Nothingknown

In trials of criminal cases in England, a small country on the nearer edge of Europe, over the Atlantic Ocean, the previous record of the accused, the defendant, can not be mentioned during the trial. It would be impossible, or at least very difficult, not to be influenced by the knowledge that the defendant has many previous convictions for check forgery and mugging old ladies for their pensions. It would be difficult, that is to say, to arrive at a fair and objective conclusion as to whether they’re guilty of the particular crime they’re on trial for. When the hearing of all the evidence is finished, however, and the time has come for sentencing, the judge will turn to the police representative at the trial and ask “Any previous convictions?” That seems fair. It may be prejudicial to the accused to know of their record during the proceedings, but when the judge has to decide on a penalty, then whether this is an old lag who does this all the time, or a decent upstanding citizen guilty of an unfortunate lapse, then it’s worth asking about previous convictions. The police response will be either to read a list of previous convictions, or to say “Nothing known.” This may be interpreted as meaning “God only knows what else they may have done and been convicted of, but we’ve done a search, and we didn’t find anything,” a cautious and noncommittal answer. The standard form of political discussion in America, (and not only America, of course) is when Mr. A makes a statement, that, let us say, water is wet, or that when things fall they fall downwards, is for Mr. B to attack Mr. A personally. Mr. B may be employed by some powerful entity but is not obliged to reveal that. Mr. A’s intelligence and academic record, his morals and sexual escapades, his acquaintance with criminal elements will all be catalogued. They may of course be entirely invented. Whether his statement is correct or not, whether water is really wet or not will be entirely ignored, though Mr. B may perhaps refer tangentially to the “dry water” recently produced by a certain company, or the secret weapon produced by a famous terrorist group that makes things fall upwards. These are smaller supports, however. The main effort goes into the total destruction of Mr. A. Politics in practice is entirely adversarial. It makes a better show. To be anonymous, to operate covered by a nickname, strikes some people as suspicious. “Why can’t you come out openly and say ‘I’m Joe Bloggs, of Seaview, Nebraska, a plumber by trade’ and have done with it” they ask. Because you will be tempted to slip into the standard “Ah yes, we know about those people in Nebraska” and slip back into the old routine is the answer. It comes down to what happened to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red,” back in the scorching sixties. Coming down the steps of an arriving airliner, he found a journalist’s microphone thrust in his face with the question “What did he think of yadder yadder yadder?” “You might just as well ask the next guy behind me in the line,” Danny replied. “We don’t have leaders like that any more.” So there ye go. We don’t have leaders like that any more. Whether I am old or young, black or white, male or female, incarcerated for life or in the middle of a round the world yacht race is none of your business.

Reality bites again

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/

August 19, 2008

The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: The feeble American response to Russia’s assertion of power in the Caucasus of Central Asia was appropriate, since, according to James Howard Kunstler, the United States’ claims of influence in that part of the world are laughable. Read on...

REALITY BITES AGAIN by James Howard Kunstler

The U.S. had taken advantage of temporary confusion in Russia, during the ten-year-long post-Soviet-collapse interval, and set up a client government in Georgia, complete with military advisors, sales of weapons, and even the promise of club membership in the Western alliance known as NATO. These blandishments were all in the service of the Baku-to-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which was designed specifically to drain the oil region around the Caspian Basin with an outlet on the Mediterranean, avoiding unfriendly nations all along the way.

At the time this gambit was first set up, in the early 1990s, there was some notion (or wish, really) among the so-called western powers that the Caspian would provide an end-run around OPEC and the Arabs, as well as the Persians, and deliver all the oil that the US and Europe would ever need – a foolish wish and a dumb gambit, as things have turned out.

For one thing, the latterly explorations of this very old oil region – first opened to drilling in the 19th century – proved somewhat disappointing. U.S. officials had been touting it as like unto “another Saudi Arabia” but the oil actually produced from the new drilling areas of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the other Stans turned out to be preponderantly heavy-and-sour crudes, in smaller quantities than previously dreamed-of, and harder to transport across the extremely challenging terrain to even get to the pipeline head in Baku.

Meanwhile, Russia got its house in order under the non-senile, non-alcoholic Vladimir Putin, and woke up along about 2007 to find itself the leading oil and natural gas producer in the world.

Among the various consequences of this was Russia’s reemergence as a new kind of world power – an energy resource power, with the energy destiny of Europe pretty much in its hands. Also, meanwhile, the USA had set up other client states in the ring of former Soviet republics along Russia’s southern underbelly, complete with U.S. military bases, while fighting active engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, if this wasn’t the dumbest, vainest move in modern geopolitical history!

It’s one thing that U.S. foreign policy wonks imagined that Russia would remain in a coma forever, but the idea that we could encircle Russia strategically with defensible bases in landlocked mountainous countries halfway around the world...? You have to ask what were they smoking over at the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSC?

So, this asinine policy has now come to grief. Not only does Russia stand to gain control over the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline, but we now have every indication that they will bring the states on its southern flank back into an active sphere of influence, and there is really not a damn thing that the U.S. can pretend to do about it.

We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order – waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away.

Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America.

So, as the vacation season winds down, this country greets a new reality. We miscalculated in Western and Central Asia. Russia still “owns” that part of the world. Are we going to extend our current land wars there into the even more distant and landlocked Stan-nations? At some point, as we face financial and military exhaustion, we have to ask ourselves if we can even successfully evacuate our personnel from the far-flung bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

This must be an equally sobering moment for Europe, and an additional reason for the recent plunge in the relative value of the Euro, for Europe is now at the mercy of Russia in terms of staying warm in the winter, running their kitchen stoves, and keeping the lights on. Russia also exerts substantial financial leverage over the U.S. in all the dollars and securitized U.S. debt paper it holds. In effect, Russia can shake the U.S. banking system at will now by threatening to dump its dollar holdings.

The American banking system may not need a shove from Russia to fall on its face. It’s effectively dead now, just lurching around zombie-like from one loan “window” to the next pretending to “borrow” capital – while handing over shreds of its moldy clothing as “collateral” to the Federal Reserve. The entire US, beyond the banks, is becoming a land of the walking dead. Business is dying, home-ownership has become a death dance, whole regions are turning into wastelands of “for sale” signs, empty parking lots, vacant buildings, and dashed hopes. And all this beats a path directly to a failure of collective national imagination. We really don’t know what’s going on.

The fantasy that we can sustain our influence nine thousand miles away, when we can’t even get our act together in Ohio is just a dark joke. One might state categorically that it would be a salubrious thing for America to knock off all its vaunted “dreaming” and just wake up.

Until next time,

James Howard Kunstler for The Daily Reckoning