking around. But in Afghanistan today -- here’s where tradition comes in again -- almost every woman and girl exercising her rights does so with the support of the man or men who let her out of the house: father, husband, brothers, uncles, sons. Exclude women from their rightful equal decision-making part in the peacemaking process and you also betray the men who stand behind them, men who are by self-definition committed to the dream of a more egalitarian and democratic future for their country.

The sad news from Afghanistan is that a great many progressives have already figured out their own exit strategy. Like generations of Afghans before them, they will become part of one of the world’s largest diasporas from a single country. Ironically, I’ll bet many of those progressive Afghan men will bring their families to the United States, where women appear to be free and it’s comforting to imagine that misogyny is dead.

Ann Jones is the author most recently of War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010) on the way war affects women from Africa to the Middle East and Asia. She wrote about the struggles of Afghan women in Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan 2006). She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Jones discusses why wars never end for women and girls, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Bali

2011-01-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

Rice terraces in Tegalalang, western Bali

The people living in Bali, the island off the eastern coast of Java, the main island in Indonesia, are Hindu. They left Java en masse when Islam arrived there, distancing themselves even further from their fellow Hindus in India, and gradually built a civilization very different from that in India, on the “island of gods and demons,” Bali.

“Bali people think only about religion,” say the Moslem Javanese dismissively, and in many ways that’s quite true. Any city block in Bali will have several statues of various gods and demons on each side of the block, each with a little basket of fruit and flowers and a burning incense stick in front of it.

According to Balinese Hindu belief, the people working the fields are not the owners of the land; the owners are the gods who do not die. Humans work the fields for a brief spell, and then pass away like a dream in the night, but the gods remain, and they reward those who exercise their stewardship well.

Rice terraces, a way of building a steep hillside into steps used to grow small areas of rice paddy, exist all over Asia, and take many generations to build and maintain. That’s the good stewardship.

GoldmanSachsEricFry

2011-01-01T11:06:00.000-08:00

Not Your Average Pundit A Few of Eric Fry's Insights from the Year Gone By
Joel Bowman From the shores of Mar del Plata, Argentina...

Yesterday, The Daily Reckoning's editorial director, Eric Fry, took a break from his eggnog to offer some kind words about Fellow Reckoner, Chris Mayer.

In today's edition, your managing editor puts down his bomba y maté, to offer some kind words about Mr. Fry.

It's not only that Eric is far too modest to sing his own praises that we honor his contributions to these pages, either. And, lest the reader think we're engaging in some kind of ritualistic, year-end back-patting festival around the office, we present below two columns, authored by the accused, as evidence of exactly the kind of writing with which he is charged.

Where most of the mainstream pundits go out of their way to miss the point entirely, Eric drives it home with an industry-rare mixture of wit and honesty. Indeed, few financial commentators rally with such editorial rigor against the state-sponsored corporatism so prevalent in today's system. Given that 2010 was such a bull market for exactly this kind of cronyism, we are all the more pleased to present a couple of Eric's best insights from the year gone by.

We'll leave it to the intellectual safekeeping of the reader to connect the dots between these two most revealing observations...and to then feel suitably disgusted by it all. Enjoy!

The Daily Reckoning Presents Goldman's Perfect Quarter Eric Fry [Reckoning on May 12, from Laguna Beach, California]

While the European Central Bank (ECB) was busy manipulating markets and making headlines Monday, Goldman Sachs was quietly revealing a different story of market manipulation...or something that walks and quacks very much like a market manipulation duck.

In an SEC filing, Goldman disclosed its first-ever "perfect" quarter. The firm's proprietary trading desk navigated the first quarter without producing a single day of losses, the first time it had accomplished such a feat.

How is this possible? Please permit us to offer a simple explanation: It's not.

Imagine a poker player who competes against skilled competitors for 63 sessions of 6 1/2 hours each, then walks away with a profit after all 63 sessions. Would that be possible? Not unless the poker player is holding a stack of aces up his sleeve. But Goldman accomplished this improbable feat. Its trading desk turned a profit on each and every day of the first quarter - that's 63 trading sessions of 6 1/2 hours each, not counting whatever additional shenanigans Goldman was conducting in foreign markets.

There is something wrong with this picture...very, very wrong. And yet, Goldman trumpets this success as an example of something that is very, very right. "This is the first time we have reported zero trading loss days in a quarter," crowed Samuel Robinson, a Goldman Sachs spokesman. "We believe it shows the strength of our customer franchise and risk management."

An alternative interpretation would attribute Goldman's uncanny trading success to the strength of its "political franchise," subsidized risk- taking and various forms of de facto front-running. If, as James Howard Kunstler asserts, the US stock market has become "a robot combat arena where algorithms battle for supremacy of the feedback loops," Goldman Sachs must control the "Supreme Combat Robot." But we wonder whether this robot is abiding by all applicable securities laws, or vaporizing them with his special "Mega-fraud laser beam."

"The firm did not record a loss of even $0.01 on even one day in the last quarter," Durden says. "The statistic probability of this event is itself statistically undefined. Goldman is now the market - or, in keeping with modern market reality, Goldman is the 'house,' it controls the casino, and always wins. Congratulations America: you now have far, far better odds in Las Vegas that you have making money with your E- Trade account."

In fairness to Goldman, JP Morgan also produced a perfect quarter of proprietary trading. Morgan Stanley, the relative loser in the crowd, managed to produce a trading profit on only 93% of its trading days.

"The rape and pillage of the middle class was not isolated to Goldman," Durden continues. "JP Morgan also had a flawless quarter. And if the odds of Goldman making 63 out of 63 are virtually impossible in any universe in which risk goes hand in hand with return (but in those in which monopolies are encouraged and bailed out), the coincidence of the two main firms that control the world having a perfect track record is impossible. And since things in reality tend to be zero sum, when everyone makes money, someone may be tempted to ask the question, just who is losing money? And the answer, dear taxpayers, and [Goldman/JPMorgan] clients, is you."

Perfection is either a religious virtue or a devilish fraud, dear reader; it is never a financial market reality. So there's something a little troubling about the perfection achieved by Goldman's (and Morgan's) trader-bots. In fact, there might be something a lot troubling about their trader-bots, as well as their investment-bank- atrons.

Perhaps the truth will come to light in the fullness of time...or in the details of a future SEC complaint.

Goldman acknowledged in Monday's SEC filing that it still faces a large and diverse number of criminal and quasi-criminal investigations. In addition to a bevy of investigations by the SEC, Goldman is facing detailed probes by the Justice Department, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the UK's Financial Services Authority related to CDO offerings and related matters.

"We anticipate that additional putative shareholder derivative actions and other litigation may be filed, and regulatory and other investigations and actions [will be] commenced against us with respect to offering of CDOs," Goldman's filing somberly disclosed, "[These probes] could result in collateral consequences to us that may materially adversely affect the manner in which we conduct our businesses."

Hmmm...we'd guess that the list of "collateral consequences" would include reducing Goldman's trading success from 100% to something much lower. And since trading revenues accounted for 80% of Goldman's revenue in the first quarter, we'd guess that much lower net profit will be another "collateral consequence."

Outing Ben Bernanke by Eric Fry [Reckoning on Dec. 15, from Laguna Beach, California]

Deception in the financial markets is not always costly, but it is rarely remunerative. Investors cannot afford to ignore this tendency.

Recent disclosures from the Federal Reserve reveal that honesty was one of the earliest casualties of the 2008 financial crisis. These disclosures contain a number of juicy tidbits, like the fact that Goldman Sachs received tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect succor from the Fed.

Thanks to these spectacularly large taxpayer-funded bailouts, Goldman was able to continue "doing God's Work" - as CEO Lloyd Blankfein infamously remarked - like the work of producing billion-dollar trading profits without ever suffering a single day of losses.

Thanks to the Fed's massive, undisclosed assistance, Goldman Sachs managed to project an image of financial well-being, even while accessing tens of billions of dollars of direct assistance from the Federal Reserve.

By repaying its TARP loan, for example, Goldman wriggled out from under the nettlesome compensation limits imposed by TARP, while also conveying an image of financial strength. But this "strength" was illusory. Goldman repaid the TARP loans with funds it procured days earlier from the Federal Reserve. Then, over the ensuing months, Goldman recapitalized its balance sheet by selling tens of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities to the Fed.

And the public never knew anything about these activities until two weeks ago, when the Fed was forced to reveal them.

In a free-market economy, certain precepts seem fundamental...and essential:

1) Taxpayers have a right to know who's spending their money.
2) Dollar-holders have a right to know who's debasing their money.
3) Investors have a right to know who's cheating them out of their money...by hiding the truth.

All three camps have a very large and legitimate bone to pick with the Fed's secret bailouts of 2008 and 2009. But let's consider only the case of the deceived investor...

Secret bailouts do not merely benefit recipients; they also deceive investors into mistaking fantasy for fact. Such deceptions often punish honest investors, like the honest investors who sold short the shares of insolvent financial institutions early in 2009.

Some of these investors had done enough homework to understand that no private-market remedy could ride to the rescue of certain financial firms. Therefore, these investors sold short the shares of certain ailing institutions and waited for nature to take its course. But the course that nature would take would be shockingly unnatural. We now know why. The Federal Reserve altered the course of nature, and did so without telling anyone.

Many of the investors who sold short ailing financial firms in 2009 were alert to the possibility that bailouts by the Federal Reserve could change the calculus. In other words, the Fed could make the bearish case less bearish...at least temporarily. Therefore, many of these investors studied the Federal Reserve's disclosures, as well as corporate press releases, in order to quantify the Fed's influence.

Based on all available public disclosures, the story remained fairly grim into the spring of 2009. Accordingly, the short interest - i.e., number of shares sold short - on Goldman Sachs common stock hit a record 16.3 million shares on May 15, 2009 - about 3.3% of the public float. But over the ensuing six months, Goldman's stock soared more than 30% - producing roughly $500 million in losses for those investors who had sold short its stock. Not surprisingly, the total short interest during that timeframe plummeted to less than 6 million shares, as short-sellers closed out their losing positions.

Was it just bad luck? Or was something more nefarious at work here?

Let the reader decide. But before deciding, let the reader carefully examine the chart below, while also carefully considering a selection of public announcements from Goldman Sachs during this timeframe.

Based upon contemporaneous public disclosures, Goldman Sachs was "forced" by the Federal Reserve to accept a $10 billion loan from the TARP facility in October 2008. But Goldman's top officers repeatedly - and very publically - bristled under the compensation limits the TARP loan imposed.

Therefore, as early as February 5, 2009, Goldman's chief financial officer, David Viniar, remarked, "Operating our business without the government capital would be an easier thing to do. We'd be under less scrutiny..." And on February 11, 2009, CEO Blankfein magnanimously remarked, "We look forward to paying back the government's investment so that money can be used elsewhere to support our economy."

But at that exact moment, we now know, Goldman was operating its business with at least $25 billion of undisclosed "government capital."

In April, 2009, The Wall Street Journal observed, "Goldman Sachs group Inc., frustrated at federally mandated pay caps, has been plotting for months to get out from under the government's thumb... Goldman's managers have a big incentive to escape the state's clutches. Last year, 953 Goldman employees - nearly one in 30 - were paid in excess of $1 million apiece... But tight federal restrictions connected to the financial-sector bailout have severely crimp the Wall Street firm's ability to offer such lavish pay this year."

On May 7, 2009, a Goldman press release states: "We are pleased that the Federal Reserve's Supervisory Capital Assessment Program has been completed... With respect to Goldman Sachs, the tests determined that the firm does not require further capital... We will soon repay the government's investment from the TARP's Capital Purchase Program."

On June 17, 2009, Goldman finally got its wish, thanks to some timely, undisclosed assistance from the Federal Reserve. Goldman repaid its $10 billion TARP loan. But just six days before this announcement, Goldman sold $11 billion of MBS to the Fed. In other words, Goldman "repaid" the Treasury by secretly selling illiquid assets to the Fed.

One month later, Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein beamed, "We are grateful for the government efforts and are pleased that [the monies we repaid] can be used by the government to revitalize the economy, a priority in which we all have a common stake."

As it turns out, the government continued to "revitalize" that small sliver of the economy known as Goldman Sachs. During the three months following Goldman's re-payment of its $10 billion TARP loan, the Fed purchased $27 billion of MBS from Goldman. In all, the Fed would purchase more than $100 billion of MBS from Goldman during the 12 months that followed Goldman's TARP re-payment.

Did private investors not have the right to know that the Federal Reserve was secretly recapitalizing Goldman's balance sheet during this period? Did they not deserve to know that the Fed's MBS buying was producing Goldman's "perfect" trading record during this timeframe?

Yes, would seem to be the obvious answer.

"There's a saying in poker: If you don't know who the patsy is at the table, it's you," observes Henry Blodget, the once and again stock market analyst, "Next time you feel like bellying up to the Wall Street poker table, therefore, ask yourself again who the sucker is."

Regards, Eric Fry for The Daily Reckoning

Assange

2010-12-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

Mr. Julian Assange, of WiikiLeaks, most strikingly resembles the Chinese gentleman skipping backwards in front of the advancing tank in the Tianmen Square events in China of a few years ago.

Mr. Linton Kwesi Johnson, of Brixton, UK was unquestionably correct: “There are wicked men in the seats of judgement.” We now have documentary evidence.

“The devil, that prowde spirit, can not endure to be mocked” says Martin Luther, and mocked he certainly has been. The fury of the movers and shakers, as they see themselves, is palpable, vindictive, and boundless. How dare the Irish vote seventy five per cent for independence – Send in the Black and Tans.

The demonstration that the most powerful state in the world, as they see themselves, can be, in a sense, brought to a shuddering halt, reduced to forbidding its citizens to read the daily papers, that even a single person can do it, is an unbearable humiliation. “The flame at the center of your being is more powerful than any government or king.” (Dean_Saor)

A brave man. The most ominous comment made by him was at the end of a recent interview, when asked if he expected to win his bout against the world’s super power. “That’s up to you,” he said. And so it is.

ForBetterForWorse

2010-12-15T17:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/kholoussyINT.htm

Interventions: A Middle East Report Online Feature

The Fiction (and Non-Fiction) of Egypt’s Marriage Crisis Hanan Kholoussy December 2010

(Hanan Kholoussy, an assistant professor of history and Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo, is author of For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt [Stanford, 2010].)

In August 2006, a 27-year old pharmacist started blogging anonymously about her futile hunt for a husband in Mahalla al-Kubra, an industrial city 60 miles north of Cairo in the Nile Delta. Steeped in satirical humor, the blog of this “wannabe bride” turned into a powerful critique of everything that is wrong with how middle-class Egyptians meet and marry. The author poked fun at every aspect of arranged marriage -- from the split-second decisions couples are expected to make after hour-long meetings about their lifetime compatibility to the meddling relatives and nosy neighbors who introduce them to each other. She joked about her desperation to marry in a society that stigmatizes single women over the age of 30. She ridiculed bachelors for their unrealistic expectations and inflated self-images while sympathizing with the exorbitant financial demands placed on would-be husbands. Thirty suitors and four years later, the pharmacist remains proudly single at 32, refusing to settle for just any man.

Ghada Abdel Aal has taken Egypt by storm -- its blogosphere, its literary scene, its television lineup and even its image abroad. Blogging in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and peppering her slang with the pop culture references of youth, Abdel Aal quickly attracted a large following. The hits on the witty website have surpassed a half million.[1] Her tragicomic tales of matchmaking mishaps became so popular that Egypt’s powerhouse publisher Dar al-Shorouq tracked her down to offer a book deal. A year and a half after she first posted in cyberspace, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz (I Want to Get Married) debuted at the Cairo International Book Fair in January 2008. Less than three years later, the book was adapted into an Egyptian television series with the same name. To date, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz has been translated into Italian, German, Dutch and, most recently, English.

Divided into 25 brief chapters that showcase her best blog entries, the book describes Abdel Aal’s encounters with ten different suitors. Each suitor gets his own chapter, with each encounter preceded and followed by a chapter or two of commentary. No subject is sacred: Abdel Aal discusses police brutality, al-Qaeda and the peccadilloes of politicians, as well as sexual harassment and dating, a phenomenon dimly acknowledged in Egypt beyond Westernized elite circles. Her parade of suitors includes a thief who cons her into loaning him money before making a fast getaway, a polygamist who proposes with his two wives looking on, a detective who checks out her family through a full-blown police investigation, and an avid soccer fan who watches a game during their first meeting and walks out because her family cheers for the opposing team. Most of these episodes are drawn from her own experiences, although Abdel Aal admits she occasionally borrowed friends’ stories or embellished her own for entertainment’s sake. And entertain she has. In a country where books are an increasingly hard sell, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz was an instant bestseller. It has already gone through six printings. The book made such a big splash in Egypt that Western media giants like the BBC and the Washington Post reported on the sensation.

Parodies with a Point

Throughout her rapid rise to stardom, Abdel Aal has ignited controversy. Egyptian literary critics who value formal Arabic are offended that her very vernacular blog is considered a literary contribution worthy of translation. Many men are affronted by her parodies of suitors’ behavior and accuse her of being a publicity hound. Many women, too, are uncomfortable with Abdel Aal’s expressed anxiety about marrying and her derision at experiences that may be all too familiar. Elders are dismayed by her mockery of matchmaking practices that are deeply embedded in social norms. But the overwhelming majority of her readers, young and middle- to upper-class, find the book hilarious, appreciate the slang and agree with her critique of the customs and costs of Egyptian marriage. As a result, the broadcast version of ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz was one of the most anticipated shows of Ramadan -- the hottest television season in Egypt and the Arab world.

Boasting a famous cast, including Hind Sabri, Sawsan Badr and Ahmad al-Saqqa, ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz was one of the three most watched of the 40-odd new shows that aired during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which in 2010 occurred in August and September. Framed as a sitcom, the show reached a much broader audience than the book has, both outside Egypt and inside Egypt, where more than half of the population cannot read or write. Its broadcast as a Ramadan serial cemented the book’s status as a cultural watershed -- another coup for a small-town blogger from the Delta.

Although half of the sitcom’s 30 episodes came straight from the book and Abdel Aal co-wrote the screenplay, the show did not live up to the expectations of many of her readers. Some were disappointed with Hind Sabri, in her first comedic role as the professionally successful but hopelessly single main character ‘Ula, a 29-year old pharmacist. They faulted Sabri for exaggerated facial expressions, body language and intonation, and for telegraphing the jokes while failing to provide a sense of character development. Others found ‘Ula’s aggressiveness in pursuit of marriage unrealistic and the satire overly broad. In one episode that did not come from the book, for example, ‘Ula poisons her best friend and colleague to prevent her from attending a professional conference teeming with potential grooms.

A few readers were upset that the serial did not relay the book’s more serious underlying message. In the book, amidst her failures at finding a husband, Abdel Aal pauses to ponder the injustice of the social pressure on women to marry: “Society needs to stop confining women solely to the role of bride. Because when things fall apart…they feel like worthless good-for-nothings, and they sit and complain, like I’m doing to you right now…. If I don’t get married and if I don’t have children and if I can’t follow society’s grand plan, I will always have my independent nature and I will always have my own life and I will never be…a good-for-nothing.”[2] By contrast, Abdel Aal’s televised persona ‘Ula is so swept up in the race to matrimony, at the expense of friendships and dignity, that she offers no such profound reflections despite regular soliloquies to the camera.

Anxieties Underneath

These criticisms reveal the underlying discomfort that many Egyptians, regardless of age, gender or class, feel with the sensitive subject that the show shallowly addresses. Some are disquieted by Abdel Aal’s more nuanced textual narrative as well. The depiction of a single woman’s quest for a partner makes many uneasy because Abdel Aal effectively reverses the active-passive binary that has historically dictated the rules of marriage in Egypt: Men choose while women comply. The strict division of gender roles is even reflected in the verbs used to describe the act of marriage in Egyptian dialect: A man marries (yigawwiz) while a woman is married off (titgawwiz).

In the typical Egyptian marriage, it is the prospective groom who actively pursues a potential bride. If he has not already found one on his own, then it is he, often with his mother, who visits his intended and her family (traditionally in their living room, which is why arranged marriage is referred to as gawaz al-salonat, or living-room marriage, in Egyptian argot). It is he who decides if she would make a suitable wife, and he who meets with her father (or male guardian) to negotiate the fiscal provisions of the match. The groom is the one who shoulders almost all of the financial burdens (though rarely without the help of his parents or other economic assistance). His future wife may or may not be present during these negotiations, and may or may not express her opinion about the decisions. But the legal institutions and socioeconomic structures that support marriage are set up in a way that reinforces this gendered arrangement across class divisions. Though many Egyptian women, especially among the upper classes, choose their own spouses or at least have much more say in whom they marry, few do so without their fathers’ consent. Most brides’ fathers (or, in their absence, uncles or brothers) sign their marriage contracts as proxies, further reinforcing the degree to which patriarchal norms govern the practice of marriage.

Abdel Aal’s fame is due to her sharp and funny writing, to be sure, but just as much to her timing. In 2008, around the time of her book’s publication, a spate of articles bemoaning a “marriage crisis” in Egypt appeared in the local and international press. These articles identified a growing number of Egyptian men who could not afford marriage because of its extravagant costs, blaming women and their parents for their unreasonable financial expectations of would-be grooms hit hard by the worldwide economic crisis. Egypt’s high rates of inflation and unemployment, matched with unprecedented shortages of affordable housing, took on a more sinister cast: These economic worries were keeping young men from achieving the most basic of rights -- the right to marry.

There is no doubt that marriage burdens an Egyptian groom with staggering costs. The pricey wedding celebration, dower and down payments to establish the household are the foretaste of decades of spousal and child support. For many young urban men, particularly from the struggling middle and lower middle classes, these expenses can be so steep as to deter them from seeking a bride well into their thirties. But the stream of news coverage offered little insight into how the “marriage crisis” affected women. Nor did it provide convincing evidence that there was a genuine crisis, that is, a significant erosion of the ability to marry. Journalists and analysts initially cited a vague 2007 Brookings Institution statistic that nearly 50 percent of Middle Eastern men aged 25 to 29 were single.[3] A year later, however, Navtej Dhillon, who had directed the two-year research project that produced this figure, announced a “noteworthy” reversal in the trend of delayed marriage in Egypt: Men born in 1976 were marrying at the median age of 26 years.[4] Similarly, in 2009, the head of Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics retracted his own agency’s report that the 2006 census had shown the number of single Egyptian women to be 5.7 million. He revised the estimate to only a few hundred thousand amidst the media brouhaha.[5]

More significant than the accuracy of these statistics or their subsequent retraction is the perception that a marriage crisis menaces Egypt. Western analysts, Muslim Brothers, academics and laypeople have all weighed in: What are the implications of large numbers of bachelors for national and international security? Might the young men be lured by Islamist opposition groups, which provide interest-free loans and officiate mass weddings to facilitate marriage? How might they vote in elections in which Islamists and others inveigh against the dearth of legitimate unions? The engagement of these questions in the press reveals a great deal about Egyptian men and women (as well as outside observers): Marriage, it seems, is regarded as a barometer of the nation’s social progress, political wellbeing and economic health. The “marriage crisis” is about much more than matrimony. It serves as a platform for debate about materialism, privatization, social customs, unemployment, gender roles, Islamism and the performance of the government. Contrary to commentators’ beliefs, furthermore, the marriage crisis is not a phenomenon unique to twenty-first-century Egypt. In decades past, anxieties over marriage have peaked whenever Egypt finds itself in the midst of socioeconomic and political upheaval.

Taking Back Spinsterhood

What distinguishes this latest round of marriage crisis debate is its coincidence with the popularity of ‘Ayiza Atgawwiz, a voice that claims to speak on behalf of single women. In her blog profile, Abdel Aal identified herself as one of Egypt’s 15 million single women between the ages of 25 to 35. Though she does not reveal how she obtained this improbable number, she does something far more powerful and provocative than add a statistic to the hubbub. She coopts the slur “spinster” and proclaims herself a spokesperson for this constituency. In doing so, Abdel Aal exposes the implicit threat concealed within the discussion of the marriage crisis affecting men: the fate of a nation full of unwed women in a society where marriage is the only legitimate outlet for sexual activity, particularly for women. As throughout the twentieth century, the press debates on the marriage crisis have focused overwhelmingly on bachelors and their reasons for not marrying. Rather than ask women why they are not marrying, analysts have assumed that they must be the main reason for men’s abstention from marriage and thus a persistent obstacle to the course of nature. These female thirty-somethings are said to be materialistic, and too career-oriented, educated or “liberated” to make proper wives, not because they wish it so, but because men could not possibly choose them as partners. A single woman like Abdel Aal, who has made a career of explaining why she is not married, reverses the gender roles that maintain the social order. If throngs of single and not-so-young women like her are actively resisting marriage, they may be more subversive to the nation than the bachelors and their supposedly inadequate pool of potential brides.

Abdel Aal is aware that her simultaneous determination to marry and refusal to settle for just any suitor challenges social conventions. She begins her book by acknowledging, “This whole subject of marriage, suitors and delayed marriage is a really sensitive subject. It’s hard to find anyone who talks about it honestly. Especially girls. Because girls who talk about this honestly are either seen as crass and badly raised, or as obsessed with getting married. Either that or as old maids who can’t find anyone to marry them.” Like her audience, Abdel Aal seems unaware that she is not the first in Egypt’s long history of women’s rights activism to castigate the institution of arranged marriage or advocate for a woman’s right to choose her life partner.

Since the inception of the women’s press in the 1890s, Egyptian women (and men) have reproached fathers for marrying their daughters off to men without their consent. They have also condemned the custom of arranged marriage for preventing the prospective couple from getting to know one another before marriage. Most of these critical voices framed their arguments as providing a service to the nation and its sons. According to these commentators, men were in dire need of being better acquainted with women, so that they might find suitable companions, women who could, for example, assist in giving children (especially boys) a modern education. The colonial nation, in turn, was in need of successful marriages that would serve as a strong base of unity in the anti-colonial struggle against the British and then form the foundation for independence. Few writers asserted the right of women to choose a mate for their own sakes like Abdel Aal does. Nor did they suggest that women should marry freely and without their fathers’ consent.

Nowhere in her book, however, does Abdel Aal advocate for women’s ability to marry against their fathers’ will and never does she condemn marriage itself. As the title of her books makes clear, Abdel Aal wants to get married. She is merely saying that she does not want to settle for the first caller with a furnished flat; she demands her right to get to know her suitor to make sure he is right for her. And if she never finds a partner, she is asking society to respect her nonetheless. She writes, “A thirties girl has been employed for seven or eight years, seen all sorts of people, understood all sorts of people…. It has given her experience, a certain outlook on things, and it’s made her demand things of a future husband that go beyond the dreams of a girl in her twenties…. A thirties girl has held down jobs, has made money, and she doesn’t need a man to support her financially anymore, so it’s not likely that she’ll be impressed with an apartment or jewelry or a car…. Anyone who thinks thirties girls are desperate and will settle for anything needs to read this over again and think again.” While other Egyptian women might not say these things out loud or so forcefully, many agree with her, judging by her fan mail and the comments on her blog. Abdel Aal even inspired a few, like Yumna Mukhtar and ‘Abir Sulayman, to launch Facebook groups and blogs in support of single women.

The Interpreters

Western journalists who have been reporting on Abdel Aal’s blog-turned-bestseller-turned-hit-sitcom paint her as a feminist. Although a “traditionalist who covers her hair,” Abdel Aal daringly “lifts the veil”[6] on patriarchal marital customs that oppress women who are just “beginning to find their voice”[7] in a society where many “still regard marrying for love as slightly shameful.”[8] NPR went so far as to brand Abdel Aal “Carrie Bradshaw in a headscarf,” invoking the column-writing lead character of the HBO comedy-drama Sex and the City. This linear depiction of Arab and Muslim women as oppressed second-class citizens breaking an age-old silence is not new in the Western media. It is drawn from a historically rooted discourse of the “other” that predates even the colonial era. This narrative often fails to see the complex positions of Arab and Muslim women and their forms of agency within the patriarchal societies in which they live. The same reporters who make simplistic assumptions about the uniqueness of Abdel Aal do not seem to hear her when she tells them, “In Egypt, I think the women are stronger than the men, and have bigger personalities.”[9]

Given Abdel Aal’s introduction in the Western media, it will be interesting to see how the English translation of her book will be received in the United States. Published by the University of Texas Press, I Want to Get Married! was released in October 2010. The paperback is the first installment in an “Emerging Voices from the Middle East” series that seeks to translate “daring and innovative works” by “new authors…who are at the cutting edge of Middle Eastern culture.” Introduced by series editor Tarek El-Ariss, I Want to Get Married! is translated by Nora Eltahawy, an Egyptian writer who earned her bachelor’s degree from the American University in Cairo and is pursuing her master’s degree in comparative literature at Texas. Excluding the eight pages of introduction and translator’s note, the 160-page paperback follows the same format as the original Arabic text. In her translator’s note, Eltahawy provides background on Abdel Aal and discusses the challenges she encountered in rendering Abdel Aal’s slang-filled Arabic into English.

It was no easy feat. Eltahawy used a variety of strategies to try to capture Abdel Aal’s seamless oscillation between Egyptian colloquial and formal Modern Standard Arabic, as well as the transliterated English phrases replete with American and Arab pop culture references and the tone that drips sarcasm and sincerity in equal measure. The translation, unfortunately, renders Abdel Aal’s writing as choppy, rambling and awkward. Eltahawy explains she aimed “to present the particularities of Abdel Aal’s story free of exoticizing and of a literalness of language that would have overburdened the translation with footnotes.” Yet Eltahawy provides 70-odd footnotes in the short book to parse Arab sayings and customs for the American reader, and in many places she translates Abdel Aal’s language too literally without finding the equivalent American expression. For example, when Abdel Aal observes that many Egyptian women today want to find themselves and establish their careers before they marry, Eltahawy conveys these concepts via word-for-word renditions of the Arabic phrases, “building my future” and “achieve self-realization.”

Bilingual audiences who read the original blog or book will appreciate Eltahawy’s efforts although they will not enjoy the English version as fully, since many of the nuances and local humor are lost in translation. For example, in one of her most popularly recounted tales, Abdel Aal describes how embarrassed she was when her handsome colleague and crush, the only male druggist among 14 single female counterparts in her office, smiles at her: “And I basked in the glow of that smile until I was rendered temporarily blind by its brightness…. Everyone was staring -- and suddenly my body was drowning in its own sweat. The amount of sweat that I perspired in that moment could’ve solved the drought problem in Ethiopia. And I don’t even want to tell you about my face. My face was so red that if you’d painted a 22 on it, people would’ve thought it was Abou Treika’s soccer jersey.” Hilarious in the original Arabic, the excerpt falls flat in English, even though (or perhaps partly because) it is followed by a footnote explaining who Abou Treika is. American readers unaccustomed to the dramatic flair and politically incorrect humor of Egyptian colloquial Arabic (or the mania for the soccer hero who plays for Ahli, the more widely beloved of Egypt’s two major clubs, and famously lifted his jersey during an Africa Cup match to reveal “Sympathize with Gaza” on the t-shirt underneath) probably will not find this passage funny.

Although published by a university press, the book’s jacket evokes an American chick-lit novel. Subtitled as “One Wannabe Bride’s Misadventures with Handsome Houdinis, Technicolor Grooms, Morality Police and Other Mr. Not-Quite-Rights,” the book has a blurb on the back cover claiming that it “presents a realistic picture of what it means to be a single young woman in the Arab world, where, like elsewhere, a good man can be hard to find.” The team behind the English version should be commended for its endeavor to bring Abdel Aal’s story to an American audience that does not have much direct exposure to Arab and Muslim women living in the Middle East. It is also noteworthy that the editor and translator were careful not to mystify Abdel Aal or her encounters by pointing out that women elsewhere are searching for Mr. Right and are forced to deal with the pressures to marry. In some ways, the adventures of the pharmacist from Mahalla al-Kubra are indeed akin to Carrie Bradshaw’s. “But without the sex. It’s just the city,” Abdel Aal laughingly agreed in response to the NPR interviewer making the comparison.

The cover of I Want to Get Married! announces the title in a feminine cursive font on a pistachio-colored background with a cartoon of a pretty young woman with shoulder-length brown hair sitting before her laptop, a mouse in one hand and a huge, sparkling diamond engagement ring on the other, daydreaming of a sexy white wedding dress and matching heels, a three-tiered white wedding cake and a bridal bouquet of white flowers. As one astute blogger points out, the cover screams: “This is any (Western-friendly) woman’s story! This is a fun book! This is not a foreign book! This is a book that could be about any brunette.”[10] The woman on the jacket is notably unveiled, like the woman on the Egyptian cover and ‘Ula of the Ramadan sitcom. None of these depictions come close to capturing Abdel Aal, who, like most Muslim women in contemporary Egypt, wears a headscarf. In comparison to her Egyptian representations, however, the American cover image is the least fraught. The voluptuous femme fatale on the Egyptian book cover and the dowdy TV character of ‘Ula suggest that only a sexy seductress or a desperate plain Jane would aggressively pursue marriage. A proper Egyptian woman, especially one who dons a headscarf, ostensibly would never actively seek out a man.

The various Egyptian and Western interpreters of Abdel Aal’s story seem to be intentionally disguising the unsettling reality about her: She totally upends everyone’s preconceptions about veiled middle-class Egyptian women. To many Egyptians, a woman, especially a middle-class veiled one who is a product of the public school system and a government bureaucrat from the Delta, should not be publicizing her desire to marry and condemning Egyptian customs and men for thus far preventing her from finding a true companion. While Egyptians are accustomed to feminists and women’s activists, who have been publicly and harshly rebuking customs and practices they find oppressive for more than a century, these women are easy to classify (even if incorrectly) in one of two categories -- secular Westernized radicals or conservative Islamist activists. Abdel Aal does not fit neatly into either mold. While her socioeconomic and political critiques are not new, her tactic of disguising them in tongue-in-cheek slang is original. The satirical mode not only enabled Abdel Aal to get away with her rather biting criticisms, it also afforded her fortune and fame in doing so, which she admits have made her prospects of marriage in Egypt even slimmer because men fear they will end up as characters in her next book. Her detractors -- among them a commentator on her blog who suggested someone marry her to shut her up at long last -- see marriage as an institution that disciplines women into submission. Abdel Aal’s refusal to shut up has at least temporarily and in this instance reversed the conventional hierarchy of marriage. This hierarchy is premised on women’s subordination to -- not their disruption of -- the normative order in which men seek and women comply, men provide and women consume, men speak out and women remain silent.

Is Abdel Aal a daring feminist arguing against her own society’s stigmatization of single women? Is she another chick-lit author writing about the universal search for love? Is she a veiled traditionalist who is simply desperate to be a bride? Is she a writer whose script represents the cutting edge of Arabic literature and belongs in a university press series with such ambitions? Readers should pick up a copy of I Want to Get Married!, try to overlook the redundancies and roughly translated, cheesy humor, and decide for themselves. Hopefully, they will hear Abdel Aal telling her story in her own voice rather than through the filter of one media representation or another. If they do, they will come to the conclusion that she is none of the above. Abdel Aal defies both Egyptian and Western stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women, especially how they are supposed to think and act. The thing is that she is not unique. She just happened to blog about the thoughts and experiences that many women before her and around her share. Like women everywhere who face the pressure to conform, keep quiet or behave passively, Abdel Aal employs subtlety to deliver her message. The reader (of the original Arabic text at least) is too busy laughing to realize just how powerful her socioeconomic and political critique is, even if she is not the first or last Egyptian woman to offer one. In spite of local and foreign presumptions related to Abdel Aal’s gender, headscarf, socioeconomic class and literary ability, she has effectively and brilliantly shifted the spotlight of Egypt’s fictional “marriage crisis” from its male victims to its female critics.

Endnotes

[1] The Arabic-language blog is available and occasionally still updated at: http://wanna-b-a-bride.blogspot.com/.

[2] All translations are taken from Ghada Abdel Aal, I Want to Get Married! (trans. Nora Eltahawy) (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010).

[3] Navtej Dhillon, “The Wedding Shortage,” Newsweek, March 5, 2007.

[4] Navtej Dhillon and Ragui Assad, “Light at the End of the Tunnel in Egypt’s Marriage Crisis?” Egyptian Gazette, November 23, 2008.

[5] Ursula Lindsey, “The Marriage Crisis that Wasn’t,” Foreign Policy, March 19, 2010.

[6] Independent, October 28, 2008.

[7] Times (London), October 30, 2008.

[8] Washington Post, October 21, 2008.

[9] Independent, October 28, 2008.

[10] This post by M. Lynx Qualey of the blog Arabic Literature (in Translation) is available at: http://arablit.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/headscarves-diamond-rings-and-the-schizophrenia-of-ayza-atgowaz-in-english/ .

ThePureLight

2010-12-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

Amitabha, the pure light, the Unbounded Light

Buddha said: "There are five meditations. The first meditation is the meditation of love in which thou must so adjust thy heart that thou longest for the weal and welfare of all beings, including the happiness of thine enemies.

"The second meditation is the meditation of pity, in which thou thinkest of all beings in distress, vividly representing in thine imagination their sorrows and anxieties so as to arouse a deep compassion for them in thy soul.

"The third meditation is the meditation of joy in which thou thinkest of the prosperity of others and rejoicest with their rejoicings.

"The fourth meditation is the meditation on impurity, in which thou considerest the evil consequences of corruption, the effects of wrongs and evils. How trivial is often the pleasure of the moment and how fatal are its consequences!

"The fifth meditation is the meditation on serenity, in which thou risest above love and hate, tyranny and thraldom, wealth and want, and regardest thine own fate with impartial calmness and perfect tranquility.”

http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2008/03/amitabha-pure-light.html

CrowleyandtheAustralian

2010-12-07T20:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/dont-shoot-messenger-for-revealing-uncomfortable-truths/story-fn775xjq-1225967241332

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be "taken out" by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be "hunted down like Osama bin Laden", a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a "transnational threat" and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister's office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.

Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.

We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn't want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.

Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.

Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: "You'll risk lives! National security! You'll endanger troops!" Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can't be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn't find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:

► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.

► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.

► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran's nuclear program stopped by any means available.

► Britain's Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect "US interests".

► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.

► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

********************************

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2010/12/152465.htm
Press Statement
Philip J. Crowley
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, DC

December 7, 2010

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 - May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.

The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

Highlighting the many events surrounding the celebration will be the awarding of the UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize at the National Press Club on May 3rd. This prize, determined by an independent jury of international journalists, honors a person, organization or institution that has notably contributed to the defense and/or promotion of press freedom, especially where risks have been undertaken.

The Newseum will host the first two days of events, which will engage a broad array of media professionals, students, and citizen reporters on themes that address the status of new media and internet freedom, and challenges and opportunities faced by media in our rapidly changing world.

The State Department looks forward to working with UNESCO and the U.S. executive committee spearheaded by the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy, IREX, and the United Nations Foundation and the many civil society organizations they have brought together in support of the organization of events unfolding in Washington.

For further information regarding World Press Freedom Day Events for program content, please visit the World Press Freedom Facebook page

http://www.connect.connect.facebook.com/WPFD2011

**********************

To recap "Obama justice": if you create an illegal worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected. But if you expose any of the evils secretly perpetrated as part of those lawless actions -- by publishing the truth about what was done -- then you are an Evil Criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/07/wikileaks/index.html

Merry Christmas

Talkingclock

2010-12-04T22:15:00.000-08:00

After closing time at the bar, a drunk was proudly showing off his new apartment to a couple of his friends. He led the way to his bedroom where there was a big brass gong and a mallet.

'What's up with the big brass gong?' one of the guests asked.

'It's not a gong. It's a talking clock,' the drunk replied.

'A talking clock? Seriously?' asked his astonished friend.

'Yup,' replied the drunk.

'How's it work?' the friend asked, squinting at it.

'Watch,' the drunk replied. He picked up the mallet, gave the gong an ear-shattering pound and stepped back. .

The three stood looking at one another for a moment.......

Suddenly, someone on the other side of the wall screamed, 'You asshole! It's three-fifteen in the morning!

Ultimatum

2010-11-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/11/28/israeli-dm-gave-us-until-end-of-2010-to-resolve-iran-nuclear-program/

Israeli DM Gave US Until End of 2010 to ‘Resolve’ Iran Nuclear Program 2010 a "Pivotal" Year as Israel Poised to Strike by Jason Ditz, November 28, 2010
According to one State Department document, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak gave an ultimatum to US Congressmen to “resolve” Iran’s nuclear program by the end of 2010 or that a “military solution” would be sought.

At the same time, Barak conceded that an Israeli attack on Iran would result in “unacceptable collateral damage,” though this did not appear to dissuade him from the belief that such an attack must be launched within the “window of opportunity” that he believed would close at the end of 2010 or shortly thereafter.

US officials were said to have been concerned about the reliability of Israeli assessments, noting that Israel had predicted that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1998 “at the latest” and has repeatedly updated to a new deadline every few years.

A separate cable also cited Israeli Defense Ministry official Pinchas Buchris insisting that the US wasn’t committed enough to attacking Iran and that Israel was willing to do so “no matter how undesirable the consequences.“

***********

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/11/28/us-warned-turkey-not-to-publicly-question-allegations-on-iran/

US Warned Turkey Not to Publicly Question Allegations on Iran State Dept Demanded Officials 'Rein In' PM's Criticism by Jason Ditz, November 28, 2010

In late 2009 the Obama Administration, it was revealed today, privately warned the Turkish government not to criticize unsubstantiated allegations against Iran’s civilian nuclear program, in particular warning that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s comments made Turkey “vulnerable to international community criticism.

Turkish PM ErdoganThe documents, revealed today as part of the WikiLeaks Cablegate release, centered around Prime Minister Erdogan’s criticism of Obama’s allegations as “gossip,” and advised top Erdogan aides and Turkish President Gul to “rein in” the prime minister.

Another document expressed concern at Turkey’s interest in a working relationship with Iran, saying Turkey was missing an opportunity to weaken the Iranian government by not condemning the 2009 election and saying Turkey was motivated by a desire to avoid a region-wide war.

Though US officials have repeatedly accused Iran of making nuclear weapons they have never provided evidence of this assertion, and the IAEA has continually verified the non-diversion of Iran’s nuclear material.

Interestingly, the US mocked Turkey’s claims of “influence” with Iran by saying Turkey was unable to even convince Iran to sign the third party enrichment deal sought by the P5+1. Just months after the cable Turkey did succeed in getting Iran to sign the deal, sparking public US condemnation of Turkey and a refusal by the US to complete the proposed deal.

**********

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/11/28/hillary-clinton-ordered-diplomats-to-steal-un-officials-credit-card-numbers/

Hillary Clinton Ordered Diplomats to Steal UN Officials’ Credit Card Numbers 'National Humint Collection Directive' Also Called for Them to Steal Passwords, DNA by Jason Ditz, November 28, 2010

One of the first eye-opening revelations from the massive WikiLeaks diplomatic logs release is the length to which the US State Department is being treated as just another of America’s many spying apparatus.

Among the leaks was something called the “National Humint Collection Directive,” a secret document signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year. The document orders officials at the State Department to conduct mass surveillance and in some cases outright theft against high ranking UN officials.

Incredibly, beyond the simple collection of secret information about officials including UN chief Ban Ki-moon, the directive also calls for State Department officials to try to steal credit card data from a number of top officials, as well as passwords and personal encryption keys. They also sought to collect DNA samples from UN members.

The directive was sent to 33 US embassies across the world, and specified not just Ban, but his top advisers, the heads of all UN agencies, commanders of UN military missions and representatives of all the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The State Department was chiefly responsible for this attempt, but they were also to enlist the CIA, FBI, and the US Secret Service in the collection of data if necessary. The 1946 UN Convention prohibits most if not all of the attempts at theft and surveillance detailed in the operation.

**********
The Stench of US Economic Decay Grows Stronger By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Counterpunch/20101128/

On Thanksgiving eve the English-language China Daily and People’s Daily Online reported that Russia and China have concluded an agreement to abandon the use of the US dollar in their bilateral trade and to use their own currencies in its place. The Russians and Chinese said that they had taken this step in order to insulate their economies from the risks that have undermined their confidence in the US dollar as world reserve currency.

This is big news, especially for the news-dead Thanksgiving holiday period, but I did not see it reported on Bloomberg, CNN, New York Times or anywhere in the US print or TV media. The ostrich’s head remains in the sand.

Previously, China concluded the same agreement with Brazil.

As China has a large and growing supply of dollars from trade surpluses with which to conduct trade, China is signaling that she prefers Russian rubles and Brazilian reais to more US dollars.

The American financial press finds solace in the episodes when sovereign debt scares in the EU send the dollar up against the euro and UK pound. But these currency movements are just measures of financial players shorting troubled EU-denominated debt. They are not a measure of dollar strength.

The dollar’s role as world reserve currency is one of the main instruments of American financial hegemony. We haven’t been told how much damage Wall Street fraud has inflicted on EU financial institutions, but the EU countries no longer need the US dollar for trade between themselves as they share a common currency. Once the OPEC countries cease to hold the dollars that they are paid for oil, dollar hegemony will have faded away.

Another instrument of American financial hegemony is the IMF. Whenever a country cannot make good on its debts and pay back the American banks, in steps the IMF with an austerity package that squeezes the country’s population with higher taxes and cuts in education, medical and income support programs until the bankers get their money back.

This is now happening to Ireland and is likely to spread to Portugal, Spain, and perhaps even to France. After the American-caused financial crisis, the IMF’s role as a tool of US imperialism is less and less acceptable. The point could come when governments can no longer sell out their people for the sake of the American banks.

There are other signs that some countries are tiring of America’s irresponsible use of power. Turkey’s civilian governments have long been under the thumb of the American-influenced Turkish military. However, recently the civilian government moved against two top generals and an admiral suspected of involvement in planning a coup. The civilian government further asserted itself when the prime minister announced on Thanksgiving day that Turkey is prepared to react to any Israeli offensive against Lebanon. Here is an American NATO ally freeing itself from American suzerainty exercised through the Turkish military. Who knows, Germany could be next.

Meanwhile in America the Obama administration has managed to come up with a Deficit Commission whose members want to pay for the multi-trillion dollar wars that are enriching the military/security complex and the multi-trillion dollar bailouts of the financial system by reducing annual cost-of-living increases for Social Security, raising the retirement age to 69, ending the mortgage interest deduction, ending the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, imposing a 6.5 per cent federal sales tax, while cutting the top tax rate for the rich.

Even the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates are aimed at helping the banksters. The low interest rates deprive retirees and those living on their savings of interest income. The low interest rates have also deprived corporate pensions of funding. To fill the gap corporations are issuing billions of dollars in corporate bonds in order to fund their pensions. Corporate debt is increasing, but not plant and equipment that would produce earnings to service the debt. As the economy worsens, servicing the additional debt will be a problem.

In addition, America’s elderly are finding that fewer and fewer doctors will accept them as patients as a 23 per cent cut looms in the already low Medicare payments to doctors.

The American government only has resources for wars of aggression, police state intrusions, and bailouts of rich banksters. The American citizen has become a mere subject to be bled for the ruling oligarchies.

The police state attitude of the TSA toward airline travelers is a clear indication that Americans are no longer citizens with rights but subjects without rights. Perhaps the day will come when oppressed Americans will take to the streets like the French, the Greeks, the Irish, and the British.

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 at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Signals

2010-11-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, the Chinese shot down one of their own low orbiting satellites. Apart from bad tempered muttering about space debris, nothing could be done about it. It demonstrated, however, the ability to shoot down low orbiting satellites, such as those on which US navy ships rely to direct their smart bombs, work their radar and a thousand other things. Deprived of their low orbiting satellites, the ships become blind and deaf hunks of metal, tombs for all their inhabitants.

Signals assume an intelligent receiver. Did any military war college assess the extent of the danger? Who knows. Certainly no overt sign appeared that the military understood the signal. Signaling should not be like expecting the fireflies to be capable of reading the morse code from your lamp.

Chinese signals tend to assume an opponent intelligent enough to understand them.

Chinese submarines have a noiseless operating capacity far beyond that of western vessels, as demonstrated by the Chinese submarine penetrating unobserved to the very center of a US fleet:

“The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise; military chiefs red-faced Source: dailymail.co.uk Published: November 10, 2007 Author: MATTHEW HICKLEY
When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed. At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world's only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.
That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.
Uninvited guest: A Chinese Song Class submarine, like the one that surfaced by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk
American military chiefs have been left dumb struck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft super carrier with 4,500 personnel on board. By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.
According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.
The Americans had no idea China's fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.
One Nato figure said the effect was "as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik" - a reference to the Soviet Union's first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age. The incident, which took place in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embarrassment for the Pentagon.
Battle stations: The Kitty Hawk carries 4,500 personnel. The lone Chinese vessel slipped past at least a dozen other American warships which were supposed to protect the carrier from hostile aircraft or submarines. And the rest of the costly defensive screen, which usually includes at least two U.S. submarines, was also apparently unable to detect it.
According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a serious re-think of American and Nato naval strategy as commanders reconsider the level of threat from potentially hostile Chinese submarines.
It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was "shadowing" the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.
Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its "backyard".
The People's Liberation Army Navy's submarine fleet includes at least two nuclear-missile launching vessels. Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.
Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War. He said: "It was certainly a wake-up call for the Americans.
"It would tie in with what we see the Chinese trying to do, which appears to be to deter the Americans from interfering or operating in their backyard, particularly in relation to Taiwan."

In January China carried a successful missile test, shooting down a satellite in orbit for the first time.

In November 2010, a Chinese Jin class submarine standing off the coast of Los Angeles, California, fired a missile, an ICBM or intercontinental ballistic missile, back form the coast of California to a destination somewhere in western China, demonstrating accuracy and confidence. Military expertise is not required to understand that if a missile can be fired from Los Angeles to China, it can also be fired from China to Los Angeles. And Jane’s doesn’t do hoaxes. That's Jane's Fighting Ships. See http://jfs.janes.com/public/jfs/index.shtml

Wayne Madsen Report November 10, 2010 Pentagon insists it was a jet aircraft or model rocket

China flexed its military muscle Monday evening in the skies west of Los Angeles when a Chinese Navy Jin class ballistic missile nuclear submarine, deployed secretly from its underground home base on the south coast of Hainan island, launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from international waters off the southern California coast. WMR’s intelligence sources in Asia, including Japan, say the belief by the military commands in Asia and the intelligence services is that the Chinese decided to demonstrate to the United States its capabilities on the eve of the G-20 Summit in Seoul and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Tokyo, where President Obama is scheduled to attend during his ten-day trip to Asia.

The reported Chinese missile test off Los Angeles came as a double blow to Obama. The day after the missile firing, China’s leading credit rating agency, Dagong Global Credit Rating, downgraded sovereign debt rating of the United States to A-plus from AA. The missile demonstration coupled with the downgrading of the United States financial grade represents a military and financial show of force by Beijing to Washington.

The Pentagon spin machine, backed by the media reporters who regularly cover the Defense Department, as well as officials of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and the U.S. Northern Command, is now spinning various conspiracy theories, including describing the missile plume videotaped by KCBS news helicopter cameraman Gil Leyvas at around 5:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, during the height of evening rush hour, as the condensation trail from a jet aircraft. Other Pentagon-inspired cover stories are that the missile was actually an amateur rocket or an optical illusion.

Experts agree that this was a ballistic missile being fired off of Los Angeles.

Pentagon insists it was a jet aircraft or model rocket.

There are no records of a plane in the area having taken off from Los Angeles International Airport or from other airports in the region. The Navy and Air Force have said that they were not conducting any missile tests from submarines, ships, or Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Navy has also ruled out an accidental firing from one of its own submarines.

Missile experts, including those from Jane’s in London, say the plume was definitely from a missile, possibly launched from a submarine. WMR has learned that the missile was likely a JL-2 ICBM, which has a range of 7,000 miles, and was fired in a northwesterly direction over the Pacific and away from U.S. territory from a Jin class submarine. The Jin class can carry up to twelve such missiles.

Navy sources have revealed that the missile may have impacted on Chinese territory and that the National Security Agency (NSA) likely possesses intercepts of Chinese telemetry signals during the missile firing and subsequent testing operations.

Japanese and other Asian intelligence agencies believe that a Chinese Jin-class SSBN submarine conducted missile “show of force” in skies west of Los Angeles. Asian intelligence sources believe the submarine transited from its base on Hainan through South Pacific waters, where U.S. anti-submarine warfare detection capabilities are not as effective as they are in the northern and mid-Pacific, and then transited north to waters off of Los Angeles. The Pentagon, which has spent billions on ballistic missile defense systems, a pet project of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is clearly embarrassed over the Chinese show of strength…

…The White House also wants to downplay the missile story before President Obama meets with his Chinese counterpart in Seoul and Tokyo. According to Japanese intelligence sources, Beijing has been angry over United States and allied naval exercises in the South China and Yellow Seas, in what China considers its sphere of influence, and the missile firing within the view of people in Southern California was a demonstration that China’s navy can also play in waters off the American coast.

For the U.S. Navy, the Chinese show of force is a huge embarassment, especially for the Navy’s Pacific Command in Pearl Harbor, where Japan’s December 7, 1941 attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor remains a sore subject.

In 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly scolded visiting Chinese General Xiong Guankai, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the People’s Liberation Army, for remarks he allegedly made in 1995 that China would use nuclear weapons on Los Angeles. Xiong denied he made any such comments but the “spin” on the story helped convince Congress to sink billions of additional dollars into ballistic missile defense, sometimes referred to at “Star Wars II.”

http://www.waynemadsenreport. com/articles/ 20101110

Those pesky fireflies! When’ll they learn to read morse code?

HappyThanksgiving

2010-11-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

The magnificently executed, Guards on Parade style, lockstep left swing carried out by all US media, print, TV, radio, of switching nomenclatura from US troops to NATO troops has gone without comment. No one seemed impressed, but I was. Wow. And all in the space certainly of two days, probably just one day. And without audible or visible orders being given, like the dog whistle that only dogs can hear. Impressive.

Coupla problems, tho’ apart from Katla. “Though unverified, a report by Anatoly Sagalevich, director of Deepwater Submersibles Laboratory at Russia's Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, said the Gulf seabed is fractured "beyond all repair," a potentially disastrous condition he called "beyond comprehension." Using one of the Institute's Deep Submergence Vehicles, his analysis was based on close-up seabed observation and analysis."

(This was after the amazing double somersault of the Russian administration, who, having unobtrusively been allowed WTO (World Trade Organization) membership, long a prized objective of the Russians, canceled their S-300 delivery contract with Iran, and rubbed salt in the wound by refusing them more than ten per cent of the full price they had already paid.

Barely pausing for breath, the athletic (Putin) ex-director of the KGB offered its services to the US in policing the troublesome Afghanistan situation, including not only transit rights for American supplies through Russian territory, but actual boots on the ground military partnership in an area where they had some previous experience. Neat. Their rear had been very satisfactorily buttressed by the Siberia to north eastern China oil/gas pipeline being constructed, and they could leave their partners back there to stir up some local pressures, which they have, and Hillary was very politely advised to go find a lake to jump into, when she tried to horn in on the discussion, which she did.)

Now the Russians are waiting impatiently for the ratification of the START treaty, checking on each others nuclear stockpiles, and saying “Well if you can’t sign a treaty which is the cornerstone of our whole partnership because you can’t control your own government, what’s the point of doing business with you?” Answer there was none.

Moody’s surfaced from sex and drugs orgies long enough to issue an AAA rating for Britain, so that teachers pension funds could continue to buy them, but no one was really listening, or seemed to notice. Dagong, the official Chinese rating agency got more attention for their reduction of the US AA+ rating to A+.

Many years ago, the Reader’s Digest published a story about the (future) King George the VI of England, but then a stripling princely midshipman drilling troops on an aircraft carrier. The railings had been removed, for aircraft landing. “On the command, Forward March!” The correct command was everything. The Prince of Wales, as he then was, was practicing giving these commands under the eagle eye of a sergeant visibly chafing at nurse maiding the royal idiot. George visibly had given the correct order for forward march, but couldn’t remember the correct word for the next command, and as the squad marched forward closer and closer to the edge of the deck, the sergeant could stand it no longer. “Well, aren’t you even going to say ‘Goodbye’ to them?” he yelled.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Arminius

2010-11-11T16:52:00.000-08:00

Here is a readers comment: ''If Americans had half the common sense and a quarter of the balls of the German people the US would be a totally different country.''

1000 injured in nuclear protests, police at breaking point

By Jane Burgermeister – November 8, 2010

Source: http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/german-people-in-unprecedented-rebellion-against-government/#

Like the Roman legions vanquished in the Teutoburger Wald in Lower Saxony in 9 AD, the 17,000 police officers that marched into the woods around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben in northern Germany on Sunday morning looked invincible. Police personnel from France, Croatia and Poland had joined in the biggest security operation ever mounted against protestors against the a train carrying nuclear waste to a depot in an isolated part of Lower Saxony’s countryside. Helicopters, water canons and police vehicles, including an armoured surveillance truck, accompanied an endless column of anti-riot police mounted on horses and also marching down the railway tracks into the dense woods. Tens of thousands of anti riot police clattered along the tracks, their helmets and visors gleaming in the morning sun, and wearing body armour, leg guards and carrying batons.

But by Sunday night, those same police officers were begging the protestors for a respite.

Trapped in black, icy woods without supplies or reinforcements able to reach them because of blockades by a mobile fleet of farmer’s tractors, the exhausted and hungry police officers requested negotiations with the protestors. A water cannon truck was blocked by tractors, and yet the police still had to clear 5000 people lying on the railway track at Harlingen in pitch darkness. The largest ever police operation had descended into chaos and confusion in the autumn woods of Lower Saxony, defeated by the courage and determination of peaceful protestors who marched for miles through woods to find places to lie down on the tracks and to scoop out gravel to delay the progress of the “the train from hell.”

The police union head Reiner Wendt gave vent to the general frustration when he issued a press statement via the DPA news agency last night saying the police had reached exhaustion point and needed a break. Behind the scenes, a battle seemed to be raging between the police chiefs, tucked up in their warm headquarters urging more action, and the exhausted officers on the ground.

The police on the ground won out. The Castor train – called a “Chernobyl on wheels” because it has been carrying 133 tonnes of highly radioactive waste to an unsafe depot – was stopped in the middle of the countryside and Nato barbed wire was placed around it. Lit by floodlights and guarded by a handful of police, the most dangerous train on the planet was forced to a halt after a 63 hour journey across France and Germany.

The defeat of the legions at Teutoburg marked the end of the attempt by the Roman empire to conquer Germania magna. And the failure of the biggest ever police operation two thousand years later in the woods of Lower Saxony to tame women, elderly people and school children protesting the government’s nuclear policy, could well also go down as a turning point.

The Berlin government can no longer rely on the discredited mainstream media to control the way people see issues. Too many people recognise it to be a tool of propaganda. The government now needs to resort to brute force to bludgeon through decisions that enrich corporations and banks and impoverish everyone else. But the police forces at its disposal are simply not sufficient given the scale of the protests now gripping Germany. Only 1,500 police reinforcements could be mustered on Morning from the entire territory to deal with road blockades by thousands of protestors aiming to delay the transport of the nuclear waste on the final leg of its journey.

The police officers were exhausted after shifts of 24 hours or more, often without any food or just a cappucino and snack bar, and they had nothing to look forward to but more of the same drudgery after a night spent four to a room in a Youth Hostel.

http://newsticker.sueddeutsche.de/list/id/1065325

A leading figure in a German police police union Bernard Witthaut today even lashed out at the government for trying to drive through unpopular policies using the police.

“Whether in Stuttgart or in Wendland today my colleagues are simply not getting out of their anti riot gear because of the wrong decisions by the government,” he said.

Many police officers also expressed sympathy with the protestors’ aims.

The question now is: how long can the use of police to bludgeon protestors continue when the protests are reaching this scale? How long can Germany be governed by a semi authoritarian regime using brute force when the force at its disposal is so small? The German army cannot be deployed on this kind of mission without sparking even more outrage. A false flag terrorist operation will hardly wash when the people are so fed up with the government lies and the media lies. EU soldiers will find it hard to deal with the Germans. The German and EU secret police cannot infiltrate all of the protestor’s organizations when there are simply so many.

The German people as a whole are on the march.

“Citizens in rebellion,” shouted a TAZ headline.

“Civil war in Wendtand,” fumed Bild.

NGO chief Kersin Rudek spoke for many when she said:

“We have lost faith in the government until they prove that their politics is for the people and not for the corporations.”

She talked about the “anger” among people at the “arrogance of the political class.”

As in the Stuttgart 21 railway protests, it was people from all walks of life, a genuine grass roots movement, that arrived in Wendland to protest the decision by the CDU/CSU/FDP government to ignore a legally binding deadline to phase out nuclear power. Against the wishes of the majority, Bilderberg Chancellor Angela Merkel announced this autumn that 17 reactors would continue for another 12 years at gigantic cost to the tax payer in subsidies.

The tax payers of Lower Saxony even have to foot the bill of 50 million euro for the police operation to protect the nuclear waste – and not the electricity companies making a fortune from the extravagant energy source [which is associated with France's WMD program] while the government keeps investments in ground-breaking new renewable energy technologies such as the third generation solar cells at a negligible amount.

As in Stutggart, the police used savage force against peaceful demonstrators reinforcing the impression of a government out of control and refusing to respect the basic democratic right of people to hold protests without being beaten to a pulp. Videos of the Castor transport on Sunday show police beating people with their truncheons, punching them and throwing them to the ground. Police also used tear gas, pepper spray and water canon.

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,727706,00.html

About a 1000 people were injured, it is reported. 950 people are reported to have suffered eye injuries due to pepper spray and tear gas, according to a spokesperson of “Castor schottern”. Another sixteen protestors suffered broken bones. There were 29 severe head wounds. Two people had to be taken to hospital.

http://www.ftd.de/politik/deutschland/:live-ticker-zum-atomprotest-castor-gegner-beklagen-1000-verletzte/50192073.html

One person had to be taken by helicopter after suffering multiple bone fractures after being trampled by a police horse.

But as in Stuttgart, the people did not give up in spite of the risk of savage beatings at the hands of the police. They insisted on their civic right enshrined in the constitution to hold peaceful political protests.

More than 50,000 people from all parts of the country and all walks of life attended a rally on a field close to Dannenberg. Thousands then marched through the autumn woods, splitting into small groups to descend into the valley, break through police lines to chain themselves to the rails or remove gravel from the tracks to delay the train.

According to Spiegel, 7000 people alone took part in the road and railway blockades.

An armoured police car was set on fire by masked men but it is not clear if this was an agent pravocateur acting to discredit the protestors. A video shows a man able to walk up to the armoured car and set it alight unhindered.

The overwhelming number of protestors were peaceful.

In spite of the sub zero temperatures and ground frost, up to 5000 protestors lay down on the railway tracks at Harlingen late in the evening and refused to move. Supplies of hot tea, food and blankets were brought to them by mobile kitchens. Fires were lit to help stay warm.

The police worked from midnight until 7 am to clear protestors blocking the track, dragging many to an open air “prison concentration camp” where people were forced to sleep in fields surrounded by police trucks.

This morning, the protestors have regrouped today and thousands are reported to be preparing to block the transport by road of the nculear waste from Dannenberg to Gorleben.

http://www.bild.de/BILD/politik/2010/11/08/castor-transport-nach-gorleben/behaelter-werden-umgeladen-jetzt-droht-strassen-terror.html

The organisers of the protest kept journalists and the public informed using live tickers, press releases and at Infopoints so that the whole country could follow the events outside the mainstream media. Radio Wendland is also broadcasting updates on the incredibly heroic resistance of so many people. At great personal risk, tens of thousands of people gave an example of courageous and peaceful non-violent resistance that will surely go down in history.

If this is the resistance for Castor and Stuttgart 21, just imagine what will happen when Germans finally grasp the scale of the banking scam being carried out by their “elite.”

The CDU/CSU/FDP government has already hit record lows in the polls and after Sunday’s savage police operation against peaceful protestors, support for them is sure to plummet further.

The feudal lords without a feudal army to push through their agenda of robbery are facing the end of the road now that their media propaganda apparatus based on the Springer and Bertelsmann empire is falling apart and their strategy of divide and rule through a false left/right political paradigm is no longer working.

A new freedom and power was born in the woods of Wendland. And it belonged to the people who have had enough of the arrogant authoritarian political class.

Here is another good comment:

The struggle is world wide. The Globalist-Illuminati (Cabalist) threat is the most potent force in the world acting against the principles that built western civilization. These are the forces that generated the overthrow of the English in the 1600′s (staging from Holland’s Cabalist Financiers ) and established their Bank of England, which soon ensued to the Rothschild hegemony, who proudly brought about the horrors of the 20th century: World War I, the Soviet Revolution, the Great Depression, World War II, the Atomic Bomb, its use in Japan, the subsequent Cold War, the Soviet “collapse”, and now (illegal) Derivatives. Death is too good for them, IMHO.

Castro

2010-11-10T22:43:00.000-08:00

The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime.

Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet.

Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.

The World’s peoples have an obligation to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent; not one minute can be lost in demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late.

Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make use of those sticks and stones.

There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.

In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.

Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!

Fidel Castro Ruz

LegalTender

2010-11-07T05:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.24hgold.com/english/contributor.aspx?article=2420391322G10020&redirect=false&contributor=Antal+E.+Fekete

Forgotten Anniversary: One Hundred Years of Legal Tender An Address by Antal E. Fekete Professor of Money and Banking San Francisco School of Economics at a Fund-Raising Dinner for the benefit of the Ficino School Auckland, New Zealand ~ October 28, 2009

The year 2009 will most likely expire without commemorating the centenary of a most momentous event in history that figures prominently as the main cause of the Great Financial Crisis of the century. This event was the so-called legal tender legislation in 1909. The bank notes of both the Banque de France and the Reichsbank of Germany were made legal tender by law, first in France and then, a very short time later, also in Imperial Germany. The rest of the world followed suit. In this way all roadblocks were removed in the way of financing the coming world war through credits and monetizing the resulting debt through the issuance of bank notes.

One unintended effect was that all efforts to avert the war and the concomitant great bloodshed and destruction of property through better diplomacy were short-circuited. The war parties in both countries had won a great victory. The cause of peace suffered a decisive defeat.

Please note that I have said “so-called legal tender legislation” because ‘legal tender’ in this context was a vicious distortion of the meaning of the phrase. There was nothing coercive about legal tender before 1909. Bank notes circulated as money, but their acceptance was entirely voluntary. People had an unconditional right to exchange them for the coin of the realm, that is, for gold coins. If the bank did not comply, then it was in technical default and had to face the consequences.

The original meaning of legal tender simply referred to a tolerance standard applicable to the wear and tear of gold coins. Coins meeting the tolerance standard circulated by tale, that is, their value was established by counting them out ― a great convenience. Others circulated by weight: each and every coin had to be weighed ― a great inconvenience. There was absolutely no coercion involved in this discrimination. The Mint exchanged gold coins within the tolerance standard by freshly struck full-bodied gold coins at no charge to bearer. The government absorbed the loss and covered it out of the general revenue fund. The cost was treated the same way as the cost of maintaining the nation’s highway system in good repair. Not only was there no coercion involved in legal tender laws; in effect a public service was provided by the government without charging user-fees. That was the meaning of the phrase “legal tender” prior to 1909.

Notice the underhanded change in the meaning as a result of the legal tender laws of 1909. A public convenience was replaced by public coercion. Two governments with the greatest war-making power in the world introduced coercion forcing their subjects to accept and use debt as money. This was a ‘first’ in history. In particular, the governments were forcing the military, as well as civil servants, to take paper promises as ultimate payment for services rendered.

Of course, the use of the phrase ‘legal tender’ in this way is an oxymoron. A promise to pay that is at the same time an ultimate payment is not a promise. It is an ukase. This was a reactionary step, designed to facilitate the unlimited augmentation of monetary circulation regardless of the gold reserve. It allowed the financing of the coming war with government credits, much of it interest free and with no maturity date. The burden was thrown on the shoulders of the people without their concurrence.

The measure was represented as an innocent house-keeping change. There was no public debate on its wisdom. Nobody at the time could see the ominous consequences. Nobody suspected bad faith on the part of the government. As a proof of good faith gold coins were allowed to remain in circulation for another five years. Banks paid them out routinely as before, without fuss. There was no noticeable increase in the hoarding of gold coins by the people, a sign that they implicitly trusted their government. When the war finally broke out in 1914, the “guns of August” heralded the delayed effect of the legal tender laws. All gold coins went into hiding at once. Banks refused to meet any request for payment in gold. Members of the legislation, including all the socialist deputies, voted all the war-credits the government had asked for without demur.

The first author to unmask the connection between the Legal Tender Laws of 1909 and the outbreak of the war five years later, in 1914, was the German economist Heinrich Rittershausen (1898-1984). He also predicted the Great Depression, and linked the coming unprecedented wave of unemployment to legal tender, as I am going to discuss it in more details in a minute.

We are left to second-guess history. Would the senseless killing and destruction of property have come to an early end in the absence of legal tender laws, just as soon as the belligerent governments had run out of gold to finance it? Most contemporary observers had predicted that it would have. There was no way to finance a conflict of this magnitude out of taxes. People did not understand that legal tender was an invisible form of tax to pay for the greatest war up to that point in history. They did not understand the power of credit that would enable governments to expend blood and treasure freely, without any restraint. People did not see the Moloch behind the façade of legal tender ― the god that was preparing to devour his own children.

* * *

But there was also another, most sinister consequence of the legal tender laws that was not recognized at the time. Before 1909 world trade had been financed through real bills drawn on London. A real bill was a short-term commercial paper payable in gold coin upon maturity. It represented self-liquidating credit to finance the emergence of new merchandise in the markets demanded most urgently by the consumers. As its issue was limited by the amount of new merchandise on its way to the market, it was non-inflationary. The credit was liquidated by the gold coin released by the ultimate consumer of the underlying merchandise. You can look at a real bill as credit in the process of presently “maturing into gold coins”. As a medium of exchange, a real bill is “the next best thing” to the gold coin. It is virtually risk free to hold, as the underlying merchandise has a ready market waiting for its arrival.

Clearly, real bills are incompatible with legal tender laws. It makes no sense to suggest that you can make real bills “mature in legal tender bank notes”. The fact is that the bank note is inferior to a real bill in almost every way. For one thing, real bills are an earning asset. This is due to the existence of discount applied to face value as the real bill is bought and sold before maturity. Real bills are most liquid: only the gold coin has greater liquidity. They are the best earning asset a commercial bank can have.

But what makes real bill paramount in the economy is the fact that, in the aggregate, they constitute the wage fund of society. They alone make it possible to produce and distribute goods now that the consumer will only pay for later. Up to three months later, to be precise. However, in the meantime workers employed in their production will have to be paid their due wages every week. Indeed, these workers must eat and satisfy other wants to be able to continue their production efforts. The payment of wages is definitely not financed through savings of the capitalists. It is financed through clearing, that is, through the spontaneous granting of temporary monetary privileges to real bills, thus enabling them to circulate before maturity.

An unintended consequence of the legal tender legislation was the destruction of this wage fund out of which workers could be paid before the goods were sold. Legal tender laws bore direct responsibility for the horrible unemployment during the Great Depression ― as pointed out by Rittershausen. As long as the wage fund is intact, there can be no unemployment. Everybody who is anxious to earn wages can go into the production or distribution of some goods demanded by the consumers urgently, and get compensation from the wage fund immediately, even before his product is sold. The destruction of the wage fund changed all that. Workers could no longer be compensated for their labor expended in the production of merchandise unless it is ready for sale right away.

The destruction of the wage fund was not immediately obvious in 1909. Military training and production of war materiel absorbed the available manpower. During the war labor was in short supply because of the vast expansion of the production of munitions. Unemployment hit society only after the cessation of hostilities.

Had the victorious powers repealed legal tender laws after the war, thereby rehabilitating the market in real bills and replenishing the wage fund, the great Depression would have never occurred. But the victors were not interested in multilateral world trade. They wanted to punish the vanquished even more by making trade bilateral, to the exclusion of real bill circulation. In this way they wanted to retain control of the trade of their former adversaries. As a result the wage fund was never resurrected and workers could not be paid. The result was the greatest unemployment ever in history. Governments were forced to assume responsibility for the unemployed through the dole system. This system, an affront to people eager to work for wages, is still with us but its root cause, the absence of real bill circulation, remains unrecognized.

* * *

Legal tender laws, representing the unholy alliance (not to say conspiracy) between the government and banks, have never been repealed. Governments have come to love the extra powers they acquired through false pretenses. The banks were happy to take the bribe. They shifted their loyalty from their customers to the government. In exchange for the privilege to create bank deposits without the restraint of a gold reserve, as was the case prior to 1909, the banks were prepared to buy all the government bonds that have found no willing buyers in the bond market. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours.” This conspiracy still goes on under a new ‘social contract’ in which bribe and blackmail has replaced voluntary cooperation.

The connivance of academia and media, in particular, the loyalty of the economists’ profession and that of financial journalists, has been bought by the central banks’ eagerness to sponsor research. “Whoever pays the piper shall call the tunes.” Authors who were prepared to sing the praise of irredeemable currency were handsomely rewarded. Authors critical of fiat money need not apply. Most of the economists and financial journalists today are scribes for hire, selling their pen to the government and the central bank. Propaganda is passed on as research.

Mathematics has been prostituted as never before in the history of the Queen of Sciences. Research papers on economics and monetary theory studded with formidable-looking but otherwise vacuous differential equations are presented as Holy Grail. The studied gestures and hocus-pocus of latter-day economists is similar to those of the priesthood in ancient Egypt. By virtue of their knowledge of astronomy ― knowledge denied to the general public ― Egyptian priests could predict eclipses of the Sun and other celestial events. They keep their audience in awe and in fear of their supernatural powers. The difference is this: while Egyptian priests were professionals representing state-of-art scientific knowledge, mainstream economists are charlatans and quacks who, while basking in their own glory, are totally incapable of predicting financial collapse even when it is staring at them in the face, as their miserable performance in 2007 showed. Worse still, they are totally incapable to admit their own mistakes. They are a curse on the body politic and a wart on the body academic. They are leading the world into an unprecedented monetary and economic disaster right now as I speak here.

* * *

Our present financial crisis is the epitome of a tragedy brought upon us by coercion in the monetary field. The way out of the crisis, and the way to prevent another great Depression, is through the restoration of freedom in the realm of money: through an adroit repeal of legal tender laws. The gold standard must be rehabilitated together with its clearing system, the bill market. The monopolistic nature of government debt in the bond market must be eliminated through bringing back the competition of the gold coin to the promises of the government. Bondholders dissatisfied with the rate of interest offered by the coupons arbitrarily attached to government bonds must have their rights restored to them: the right to park their savings in gold coins, as they did before 1909. In this way they could force the government to pay competitive rates of interest on private savings, All coercion in the monetary field must be stopped. The dignity of the individual must be respected. The present collectivistic frame of mind of the government must be discarded in favor of one favoring the individual, restoring freedom and the free initiative of man.

A century is just a fleeting moment in history. The past one hundred years must be looked upon as a reactionary episode in our civilization, a mindless experiment with irredeemable currency. The experiment has failed miserably, as have all similar experiments in the past. Unless stopped forthwith, it will plunge the human race in unprecedented economic misery. It literally threatens the survival of our civilization and the entire system of our values.

Freedom in the field of money will bring us peace
http://www.24hgold.com/english/contributor.aspx?article=2420391322G10020&redirect=false&contributor=Antal+E.+Fekete

#3Teatandwaragainsthumanity

2010-11-01T20:03:00.000-07:00

First comes Hallowe’en, Walpurgisnacht, storms and horrors, headless horsemen and ghosts and demons, the powers of evil allowed control for one evening only. This is the eve, or day before, All Saints Day on November 1, which breaks into the draft of clean morning air of All Saints Day, and another chance at the biggest teat in history.

I say the biggest but my numbers are shaky. They are in dollars. If the US dollar loses five per cent more of its 1911 value as a dollar, then it will be completely worthless, and so we must be careful when we say so many dollars. This outcome is the main (possibly vain) hope of the three stooges (aka Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner) who look forward to writing hundred trillion dollar checks with gay abandon and a general air of “See, paysano, that’s how it’s done.”

The inner edges of the heart of the teat have been sketched in well enough by Mr. Ackerman, and there’s no reason to doubt his description and much to support it. With Steny Hoyer, (the apparatchik Pelosi was forced to accept when she wanted Murtha as her deputy, as the Israeli point man, - congressmen glance at Steny Hoyer to check, yes, it’s OK with Israel, no, it’s not OK with Israel,) the rising Dem manager to back up the Obama/Lieberman administration, the inner ring, funds paid to Israel, funds Israel contributes to congressman candidate support, congressional vote to increase loans and gifts to Israel. (Even foreign dignitaries may be admitted to this inside ring, like Mr. Tony Blair, previously UK PM, awarded a milllion dollar prize in 2010 by the Israelis, for services previously rendered.) And congressmen vote to keep weapons industries operating in their own state, to provide the weaponry, to sell to friends and foes alike. Works like a charm, and no one can get into the central ring who is not already in.

Holding up the wings of the enterprise are well funded groups, mercifully released from any need to reveal sources, mostly the Koch brothers and their groups, and all the official organs of the state, of course.

The teat has more vital roots than might be supposed, a country still producing more than twice the food it needs to feed its population, one of the basic meanings of the word rich when used of countries.

And the ten per cent that the population pays for it s food bill is number one lowest in the world, i.e., the USA is still the world’s main producer of cheap food, Numero Uno.

And still usefully between two oceans as natural barriers. Could be a lot worse.

OK, that’s on the plus side.

Here is Globalization and Militarization by Vishnu Bhagwat for some of the other:

The Root Causes of the Worldwide War against Humanity Global Research, October 23, 2010

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21543

The following text was first presented to the International Physicians for prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) Conference, Delhi, March 10, 2008

“There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lives ; there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe…violent conflicts will dominate the headlines……” A ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’ …’ Wolfowitz and Perle in the preamble of the draft of the ‘Project for the New American Century’ in the heady days in 1992,when the Soviet Union had been subverted at its very top. The ‘ New World Order’ demands the control and seizure of oil and mineral resources and markets of every country by military force or through proxy governments and comprador elites, camouflaged as ‘ Globalisation’; preceded by subversion of targeted countries. Hence the new colonial project is unprecedented on a historical scale within countries and societies,and overseas.

The leader of one of the earliest movements to understand this militarized ‘New World Order’, Subcomandante Marcos the leader of the Zaptista movement in Mexico, declared in relation to NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that neoliberal globalisation was a “ world war waged by financial power (oligarchies) against humanity” and the expression of the worldwide crisis of capitalism and not its success.

On 19 October 2001, US Vice President Cheney, stated that the “New war may never end. At least not in our life time. The way I think of it, it’s a new normalcy”.

The NSSD of 1 March 2005 says “America is a Nation at war’. In September 2005 Cheney again asserted that the War (on terror) could go on for several decades, just as periodical assertions come regarding the war and occupation for decades in Iraq and Afghanistan, the planning for the ‘long war’, the new Middle-East to be balkanized into state-lets, just as the USSR was, South Asia to fall in line or be divided into financial principalities to serve the ‘metropolitan core or center’ and so on for Globalisation or global finance capital, to integrate all markets (nation states may continue to exist as enfeebled entities to preserve local law and order of their populace and to transfer their budgetary surpluses to the ‘core’. The Washington Consensus is about this. It had claimed to lead global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through ‘deregulation, liberalization and privatization’). “ Is there an alternative to plundering the earth ? Is there an alternative to making war ? Is there an alternative to destroying the planet ?’ (Wehrlof)

In the meanwhile, militarisation of Space, weaponisation of the sea-bed, unfettered use of low radiation nuclear warfare with Depleted Uranium, not just killing and infecting with cancer and leukaemia but poisoning the air, water, flora, fauna and every speck of dust for ever, readiness to use chemical, germ and gene warfare agents, destruction of water and sanitary systems, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gaza are being demonstrated before our eyes. The soldier in uniform now constitutes only a very small proportion of the casualties which are overwhelmingly civilian--- women, children, men-- schools, hospitals, homes and work places. In percentage terms collateral damage, as people are termed, is ninety percent of the casualties.

Statistics do not always convey the sufferings of humanity. However, if the first world war caused about 17 million maimed and dead, the second great war around 50 million dead, followed by millions murdered in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo, Angola, Rwanda, and now in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, the continuing civil war raging in Congo (5 million), the mass murders in Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and the myriad civil wars ignited by the corporations in different corners of the world, are still taking their toll.

Incidentally, when Madeline Albright then US Secretary of State was asked her response to the sanctions on Iraq, in the wake of the 1991 Gulf war, which had caused the loss of half a million children’s lives and "was it worth it", she blandly replied “I think so”. This sums up the ruthless psychology and policy dictating this period of contemporary history, its economic policy with militarization as its adjunct.

Briefly, Globalisation is a multi-pronged drive for capture and control of resources, by finance capital and the dominant Transnational Corporations leading to wars for resources, not of territory which is incidental, to the extent that control of territory is necessary to enslave a society for its resources. How does it proceed apace ? What are the driving forces ? How is it organized ? Who are the key players ? Why has it taken such an all pervasive, brutal form ?

How has it evoled historically? Why is it unending? What political and economic ideologies dominate it? Where is it leading humanity and the world to?

Neoliberal globalisation is a type of totalitarian neo-mercantilism in which all resources, markets, all money and financial institutions, all profits, all means of production, all investment opportunities and all power belongs to the corporations. In the new world order, democracy appears outdated for it hinders business (Hardt /Negri / Chomsky and Werlhof). The notion of people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished and real democracy is largely non-existent, except the manipulated form, suitably greased by corporate funding without the substance of democratic policy making, with people at its core.

This system is supported by the corporate media, its monopoly ownership and alliance with what has been aptly described as the ‘War Corporations’ and the latter’s incestuous relationships with the power elites and the ruling establishments to permit them unbridled profiteering and predatory operations. International law, the UN Charter, the Geneva and Hague conventions, the rule of law have all been cast aside. In addition the military is virtually placed at the disposal of the financial elites' corporate boardrooms to maximize destruction in the quickest time period with no thought of the loss of civilian life, property and infrastructure, camouflaged in certain cases by so called ‘ humanitarian intervention’ under the auspices of the United Nations .

To give only one example, NBC, America's network TV, is an arm of General Electric, the manufacturer of F-16, B-2, Apache, Abrams tank, A-10 aircraft engines and so on. Murdoch, the media baron’s empire is always in the forefront to beat the war drums through the Corporate media an adjunct of war and the inciting of sectarian strife.

The age of colonization is replete with the horrors of loot, genocide, man made famines, plunder, pillage, deceit, fraud and the intimate partnership between the trading companies and the colonial armies. In more recent times in the last century, oil became the reason for the great colonial enterprises of the European, Anglo-US, German and Japanese wars of aggression and the precursor of Oil politics in the New World Order (with the smoke screen to make the world safe for freedom and democracy).

Contemporary wars have devastated whole societies where one sees not democracies but corpses of the victims of some of the most technologically advanced weapons known to mankind. These weapons increase the scale and magnitude of this process of "collective killing".

As recently as the second World War, while soldiers were the cannon fodder for the Allies and the Axis powers, their big banks, corporations were in covert partnerships. In Germany, Italy and Spain, Ford, GM. Standard Oil, Dupont, Union Carbide, Dow Chemicals, Westinghouse, GE, IBM, the Bank of New York and the famous Bank of International Settlements had close financial and business dealings with Germany's Thyssen, Krupps, IG Farben conglomerates along with German banks who in fact bank-rolled the Nazi Party. That is why as the allied forces marched into Germany in 1945 they were told to bypass several industries and businesses which had links to Anglo-US interests.

German Fortune 500 companies, Krupps and IG Farben amongst others were charged in 1948 following the main Nuremburg Trials with “ the preparation, initiation and waging wars of aggression and invasions of other countries “ and “the plunder of public and private property …conspiracies to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of slave labour”. Due to the influence of powerful political interests, as US interest in Europe became one of countering Soviet influence and protecting the common political and economic systems of the allies and the Axis, (except the USSR), the Directors and executives were given minor sentences for the lesser charges of pillage and use of slave labour, rendering incomplete the task of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. (see Niloufer Bhagwat, Privatizing War)

In Africa, Angola and Congo in the 1960s and 70s are prime examples of "civil wars" and genocide fostered by the oil and mining MNCs. Hungry, unclothed men, women and children have been living and sleeping in the wet and cold, atop mounds and jungles below which lie diamonds, precious stones and strategic raw materials which make for the arsenals that kill mankind across the globe.

Can there be co-existence between humanity and this culture of military seizure?

Neo-liberal globalisation is tantamount to subordination of policy and decision making to corporate rule. “Freedom of the economy means the freedom of the corporations”.

There is the underlying insistence that all nations must abide by the diktats of the world "free markets" which means the diktat of the major financial, oil, weapons corporations, and there is the threat of military action should any country be judged to have deviated from the path.

It is the corporations –not the ‘market’, that determines today’s rules of trade, prices and legal regulations.

The recent shift from consumer goods to armaments is a particularly troubling development (Chossudovsky 2003) with new forms of “enclosures” emerging with privatization of public industries and “commons” what was free and accessible to mankind as a whole, like water, rain forests, regions of bio-diversity or geographical interest like pipeline routes, oceans etc. are now a part of the new enclosures of privatization with the threat of military control of the heritage of mankind as a whole.

It is the corporations that dictate policy and as far as they are concerned there is no place for democratic convention: ’res public turns into a res privata.’ The ones who get in their way or challenge their “rights” are vilified and to an increasing degree defined as ‘terrorists’.

The US President has declared the possibility of “pre-emptive nuclear strikes” should the US so decide. Current US Doctrine for nuclear weapons 2007, authorizes Theatre Commanders their use on “targets that can withstand non –nuclear attacks (tunnels, underground strikes etc). Also in retaliation for military, biological, chemical weapons …or IN THE EVENT OF SURPRISING MILITARY DEVELOPMENTS (against US forces) of an unspecified nature. Mini-nukes (up to six times the size of the Hiroshima atom bomb) are described as conventional ordnance.

Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin. War is not only good for the economy but is indeed its driving force: ” Continuation of the economy by other means. “War and economy have become almost indistinguishable (Werlhof 2005)”…The Gulf wars and the conflicts in Africa starting with Congo, Angola, Chad, Rwanda and the threats to Sudan, Somalia and Iran are obvious examples. Militarism once again appears as the “executor of capital accumulation.”(Luxemburg 1970)--- potentially everywhere and enduringly.

A few examples of what globalisation in its different manifestations has led to in the erstwhile USSR, Yugoslavia and now Iraq.

In the Soviet Union, the General Secretary of the CPSU sold out, despite an overwhelming Referendum vote in favour of the Union, a letter signed by Marshal SF Akhromeyev, Chief of the General Staff and 200 Generals and Admirals, all deputies of the Duma, the Soviet Parliament, opposing the move by Gorbachev and comparing his act to worse than the Nazi invasion which failed to annihilate the Soviet Union. In a putsch backed by the West and its propaganda machine, unprecedented in history, the USSR politically capitulated and Yeltsin began to dismantle institutions, plants, factories to the oligarchs who simply usurped state property, sold it for a song and laundered a trillion dollars to US Banks, advised by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs, Strobe Talbot ; and the rest is history. A people and a nation brought to their knees by their own sold out leadership.

Yugoslavia was balkanized thereafter by several well planned, neo-liberal devices and measures. Alienation of the federal constituents by stopping federal grants, recognition of Croatia by Germany, privatisation of industry leading to 50 % unemployment, privatization of the Central Bank and the nomination of a non-citizen as its Governor, insistence of first charge on revenues to the World Bank –IMF, lifting of controls of food prices and other essentials causing raging profiteering and inflation ….breaking up the once happy, peaceful and generally prosperous Yugoslavia that fascist forces could not overcome in the Great War. The story for the rest of Eastern Europe and the Balkans is similar. Their reconstruction is now solely in the hands of Western corporations.

By now, despite the best attempts by the corporate media, the lies used as pretexts for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, are common knowledge. The propaganda to demonise Iran lies in shambles after the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate was made public by the Intelligence community, even though analysts still insist that Iran has a nuclear weapons program which could serve as a pretext for military intervention, should the financial meltdown of certain power centers require the take over of another country’s resources and national budget as happened in Iraq.

All reasons advanced in the UNSC and in the International community by the US at every level have been demonstrated to be manufactured, as confirmed by the leaked Downing Street Memorandum, the Niger Uranium hoax, the aluminium tubes, the non-existence of WMD mobile storages and so on.

The oil majors through their representatives in the highest levels of Government in Washington DC desire to control the oil spigots, in order not only to control and dominate the major oil consumers –Japan, China, India, Europe, a very sensitive geo-political region, but also to usurp petro-dollars (Iraq had switched to euros in October 2002), of the OPEC countries in return for useless arms imports and security protection for the rather unpopular regimes.

Zionist influence on US foreign policy through Big Business, Banks, Investment firms, financial oligarchies and the media, in Wall street and in the City –London, is documented in detail. The reality is that the practice of the ‘Revolving Door’ between the executives in the corporations and banks on the Wall Street, the White House, the Pentagon, Treasury, FED, the State department make it so much easier to ensure planning, coordination and continuity of policies as deliberated upon by the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, the conglomerates and generally endorsed at Davos in the WEF, by definition an alliance of Big Business and political establishments.

It is not the Pentagon but the Wall Street boardrooms which select targeted entities. President Eisenhower called it the Military-Industrial Complex. One can add the energy-oil majors to this.

It is on record that the nuclear weapons targeting plan was jointly prepared by the business executives and the military at the Offut air base in Nebraska in 2002. Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR has won hundreds of billions of single vendor contracts in Iraq and siphoned off non-metered Iraqi oil. Some little noises may be made by the GAO, that’s all ! The “reconstruction” plan for targeted countries is usually made prior to the ‘destruction’ plan in the Board Rooms ! The Central Bank of Baghdad (Iraq) is run by Morgan Stanley as a natural sequence to the great usurpation of Iraqi assets in totality, starting with the Oil Ministry and oil reserves and fields, by Bremmer’s 100 orders unprecedented in history, in open defiance of the Hague conventions, all for ‘globalisation’, the code word for the 21st century colonial project.

Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, Aegis, BKSH associates, Bearing Pony, Custer Battles, Loral satellite, Qualcom, CACI and Titan and others are the beneficiaries in the Iraq war and occupation just as they have been its orchestrators with CNN, Fox, NBC (GE), Murdoch, BBC in the first place. Their stock prices have tripled, in every phase of the war. Even the Iraqi Media network is run by a former Director of the Voice of America.

Architecture & Characteristics of Globalisation

1. Implementation of the Neo-liberal Agenda is through shock therapy, structural adjustment programs, Washington Consensus. Speculative finance capital which lies at the heart of the current phase of ‘Financialisation’ of capitalism requires seemingly endless infusion of cash which necessitates more exploitation and thus more inequality. Violence is often considered a solution to all problems to control society even as economic policies impact a wider groups of citizens.

2. Subversion of key personnel in the institutions of the state.

3. Sanctions or threat of sanctions where necessary, to weaken the country targeted when a military attack is intended some months or years hence.

4. Deregulating the economy and dismantling the public sector as part of the Reforms or ‘Deform’ package.

5. Influence, control and takeover of financial institutions and later Banks, Insurance and Real estate (FIRE).

6. Takeover of the Media via the FDI route.

7. The Myth of Free Trade.

8. Control of food, seeds, land, contract farming, Futures Exchanges, pharmaceuticals via new Patents Act, IPR, robbery of genetic and bio-diversity assets.

9. Extension of pro-corporate and commercial contract laws under the pretext of modernising laws and the legal framework.

10. Steady destruction of the Environment and ecology.

11. Unsustainable consumption, provoking internal conflict and external competition or leading to wars.

12. Resort to state terrorism while crying wolf by contrived individual acts of terrorism, using a spectrum of instruments, from special forces to bombardment of civilian habitats, torture, rendition, using the ‘war on terror’ propaganda as a cover for military intervention to invade, occupy and foreign control of national resources. Corporate commitment to weapons in a war economy is total where 85% of the production is funded by the military as JK Galbraith says in his book ‘The Economy of Innocent Fraud: Truth of our Times’.

13. Enforcing WTO rules, also referred to as the ‘Economic Constitution’ of the world, whose objective is to gradually annihilate the legitimate and democratically endorsed State’s and people’s rights and prerogatives. Davos Project 2020 shapes the road map for the ‘global future’ staffed as it is by executives nominated by the proliferating Transnationals whose ideology is influenced by the ‘end of history’ credo. IMF, WB and WTO constitute a “separate supranational state”. The rules of these institutions are applied asymmetrically---least of all where such rules interfere with global finance capital and most of all where they further the exploitation of the already impoverished. Aimed at military control of the planet, through a multi-dimensional and permanent war of the North against the South.

14. Contemporary ethos of establishing hegemony is characterized by Military Keynesianism --ie the "long war" and occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq and the looming wars in the Middle–East to boost annual aggregate military expenditure to over $ 1 trillion in the US, expansion of global military bases to over 700 and increase in production of hugely expensive armaments and munitions, their relentless exports while paying ‘lip service ‘ to developmental aid at G-8 and other UN convened conferences, and in practice disregarding ‘peace and security’ the founding purpose of the UN Charter.

15. “The more fundamental concern is the need to protect the West’s pre-emptive claim to the financial surpluses of the Arab and oil world. This is essential for underwriting their political stability which today is irretrievable and in distinct decline.” (Sukumar Muralidharan in EPW, March 1991).

16. “Globalisation is privatization of the world” as William Blum writes The Pre-emptive ‘First strike option’ is complementary to the idea and is being discussed at the NATO* summit in Bucharest in April (2008).

The Commander of the space shuttle that circled the earth in 2005, called and said ‘the centre of Africa was burning “. She meant the Congo, in which the great rain forest of the continent was located. It needed to disappear for corporations to gain free access to the Congo’s natural resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all one needs diamonds, precious and strategic raw materials for the exotic weapons of today and tomorrow. Brazil has followed the same policy with respect to the great Amazon river basin.

Henry CK Liu, a New York based Investment banker who writes prolifically for the Asia Times notes “ For the trade deficit developing economies, neo-liberal global trade makes old fashion 19th Century Imperialism look benign ...”(and its predatory wars, fraud and loot look like a teddy bear’s picnic) Economic power when sufficiently vast, as in the contemporary globalised system generating unprecedented and accelerating inequalities, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of Big Business has diminished democracy and led to the establishment of rule by an oligarchy.

Militarisation of the State and society is a natural consequence of rule by an oligarchy, focused on ‘market fundamentalism’ whose affects are all too visible across the globe and even within the ‘core’ or the metropolitan center.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times one of the propagandists of this anti-humanity policies has summed it up graphically with nothing left to the imagination , “ The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist …. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas (Manufacturers of F-15s).

Globalisation Politics in Action

The nihilism of neoliberal globalisation is evident. The whole ‘ Real’ world is sought to be transformed into money and speculative transactions with mounds of paper money created,destructive to human welfare and development (Werlhof). The material limits of such politics becomes clearer by the day: global, ecological, economic, monetary, social and political collapse (Diamond 2005). How else can we understand the fact that in times when civilization has reached its alleged zenith, a human being starves (to death) every second (Ziegler) ? The original riches of ‘mother earth’ is now giving way to a barren wasteland.

Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank, the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. When the WTO was founded in 1995 in place of GATT, several agreements which operationalise it followed :The Multilateral Agreement on Investments, the General Agreement on Trade in Services(GATS), the agreement on Trade-Related aspects on Intellectual Property Rights (leading to India giving up on its Patent Rights Act), and the Agreement on Agriculture, which has now been supplemented by the Agreement on Non-Agricultural Market Access(NAMA).

All these agreements facilitate corporate rule, and total liberation of all corporate activities. Never before, not even in colonial times, have those in power been so completely been “freed” from all responsibility for their actions (no wonder that the MAI negotiations were kept secret for years, though the EU Trade Unions knew since they were part of the TUAC and took part in the OECD conferences in Paris). Negotiations of the GATS have also been kept secret since the late 1990s. That sensitive areas like education, health or water services are excluded is a lie. Even the elements –air, water, earth, fire(energy) are increasingly turned into commodities. Financial Services, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) are the tools for opening up the womb. The genes of plants, animals, even human-beings are sometimes pirated and made one’s own legal “property”(Thaler 2004). Vandana Shiva calls this process “trading in our lives” and in Korea “WTO kills farmers” is a popular slogan.

The transnational agribusiness corporations now even discuss a general prohibition of “traditional” farming methods. Iraqi farmers have been forced to burn their seeds and use “terminator seeds “ instead –this in Mesopotamia, the “cradle of agriculture”….or “Wheat becomes a Weapon”(Krieg1980). In India too the Iraq model is being repeated, only with a slower rate of strangulation to death of our farmers. A new infertility enters the world instead of a new creation ….consequence is an artificially created death –a death with no life to follow. No one seems to know how to prevent this (Werlhof 2006)….Amongst the most ludicrous examples is the idea to distribute contraceptive GM corn developed by the Swiss company Syngenta, in regions that suffer from so called overpopulation”(Reiter 2005). Fed on it German cows died of different forms of circulatory collapse. The AoA in dumping subsidized GM food into markets of the South is threatening the survival of three billion small farmers, half the world’s population!

Today the rights of corporations are better protected by the court systems in all countries …we may even say that “human rights ‘ only apply to corporations. Neoliberal globalisation is a conscious betrayal of the interests of 99% of the people on this planet. In both its intention and effect, a true “weapon of mass destruction”—even when no immediate wars are fought (Werlhof 2006). How many lives are sacrificed to this globalisation ? Some estimate that the numbers already go into hundreds of millions (Widerspruch 2004).

In the EU’s first draft Constitution Treaty, rejected by the referendum, there was the engagement in armament and military operations (Oberansmayer 2004).The draft of the EU constitution promised to be part of an effort to secure peace and refers to acts of war as –“humanitarian intervention”, alternatively as “acts of defense”, like the NATO* war against Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and now in Africa (wherever there is oil or strategic raw materials), alongside the US Africa Military command.. Once again neoliberal globalisation and militarism appear as Siamese twins ….All this against the backdrop of deployable nuclear weapons in Europe (Galtung 1993, Oberansmayer 2004). The EU is aware of the impending problems of shortage of water and energy in Southern Europe. At the European Security conference (Munich) 2005 it already discussed scenarios of poor people’s revolts.

Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech vividly articulated as only a writer can - “ It means you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene blow….When the populace has been subdued or beaten to death …the Military and the great Corporations sit comfortably in power –you go before the cameras and say Democracy has prevailed.”

Will the Tide Turn?

The series of people’s movements, whether against the WTO trade talks at Seattle, Cancun, Hong Kong, GM foods, privatization of public sector enterprises, SEZs, Water privatization (Vandana Shiva says “ Denying people their human right to water is not development.It is genocide”), unemployment, forest rights and displacement from mineral rich regions, against the War in Iraq and the indigenous people -- largely spontaneous, has been termed as the emergence of the ‘second super power’.

The current revolt emerging against neo-liberalism throughout the periphery, led by the Iraqi, Palestinian, Afghan and Lebanese national resistance will be met by increased interventions from the imperial center of the System – an evil and destructive system which maims, oppresses and dishonors those who live under it and which threatens and executes devastation and death to millions around the globe, shaming the age of enlightenment, in the name of freedom and democracy. However the choice, not to resist is no choice and peoples resistance have won throughout history.

“What is really needed of course is nothing less than a different civilization. A different economy alone, or a different society or culture will not suffice…We need a civilization that is the exact opposite … We would still be left with the damage that the earth has suffered ….and all this happened within what comes to a nanosecond of the earth’s history” (Werlhof).

To conclude military power no matter how strong, can never conquer the people’s desire to be free and their love of peace, as post world war II history has shown in our times, though it has imposed so much suffering and will continue to do for some more time.

When neoliberal Globalisation is on a self destruct mode and its financial system heading for an abyss what holds back its demise ? The answer is the ‘Ruling’ elites of many nations, amongst them the petro-dollar oligarchies in collusion with military alliances, who have and continue to betray their people’s interests. Since it is arraigned against entire humanity it has to be defeated by a united humanity with diverse strategies.

It is necessary to remember in times such as these, when the words “freedom and democracy” are voiced by those who have enslaved even their own societies, the wise words of Mahatma Gandhi - “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed Red with innocent blood.”

Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat is former Chief of the Naval Staff, India. He can be reached admiralvb@hathway.com

Note

* NATO—Started with a membership of 15, now has an additional 26 members and also 23 “partnership countries” -- ‘Partnership for Peace.’ It has affiliates like the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, the Mediterranean Dialogue and the GCC, all facilitating intervention, outside the UNSC, to protect human lives.

With acknowledgements to Prof Claudia von Werlhof ‘s paper on ‘The Consequences of Globalization and Neoliberal Policies. What are the Alternatives ?’ November 21, 2005, Prof Michel Chossudovsky’s books –Globalization of Poverty & America’s War of Terror, published by Global Research.

1and2

2010-10-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

#1 The real rulers

http://kropotkiniod.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/placeholder/
Three of Five “Super Jews” in US Congress Are Also Members of Israeli Group By steamedfrog

Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY), recently stated* that he and four other chairmen of important House committees were a “first-class team” of Jewish pro-Israel Democrats (“Berman at Foreign Affairs, Barney Frank at Financial Services, Henry Waxman at the Energy and Commerce committee, Sander Levin at Ways and Means, and Ackerman himself in his role as head of the Middle East subcommittee.”). He also claimed that they have “major, major, major” (Catch-22, anyone?) pull in the Executive Branch.

Oddly enough, three of the five of these chairmen are also members of the steering committee of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians (ICJP), a group fostered by the State of Israel to allow a closer cooperation between Jewish politicians worldwide. Members of the steering committee met with other members of Congress, senators and representatives alike:

“In early February, meetings were held in Washington, DC, with U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer, Norm Coleman, Dianne Feinstein, Frank Lautenberg, Joseph Lieberman and Carl Levin, and with Members of Congress Gary Ackerman, Howard Berman, Susan Davis, Eliot Engel, Barney Frank, Tom Lantos, Nita Lowey, Jerrold Nadler, Jan Schakowsky, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Allyson Schwartz, and Henry Waxman.” http://www.icjp.net

I suppose it’s rather redundant at this point to keep stating the obvious:

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” – Disraeli

Update: A 2008 letter from Rep. Gary Ackerman to other members of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians is below. In it, he states that “Government of Israel, the Knesset” provide material support to the ICJP.

The United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 9 states:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.”

Gary Ackerman is President of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians, an organ of a foreign state. As such, he is in clear violation of the law he claims to represent and uphold.

http://www.icjp.net/ack_letter.htm

Dear Friend,

I am delighted to inform you that the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians (ICJP) will be meeting in Jerusalem on December 14-16th, 2008—and we hope that we will be honored by your presence at this important gathering. This event will coincide with the celebration of the 60th anniversary year of the establishment of the State of Israel.

The 2008 ICJP conference will deal with issues including: actual and potential threats to our Jewish communities worldwide; the looming menace of the Iranian nuclear program; the means of combating anti-Semitism and ways to build relationships between our Jewish communities around the world.

As in the past, our goal is to bring together Jewish legislators and parliamentarians from around the world. Once again, we are enormously grateful for the organizational support the conference will receive from Ruthi Kaplan and the material support from the Government of Israel, the Knesset and the World Jewish Congress.

As we continue our work preparing the conference’s schedule and arrangements, we would be glad to receive any ideas, proposals or comments you may have on the program for our next meeting.

Do RSVP to Hana Kimchi (Hana@wjc.co.il) as soon as possible. If you need financial assistance to underwrite the cost of the flight ticket or hotel, please let us know and we will endeavor to help you within the limitations of available funds.

I look forward to welcoming you to our conference in Jerusalem in December.

Gary L. Ackerman
President, International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians

*”If you need the president, you need us as chairs of the committees,” Ackerman said as he listed what he called the “first-class team” of Jewish pro-Israel Democrats who chair key House committees: Berman at Foreign Affairs, Barney Frank at Financial Services, Henry Waxman at the Energy and Commerce committee, Sander Levin at Ways and Means, and Ackerman himself in his role as head of the Middle East subcommittee. “We are all pro-Israel and we all have major, major, major influence in the executive branch.” http://forward.com/articles/132608/

#2 Freeman on the land

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Canada+freemen/3748349/story.html

Who are Canada's 'freemen'?

Police seized Mike Rasila's van, arrested him and charged him with six traffic offences, but the incident signaled that the anti-government Freemen on the Land, of which he is a prominent member, had taken root in Canada.

Freeman on the Land Stewart Bell, National Post · Friday, Oct. 29, 2010

HAMILTON, ONT. • When Mika Rasila got pulled over by Niagara police in January for driving his white Pontiac Montana without licence plates, he was ready with a defence: he doesn’t need plates because he’s a Freeman on the Land.

A Freeman on the Land, he explained in a letter he tried to hand the patrol officer through the window, is someone who has revoked his consent to be governed. He has opted out of Canada so the laws don’t apply to him.

It didn’t work.

Police seized his van, arrested him and charged him with six traffic offences, but the incident signaled that the anti-government Freemen on the Land, of which Mr. Rasila is a prominent member, had taken root in Canada.

Across the country, police and officials have been having similar run-ins with “freemen,” also known as “sovereign citizens,” members of a radical movement that does not recognize government authority and consequently refuses to licence their cars, carry government ID or obey police.

“We have thousands of members now,” said Mr. Rasila, who writes on the Freemen of Canada Facebook page, which has over 2,000 members. “We have meetings, we’re fairly organized. They’re very casual, usually just in someone’s living room or we’ll rent a hall.”

Canada’s freemen are a loose collection of true believers, ranging from tax protesters to 9/11 conspiracists to fathers whose children have been apprehended by child welfare agencies. What unites them is their dislike of government.

Self-declared defenders of individual freedom, they are anti-government extremists in the sense that, rather than opposing specific policies, they deny government has any legitimacy at all and want to be left alone to live according to their own rules.

Police aren’t sure what to make of the freemen. Are they harmless fanatics or an emerging domestic extremist group? Although police in Ontario say it’s too soon to tell, they are concerned about the potential for violence and have begun sharing information and circulating intelligence reports on the subject.

“It’s something that we know about, it’s something that we need to know about and it’s something we need to monitor to a degree,” said Sergeant Brian Ritchie of the Hamilton Police Service hate crimes unit.

A freeman is scheduled to appear in court in Toronto in March, but most incidents have been in smaller southern Ontario cities like London and Guelph, as well as in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

“Basically what we’re doing is we’re teaching,” Mr. Rasila said. “We’re not here to recruit people, we’re just educating.” That teaching takes place at small seminars and on the Internet. It promotes an ideology that sounds a lot like conspiracy theory.

Over the past century, the freemen claim, Canada went bankrupt and was taken over by a corporation. Ever since, the government has had no authority to make laws — but it doesn’t want you to know that. “Canada’s been co-opted by criminals,” said Mr. Rasila.

The freemen are not openly racist, although their ideology rests partly on the claim, pervasive in the racist right, that Jews secretly control the world through banking and media ownership.

“You’ve got something that’s a little bit more subtle,” said Rick Eaton, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California. “Even though a lot of these groups may be associated with hate groups, they’re very careful.”

Freemen claim Canadians are enslaved by government encroachment but that they know the remedy: anyone can simply opt-out of Canada by severing their “contract” with the government and living instead according to a “common law” enforced by other freemen.

“We have our own police force, we have our own insurance company,” Mr. Rasila said. “But what we don’t have is the compliance of the government, so what they’re doing is they’re sending out their mercenary thugs and their criminal judges.”

Mr. Rasila described his activities as “peaceful non-compliance.” On the Internet, however, he doesn’t always sound so peaceful. A letter he posted on-line warned that “there is in fact a war coming and we the people have had enough.”

A YouTube video shows him throwing knives at a painted gunman while captions advise to “be prepared” because the government has been “co-opted by criminals.” Another post encourages unlicensed gun ownership.

He also claims affiliations with U.S. militias and right wing groups like the Oath Keepers. “It is basically us against the government now,” he said. “If we don’t rein them in then they are just going to take over every possible freedom that we have … I mean if it comes down to defence, we are willing to defend ourselves.”

Asked if he was peaceful, he responded, “I am, yes. But I will defend myself if I have to. I mean, what are we going to do, allow these people to just throw us around? It’s crazy. So we all have to be prepared. We’re not slaves. We are not subject to these laws. We are subject to the laws of nature and the laws of our creator and that’s it.”

How far would he go?

“As far as I’d have to go. Would you allow yourself to be thrown into a cell and be tazed six times when you know this is what happens? Would you?

“I wouldn’t.”

Canada’s new radical right is appearing as groups with an almost identical platform are exploding south of the border. American sovereign citizens groups emerged in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the tax protest movement.

Some turned violent. The 1995 Oklahoma City bomber, Terry Nichols, was a member of the “sovereign citizen” movement. In 1996, an armed standoff between the Freemen of Montana and federal authorities lasted 81 days.

Experts said the movement is booming again, fueled by the economic crash, demographic changes symbolized by the election of President Barack Obama and incitement by political and media figures.

“It’s a kind of perfect storm of factors that are driving the continued growth of radical right wing groups, and the freemen or sovereign citizens are very much a part of that,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama.

For his part, Mr. Rasila, a 44-year-old self-employed contractor originally from Windsor, said he was first exposed to these ideas on the Internet. Three to four years ago, he said, he decided to live as a Freeman on the Land.

He stopped registering his van, voided his government ID and cut himself off from benefits such as welfare and health insurance. By doing so, he believes he has withdrawn his consent to be governed.

“Nobody can tell you what to do as an adult without your express consent or permission,” he said. “This is why you need to void all your identification, void all your contracts and just live your life with decency.”

The freemen should concern Canadians, Mr. Potok said. “The thing to realize is that the conspiracy theories that animate many of these people seem absurd to most thinking people and it is hard to imagine them motivating people to violence.

“But the fact is, we have seen time and time again that a certain percentage of the people that start to subscribe to these theories will end up acting out in criminal violence, sometimes as extreme as murdering police officers.”

On May 20, two West Memphis, Ark., police officers were gunned down with an AK-47 after they pulled over a pair of hardcore “sovereign citizens,” Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joe, for what was supposed to have been a routine traffic stop.

There has been no major freemen violence in Canada but police are taking the threat seriously and have been educating frontline officers about the issue. Sgt. Ritchie said while at the moment freemen are mainly an officer safety issue, there could also be long-term law enforcement challenges.

For example, should freemen follow through with their vow to set up their own police and courts, to make arrests and impose sentences, they could be considered a criminal organization. Likewise, those that claim in seminars that Canadians don’t need to pay taxes or debts might be guilty of counseling fraud.

He said nobody should be fooled by freemen beliefs. “Sometimes you wonder if we’re walking on the same planet, have they gone off the edge,” he said. “The Criminal Code is for all Canadians, and the emphasis is on all. They can’t step outside the law, because the law applies to them. If the law is broken, then that will be dealt with under the law.”

So far, the freemen are mostly a nuisance to traffic police and courts. They will put phony plates on their cars that read FREEMAN and argue endlessly with police when they get pulled over.

One of their tactics is to modify their names. Mr. Rasila now calls himself Mika of the family Rasila. Freemen do that to distinguish themselves from their “strawman” — the version of themselves recorded in government records.

If they get arrested, they engage in what has been termed “paper terrorism” — clogging the courts with seemingly incoherent documents that use the quasi-legal jargon recommended by the movement’s leaders.

“It’s growing almost exponentially,” said Derek Hill, a Freeman on the Land from Windsor, “because people are beginning the realize how badly they’ve been conned, quote-unquote, by the government and by the courts.

“They don’t like it. They’re fed up with the government lying to them. They’re fed up with increasing taxes, police brutality, police state, economic downturn, various reasons, which is very similar to what the U.S.A. is experiencing right now.”

Mr. Hill, 23, said he was saddled with $800 a month student debt payments when he went searching on the Internet for a solution and found the lectures of Freeman on the Land guru Robert-Arthur:Menard (note the added colon).

A former Toronto street comic, Mr. Menard wants to build a Freeman Society of Canada with its own justice system and police force but Mr. Hill dismissed comparisons to U.S. militias.

“Some people have guns because they fear for their lives, because when you’re doing these things and you lawfully win, that doesn’t sit easy with cops,” he said.

“And I’ve heard stories that cops actually go in and physically assault them. So some people had to buy guns in order to secure their personal safety. But I personally don’t believe in guns.”

A week before, he was to appear in court in St. Catharines, Ont., on Oct. 19 to face charges stemming from his arrest in January, Mr. Rasila wrote a letter and posted it on his Facebook page.

It called the officer who pulled him over a “mercenary employee of the corporation of Canada” and said Mr. Rasila had cancelled his “contract” with Canada.

“As is with all Freemen in the freemen society of Canada we simply want to be left alone without interference from the state,” it read. “We will not consent to be governed by you.”

Mr. Rasila never showed up in court but the case went ahead without him. He was convicted on three counts — driving without valid plates, driving with a suspended licence and driving while using an electronic device (the video camera he used to record his arrest).

He was fined $1,250 but he says he won’t pay it.

“Never, absolutely not,” he said. “Would you pay a ransom demand if you didn’t have to?” He called it extortion, since the police are still holding his van and the carpentry tools inside.

He said he was moving west.

“I’m just going to continue living my life peacefully,” he said, “and I’m going to continue to educate people.”

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Canada+freemen/3748349/story.html#ixzz13w1t3cBp
__________________________________________________________________________
How long will it take the "central bank" to classify sovereign citizens as enemy combatants/terrorist?

Checkov

2010-10-27T05:15:00.000-07:00

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings - the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky -Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence. Chekov, The Lady with the Toy Dog

The flame in your soul, at the centre of your being,
Is larger and stronger than any government or king. Dean_Saor

The lamb, brought for the sacrifice,
ate the green leaf of the decorations,
wanting only to fill its stomach.
But, tell me, did the killers survive,
oh lord of the meeting rivers?

Basavanna, Speaking of Shiva, Penguin Books

Junkeconomics

2010-10-01T04:48:00.000-07:00

The article below might be regarded as rather heavy going – “balance-of-payments accounting and international trade theory are arcane topics” but it is well worth the effort of exercising those little grey cells you keep behind your eyes.

By the end of it, the author’s promise (“by the time you finish this article, you will understand more than 99 per cent”) has been kept.

You might like to warm up by taking a quick look at the first page of “Finance for the stout hearted – the invisible elephant in the room” at http://wahyusamputra.blogspot.com/2008/02/finance-for-stout-hearted-invisible.html for February 2008. That was done in very broad brush strokes, to explain what the economist had in mind when he declared that the dollar as a petrocurrency was “like having a mint in your backyard,” allowing virtually unlimited printing of dollars that oil buying (or selling) nations had to absorb.

Since that time the whole scene has ballooned into gigantic dimensions. The last “supplemental” (off budget) bill for war costs that president Obama signed in September, 2010 brought his total expenditure to over a trillion dollars: for slaughtering, by remote control, foreigners who’d never done the US any harm, while millions of Americans lived on food stamps.

Those trillion dollars have to come from somewhere. The current “extend and pretend” strategy, of claiming that rich idiots will be found to lend the US enough money to pay back all it owes, is wearing very thin.

Give it a try. Maybe you’re cleverer than you think.

*************************

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson09292010.html

A Short Tour of Junk Economics America's China Bashing By MICHAEL HUDSON

It is traditional for politicians to blame foreigners for problems that their own policies have caused. And in today’s zero-sum economies, it seems that if America is losing leadership position, other nations must be the beneficiaries. Inasmuch as China has avoided the financial overhead that has painted other economies into a corner, U.S. politicians and journalists are blaming it for America’s declining economic power. I realize that balance-of-payments accounting and international trade theory are arcane topics, but I promise that by the time you finish this article, you will understand more than 99 per cent of U.S. economists and diplomats striking this self-righteous pose.

The dollar’s double standard gives America an international free ride

For over a century, central banks have managed exchange rates by raising or lowering the interest rate. Countries running trade and payments deficits raise rate to attract foreign funds. The IMF also directs them to impose domestic austerity programs that reduce asset prices for their real estate, stocks and bonds, making them prone to foreign buyouts. Vulture investors and speculators usually have a field day, as they did in the Asian crisis of 1997.

Conversely, low interest rates lead bankers and speculators to seek higher returns abroad, borrowing domestic currency to buy foreign securities or make foreign loans. This capital outflow lowers the exchange rate.

There is a major exception, of course: the United States. Despite running the world’s largest balance-of-payments deficit and also the largest domestic government budget deficit, it has the world’s lowest interest rates and easiest credit. The Federal Reserve has depressed the dollar’s exchange rate by providing nearly free credit to banks at only 0.25 per cent interest. This “quantitative easing” (making it easier to borrow more) aims at preventing U.S. real estate, stocks and bonds from falling further in price. The idea is to save banks from more defaults as the economy slips deeper into negative equity territory. A byproduct of this easy credit is to lower the dollar’s exchange rate – presumably helping U.S. exporters while forcing foreign producers either to raise the dollar price of their goods they sell here or absorb a currency loss.

This policy makes the dollar a managed currency. Low U.S. interest rates and easy credit spur investors to lend abroad or buy foreign assets yielding more than 1 per cent. This dollar outflow forces other countries to protect their currencies from being forced up. So their central banks do not throw the excess dollars they receive onto the “free market,” but keep them in dollar form by buying U.S. Government bonds. So the “Chinese savings,” “yen savings” and “Euro savings” that are spent on U.S. Treasury securities (and earlier, on Fannie Mae bonds to earn a bit more) are not really what Chinese people save in their local yuan, or what Japanese or Europeans save. The money used to buy U.S. Government securities consists of the excess dollars that the American military, American investors and American consumers spend abroad in excess of U.S. earning power. To pretend that these savings are “saved up” by foreigners (who save in their own currency, after all) is Junk Economics Error #1.

By lowering U.S. interest rates to near zero, the U.S. Federal Reserve is doing what the Bank of Japan did after its financial bubble burst in 1990, when it helped Japanese banks “earn their way out of negative equity” by providing cheap credit to obtain a markup by lending to speculators and arbitrageurs to buy foreign bonds paying higher rates. This came to be known as the “carry trade.” Arbitrageurs borrowed yen cheaply and converted them into Euros, dollars, Icelandic kroner or other currencies paying a higher rate, pocketing the difference. This threw yen onto foreign-exchange market, weakening the exchange rate and hence helping Japanese automotive and electronics exporters.

This is the easy credit policy that the Fed is following today. U.S. banks borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0.25 per cent, and lend to speculators at a markup of one or two percentage points. These speculators then look for companies, government bonds, corporate stocks and bonds and any other asset in a foreign currency that they believe may yield more than about 2 per cent (or that are denominated in currencies that may rise in price against the dollar by more than 2 per cent annually), hoping to pocket the difference.

Accusations that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are “making their currencies cheaper” by recycling their dollar inflows into U.S. Treasury securities simply means that they are trying to maintain their currencies at a stable level. Even so, the yen’s exchange rate has risen as international borrowers pay off their carry-trade debts by re-converting the Euros, dollars and other currencies they borrowed in yen to play the arbitrage game. Paying back these foreign currency loans raises the yen’s price. To prevent this from pricing Japanese exporters out of world markets, Japan’s central bank is trying to stabilize the yen/dollar exchange rate by recycling these payments into the purchase of U.S. Treasury securities – exactly what U.S. officials accuse China of doing. It is how most central banks throughout the world are responding to the global dollar glut. They are increasing their international reserves by the amount of "surplus free credit" dollars that the U.S. payments deficit is pumping out. To pretend that China is “manipulating its currency” by doing what central banks have done for over a century is Junk Economics Error #2. Back in the early 1970s, U.S. officials told OPEC governments that if they did not do this, it would be deemed an act of war. And Congress has refused to let China buy U.S. companies – so China can only recycle its dollar inflows by buying Treasury securities, thereby financing the U.S. federal budget deficit.

Every currency is managed by recycling dollars to avoid distorted exchange rates

To pretend that exchange rates are determined mainly by international trade is Junk Economics Error #3. International currency speculation and investment is much larger than the volume of commodity trade. The typical currency bet lasts less than a minute, often being computer-driven by arbitrage swap models. This financial fibrillation has dislodged exchange rates from purchasing-power parity or prices for export and imports.

The largest payments imbalances have little to do with “market forces” for imports and exports. They are what economists call price-inelastic – money spent without regard for price. This is true above all for military spending and maintenance of America’s vast network of foreign bases and political maneuverings to control foreign countries. During the 1960s and ‘70s U.S. military spending accounted for the entire balance-of-payments deficit, as private sector trade and investment remained in balance. Escalation of America’s oil war in the Near East and Pipelinistan, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to prop up America-friendly regimes, end up in central banks – whose main option, as noted above, is to send them back to the United States in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bills – to finance further federal deficit spending!

None of this can be blamed on China. But any nation that succeeds economically is assumed to be doing so at America’s expense if they do not let U.S. investors siphon off the entire surplus. This attitude that other countries should sacrifice themselves is sweeping Congress, whose China bashing is reminiscent of the Japan-phobia of the late 1980s. The United States convinced the Bank of Japan to raise the yen’s exchange rate in the 1985 Plaza Accord, and then to turn Japan into a bubble economy by flooding it with credit under the 1987 Louvre Accord. Tokyo was humorously referred to as “the 13th Federal Reserve district” for recycling its export earnings in U.S. Treasury bills, becoming the mainstay of the Reagan-Bush budget deficits that financed U.S. global military spending while quadrupling the public debt.

U.S. strategists would not mind seeing China’s economy similarly untracked by letting global speculators bid up the renminbi’s exchange rate – by enough to let Wall Street speculators make hundreds of billions of dollars betting on the run-up. “Free capital markets” and “open financial markets” are euphemisms for setting the renminbi’s exchange rate by U.S. and European currency arbitrage and capital flight. The U.S. balance-of-payments outflow would increase rather than shrink, thanks to the ability of American banks to create nearly “free” credit on their keyboards to convert into Chinese or other currencies, gold or other speculative vehicles that look to rise against the dollar.

“In a world awash with excess savings, we don’t need China’s money,” writes Prof. Krugman. After all, “the Federal Reserve could and should buy up any bonds the Chinese sell.” It’s all just electronic credit. From reading such diatribes, or President Obama’s exchange with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao at the United Nations on September 23, one would not realize that Chinese savers have not sent a single yuan of their own money to the United States.

But that is the point! Krugman should have reminded his readers that the balance of payments consists of much more than just the trade balance in today’s world swamped by financial speculation and military spending. What China “invests” in the United States are the dollars thrown off by the U.S. payments deficit. China would take a loss on the yuan-value of these dollars if it revalues its currency – as it has lost on the dollars it has turned over to Blackrock in the hope of making more than the minimal 1 per cent available on U.S. Treasury securities.

Describing China as “deliberately keeping its currency artificially weak. … feeding a huge trade surplus,” Krugman adds that “in a depressed world economy, any country running an artificial trade surplus is depriving other nations of much-needed sales and jobs.” In his reading the problem is not that America has let easy bank credit bid up housing prices for its workers and loaded down their budgets with debt service that, by itself, exceeds the wage levels of most Asian workers. This financialization is largely responsible for the U.S. trade balance moving into deficit (apart from food and arms exports). Homeowners typically pay up to 40 per cent of their income for mortgage debt service and other carrying charges, 15 per cent for other debt (credit card interest and fees, auto loans, student loans, etc.), 11 per cent for FICA wage withholding for Social Security and Medicare, and about 10 to 15 per cent in other taxes (income and excise taxes). To cap matters, the financial burden of debt-leveraged real estate and consumption is aggravated by forced saving pension set-asides turned over to money managers for financial investment in these debt-leveraged financial instruments, and “financialized” wage withholding for Social Security. All these deductions are made before any money is left to buy food, clothing or other basic goods and services.

Chinese currency appreciation would make its exports cost more. But would this spur America rebuild its factories and re-employ the workforce that has been downsized and outsourced? To imagine that long-term investment responds to immediately is Junk Economics Error #4.

The same is true of international commodity trade. “An undervalued currency always promotes trade surpluses,” Krugman explains. But this is only true if trade is “price-elastic,” with other countries able to produce similar goods of their own at only marginally different prices. This is less and less the case as the United States and Europe de-industrialize and as their capital investment shrinks as a result of their expanding financial overhead ending in a wave of negative equity. To assume that higher exchange rates automatically reduce rather than increase a nation’s trade surplus is Junk Economics Error #5. It is a tenet of the free market fundamentalism that Krugman usually criticizes, except where China is concerned.

Krugman urges the United States to do what it “normally does” when other countries subsidize their exports: impose a tariff to offset the supposed subsidy. Congress is increasing the drumbeat of accusations that China is violating international trade rules by protecting itself from financialization. “Democrats in Congress are threatening to … slap huge tariffs on Chinese goods to undermine the advantages Beijing has enjoyed from a currency, the renminbi, that experts say is artificially weakened by 20 to 25 percent.” The aim is to make China “lift the strict controls on its currency, which keep Chinese exports competitive and more factory workers employed.” But such legislation is illegal under world trade rules. This has not stopped the United States in the past, but the belief that it might succeed internationally is Junk Economics Error #6.

This kind of propaganda does not see the United States as guilty of “managing the dollar” by its quantitative easing that depresses the exchange rate below what would be normal for any other economy suffering so gigantic and chronic s payments deficit. What makes this situation inherently unfair is that while the Washington Consensus directs other countries to impose austerity plans, raise their taxes on consumers and cut vital spending, the Bush-Obama administration blames China, not the U.S. financial system or post-Cold War military expansionism.

The cover story is that foreign exchange controls and purchase of U.S. securities keep the renminbi’s exchange rate low, artificially spurring its exports. The reality is that these controls protect China from U.S. banks creating free “keyboard credit” to buy out its companies or load down its economy with loans to be paid off in renminbi whose value will rise against the deficit-prone dollar.

The House Ways and Means Committee is demanding that China raise its exchange rate by 20 per cent. This would enable speculators to put down 1 per cent equity – say, $1 million to borrow $99 million and buy Chinese renminbi forward. The revaluation being demanded would produce a 20,000 per cent profit, turning the $100 million bet (and just $1 million “serious money”) into making $2 billion. It also would bankrupt Chinese exporters who had signed dollarized contracts with U.S. retailers. So it’s the arbitrage opportunity of the century that lobbyists are pressing for, not the welfare of workers.

The Internal Revenue Service treats such trading gains as “capital gains” and taxes them at only 15 per cent, much less than the tax rate on earned income that wage-earners must pay. The Brazilian real has risen by about 25 per cent against the dollar since January 2009. Last week, Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, issued $67 billion in shares to exploit the nation’s new oil discoveries. Foreigners have been swamping Brazil’s central bank with a reported $1 billion per day for the past two weeks – about 10 times its daily average in recent months – but this was largely to absorb money entering the country to take part in last week’s issue by the national oil company.

The U.S. and foreign economies alike are suffering from the idea that the way to get rich is by debt leveraging, and that the wealth of nations is whatever banks will lend – the “capitalization rate” of the available surplus. The banker’s dream is to lend against every source of revenue until it ends up being pledged to pay interest. Corporate raiders use business cash flow to pay bankers for the high-interest loans and junk bonds that provide them with takeover credit. Real estate investors use their rental income to service their mortgages, while consumers pay their disposable income as interest (and late fees) to the banks for credit cards, student loans and other debts.

But Paul Krugman and Robin Wells blame China for Wall Street’s junk mortgage binge. Instead of pointing to criminal behavior by the banks, brokerage companies, bond rating agencies and deceptive underwriters, they take the financial sector off the hook: “Just as global imbalances – the savings glut created by surpluses in China and other countries – played an important part in creating the great real estate bubble, they have an important role in blocking recovery now that the bubble has burst.”

This sounds more like what one would hear from a Wall Street lobbyist than from a liberal Democrat. It is as if the real estate bubble didn’t stem from financial fraud, junk mortgages, NINJA loans or the Federal Reserve flooding the U.S. economy with credit to inflate the real estate bubbles and sending electronic dollars abroad to glut the global economy. It’s China’s fault for running large trade surpluses “at the rest of the world’s expense.” The authors do not explain how it helps China or other economies to let foreign investors buy their companies at a 20 per cent return and pay in dollars that must be recycled to the U.S. Treasury earning just 1 per cent. And Congress won’t let the Chinese buy U.S. companies. It blocks such inflows, managing the economy ostensibly on national security grounds – in practice a structural payments deficit.

Wall Street’s idea of “equilibrium” is for foreign countries to financialize themselves along the lines that the United States is doing, then global equilibrium could be restored. But the most successful economies have kept their FIRE-sector (FIRE - Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) costs of living and doing business within reasonable bounds, and are not remotely as debt-leveraged as the United States. German workers pay only about 20 per cent of their income for housing – about half the rate of their U.S. counterparts. German practice is not to make 100 per cent mortgage loans, but to require down payments in the range of 30 per cent such as characterized the United States as recently as the 1980s.

The FIRE sector’s business plan has priced U.S. labor out of world markets. There seems little likelihood of making Chinese and German workers pay rents or mortgage interest as high as the United States. How can American economic strategists force them to raise the price of their college and university tuition so that they must take on the enormous student loans of the magnitude that Americans have to assume? How can they be persuaded to follow the high-cost U.S. practice of adding FICA-type wage withholding to the cost of living to save up pensions, Social Security and medical insurance in advance, instead of the pay-as-you-go basis that Germany quite rightly follows?

Such suggestions are a cover story for America’s own financial mismanagement. The U.S. idea for global equilibrium is to demand that that the rest of the world follow suit in adopting the short-term time frame typical of banks and hedge funds whose business plan is to make money purely from financial maneuvering, not long-term capital investment. Debt creation and the shift of economic planning to Wall Street and similar global financial centers is confused with “wealth creation,” as if it were what Adam Smith was talking about.

A Proposal

China is trying to help by voluntarily cutting back its rare earth exports. It has almost a monopoly, accounting for 97 per cent of global trade in these 17 metallic elements. These exports are “price inelastic.” There is little known replacement cost once existing deposits are depleted. Yet China charges only for the cost of digging these rare metals out of the ground and refining them. They are used in military and other high-technology applications, from guided missile steering systems and computer hard drives to hybrid electric automobile batteries. This has prompted China to recently cut back its exports to save its land from environmental pollution and, incidentally, to build up its own stockpile for future use.

So I have a modest suggestion. If and when China starts re-exporting these metals, raise their price from a few dollars a pound to a few hundred dollars. According to a theory put forth by Paul Krugman and the U.S. Congress, this price increase should slow demand for Chinese exports. It also would help promote world peace and demilitarization, because these rare metals are key elements in missile guidance systems. China should build up its national security stockpile of these key minerals for the future – say, the next prospective five years of production. Let this be a test of the junk paradigms at work.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com