http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/27/how-the-new-american-empire-really-works/
March 27, 2012 185Why the Wars Will Not End How the New American Empire Really Works
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.
The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.
In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources.
Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.
America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?
The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.
Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.
This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.
It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the American empire.
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached through his website
Title from Linton Kwesi Johnson of Brixton, England
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
May 5, 2011
Mutability
Well, three months down and nine to go. How are you enjoying the Year of the Hare so far? Hope that the sheer speed of changes since the beginning of the year on February 3, 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’s gonna get rougher.
Mutability, or changes, comes not by presidential decree nor by secret bank deals – it’s a built in condition of the whole game – you can’t even step into the same river twice.
Purchasing 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, however. One day it may become a subject of negotiation between the US and the country of the large estate, on the subject of precisely entering into an extradition treaty.
Aagh, some things never change, I hear you say.
Well, you have to wait till the rock is ready to move, as a Varashaiva saint was heard to say. Grab the moment. Carpe diem. If you see a chance, take it.
Here is what we have to change, the war on humanity of Vishnu Braphat:
Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?
The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors By Adam Hochschild
What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?
I found myself thinking about this recently while visiting the narrow strip of northern France and Belgium that has the densest concentration of young men’s graves in the world. This is the old Western Front of the First World War. Today, it is the final resting place for several million soldiers. Nearly half their bodies, blown into unrecognizable fragments by some 700 million artillery and mortar shells fired here between 1914 and 1918, lie in unmarked graves; the remainder are in hundreds upon hundreds of military cemeteries, still carefully groomed and weeded, the orderly rows of headstones or crosses covering hillsides and meadows.
Stand on a hilltop in one of the sites of greatest slaughter -- Ypres, the Somme, Verdun -- and you can see up to half-a-dozen cemeteries, large and small, surrounding you. In just one, Tyn Cot in Belgium, there are nearly 12,000 British, Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, and West Indian graves.
Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials, leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial. At least two of those memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and, without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land.
In a curious way, the death toll of that war almost a century gone, in which more than 100,000 Americans died, has become so much more visible than the deaths in our wars today. Is that why the First World War is almost always seen, unlike our present wars, not just as tragic, but as a murderous folly that swept away part of a generation and in every way remade the world for the worse?
To Paris -- or Baghdad
For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world, writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian, and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to the front line.
In government archives, I’ve looked at excuse to put their plans into action -- even though the killer was an Austro-Hungarian citizen and there was no evidence Serbia’s cabinet knew of his plot. Although the war quickly drew in many other countries, its first shots were fired by Austro-Hungarian gunboats on the Danube shelling Serbia.
The more I learned about the war’s opening, 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’s assassination, the attacks of September 11, 2001, gave them the excuse they had been waiting for -- even though there was no connection whatsoever between the hijackers, mainly Saudis, and Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Other parallels between World War I and today’s wars abound. You can see photographs from 1914 of German soldiers climbing into railway cars with “To Paris” jauntily chalked on their sides, and French soldiers boarding similar cars labeled “To Berlin.”
“You will be home,” Kaiser Wilhelm II confidently told his troops that August, “before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Doesn’t that bring to mind Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in 2003 to declare, in front of a White House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended"? A trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, whatever mission there may have been remains anything but accomplished. Similarly, in Afghanistan, where Washington expected (and thought it had achieved) the most rapid and decisive of victories, the U.S. military remains mired in one of the longest wars in American history.
The Flowery Words of War
As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious. In 1914, for instance, no country planned for the other side’s machine guns, a weapon which Europe’s colonial powers had used for decades mainly as a tool for suppressing uppity natives.
Both sides sent huge forces of cavalry to the Western Front -- the Germans eight divisions with 40,000 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, they were full of holes. Internal combustion engines were in their infancy, and in the opening weeks of the war, 60% of the invading German army’s trucks broke down. This meant supplies had to be pulled by horse and wagon. For those horses, not to mention all the useless cavalry chargers, t1 million wounded, many of them missing hands, arms, legs, eyes, genitals.
Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.
The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day -- and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.
If you need a final resemblance between the First World War and ours of the present moment, consider the soaring rhetoric. The cataclysm of 1914-1918 is sometimes called the first modern war which, among other things, meant that gone forever was the era when “manifest destiny” or “the white man’s burden” would be satisfactory justificatioprotectorates and colonies. In Africa, for instance, Germany dreamed of establishing Mittelafrika, a grand, unbroken belt of territory stretching across the continent. And the British cabinet set up the Territorial Desiderata Committee, charged with choosing the most lucrative of the other side’s possessions to acquire in the postwar division of spoils. Near the top of the list of desiderata: the oil-rich provinces of Ottoman Turkey that, after the war, would be fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate of Iraq.
When it comes to that territory, does anyone think that Washington would have gotten quite so righteously worked up in 2003 if, instead of massive amounts of oil, its principal export was turnips?
Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s 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’ lives. But here’s the question that haunts me: What will it take to bring us to that point?
Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of seven books, including King Leopold’s Ghost. His new book To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.
Copyright 2011 Adam Hochschild
*********************************
During World War 2, members of the European resistance, the underground, working against the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) powers, were expected to hold out for 24 hours, to give their companions time to dismantle all leads, addresses, plans, that that member knew about. Many, including the heroic British agent, Ms. Churchill, did indeed hold out against the worst that the Gestapo in a hurry could produce.
Mr. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a leading member of Al-Qaeda captured by the Americans, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. He did confess to being Jack the Ripper, and to destroying, disguised as an iceberg, the Titanic, and no doubt the police forces of the UK will be happy to close those files at long last. He also knew, however, at the time of the waterboarding, of the compound in Abbottobad where Osama bin Laden was found and killed, and the courier who took round messages from and to there, and said nothing about it. (Asked why, some wit said, “They never asked about it.”)
A very strong movement is developing in a large number of states to have all unions gutted, all collective bargaining rights abolished, under a number of extreme right wing governors in these United States. Combined with the economic crisis, - no money, no jobs, all prices rising, - it is seen as the perfect time to create a crushingly plutocratic state. The military will be crucial, and when Blackwater troops are repatriated from anywhere in the event (haha) of a military withdrawal from anywhere, things will get rougher inside the USA too.
That’s not to mention the hyperinflation relentlessly rushing down on all western countries, but particularly the USA, from huge volumes of money printing. In Germany in the great Weimar hyperinflation, farmers had a bumper harvest that year, but couldn’t see the point of selling the solid assets in their granaries and storehouses for the government’s funny money that halved in value every day, and so thousands of Germans starved to death in the cities. We have something similar to look forward to, and so do you.
The plans of the powers that be are made plain in the proposal by Mr. Chertoff, head of Homeland Security and a dual nationality Israeli/American 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, the company making the scanners, and although the report that it “strips your DNA” has never been explained, I’d really prefer to leave my DNA as it is, acid influence an’ all. Evacs or whatever they call the fully operated from inside a mountain in Nevada drones, armed with hell fire missiles and able to be manufactured now in ridiculously small sizes, have just been given official permission to fly not only over Libya, where they attempt to assassinate Ghaddafi, but also in the skies of the USA, mixing with commercial traffic, under an executive order signed last week. Oh, goodie!
Here is an infallible test to decide terrorism in any case where large numbers of people (Humans – genus homo sapiens hahaha) are destroyed:
If the humans are destroyed by missile strikes, smart bombs, or any automatic machinery, it is the people killed who are the terrorists, and those operating the machinery are innocent victims. This is especially true if the killing machinery is entirely human-free, such as robot drones firing hell fire missiles.
If the humans are destroyed, on the other hand, by other humans, who may also destroy themselves in the process as in the case of suicide bombers, then it is the humans destroyed who are the innocent victims, and those doing the destroying who are the terrorists.
Cousin strands of genus homo, such as apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans (orang hutan = “people of the trees”) need not be considered because although they have the necessary two legs, two arms, and head configuration, none have any known experience of manufacturing explosives.
That’s 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’s climate in fifty years time, but not before that. The sins of the past hundred years have to come home to roost first. We’ll mostly be up to our butts in raw sewage in various floods to worry over much about political philosophy: Aquarius, ruler of the waters, will see to that. Also, possibly, hungry. “Food is heaven,” as the ancient Chinese proverb puts it.
Any hope? Oh yeah. The flood of new DNA-altering stuff that arrived with acid and got pumped into our DNA, opened more doors and passages that take time to become apparent. The most recent update on bee colony destruction contains bee techniques I notice I’m independently using for my own rubbish disposal.
Important note: Forget not the wise words of young Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of the 1968 troubles in France, as he stepped off a plane to have reporters with microphones thrust at him for his opinion on blah, blah, blah. “You might just as well ask the next guy in the line behind me,” said Danny, “We don’t have leaders like that any more.” That happens to be the exact meaning of Jamahirya, the masses, the “poor people,” who “line up to throw their votes into the ballot box like pieces of waste paper into the trash can.” [Mu'ammar Qadhafi, The Green Book.] See how dangerous this guy is? That’s without even counting his 142 tons of gold, and the African gold dinar proposed, and largely accepted, by many African countries. (And for G_d’s sake don’t let any mention of the $50,000 state loan for every getting married couple out; it’ll only have everyone comparing their own situation. Concentrate on protecting the civilian population by blasting them with a hundred plus missiles.)
Soldier on. The best is yet to come, etcetera, worse things happen at sea. Masha’allah. Plant some potatoes. Good luck.
Mutability, or changes, comes not by presidential decree nor by secret bank deals – it’s a built in condition of the whole game – you can’t even step into the same river twice.
Purchasing 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, however. One day it may become a subject of negotiation between the US and the country of the large estate, on the subject of precisely entering into an extradition treaty.
Aagh, some things never change, I hear you say.
Well, you have to wait till the rock is ready to move, as a Varashaiva saint was heard to say. Grab the moment. Carpe diem. If you see a chance, take it.
Here is what we have to change, the war on humanity of Vishnu Braphat:
Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?
The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors By Adam Hochschild
What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?
I found myself thinking about this recently while visiting the narrow strip of northern France and Belgium that has the densest concentration of young men’s graves in the world. This is the old Western Front of the First World War. Today, it is the final resting place for several million soldiers. Nearly half their bodies, blown into unrecognizable fragments by some 700 million artillery and mortar shells fired here between 1914 and 1918, lie in unmarked graves; the remainder are in hundreds upon hundreds of military cemeteries, still carefully groomed and weeded, the orderly rows of headstones or crosses covering hillsides and meadows.
Stand on a hilltop in one of the sites of greatest slaughter -- Ypres, the Somme, Verdun -- and you can see up to half-a-dozen cemeteries, large and small, surrounding you. In just one, Tyn Cot in Belgium, there are nearly 12,000 British, Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, and West Indian graves.
Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials, leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial. At least two of those memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and, without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land.
In a curious way, the death toll of that war almost a century gone, in which more than 100,000 Americans died, has become so much more visible than the deaths in our wars today. Is that why the First World War is almost always seen, unlike our present wars, not just as tragic, but as a murderous folly that swept away part of a generation and in every way remade the world for the worse?
To Paris -- or Baghdad
For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world, writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian, and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to the front line.
In government archives, I’ve looked at excuse to put their plans into action -- even though the killer was an Austro-Hungarian citizen and there was no evidence Serbia’s cabinet knew of his plot. Although the war quickly drew in many other countries, its first shots were fired by Austro-Hungarian gunboats on the Danube shelling Serbia.
The more I learned about the war’s opening, 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’s assassination, the attacks of September 11, 2001, gave them the excuse they had been waiting for -- even though there was no connection whatsoever between the hijackers, mainly Saudis, and Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Other parallels between World War I and today’s wars abound. You can see photographs from 1914 of German soldiers climbing into railway cars with “To Paris” jauntily chalked on their sides, and French soldiers boarding similar cars labeled “To Berlin.”
“You will be home,” Kaiser Wilhelm II confidently told his troops that August, “before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Doesn’t that bring to mind Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in 2003 to declare, in front of a White House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended"? A trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, whatever mission there may have been remains anything but accomplished. Similarly, in Afghanistan, where Washington expected (and thought it had achieved) the most rapid and decisive of victories, the U.S. military remains mired in one of the longest wars in American history.
The Flowery Words of War
As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious. In 1914, for instance, no country planned for the other side’s machine guns, a weapon which Europe’s colonial powers had used for decades mainly as a tool for suppressing uppity natives.
Both sides sent huge forces of cavalry to the Western Front -- the Germans eight divisions with 40,000 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, they were full of holes. Internal combustion engines were in their infancy, and in the opening weeks of the war, 60% of the invading German army’s trucks broke down. This meant supplies had to be pulled by horse and wagon. For those horses, not to mention all the useless cavalry chargers, t1 million wounded, many of them missing hands, arms, legs, eyes, genitals.
Was it worth it? Of course not. Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.
The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day -- and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.
If you need a final resemblance between the First World War and ours of the present moment, consider the soaring rhetoric. The cataclysm of 1914-1918 is sometimes called the first modern war which, among other things, meant that gone forever was the era when “manifest destiny” or “the white man’s burden” would be satisfactory justificatioprotectorates and colonies. In Africa, for instance, Germany dreamed of establishing Mittelafrika, a grand, unbroken belt of territory stretching across the continent. And the British cabinet set up the Territorial Desiderata Committee, charged with choosing the most lucrative of the other side’s possessions to acquire in the postwar division of spoils. Near the top of the list of desiderata: the oil-rich provinces of Ottoman Turkey that, after the war, would be fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate of Iraq.
When it comes to that territory, does anyone think that Washington would have gotten quite so righteously worked up in 2003 if, instead of massive amounts of oil, its principal export was turnips?
Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s 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’ lives. But here’s the question that haunts me: What will it take to bring us to that point?
Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of seven books, including King Leopold’s Ghost. His new book To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.
Copyright 2011 Adam Hochschild
*********************************
During World War 2, members of the European resistance, the underground, working against the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) powers, were expected to hold out for 24 hours, to give their companions time to dismantle all leads, addresses, plans, that that member knew about. Many, including the heroic British agent, Ms. Churchill, did indeed hold out against the worst that the Gestapo in a hurry could produce.
Mr. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a leading member of Al-Qaeda captured by the Americans, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. He did confess to being Jack the Ripper, and to destroying, disguised as an iceberg, the Titanic, and no doubt the police forces of the UK will be happy to close those files at long last. He also knew, however, at the time of the waterboarding, of the compound in Abbottobad where Osama bin Laden was found and killed, and the courier who took round messages from and to there, and said nothing about it. (Asked why, some wit said, “They never asked about it.”)
A very strong movement is developing in a large number of states to have all unions gutted, all collective bargaining rights abolished, under a number of extreme right wing governors in these United States. Combined with the economic crisis, - no money, no jobs, all prices rising, - it is seen as the perfect time to create a crushingly plutocratic state. The military will be crucial, and when Blackwater troops are repatriated from anywhere in the event (haha) of a military withdrawal from anywhere, things will get rougher inside the USA too.
That’s not to mention the hyperinflation relentlessly rushing down on all western countries, but particularly the USA, from huge volumes of money printing. In Germany in the great Weimar hyperinflation, farmers had a bumper harvest that year, but couldn’t see the point of selling the solid assets in their granaries and storehouses for the government’s funny money that halved in value every day, and so thousands of Germans starved to death in the cities. We have something similar to look forward to, and so do you.
The plans of the powers that be are made plain in the proposal by Mr. Chertoff, head of Homeland Security and a dual nationality Israeli/American 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, the company making the scanners, and although the report that it “strips your DNA” has never been explained, I’d really prefer to leave my DNA as it is, acid influence an’ all. Evacs or whatever they call the fully operated from inside a mountain in Nevada drones, armed with hell fire missiles and able to be manufactured now in ridiculously small sizes, have just been given official permission to fly not only over Libya, where they attempt to assassinate Ghaddafi, but also in the skies of the USA, mixing with commercial traffic, under an executive order signed last week. Oh, goodie!
Here is an infallible test to decide terrorism in any case where large numbers of people (Humans – genus homo sapiens hahaha) are destroyed:
If the humans are destroyed by missile strikes, smart bombs, or any automatic machinery, it is the people killed who are the terrorists, and those operating the machinery are innocent victims. This is especially true if the killing machinery is entirely human-free, such as robot drones firing hell fire missiles.
If the humans are destroyed, on the other hand, by other humans, who may also destroy themselves in the process as in the case of suicide bombers, then it is the humans destroyed who are the innocent victims, and those doing the destroying who are the terrorists.
Cousin strands of genus homo, such as apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans (orang hutan = “people of the trees”) need not be considered because although they have the necessary two legs, two arms, and head configuration, none have any known experience of manufacturing explosives.
That’s 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’s climate in fifty years time, but not before that. The sins of the past hundred years have to come home to roost first. We’ll mostly be up to our butts in raw sewage in various floods to worry over much about political philosophy: Aquarius, ruler of the waters, will see to that. Also, possibly, hungry. “Food is heaven,” as the ancient Chinese proverb puts it.
Any hope? Oh yeah. The flood of new DNA-altering stuff that arrived with acid and got pumped into our DNA, opened more doors and passages that take time to become apparent. The most recent update on bee colony destruction contains bee techniques I notice I’m independently using for my own rubbish disposal.
Important note: Forget not the wise words of young Daniel Cohn-Bendit, of the 1968 troubles in France, as he stepped off a plane to have reporters with microphones thrust at him for his opinion on blah, blah, blah. “You might just as well ask the next guy in the line behind me,” said Danny, “We don’t have leaders like that any more.” That happens to be the exact meaning of Jamahirya, the masses, the “poor people,” who “line up to throw their votes into the ballot box like pieces of waste paper into the trash can.” [Mu'ammar Qadhafi, The Green Book.] See how dangerous this guy is? That’s without even counting his 142 tons of gold, and the African gold dinar proposed, and largely accepted, by many African countries. (And for G_d’s sake don’t let any mention of the $50,000 state loan for every getting married couple out; it’ll only have everyone comparing their own situation. Concentrate on protecting the civilian population by blasting them with a hundred plus missiles.)
Soldier on. The best is yet to come, etcetera, worse things happen at sea. Masha’allah. Plant some potatoes. Good luck.
Mar 16, 2009
The Grand Design
“Who will provide the grand design
What is yours and what is mine?
There is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here.” Eagles – The Last Resort
*******
http://www.breadwithcircus.com/ March 7th, 2009
…I want to send people back to something I wrote in October. This piece may help you to get a better sense of why we're in a depression, and why it's all the fault of firms like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and other mafia-style organizations known as investment banks.
Explaining the Credit-Crisis: Why The Bailout Won't Work
People don't seem to understand the conditions that have led to what is being called the "Credit-Crisis. "I've been doing a lot of research on this and I think that I have a pretty good handle on what really happened here, so I'm going to try to explain it in a way that people unfamiliar with the disastrous practices of Wall Street can easily understand. It's complicated, but bear with me.
First, banks and other agencies began issuing what have been called sub-prime loans. These were mostly mortgages with really low interest rates. The loans were structured so that the people who took them out would have very low payments for the first eighteen months or two years of the agreement, but much higher payments after that. In many cases these loans were given to people who had no income, no job, no assets, and no ability to make payments once the higher rates kicked in. However, because of the time-lag between the issuing of the loans, and the day when payments would inevitably stop, firms realized that they had a brief window of opportunity to turn temporarily valuable loan papers into billions of dollars.
Enter the Collateralized Debt Obligation. (CDO) Firms would carve the sub-prime loan debts that they owned into pieces and repackage them as a product called a CDO. A CDO would have little slivers of all sorts of different loans pieced together. A CDO might consist of 1% of Mary's second mortgage on a house in San Diego, 1% of Manuel's car-loan in Atlanta, 1% of Mohammed's mortgage on a house in Kansas City, and 1% of the money that Acme Widgets Inc. borrowed when they wanted expand their factory in Pittsburgh.
Even though the firms knew that many of their loans would and could never be repaid, because of the time-lag between when the loans were good and when they went bust, the firms could temporarily list their CDO's as assets. Because of this, it was in the interest of firms to issue as many dodgy loans as possible, in order to create as many CDO's as possible, in order to hold as many assets as possible. Firms began buying and selling their CDO's and using them as collateral when taking out loans of their own.
Enter the Credit-Default Swap. (CDS) Firms holding CDO's made deals with highly-rated firms. (Companies with good credit ratings like the now nationalized AIG) The small firm would pay the bigger firm to co-sign with them on a very large loan, often from a privately owned bank called the Federal Reserve. The small firms would list the income they were making on their CDO's as collateral, and then make a payment to the large firm for their golden signature. Having a large firm with a good credit rating as co-signer, dubious firms were able to borrow at astronomical rates, in some cases at a ratio of up to 40 times of what the CDO's were (temporarily) worth.
Big firms saw windfall profits through their ability to sell their signature to smaller firms. Smaller firms borrowed tens of billions of electronic dollars at low interest rates from the Federal Reserve Bank, among others. The stocks of the firms involved in the scheme went through the roof as they were able to show massive amounts of money on their balance sheets. A handful of CEO's made billions of dollars.
Now the chain reaction. The time-lag has caught up to us, and the higher payments on the sub-prime loans have kicked in.
People can't make these payments, so one of the slivers in a CDO package, then another and another becomes worthless.
The value of the CDO is compromised, but the firm who holds it had already borrowed an astronomical amount of money against it. With nothing coming in from these now worthless CDO's, firms holding them no longer have enough income to make payments on their debts. Since the smaller firm can't meet its debt obligations, the company that co-signed the CDS deal with it has to pay. The larger firm, which has made many CDS deals finds themselves owning the debts of many smaller firms, and they have to "write-down" their profits. Stock prices dive and some firms go bankrupt while others are nationalized.
Now the final piece. These large firms are the ones who have been lending money to regular people, regular businesses, and your bank. Perhaps your RRSP or 401K has put part of your life savings into some of these firms' stock. Now the big firms can't make loans anymore, they have diverted all of their assets to making payments on the bad debts they hold. It is all that many of these firms can do to avoid going bankrupt themselves. One fails, then another, and the problem is compounded. There is very little money available now for people to get a loan to do anything at all, from buying a house, to sending their kids to college or buying new infrastructure for their businesses.
The suggested solution to this problem has been for the US treasury to give troubled firms a "bailout", but that's not even going to come close to solving the problem. With interest factored in, there are tens, or maybe even hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of bad debts out there. The bailout, if it were passed, would do very little to solve the problem, though perhaps it would delay the inevitable collapse of the credit markets until after the US election.
Personally I think that the bailout is just a scheme for Bush to loot the treasury as a parting gift to the US...he did this to the other companies he bankrupted earlier in his career. A better option than the bailout would be for the US government to nationalize the Federal Reserve Bank, but that's a discussion for another day.
Really, things are way worse than the media is letting on. Wall Street bet your house and mine, and now everybody loses.
There are some monumental days in our near future. The entire financial system is about to be re-organized. Think of the last days of the Soviet Union. It could only be a matter of weeks before the American System comes crashing down. If this happens, try to remember that the money being played with is actually an illusion, and that troubled times will pass.
On a positive note, the destructive ideologies of the "Free-Market" and "Neo-Liberalism" are about to be completely discredited. I hope that whatever financial system rises up from the ashes will be more principled, transparent, and equitable for everyone.
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BEIJING, China -- Sources at the United States Embassy in Beijing China have just CONFIRMED that the United States of America has tendered to China a written agreement which grants to the People's Republic of China, an option to exercise Eminent Domain within the USA, as collateral for China's continued purchase of US Treasury Notes and existing US Currency reserves.
The written agreement was brought to Beijing by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was formalized and agreed-to during her recent trip to China.
This means that in the event the US Government defaults on its financial obligations to China, the Communist Government of China would be permitted to physically take -- inside the USA -- land, buildings, factories, perhaps even entire cities - to satisfy the financial obligations of the US government.
http://www.rense.com/general85/give.htm
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/13/china-us-economy
Tania Branigan in Beijing guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 March 2009 13.42 GMT
The many gestures of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao during the press conference to mark the closing session today of the annual National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
Photograph: Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images
China is worried about its vast United States treasury holdings, premier Wen Jiabao said today, urging Washington to safeguard their value.
Wen also pledged to expand the country's stimulus package if necessary, as Beijing undertakes what he admitted was the difficult task of shoring up growth.
His remarks came ahead of the meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in London this weekend to lay the groundwork for next month's G20 summit on the global downturn.
Beijing wants to head off protectionism and pressure for further appreciation of the yuan, which would cripple its plummeting export sector. It is also pressing for restructuring of the International Monetary Fund to pay more attention to the interests of developing countries.
While relations with the US are broadly stable, there was displeasure when treasury secretary Timothy Geithner said President Barack Obama believed China was manipulating its currency. The administration subsequently rowed back from the remarks.
This week also saw a spat between the two countries when America accused the Chinese navy of harassing one of its surveillance ships in international waters in the South China Sea. Beijing alleged that the US vessel was operating illegally.
Speaking at his annual press conference at the close of China's parliament, Wen said: "We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I'm a little bit worried."
He called on Washington "to honour its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets". China had worked to diversify its $2tn-worth of foreign exchange reserves, although it remains the single largest holder of US government debt, which accounts for about half of its stockpile.
Washington needs to continue selling treasury notes to fund its $787bn stimulus package. Last month, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urged Beijing to maintain its stock as she visited China.
"They are worried about forever-rising deficits, which may devalue treasuries by pushing interest rates higher," Frank Gong, a JP Morgan economist, told Reuters. "Inside China there has been a lot of debate about whether they should continue to buy treasuries."
Any change would be gradual because abrupt action would punish the dollar – damaging the value of existing holdings and further hitting the sale of goods to the US, its biggest export market.
Wen said it would be difficult but possible to reach China's 8% growth target. Independent economists suggest the figure could be as low as 5% – enviable for most major economies, but potentially too low to keep unemployment down.
Beijing announced a 4tn yuan (about £400bn) plan in November, but Wen promised: "We have prepared enough ammunition and we can launch new economic stimulus policies at any time."
He said years of growth and prudent management had left more leeway to run a larger fiscal deficit and take on more debt. "The most direct, powerful and effective way to deal with the current financial crisis is to increase fiscal spending – the quicker the better," he said.
The premier acknowledged that unemployment was a "very serious" problem but said the country was still stable.
"I really believe we will be able to walk out of the shadow of the financial crisis at an early date," he said. "After this trial, I believe the Chinese economy will show greater vitality."
He promised to focus on job creation and give more help to smaller companies, which he said generated 90% of Chinese new employment. Many economists think the government has done too little to aid entrepreneurs.
Figures released this week show a mixed picture for the Chinese economy, with exports slumping by more than 25% in February and retail sales weakening, but a sustained surge in bank lending which some analysts believe offers hope of a recovery.
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Eminent Domain
According to news reports the main item on Hillary Clinton’s discussions with China was the agreement of the Chinese government to continue to support US debt which it holds. What undertakings were given by Ms. Clinton to protect the value of those holdings was not specified.
http://www.rense.com/general85/give.htm
FEDS GRANT EMINENT DOMAIN AS COLLATERAL TO CHINA FOR U.S. DEBTS
BEIJING, China -- Sources at the United States Embassy in Beijing China have just CONFIRMED that the United States of America has tendered to China a written agreement which grants to the People's Republic of China, an option to exercise Eminent Domain within the USA, as collateral for China's continued purchase of US Treasury Notes and existing US Currency reserves.
The written agreement was brought to Beijing by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was formalized and agreed-to during her recent trip to China.
This means that in the event the US Government defaults on its financial obligations to China, the Communist Government of China would be permitted to physically take -- inside the USA -- land, buildings, factories, perhaps even entire cities - to satisfy the financial obligations of the US government.
Put simply, the feds have now actually mortgaged the physical land and property of all citizens and businesses in the United States. They have given to a foreign power, their Constitutional power to "take" all of our property, as actual collateral for continued Chinese funding of US deficit spending and the continued carrying of US national debt…
Our federal government has now granted to China, this power to "take"our homes and businesses in the event the US Gov't defaults on its debts. Let's play this out as a worst case scenario. . . .
The US Gov't goes belly-up and China comes in and says, "they owed us $2 Trillion in Treasury Notes and another $2 Trillion in actual cash money which is now worthless. We are taking the entire state of Hawaii and the entire state of California in lieu of this bad debt. "
With the stroke of a Chinese chop stick, Hawaii and California -- all the land and buildings in those states -- are now owned by China.
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“In early February nine U.S. States began the process of re- asserting their Sovereignty pursuant to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the US Constitution; declaring null and void any actions by Congress that violated the Constitution.
The states took action to make certain the feds couldn't give away cities or the states themselves!” Rense
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