http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m47991&hd=&size=1&l=e
Mutant Seeds for Mesopotamia by Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D. October 15, 2008
One would think that Iraqi farmers, now prospering under "freedom" and "democracy," would be able to plant the seeds of their choosing, but that choice, under little-known Order 81, would be illegal.
But first, it is important to set the context. Most people have never heard of the infamous "100 Orders," but they help explain why the majority of Iraqis remain opposed to foreign occupation. The 100 Orders allow multinational corporations to basically privatize an entire nation, and this degree of foreign and private control has not been witnessed since the days of the British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties.
A few examples of the 100 Orders are illuminating:
Order 39 allows for the tax-free remittance of all corporate profits.
Order 17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, immunity from Iraq's laws.
Orders 57 and 77 ensure the implementation of the orders by placing U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector general in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations. (1)
Back to one of the most blatant orders of all: Order 81. Under this mandate, Iraq's commercial farmers must now buy "registered seeds." These are normally imported by Monsanto, Cargill and the World Wide Wheat Company. Unfortunately, these registered seeds are "terminator" seeds, meaning "sterile." Imagine if all human men were infertile, and in order to reproduce women needed to buy sperm cells at a sperm bank. In agricultural terms, terminator seeds represent the same kind of sterility.
Terminator seeds have no agricultural value other than creating corporate monopolies. The Sierra Club, more of a mainstream "conservation" organization than a radical "environmentalist" one, makes the exact same case:"This technology would protect the intellectual property interests of the seed company by making the seeds from a genetically engineered crop plant sterile, unable to germinate. Terminator would make it impossible for farmers to save seed from a crop for planting the next year, and would force them to buy seed from the supplier. In the third world, this inability to save seed could be a major, perhaps fatal, burden on poor farmers." (2)
What makes this Order 81 even more outrageous is that Iraqi farmers have been saving wheat and barley seeds since at least 4000 BC, when irrigated agriculture first emerged, and probably even to about 8000 BC, when wheat was first domesticated. Mesopotamia's farmers have now been trumped by white-smocked, corporate bio-engineers from Florida who strive to replace hundreds of natural varieties with a handful of genetically scrambled hybrids.
Where does such hubris come from? It comes from the entire mission surrounding the invasion of Iraq, which, upon closer inspection, had been planned years in advance by a faction of "neo-cons" who adopted Leon Trotsky's glorification of the state, his theory "permanent revolution," and his goal of exporting revolution worldwide. The neo-con revolution aims to alter the economic, political and cultural foundations of nations on the other side of the planet (rejecting old-fashioned notions of self-determination, popular sovereignty and even the nation-state system). This mission includes the transformation of agriculture and the establishment of "food control" over local populations.
Order 81 fits into this revolutionary program, and it is quite diabolical upon closer inspection. First, it forces Iraq's commercial farmers to use registered terminator seeds (the "protected variety"). Then it defines natural seeds as illegal (the "infringing variety"), in a classic Orwellian turn of language.
This is so incredible that it must be re-stated: the exotic genetically scrambled seeds are the "protected variety" and the indigenous seeds are the "infringing variety."
As Jeffrey Smith explains, author of Order 81: Re-Engineering Iraqi Agriculture:
"To qualify for PVP [Plant Variety Protection], seeds have to meet the following criteria: they must be 'new, distinct, uniform and stable'... it is impossible for the seeds developed by the people of Iraq to meet these criteria. Their seeds are not 'new' as they are the product of millennia of development. Nor are they 'distinct'. The free exchange of seeds practiced for centuries ensures that characteristics are spread and shared across local varieties. And they are the opposite of 'uniform' and 'stable' by the very nature of their biodiversity." (3)
Order 81 comes with the Orwellian title of "Plant Variety Protection." Any self-respecting scientist knows, however, that imposing biological standardization accomplishes the exact opposite: It reduces biodiversity and threatens species. So Order 81 comes with an Orwellian title and consists of Orwellian provisions.
Jeffrey Smith peels away the layers of mischief behind Order 81, finding it nonsensical that six varieties of wheat have been developed for Iraq:"Three will be used for farmers to grow wheat that is made into pasta; three seed strains will be for 'breadmaking.'
Pasta? According to the 2001 World Food Programme report on Iraq, 'Dietary habits and preferences included consumption of large quantities and varieties of meat, as well as chicken, pulses, grains, vegetables, fruits and dairy products.' No mention of lasagna. Likewise, a quick check of the Middle Eastern cookbook on my kitchen shelves, while not exclusively Iraqi, reveals a grand total of no pasta dishes listed within it.
There can be only two reasons why 50 per cent of the grains being developed are for pasta. One, the US intends to have so many American soldiers and businessmen in Iraq that it is orienting the country's agriculture around feeding not 'Starving Iraqis' but 'Overfed Americans'. Or, and more likely, because the food was never meant to be eaten inside Iraq at all…" (4)
Just in case Iraqi farmer can't read, Order 81 enforces the new monopoly on seeds with the jackboot. Order 81 makes this clear in its own text, buried at the bottom of the document, as is most screw-you fine print:"The court may order the confiscation of the infringing variety as well as the materials and tools substantially used in the infringement of the protected variety. The court may also decide to destroy the infringing variety as well as the materials and tools or to dispose of them in any noncommercial purpose." (5)
Order 81 is about power and profit, but it disguises itself as humanitarian legislation.
Topping it all off, the entire document puts on rather magisterial airs. It was signed by L. Paul Bremer himself, with his own hand, and presumably with his own pen:
"Pursuant to my authority as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority…"
Like the Roman Proconsuls, Paul Bremer also spent a year in the provinces, governing the so-called barbarians…
The above is an excerpt from Andrew Bosworth’s new book: Biotech Empire: The Untold Future of Food, Pills, and Sex, available at Amazon.
-Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Government at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
Notes
1. Uruknet Report, "Have You Ever Heard of Bremer's 100 Orders?" 11 April 2008.
2. Institutional Report, Genetic Engineering at a Historic Crossroads," The Sierra Club Genetic Engineering Committee Report, March 2001.
3. Jeffrey Smith. "ORDER 81: Re-Engineering Iraqi Agriculture - The Ultimate War Crime: Breaking the Agricultural Cycle." Global Research and The Ecologist, 27 August 2005, Vol 35, No. 1.
4. Jeffrey Smith. "ORDER 81: Re-Engineering Iraqi Agriculture - The Ultimate War Crime: Breaking the Agricultural Cycle." Global Research and The Ecologist, 27 August 2005, Vol 35, No. 1.
5 CPA/ORD/26 April 2004/81, p. 27.
Article nr. 47991 sent on 16-oct-2008 04:02 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=47991
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Uruknet .
Oct 21, 2008
Oct 7, 2008
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind
The US Senate vote for the new, greatly improved, hundred page version of the Three Stooges bailout plan presented by Mr. Paulson was irrelevant.
The constitution of the United States establishes that appropriations (i.e., providing money) “appropriations bills must originate in the House"… the system was designed to require boondoggles to be approved first by those representatives who are up for election every two years.
The Senate, mostly very rich men nursing a desire to become president, like the House of Lords, is the senior body to which the appropriations of the House of Representatives, like the House of Commons, are delivered for their approval, change, or rejection, but that senior house can not, by itself, initiate spending.
That President George Bush could openly threaten to declare martial law, according to the accounts of several congressmen, is the price to be paid for not holding three dozen public hangings in Washington, DC, in having the Supreme Court halting the Florida recount, over which they had no jurisdiction, at the time of the original establishment of the Unitary Presidency in 2000, and generally acquiescing, even by silence, in all the scams that followed, of which this, “a historic swindle of the taxpayer” according to one Republican, is only the latest and largest.
Congressmen report huge numbers of outraged communications from their constituents, over ninety per cent against the bailout bill, ("Emails are running about 50-50" said one congressman "between No and Hell No.") but then nobody wants to see martial law or doubts President Bush’s willingness to declare it. So much for democracy.
“The world,” explained Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN, “no longer has the capacity to absorb fake U.S. dollars.” That may be true, but the only consistent strategy visible from America is the printing of ever larger numbers of those dollars in the faith that their acceptance can be enforced at gun point. Only the kindness of strangers stands between Wile E Coyote and the canyon floor.
Decoupled: No Asian banks have failed or needed rescue.
Reduction to farce is achieved by the slow realization by congressmen and anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the American taxpayer is not the main holder of the funny money mortgage backed securities, and the $700 billion will be paid, not to them, but straight to the main holders of those funny money securities to stop them suing the Wall Street Investment banks that sold them to them, so that the whole exercise is a kind of hush money. Indeed, suggestions have already been made that the scheme may have originated with those same holders of the funny money securities as a condition, or they would sue the investment banks. Like China, for example, who will be paid a large slice of the cash.
______________________________________________
Not One Dime! By Mike Whitney 01/10/08 - "ICH" - -- The mystery has been solved.
For nearly a year, we have been asking ourselves why the investors and foreign banks that bought up hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from US investment banks have not taken legal action against these same banks or initiated a boycott of US financial products to prevent more people from getting ripped off?
Now we know the answer. It's because, behind the scenes, Henry Paulson and Co. were working out a deal to dump the whole trillion dollar mess on the US taxpayer. That's what this whole $700 billion boondoggle is all about; wiping out the massive debts that were generated in the biggest incident of fraud in history. Rep Brad Sherman explained it like this last night to Larry Kudlow:
"It (The bill) provides hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts to foreign investors. It provides no real control of Paulson's power. There is a critique board but not really a board that can step in and change what he does. It's a $700 billion program run by a part-time temporary employee and there is no limit on million dollar a month salaries....... It's very clear. The Bank of Shanghai can transfer all of its toxic assets to the Bank of Shanghai of Los Angeles which can then sell them the next day to the Treasury. I had a provision to say if it wasn't owned by an American entity even a subsidiary, but at least an entity in the US, the Treasury can't buy it. It was rejected.
"The bill is very clear. Assets now held in China and London can be sold to US entities on Monday and then sold to the Treasury on Tuesday. Paulson has made it clear he will recommend a veto of any bill that contained a clear provision that said if Americans did not own the asset on September 20th that it can't be sold to the Treasury. Hundreds of billions of dollars are going to bail out foreign investors. They know it, they demanded it and the bill has been carefully written to make sure it can happen."
So, why hasn't the Treasury Secretary explained the real purpose of the bailout to the American people? Could it be that he knows that his $700 billion bailout would end up like the Hindenburg, vanishing in sheets of flames?
This is a terrible bill, and it confers absolute authority on one of the central players in the scandal, Henry Paulson, who was the Chairman of Goldman Sachs at the time this MBS garbage was being peddled around the planet to credulous investors. Now Paulson will be in a position to buy up any "troubled asset" he that he believes could pose a threat to "financial market stability". That's just great! It is clear that Paulson will use his unchecked powers to wipe the slate clean and remove any possibility that foreign investors will take legal action against the real perpetrators; the giant Wall Street investment banks.
So, how do the American people like paying off Paulson and Co. future legal bills? Is that how taxpayer revenue should be spent instead of on education, health care and infrastructure?
There's another reason why Paulson is working so hard to pass the Bailout for Tycoons Bill; it's a windfall for the banking giants. Citi did not simply pick up Wachovia by happenstance nor did JP Morgan purchase Washington Mutual because it wanted to perform its civic duty and prevent a full-system meltdown. No way; they were clearly aware of the way the wind was blowing. In fact, neither case manages to pass the smell test.
This is from AP's Sara Lepro: "Citigroup agreed Monday to purchase Wachovia's banking operations for $2.1 billion in a deal arranged by federal regulators, making the Charlotte-based bank the latest casualty of the widening global financial crisis.
"The deal greatly expands Citigroup's retail franchise—giving it a total of more than 4,300 U.S. branches and $600 billion in deposits—and secures its place among the U.S. banking industry's Big Three, along with Bank of America Corp. and JP Morgan Chase & Co.
"But it comes at a cost: Citigroup Inc. said it will slash its quarterly dividend in half to 16 cents. It also will dilute existing shareholders by selling $10 billion in common stock to shore up its capital position.
"In addition to assuming $53 billion worth of debt, Citigroup will absorb up to $42 billion of losses from Wachovia's $312 billion loan portfolio, with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. agreeing to cover any remaining losses. Citigroup also will issue $12 billion in preferred stock and warrants to the FDIC.
(Ed; Here's the punch line) "The government's proposed $700 billion rescue plan for financial institution, being voted on Monday by the House of Representatives, likely will prove of added benefit to Citi. While the plan broadly aims to prevent banks from profiting on the sale of troubled assets to the government, there is an exception made for assets acquired in a merger or buyout, or from companies that have filed for bankruptcy. This could allow Citigroup to sell toxic mortgages and other assets it gained from Wachovia for a higher price than the bank actually paid for them." ("Citigroup to buy Wachovia banking operations")
Huh?!? So Citi not only gets an army of depositors (the cheapest capital available!) but, at the same time, is going to be able to dump it's mortgage-backed junk on the taxpayer? And, guess what? The JP Morgan deal looks nearly identical.
Is this "insider baseball" or not?
Does anyone want to wager that G-Sax will also get a privileged spot at the public trough sucking up billions of taxpayer dollars to patch together its tattered balance sheet?
And what will the net result of Paulson's Bailout for Fraudsters be; more consolidation of the financial industry and the utter annihilation of local and regional banks. That's a sure thing. The mom and pop banks across the country are going to take it in the stern sheets if this bill is passed. Bet on it.
The country has no time for this cynical scavenger-hunt. The system is listing badly and we have ONE chance to get this emergency bill right. There is no way an industry rep like Henry Paulson, who has spent his entire career feathering his own nest and handing out plums to his buddies, can operate in the best interests of the American people. Paulson has got to go!
According to Bloomberg News , Sept 29:
"The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression. The Fed increased its existing currency swaps with foreign central banks by $330 billion to $620 billion to make more dollars available worldwide. The Term Auction Facility, the Fed's emergency loan program, will expand by $300 billion to $450 billion. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan are among the participating authorities.
"The crisis is reverberating through the global economy, causing stocks to plunge and forcing European governments to rescue four banks over the past two days alone." (Bloomberg)
Get it? The Fed has ALREADY brushed aside Congress's "No" vote and pumped money into the system; and look what happened.
Nothing!
Libor is still at historic highs, the Ted spread has widened to record levels and interbank lending is grinding to a standstill. There's a run on the money markets that is reducing the ability of businesses to turn over short term debt. The system is shutting down, folks, and Paulson's snake oil won't help. Why throw another $700 billion down a rathole? 400 reputable economists--not the "faith based" industry hacks that work for the Bush administration--are opposed to this bailout. It has to be stopped.
This is a "real time" meltdown and it requires real solutions, not bailouts for foreign creditors and Wall Street Goliaths. (Foreign victims of this scam will have to sue the perpetrators not the US taxpayer) As Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, points out, we are on the verge of the "mother of all bank runs", a cross-border savaging of reserves that would crash the entire financial system. Here's Roubini on the next shoe to drop:
"The next step of this panic could become the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar plus of the cross border short-term interbank liabilities of the US banking and financial system as foreign banks as starting to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to US financial institutions; such a silent cross border bank run has already started as foreign banks are worried about the solvency of US banks and are starting to reduce their exposure. And if this run accelerates - as it may now - a total meltdown of the US financial system could occur. We are thus now in a generalized panic mode and back to the risk of a systemic meltdown of the entire financial system. And US and foreign policy authorities seem to be clueless about what needs to be done next. Maybe they should today start with a coordinated 100 bps reduction in policy rates in all the major economies in the world to show that they are starting to seriously recognize and address this rapidly worsening financial crisis." (Nouriel Roubini's EconoMonitor)
We have no time for Paulson's self serving shenanigans. This is not how one goes about recapitalizing the banking system or bringing stability to the financial system. It's time to get rid of the lobbyists and banking vermin and bring in the economists and the people with real experience. Paulson's plan is loser. Not one dime should go to this latest Wall Street swindle. No bailout!
_______________________________________________
THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL AND THE MELTDOWN by Dr. Ron Paul
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
[On September 25] the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”
Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty, Ron Paul for The Daily Reckoning
Editor’s Note: Congressman Ron Paul of Texas enjoys a national reputation as the premier advocate for liberty in politics today. Dr. Paul is the leading spokesman in Washington for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies based on commodity-backed currency.
Dr. Paul is known among both his colleagues in Congress and his constituents for his consistent voting record in the House of Representatives. He never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the “one exception to the Gang of 535” on Capitol Hill.
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
[On September 25] the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”
Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty, Ron Paul for The Daily Reckoning
Editor’s Note: Congressman Ron Paul of Texas enjoys a national reputation as the premier advocate for liberty in politics today. Dr. Paul is the leading spokesman in Washington for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies based on commodity-backed currency.
Dr. Paul is known among both his colleagues in Congress and his constituents for his consistent voting record in the House of Representatives. He never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the “one exception to the Gang of 535” on Capitol Hill.
_________________________________________________
Appendix - Chan Akya's table
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JJ04Dj01.html
In contrast, the combined assets/gross domestic product (GDP) of the top three US banks is only about 35%. Isn't that wonderful? Thanks to decades of mollycoddling their domestic industries, you now have a situation where European banks - many of whom Asians haven't even heard of - are now bigger than the GDPs of their home countries. Why does the ratio of assets over GDP matter? Because to pay for failed banks to foreign creditors and all that, governments have to run a surplus to GDP for a while.
Let's take an example. Iceland moved to guarantee its banking sector even as its top three banks are about 13 times the size of its GDP. In other words, if the government runs a budget surplus of 10% of GDP (massively contractionary fiscal policy), it would still take a trifling 130 years or so to pay for all its borrowings needed. For Switzerland, this figure is a mere 100 years, while for those like Belgium, that ratio stands at some 75 years. Remember, these are just figures for the bank losses, not counting all the other stuff that will be lost as a result of the failure of the banking system; for example the industrial base, trade and so on.
Oct 1, 2008
La citta dolente
A point of light has emerged from the US Treasury as to how they decided on the figure of $700 billion for the bailout plan. This was not decided on any "data points," apparently, that is, no one sat down and figured out what might be a reasonable price to pay for all that toxic mortgage backed debt. Instead, they simply said "Think of a really big number,” which $700 billion certainly is, roughly equal to spending a million dollars every day from the birth of Christ until now, ($732 billion.)
America's internal and external debt exceeds $60 trillion, over 400% of the country's annual GDP of a bit over $14 trillion.
At last count the amount borrowed by the US government between 2000 and 2008 at $1.35 trillion is greater that the amount borrowed by the US government between 1776 and 2000 at $1.25 trillion.
According to figures released in the quarterly review of the Bank for International Settlements (pp A103) in September the total notional amount of outstanding derivatives in all categories rose 15% to a mindboggling $596 TRILLION as of December 2007.
Arithmetic is as unforgiving as the desert or the ice sheet. Plato was right. Check Jack London’s story “To light a fire.”
The cockles of the heart warm to the Pathans, with air strikes called down on their wedding parties by red haired twerps, even of lofty parentage. Why exactly we’re there for some guy who left with no forwarding address is a question too obvious to have loomed yet, but at least the Pakistanis are firing back. The Hindu Kush is about the last place on earth I’d choose to fight in and the Pathans the very last people I’d want to be fighting. Read your Kipling. The Pathans haven’t changed; they’ve just acquired a lot more to take revenge for.
Republicans calling the Three Stooges bailout plan “a historic swindle of the taxpayer” leaves me without a lot to add. I’d always point to the US reneging on its promise to remove the North Koreans from the Sponsors of Terrorism list, resulting in the NK’s rebuilding the nuclear plant they’d demolished, as the true root of the problem, destroying what was a lonely looking but genuine triumph of diplomacy. Bad faith is not a foundation for anything except extreme caution, and perhaps sterner measures, in dealing with serial scam artists. The financial mess is the same translated into money.
I’m always fascinated by the fact that you can buy a Klashnikov and ammo for about $10 almost anywhere in Africa, but you can’t get a decent meal for ten times that amount within a day’s travel. Is that our future I’m looking at?
Meanwhile, China, which does nothing by halves, has taken off all of this week to celebrate Chinese national day, a period of rest and relaxation after recent efforts. Stockmarkets are closed, and so no hints of future action can be gained from there. About a quarter of humanity is celebrating Eid Ul-Fitri, the feast at the end of Ramadan. Eid mubarak. Happy Feast.
Some elements of the bail out plan are quite sensible. AIG is an enormous insurance company with business all over the world, and working one’s way through all their divisions and selling them off to other insurance companies should produce a healthy dollop of capital. It is, of course, the equivalent of selling the family silver but the Brits have been doing that for years. The BBC even has a long running program where you can watch people auctioning off their treasures to buy a video camera.
On the other hand, the revelation by Mr. Nuri Al-Maliki, prime minister of Iraq, that in recent negotiations with the Americans on the end date for the completed withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq, the US pushed hard to move this end date backward, i.e., from 2010 to 2011, by a full year “because of domestic political considerations in the US,” marks a new honest low. Just how much “blood and treasure,” American and Iraqi, those domestic considerations in the US would consume over a full year is clearly not a priority consideration.
Ignore the Puritans reaching for your guilt buttons. The adulterous lovers drift on the winds of their passions in Limbo, the threshold of Hell, but are not involved in this.
“We are going” says Mr. Dante Alighieri, of Florence, Italy “down into the suffering city, among the lost people, who cry for the second death eternally.”
The “second death” does not come, of course. “After the first death there is no other.”
America's internal and external debt exceeds $60 trillion, over 400% of the country's annual GDP of a bit over $14 trillion.
At last count the amount borrowed by the US government between 2000 and 2008 at $1.35 trillion is greater that the amount borrowed by the US government between 1776 and 2000 at $1.25 trillion.
According to figures released in the quarterly review of the Bank for International Settlements (pp A103) in September the total notional amount of outstanding derivatives in all categories rose 15% to a mindboggling $596 TRILLION as of December 2007.
Arithmetic is as unforgiving as the desert or the ice sheet. Plato was right. Check Jack London’s story “To light a fire.”
The cockles of the heart warm to the Pathans, with air strikes called down on their wedding parties by red haired twerps, even of lofty parentage. Why exactly we’re there for some guy who left with no forwarding address is a question too obvious to have loomed yet, but at least the Pakistanis are firing back. The Hindu Kush is about the last place on earth I’d choose to fight in and the Pathans the very last people I’d want to be fighting. Read your Kipling. The Pathans haven’t changed; they’ve just acquired a lot more to take revenge for.
Republicans calling the Three Stooges bailout plan “a historic swindle of the taxpayer” leaves me without a lot to add. I’d always point to the US reneging on its promise to remove the North Koreans from the Sponsors of Terrorism list, resulting in the NK’s rebuilding the nuclear plant they’d demolished, as the true root of the problem, destroying what was a lonely looking but genuine triumph of diplomacy. Bad faith is not a foundation for anything except extreme caution, and perhaps sterner measures, in dealing with serial scam artists. The financial mess is the same translated into money.
I’m always fascinated by the fact that you can buy a Klashnikov and ammo for about $10 almost anywhere in Africa, but you can’t get a decent meal for ten times that amount within a day’s travel. Is that our future I’m looking at?
Meanwhile, China, which does nothing by halves, has taken off all of this week to celebrate Chinese national day, a period of rest and relaxation after recent efforts. Stockmarkets are closed, and so no hints of future action can be gained from there. About a quarter of humanity is celebrating Eid Ul-Fitri, the feast at the end of Ramadan. Eid mubarak. Happy Feast.
Some elements of the bail out plan are quite sensible. AIG is an enormous insurance company with business all over the world, and working one’s way through all their divisions and selling them off to other insurance companies should produce a healthy dollop of capital. It is, of course, the equivalent of selling the family silver but the Brits have been doing that for years. The BBC even has a long running program where you can watch people auctioning off their treasures to buy a video camera.
On the other hand, the revelation by Mr. Nuri Al-Maliki, prime minister of Iraq, that in recent negotiations with the Americans on the end date for the completed withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq, the US pushed hard to move this end date backward, i.e., from 2010 to 2011, by a full year “because of domestic political considerations in the US,” marks a new honest low. Just how much “blood and treasure,” American and Iraqi, those domestic considerations in the US would consume over a full year is clearly not a priority consideration.
Ignore the Puritans reaching for your guilt buttons. The adulterous lovers drift on the winds of their passions in Limbo, the threshold of Hell, but are not involved in this.
“We are going” says Mr. Dante Alighieri, of Florence, Italy “down into the suffering city, among the lost people, who cry for the second death eternally.”
The “second death” does not come, of course. “After the first death there is no other.”
Sep 1, 2008
Aug 29, 2008
Wake up, America
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20631.htm
Kucinich wakes up Democratic Convention
26/08/08 DENVER -- Who lit a fire under U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich?
The Ohio Democrat went to church at the Democratic National Convention today, lighting up the 4 o’clock hour as time marched toward Sen. Hillary Clinton’s much anticipated appearance.
Kucinich preached.
I mean he preached like he’d had some lessons from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. And he woke up an audience that until that moment appeared to be mostly waiting to hear anybody else.
“We Democrats are giving America a wake-up call,” he preached. “Wake up, America. In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the neo-con artists seized the economy and have added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defense, three times more for gasoline and home heating oil, and twice what we paid for health care.”
Sleepy delegates in a half-empty arena began to take notice. A couple of them pointed.
“If there was an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating, this administration would take the gold,” Kucinich said. “World records for violations of national and international laws … we can't afford another Republican administration. Wake up, America.
“The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America. The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing. Wake up, America. The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America. They want to take your Social Security. Wake up, America.
He had them. Where was this speech when the tiny Ohio congressman was running for president? Or did we really just not pay attention?
“This administration can tap our phones. They can't tap our creative spirit,” he said. “They can open our mail. They can't open economic opportunities. They can track our every move. They lost track of the economy while the cost of food, gasoline and electricity skyrockets. They skillfully played our post-9/11 fears and allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many. Every day we get the color orange while the oil companies, the insurance companies, the speculators, the war contractors get the color green.
“Wake up, America! This is not a call for you to take a new direction from right to left. This is call for you to go from down to up. Up with the rights of workers. Up with wages.”
And Dennis Kucinich began to bounce, the way the ministers of my girlhood churches did.
“Up with fair trade. Up with creating millions of good paying jobs, rebuilding our bridges, ports and water systems,” he said, his voice rising, people rising and grinning at the Dennis Kucinich who was surprising them.
“Up with health care for all,” he said. “Up with education for all. Up with homeownership. Up with guaranteed retirement benefits. Up with peace. Up with prosperity. Up with the Democratic Party. Up with Obama-Biden!”
Hmmmmm. Did the Democrats miss something along the way from the only man with the courage to introduce a resolution in June to impeach President George W. Bush and whose speech reminded those gathered who their fight actually was with?
____________________________________
Wahyusamputra writes "As for Obama, in return for signing on to all the main programs, oath of allegiance to AIPAC, greatly increased military spending, invasion of Pakistan, support of Georgia and Poland schemes, and so forth, all his initiatives have been followed, or rather the administration's initiatives that he's signed on to, invasion of Pakistan, increased troops for Afghanistan and so on. Not that any of them are any more likely to succeed, but there is now no daylight between what Obama recommends and what the Bushies are doing. Assassination remains as likely as when Hillary hinted at it, but that 's mainly all the folks who can't abide the thought of a dark complexioned gentleman running things, and Bill and Hillary are still waiting in the wings, of course.
"And everyone agrees the great dollar rally is smoke and mirrors..."
Kucinich wakes up Democratic Convention
26/08/08 DENVER -- Who lit a fire under U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich?
The Ohio Democrat went to church at the Democratic National Convention today, lighting up the 4 o’clock hour as time marched toward Sen. Hillary Clinton’s much anticipated appearance.
Kucinich preached.
I mean he preached like he’d had some lessons from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. And he woke up an audience that until that moment appeared to be mostly waiting to hear anybody else.
“We Democrats are giving America a wake-up call,” he preached. “Wake up, America. In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the neo-con artists seized the economy and have added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defense, three times more for gasoline and home heating oil, and twice what we paid for health care.”
Sleepy delegates in a half-empty arena began to take notice. A couple of them pointed.
“If there was an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating, this administration would take the gold,” Kucinich said. “World records for violations of national and international laws … we can't afford another Republican administration. Wake up, America.
“The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America. The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing. Wake up, America. The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America. They want to take your Social Security. Wake up, America.
He had them. Where was this speech when the tiny Ohio congressman was running for president? Or did we really just not pay attention?
“This administration can tap our phones. They can't tap our creative spirit,” he said. “They can open our mail. They can't open economic opportunities. They can track our every move. They lost track of the economy while the cost of food, gasoline and electricity skyrockets. They skillfully played our post-9/11 fears and allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many. Every day we get the color orange while the oil companies, the insurance companies, the speculators, the war contractors get the color green.
“Wake up, America! This is not a call for you to take a new direction from right to left. This is call for you to go from down to up. Up with the rights of workers. Up with wages.”
And Dennis Kucinich began to bounce, the way the ministers of my girlhood churches did.
“Up with fair trade. Up with creating millions of good paying jobs, rebuilding our bridges, ports and water systems,” he said, his voice rising, people rising and grinning at the Dennis Kucinich who was surprising them.
“Up with health care for all,” he said. “Up with education for all. Up with homeownership. Up with guaranteed retirement benefits. Up with peace. Up with prosperity. Up with the Democratic Party. Up with Obama-Biden!”
Hmmmmm. Did the Democrats miss something along the way from the only man with the courage to introduce a resolution in June to impeach President George W. Bush and whose speech reminded those gathered who their fight actually was with?
____________________________________
Wahyusamputra writes "As for Obama, in return for signing on to all the main programs, oath of allegiance to AIPAC, greatly increased military spending, invasion of Pakistan, support of Georgia and Poland schemes, and so forth, all his initiatives have been followed, or rather the administration's initiatives that he's signed on to, invasion of Pakistan, increased troops for Afghanistan and so on. Not that any of them are any more likely to succeed, but there is now no daylight between what Obama recommends and what the Bushies are doing. Assassination remains as likely as when Hillary hinted at it, but that 's mainly all the folks who can't abide the thought of a dark complexioned gentleman running things, and Bill and Hillary are still waiting in the wings, of course.
"And everyone agrees the great dollar rally is smoke and mirrors..."
Aug 26, 2008
Paean for the good laborers on Labor Day
(Including all great successes, such as the Chinese Olympic Games display.)
This paean – old fashioned word for song of praise – deals with Eric Clapton, born in Ripley, Surrey, England, and why the BBC referred to him as “God” in one broadcast.
Those interested in music may remember that according to general acknowledgement, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were the two people who taught us all how to play the electric, as opposed to acoustic, guitar, and the voice of Eric "Slowhand" Clapton's guitar is unmistakable, that high singing tone that goes like a knife through butter, like a laser through a lump of tofu, and he didn't go under in the colorful seas of the sixties like Hendrix.
Those with more detailed memories may recall that “Cream,” called that because they were indisputably the cream in the heady 1960’s Carnaby Street days, consisted of Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Bruce. Clapton went on to a very successful solo career also, - who can forget "Long tall Sally,” or “Wonderful tonight”? – but more important than any of this was the fact that he carried on working as a session musician, i.e., when the local session musicians were called in to do, say a jingle for a breakfast cereal manufacturer, one of the sound technicians would nudge one of the other sound technicians and say, “Hey, you see that guy in the sports jacket who just went out? You know who that was? That was Eric Clapton.”
In this spirit of determined anonymity, it was hardly surprising that perhaps his greatest success, “Layla,” a favorite even of President George Bush, was put out as performed by “Derek and the Dominoes,” yeah, you remember them, surely! Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and other love songs, but dominated by the title track with its haunting final minor key instrumental, like Steve Miller’s Song for the Ancestors track with the ships hooting in the bay.
It was that spirit of determined anonymity, with stellar accomplishments to brag about but never mentioned, that gave him the awed recognition they owed him, and made the BBC refer to him as “God,” – yes, this is where you get in and say “Oh, I thought it was Guaranteed Overnight Delivery” - and in a sense that was the kind of attitude that his fans seemed to adopt. Everybody knew what the BBC meant, and agreed with it, and there was never, God be thanked, as there certainly would have been in these good ole US of A, an attempt to ban the program by right wing religious groups for blasphemy.
Happy Labor Day, successful laborers of the world. More power to your elbow!
This paean – old fashioned word for song of praise – deals with Eric Clapton, born in Ripley, Surrey, England, and why the BBC referred to him as “God” in one broadcast.
Those interested in music may remember that according to general acknowledgement, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were the two people who taught us all how to play the electric, as opposed to acoustic, guitar, and the voice of Eric "Slowhand" Clapton's guitar is unmistakable, that high singing tone that goes like a knife through butter, like a laser through a lump of tofu, and he didn't go under in the colorful seas of the sixties like Hendrix.
Those with more detailed memories may recall that “Cream,” called that because they were indisputably the cream in the heady 1960’s Carnaby Street days, consisted of Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Bruce. Clapton went on to a very successful solo career also, - who can forget "Long tall Sally,” or “Wonderful tonight”? – but more important than any of this was the fact that he carried on working as a session musician, i.e., when the local session musicians were called in to do, say a jingle for a breakfast cereal manufacturer, one of the sound technicians would nudge one of the other sound technicians and say, “Hey, you see that guy in the sports jacket who just went out? You know who that was? That was Eric Clapton.”
In this spirit of determined anonymity, it was hardly surprising that perhaps his greatest success, “Layla,” a favorite even of President George Bush, was put out as performed by “Derek and the Dominoes,” yeah, you remember them, surely! Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and other love songs, but dominated by the title track with its haunting final minor key instrumental, like Steve Miller’s Song for the Ancestors track with the ships hooting in the bay.
It was that spirit of determined anonymity, with stellar accomplishments to brag about but never mentioned, that gave him the awed recognition they owed him, and made the BBC refer to him as “God,” – yes, this is where you get in and say “Oh, I thought it was Guaranteed Overnight Delivery” - and in a sense that was the kind of attitude that his fans seemed to adopt. Everybody knew what the BBC meant, and agreed with it, and there was never, God be thanked, as there certainly would have been in these good ole US of A, an attempt to ban the program by right wing religious groups for blasphemy.
Happy Labor Day, successful laborers of the world. More power to your elbow!
Aug 25, 2008
Long Chen
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43635
Synopsis: Long Chen is the last chapter of the Vietnam War and both governments want it forgotten Published: August 22, 2008 Author: Andrew Nette
PHNOM PENH, Aug 22 (IPS) - It was known as the ‘secret war’, a covert operation waged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos.
And the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.
A new film, ‘The Most Secret Place on Earth’, to be released in cinemas across Europe later this year, explores this little known conflict.
The film, which previewed for the first time in Phnom Penh in mid-August, includes images of Long Chen shot by the first Western camera crew to enter the base since the communists took control of the country in 1975.
"I first got the idea to do the film when I visited the Plain of Jars in Laos in 2002," recalled Marc Eberle,36, the German director in an interview with IPS.
"You could still see the craters from the air bombing and unexploded ordnance was everywhere."
"Then I heard about Long Chen and the fact that no one had got there since the war and I thought, how do I visit and how do I make a film about it?"
Little is known about the Lao conflict despite the fact that it remains the largest and most expensive paramilitary operation ever run by the U.S.
It was completely run by the CIA using largely civilian pilots from the agency’s own airline, Air America, and mercenaries recruited from the Hmong, an ethnic tribe living in mountainous areas in central and northern Laos.
Despite being the centre of the covert operation and, at its peak, one of the world’s busiest airports with a population of 50,000 people, Long Chen’s location was never marked on any map.
"I found it bizarre that at one time this was the second biggest city in Laos and it was completely secret," Eberle says.
Long Chen remains off limits to foreigners and most Lao due to clashes with remnants of the CIA’s Hmong army. Until recently it formed part of a special administrative zone under the direct control of the Lao army.
Renewed interest in the Laos’ secret war was briefly rekindled in 2003 when two Western journalists made contact with members of the Hmong resistance, the first white people they had seen since the CIA abandoned them 27 years ago.
Although pictures from the encounter were printed in Time Asia and won a world press award, U.S. media failed to pick up the story and it died.
The decades-old conflict again made headlines last year when U.S. authorities arrested 78 year-old Vang Pao, the head of the CIA’s Hmong forces in the sixties, and indicted him on terrorism charges relating to his alleged involvement in a plot to over throw the Lao government.
Eberle also believes what happened in Laos in the sixties is relevant in that it shares strong parallels with the conflict in Iraq.
"Laos was the progenitor of the way America fights wars in the 21st century," he says.
"Outsourcing the war to private companies, gathering public support by falsifying intelligence and documents, embedded journalism and automated warfare including the use of so-called ‘smart weapons’, all these methods were first tested in Laos."
The conflict began in the late fifties, as Washington sought to counter communist Pathet Lao forces and their North Vietnamese allies who had began building the Ho Chi Minh trail through the jungles running down the eastern border of Laos.
The operation was placed under CIA control to get around Laos’ supposed political neutrality and the conditions set by the Geneva Accords.
Vang Pao, then an officer in the Royal Lao Army, was recruited in 1960 to lead the Hmong troops drafted to fight the communists, which at the peak of the fighting numbered up to 30,000.
The largest of hundreds of airstrips built by the CIA throughout Laos, Long Chen was established soon after.
The Most Secret Place examines the conflict through the stories of players involved in the covert, diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, including former diplomats, CIA officers and Air America pilots.
It also draws on critics such as Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and a reporter in Laos at the time, and Fred Branfman, an aid worker turned anti-war activist who worked to expose the conflict.
Ordinary Lao people at the receiving end of the world’s most technologically sophisticated military machine get a chance to tell their story.
Although there is a short interview with Vang Pao, the one aspect of the story not adequately dealt with is the plight of the Hmong, who bore the brunt of some of the most savage fighting. With the exception of senior officers like Vang Pao and their families, the Hmong fighters were abandoned when the U.S. pulled out.
One of the most interesting aspects of ‘The Most Secret Place’ is that it incorporates previously unused footage Eberle managed to collect, including film of actual combat missions and day-to-day life at Long Chen.
This was gathered from myriad sources, including the U.S. National Film Archive and footage held by television stations from across Europe.
"The CIA had just declassified a whole lot of material so that helped as well," he says. "The most important source was the guys who were over there filming with their little Super 8 cameras, often illegally."
This film’s analysis sets it apart from other books and documentaries on the subject, most of which justify the conflict, lauding the CIA operatives and their Air America pilots as heroes.
The reality, as Alfred McCoy says towards the end of the film, was very different. "We destroyed a whole civilisation, we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost."
The covert nature of the conflict meant that U.S. forces were able to ignore virtually all the rules of engagement operating in Vietnam. Every building was a potential target and the civilian toll was huge.
The situation grew worse in 1970 when U.S. President Nixon authorised massive B-52 bombing strikes on Laos, which remained classified information until many years later.
American planes dropped an average of one planeload of bombs on targets in Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, making it the most heavily bombed country on earth per capita in the history of warfare.
Eberle remains cagey about exactly how he managed to gain access to film at Long Chen. "It was a matter of having the right contacts," he says.
The last film crew to try and get there were caught and convicted to 15 years prison, although they were eventually freed after four weeks due to international pressure.
"After we went another UK crew tried to get there but they were caught and deported," he adds.
"There are some places in the world that have a different energy and Long Chen is one of these. You look down the runway and think this is the place were it all happened. The planes took off from here and bombed all those people."
The film, which contains aerial footage of the base as well as shots from the ground, shows Long Chen today as an overgrown airstrip surrounded by heavily forested mountains.
"It’s just an army outpost now. A small village, a couple of hundred people, soldiers and their families."
The buildings, including Californian bungalows and a number of other structures designed in sixties style, largely lie vacant and derelict.
"The golden age of Long Chen is over. It used to be the high-tech oasis for spooks in Laos. There were allegedly more antennas there than trees. Now they do not even have power."
The 2007 arrest of Vang Pao in California, along with eight other Hmong and a former U.S. army ranger who served in Vietnam, on charges of allegedly plotting to topple the Lao government, has highlighted the current state of Hmong resistance inside Laos.
Eberle believes, as do many other observers in Laos, that the resistance is on its last legs.
"There are still some groups but they are not organised. They are certainly not politically or militarily organised. They are remnants, the children and grandchildren of those involved in the war who are scared to come out of the jungle because they have never known anything else."
"Whether Vang Pao is guilty or not of the charges he is facing, one thing that is true is that he and other expatriate Hmong have used these people as pawns," maintains Eberle.
"Vang Pao has also got millions [of dollars] out of the Hmong community in the U.S. under the guise of liberating their homeland."
The decline in the resistance has been accompanied by talk of opening up Long Chen and the area around it to tourism.
"I do not see that happening in the next few years. It is still far too sensitive on the part of the Lao government," says Eberle. "They are also keen not to risk unsettling relations with the Americans by opening it up."
"It is the last chapter of the Vietnam War and both governments have an interest in making sure it is forgotten."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wahyusamputra writes: The Long Chen story not only illustrates a totally out of control agency, “an empire within an empire,” as the Pakistani ISI is often described, creators and supporters of the Taliban in much the same way as the CIA created and supported the Hmong forces, and that should also make it easy to understand the precisely similar Pakistani situation. (Except in Pakistan’s case they didn’t walk off and abandon them, of course.)
Well, isn't it grand!? The geniuses who rule us have managed to get us back to the Cold War days, complete with permanent possibly imminent MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) by nuclear war. Where do they dig these geniuses up? While total bankruptcy looms ever nearer, and the country is flooded, burnt, and generally crumbling anyway. Medals all round, perhaps? At least. And Russia's huge wheat harvest, so large they've run out of storage for it, makes an additional reason for Mr. Obama to go along with the administration's policy of aggressive confrontation with Russia. Who needs wheat?
Hear now the immortal words of Mr. Vonnegut: "There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president."
Synopsis: Long Chen is the last chapter of the Vietnam War and both governments want it forgotten Published: August 22, 2008 Author: Andrew Nette
PHNOM PENH, Aug 22 (IPS) - It was known as the ‘secret war’, a covert operation waged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos.
And the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.
A new film, ‘The Most Secret Place on Earth’, to be released in cinemas across Europe later this year, explores this little known conflict.
The film, which previewed for the first time in Phnom Penh in mid-August, includes images of Long Chen shot by the first Western camera crew to enter the base since the communists took control of the country in 1975.
"I first got the idea to do the film when I visited the Plain of Jars in Laos in 2002," recalled Marc Eberle,36, the German director in an interview with IPS.
"You could still see the craters from the air bombing and unexploded ordnance was everywhere."
"Then I heard about Long Chen and the fact that no one had got there since the war and I thought, how do I visit and how do I make a film about it?"
Little is known about the Lao conflict despite the fact that it remains the largest and most expensive paramilitary operation ever run by the U.S.
It was completely run by the CIA using largely civilian pilots from the agency’s own airline, Air America, and mercenaries recruited from the Hmong, an ethnic tribe living in mountainous areas in central and northern Laos.
Despite being the centre of the covert operation and, at its peak, one of the world’s busiest airports with a population of 50,000 people, Long Chen’s location was never marked on any map.
"I found it bizarre that at one time this was the second biggest city in Laos and it was completely secret," Eberle says.
Long Chen remains off limits to foreigners and most Lao due to clashes with remnants of the CIA’s Hmong army. Until recently it formed part of a special administrative zone under the direct control of the Lao army.
Renewed interest in the Laos’ secret war was briefly rekindled in 2003 when two Western journalists made contact with members of the Hmong resistance, the first white people they had seen since the CIA abandoned them 27 years ago.
Although pictures from the encounter were printed in Time Asia and won a world press award, U.S. media failed to pick up the story and it died.
The decades-old conflict again made headlines last year when U.S. authorities arrested 78 year-old Vang Pao, the head of the CIA’s Hmong forces in the sixties, and indicted him on terrorism charges relating to his alleged involvement in a plot to over throw the Lao government.
Eberle also believes what happened in Laos in the sixties is relevant in that it shares strong parallels with the conflict in Iraq.
"Laos was the progenitor of the way America fights wars in the 21st century," he says.
"Outsourcing the war to private companies, gathering public support by falsifying intelligence and documents, embedded journalism and automated warfare including the use of so-called ‘smart weapons’, all these methods were first tested in Laos."
The conflict began in the late fifties, as Washington sought to counter communist Pathet Lao forces and their North Vietnamese allies who had began building the Ho Chi Minh trail through the jungles running down the eastern border of Laos.
The operation was placed under CIA control to get around Laos’ supposed political neutrality and the conditions set by the Geneva Accords.
Vang Pao, then an officer in the Royal Lao Army, was recruited in 1960 to lead the Hmong troops drafted to fight the communists, which at the peak of the fighting numbered up to 30,000.
The largest of hundreds of airstrips built by the CIA throughout Laos, Long Chen was established soon after.
The Most Secret Place examines the conflict through the stories of players involved in the covert, diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, including former diplomats, CIA officers and Air America pilots.
It also draws on critics such as Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and a reporter in Laos at the time, and Fred Branfman, an aid worker turned anti-war activist who worked to expose the conflict.
Ordinary Lao people at the receiving end of the world’s most technologically sophisticated military machine get a chance to tell their story.
Although there is a short interview with Vang Pao, the one aspect of the story not adequately dealt with is the plight of the Hmong, who bore the brunt of some of the most savage fighting. With the exception of senior officers like Vang Pao and their families, the Hmong fighters were abandoned when the U.S. pulled out.
One of the most interesting aspects of ‘The Most Secret Place’ is that it incorporates previously unused footage Eberle managed to collect, including film of actual combat missions and day-to-day life at Long Chen.
This was gathered from myriad sources, including the U.S. National Film Archive and footage held by television stations from across Europe.
"The CIA had just declassified a whole lot of material so that helped as well," he says. "The most important source was the guys who were over there filming with their little Super 8 cameras, often illegally."
This film’s analysis sets it apart from other books and documentaries on the subject, most of which justify the conflict, lauding the CIA operatives and their Air America pilots as heroes.
The reality, as Alfred McCoy says towards the end of the film, was very different. "We destroyed a whole civilisation, we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost."
The covert nature of the conflict meant that U.S. forces were able to ignore virtually all the rules of engagement operating in Vietnam. Every building was a potential target and the civilian toll was huge.
The situation grew worse in 1970 when U.S. President Nixon authorised massive B-52 bombing strikes on Laos, which remained classified information until many years later.
American planes dropped an average of one planeload of bombs on targets in Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, making it the most heavily bombed country on earth per capita in the history of warfare.
Eberle remains cagey about exactly how he managed to gain access to film at Long Chen. "It was a matter of having the right contacts," he says.
The last film crew to try and get there were caught and convicted to 15 years prison, although they were eventually freed after four weeks due to international pressure.
"After we went another UK crew tried to get there but they were caught and deported," he adds.
"There are some places in the world that have a different energy and Long Chen is one of these. You look down the runway and think this is the place were it all happened. The planes took off from here and bombed all those people."
The film, which contains aerial footage of the base as well as shots from the ground, shows Long Chen today as an overgrown airstrip surrounded by heavily forested mountains.
"It’s just an army outpost now. A small village, a couple of hundred people, soldiers and their families."
The buildings, including Californian bungalows and a number of other structures designed in sixties style, largely lie vacant and derelict.
"The golden age of Long Chen is over. It used to be the high-tech oasis for spooks in Laos. There were allegedly more antennas there than trees. Now they do not even have power."
The 2007 arrest of Vang Pao in California, along with eight other Hmong and a former U.S. army ranger who served in Vietnam, on charges of allegedly plotting to topple the Lao government, has highlighted the current state of Hmong resistance inside Laos.
Eberle believes, as do many other observers in Laos, that the resistance is on its last legs.
"There are still some groups but they are not organised. They are certainly not politically or militarily organised. They are remnants, the children and grandchildren of those involved in the war who are scared to come out of the jungle because they have never known anything else."
"Whether Vang Pao is guilty or not of the charges he is facing, one thing that is true is that he and other expatriate Hmong have used these people as pawns," maintains Eberle.
"Vang Pao has also got millions [of dollars] out of the Hmong community in the U.S. under the guise of liberating their homeland."
The decline in the resistance has been accompanied by talk of opening up Long Chen and the area around it to tourism.
"I do not see that happening in the next few years. It is still far too sensitive on the part of the Lao government," says Eberle. "They are also keen not to risk unsettling relations with the Americans by opening it up."
"It is the last chapter of the Vietnam War and both governments have an interest in making sure it is forgotten."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wahyusamputra writes: The Long Chen story not only illustrates a totally out of control agency, “an empire within an empire,” as the Pakistani ISI is often described, creators and supporters of the Taliban in much the same way as the CIA created and supported the Hmong forces, and that should also make it easy to understand the precisely similar Pakistani situation. (Except in Pakistan’s case they didn’t walk off and abandon them, of course.)
Well, isn't it grand!? The geniuses who rule us have managed to get us back to the Cold War days, complete with permanent possibly imminent MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) by nuclear war. Where do they dig these geniuses up? While total bankruptcy looms ever nearer, and the country is flooded, burnt, and generally crumbling anyway. Medals all round, perhaps? At least. And Russia's huge wheat harvest, so large they've run out of storage for it, makes an additional reason for Mr. Obama to go along with the administration's policy of aggressive confrontation with Russia. Who needs wheat?
Hear now the immortal words of Mr. Vonnegut: "There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president."
Aug 20, 2008
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
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
Aug 19, 2008
A fable for our times
Once there was a country, large and important, but burdened by many debts, and with most of its financial systems bankrupt. The country was also very short of oil and gas, and had to spend huge amounts every month to import these, adding to its debts, and its infrastructure, its roads, bridges, sewers, viaducts, and transport systems were all very old and crumbling.
A very long way away there was another country, three or four times the size of the first one, less advanced in many ways, but with vast stores of oil and gas, which were making it very rich. (It also had many missiles aimed at the first country, a relic of the “Cold War” between the two, lasting some fifty years, though without direct attack. Its people, though much poorer, had centuries of experience of fighting invading armies on its own soil.)
Now the first country could have said to the second country, hey, we could give you a hand in all sorts of ways, technical expertise to develop your resources, all kinds of organizations we belong to, and we’d really appreciate some help with our oil and gas shortage, but instead of taking this obvious course, the first country borrowed even more money to increase its military, and worked hard to make arrangements with the neighbors of the second country to cause them as much trouble as possible, and surrounded the second country with as many missile bases as it could persuade the neighbors to let them build.
Both countries also faced some fifty years or so of climate change, with floods, drought, and storms of increasing violence.
What the first country had in mind was never very clear, since it clearly could not take over and rule such a vast country, several times its own size, so far away. Nor was it clear how the various military adventures could help their bankrupt institutions, or rebuild their crumbling infrastructure.
“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” Perhaps that was the moral.
A very long way away there was another country, three or four times the size of the first one, less advanced in many ways, but with vast stores of oil and gas, which were making it very rich. (It also had many missiles aimed at the first country, a relic of the “Cold War” between the two, lasting some fifty years, though without direct attack. Its people, though much poorer, had centuries of experience of fighting invading armies on its own soil.)
Now the first country could have said to the second country, hey, we could give you a hand in all sorts of ways, technical expertise to develop your resources, all kinds of organizations we belong to, and we’d really appreciate some help with our oil and gas shortage, but instead of taking this obvious course, the first country borrowed even more money to increase its military, and worked hard to make arrangements with the neighbors of the second country to cause them as much trouble as possible, and surrounded the second country with as many missile bases as it could persuade the neighbors to let them build.
Both countries also faced some fifty years or so of climate change, with floods, drought, and storms of increasing violence.
What the first country had in mind was never very clear, since it clearly could not take over and rule such a vast country, several times its own size, so far away. Nor was it clear how the various military adventures could help their bankrupt institutions, or rebuild their crumbling infrastructure.
“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” Perhaps that was the moral.
Aug 14, 2008
Labor Day Overview 2008
Labor Day 2008 Overview: the silence of the lambs
The conglomerate of western TV news stands like Cleopatra’s needle, polished, impenetrable, immaculate.
A number of subjects are banned by the conglomerate of western TV news media – the BBC is a participating member, though taking a wider view:
1. How “Songbird” McCain acquired his name
2. The bill for impeachment of the president being read for the second time by Senators Kuchinic and Waxman in the US Senate (Even the Pakistanis are allowed to know about bills of impeachment of their president, for God’s sake![1] )
3. When, in a universally acknowledged free and fair election – the only one I can think of, actually, without allegations of vote rigging – the Palestinian elections returned a winner by a landslide, the US and its allies immediately put their backing behind the loser in the election, Abu Mazen and Fatah, and declared the winner could not legally exercise power unless it accepted and promised to abide by, all arrangements, treaties, agreements, understandings that had been reached with the Israelis by the previous Palestinian administration, i.e., Fatah, which is what the election had been all about in the first place. The election winners, Hamas, were then declared “Islamist insurgents,” and must be only so referred to in all news items. (A fine example of a free press, also to be found in places like Myanmar.)
4. The list could be greatly extended.
Other developments since June, 2007: Mostly none.
Mr. Sarkozy, or “President Bling Bling” as he is better known in France, a sayan (helper) of the Israeli Mossad, as the French press has dryly noticed and not made an issue out of, (a genuinely free press works quite well in some places) had his finance minister declare that France was bankrupt at the very beginning of his presidency.
France produces 120% (one hundred and twenty per cent) of what it requires to keep eating, (Japan produces 39 % (thirty nine per cent) of the food required to keep everybody eating, a difference which explains a great deal.)
One of France’s main money spinners left is the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy, of Europe. Under which France collects vast sums from EU budgets to support its farmers. The extra twenty per cent of French agricultural production is basically sold abroad, but often and mainly used for food support in African and Asian countries, essentially dumping the produce, driving the farmers to despair and suicide and getting on leaky boats in their thousands and causing immense problems in the European countries they flee to. “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
France could be relied upon in any case to be a strong supporter of such programs as the Monsanto “one season seeds,” buy your next season’s seeds from Monsanto, but the crux of their situation is that essentially they could not afford, being bankrupt, to lose their main remaining source of income. The demand of the poor countries in the Doha round that the rich countries stop dumping their agricultural surpluses in Africa and Asia was bound to be refused, as it duly was for the seventh time in a row, and this year the Doha round of trade talks failed again, just as it had always failed previously, and for the same reasons. You can not really expect France to give up its main remaining source of income without a titanic struggle. Not that France is the only one, of course.
The three dead American and four dead Israeli soldiers found among the casualties of the Georgian attack on South Ossetia will be one of those items never mentioned listed above. Won’t it? You mean it’ll be like the instructions from Cheney’s office to produce a forgery to tie Saddam in to 9/11 that so many people have seen and admired in passing that there’s no alternative to claim it as a master stroke of policy? (That little job, incidentally, the forging of the evidence, was passed to Douglas Feith (recently voted by acclaim of political journalists the stupidest person in Washington) at the OSP, Rumsfeld’s famous Office of Special Plans, which had already produced so much smelly stuff planted by the Israeli guests that Feith waved though security, like Saddam’s plan to aim planes carrying biological weapons on the US, re fuelled by Saddam’s extensive Atlantic fleet, that one more would hardly notice.
So everything happened pretty much as expected, Doha round fails again, France and allies hang tough on agriculture, President Bing Bling marries Eric Clapton’s girl friend and makes like a rock star, and sucks up enthusiastically to the Bushies. Germany oddly strident in anti-Iran campaign, announces intention to implement Bill 232 restrictions on Iran immediately “under strong American pressure” says my TV banner, probably the Secret Vassal till 2099 Treaty, building on all that good work done by France.
As for the agonized appeal to McCain by Saakashvili, president of Georgia, that’s just further illustration of a principle established in the Clinton administration, when, as one Asian politician put it, “It’s a turnstile. You put your money in, and you get access.” It seems Mr. Saakashvili took a little too trustingly the bumper sticker message “Invest in America – buy a congressman.” Buying a congressman is no guarantee that the congressman can actually deliver anything for you. Not even if his main foreign policy advisor, as in this case, was also a lobbyist for Georgia, bought and paid for.
Decoupling
The slow decoupling. or drifting away, of the Asian economies from the west, much misunderstood, usually deliberately, is an obvious fact.
China gains greatly in basic industrial training for its population by manufacturing and exporting to the west, but the process of getting paid in dollar loans which are then used to stop the dollar collapsing and ruining the game has gone about as far as it can, and China is doing a slow tanker turn to pour its production into improving the lives of its own population, (the Chinese can do attitude at three thousand years old is even more impressive than the American can do attitude at three hundred years old) as also are Brazil, Venezuela, and most other developing countries. (India has itself temporarily entangled in a proposed US nuclear deal and fighting in Kashmir, but will probably end up doing the same.)
With most western countries essentially bankrupt (America heads the list, closely followed by Britain, France, and Italy, to name only a few) and the majority of world trade in the hands of Brazil, China, and India, the west is marginalized. Even occasional military adventures like Georgia, and Poland in the north, where the hatred between Poles and Russians is ancient and virulent, seems unlikely to halt this tidal change.
[1] The phrase freedom of the press, or free speech, or the right to free expression can only be used in cases where a properly constituted panel of experts have scientifically established, e.g., the most offensive thing one could possibly say in respect of a certain group (say, Moslems) and then proceeding to create, print, and publish the said scientifically designed project, i.e., to drive twenty per cent of the world’s population into a frenzy of rage, such as, for example, the cartoons of the prophet created in Denmark and published as widely as possible. Other “freedom of speech” projects may have no such scientific basis.
The difference in cultures might be illustrated by imagining what the threat to humiliate him by draping women's knickers over his head might have done to a Viet Cong combatant? He'd have laughed in your face and blown his nose on the knickers, right?
MBIA stock rose on Thursday 8/28/08 because the company had agreed to reinsure $184 billion in municipal bonds.
(Yes, you’re right, MBIA was not asked from where it was going to get $184 billion to make good on the insurance if municipalities should fail – one county in Alabama has just declared bankruptcy.)
The US is to crack down, says the news banner, on prosecutors pursuing white collar crime, of which this would be a clear example, of insurance fraud – MBIA is undertaking risks it has no way of paying for.
The message is clear, however, continue as if nothing is wrong and everything is as it was before. Keep up the pretence. With imminent bankruptcy barreling down, and the land crumbling under climate change, not the most reassuring action, one feels.
If you manage to ignore the Tara-ra-boom-dee-ay of the Democratic Convention, and watch what’s actually happening, the thought “Do these clowns really know what they’re doing?” is bound to occur.
I mean, the awful question is beginning loom "Why are we fighting in Afghanistan at all?" "Yeah, I know about this feller Osama you're chasing for knocking down your two towers, but he ain't here, see? Left with no forwarding address. They say he's in Pakistan. Now will you please stop air strikes on our wedding parties and get your butts out of here?" an attitude beginning to seep into the pronouncements even of Mr. Karzai. And with the Taliban almost having their hands round the throats of the capital Kabul, well, hey guys, how about listening to what they wanna say?
The conglomerate of western TV news stands like Cleopatra’s needle, polished, impenetrable, immaculate.
A number of subjects are banned by the conglomerate of western TV news media – the BBC is a participating member, though taking a wider view:
1. How “Songbird” McCain acquired his name
2. The bill for impeachment of the president being read for the second time by Senators Kuchinic and Waxman in the US Senate (Even the Pakistanis are allowed to know about bills of impeachment of their president, for God’s sake![1] )
3. When, in a universally acknowledged free and fair election – the only one I can think of, actually, without allegations of vote rigging – the Palestinian elections returned a winner by a landslide, the US and its allies immediately put their backing behind the loser in the election, Abu Mazen and Fatah, and declared the winner could not legally exercise power unless it accepted and promised to abide by, all arrangements, treaties, agreements, understandings that had been reached with the Israelis by the previous Palestinian administration, i.e., Fatah, which is what the election had been all about in the first place. The election winners, Hamas, were then declared “Islamist insurgents,” and must be only so referred to in all news items. (A fine example of a free press, also to be found in places like Myanmar.)
4. The list could be greatly extended.
Other developments since June, 2007: Mostly none.
Mr. Sarkozy, or “President Bling Bling” as he is better known in France, a sayan (helper) of the Israeli Mossad, as the French press has dryly noticed and not made an issue out of, (a genuinely free press works quite well in some places) had his finance minister declare that France was bankrupt at the very beginning of his presidency.
France produces 120% (one hundred and twenty per cent) of what it requires to keep eating, (Japan produces 39 % (thirty nine per cent) of the food required to keep everybody eating, a difference which explains a great deal.)
One of France’s main money spinners left is the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy, of Europe. Under which France collects vast sums from EU budgets to support its farmers. The extra twenty per cent of French agricultural production is basically sold abroad, but often and mainly used for food support in African and Asian countries, essentially dumping the produce, driving the farmers to despair and suicide and getting on leaky boats in their thousands and causing immense problems in the European countries they flee to. “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
France could be relied upon in any case to be a strong supporter of such programs as the Monsanto “one season seeds,” buy your next season’s seeds from Monsanto, but the crux of their situation is that essentially they could not afford, being bankrupt, to lose their main remaining source of income. The demand of the poor countries in the Doha round that the rich countries stop dumping their agricultural surpluses in Africa and Asia was bound to be refused, as it duly was for the seventh time in a row, and this year the Doha round of trade talks failed again, just as it had always failed previously, and for the same reasons. You can not really expect France to give up its main remaining source of income without a titanic struggle. Not that France is the only one, of course.
The three dead American and four dead Israeli soldiers found among the casualties of the Georgian attack on South Ossetia will be one of those items never mentioned listed above. Won’t it? You mean it’ll be like the instructions from Cheney’s office to produce a forgery to tie Saddam in to 9/11 that so many people have seen and admired in passing that there’s no alternative to claim it as a master stroke of policy? (That little job, incidentally, the forging of the evidence, was passed to Douglas Feith (recently voted by acclaim of political journalists the stupidest person in Washington) at the OSP, Rumsfeld’s famous Office of Special Plans, which had already produced so much smelly stuff planted by the Israeli guests that Feith waved though security, like Saddam’s plan to aim planes carrying biological weapons on the US, re fuelled by Saddam’s extensive Atlantic fleet, that one more would hardly notice.
So everything happened pretty much as expected, Doha round fails again, France and allies hang tough on agriculture, President Bing Bling marries Eric Clapton’s girl friend and makes like a rock star, and sucks up enthusiastically to the Bushies. Germany oddly strident in anti-Iran campaign, announces intention to implement Bill 232 restrictions on Iran immediately “under strong American pressure” says my TV banner, probably the Secret Vassal till 2099 Treaty, building on all that good work done by France.
As for the agonized appeal to McCain by Saakashvili, president of Georgia, that’s just further illustration of a principle established in the Clinton administration, when, as one Asian politician put it, “It’s a turnstile. You put your money in, and you get access.” It seems Mr. Saakashvili took a little too trustingly the bumper sticker message “Invest in America – buy a congressman.” Buying a congressman is no guarantee that the congressman can actually deliver anything for you. Not even if his main foreign policy advisor, as in this case, was also a lobbyist for Georgia, bought and paid for.
Decoupling
The slow decoupling. or drifting away, of the Asian economies from the west, much misunderstood, usually deliberately, is an obvious fact.
China gains greatly in basic industrial training for its population by manufacturing and exporting to the west, but the process of getting paid in dollar loans which are then used to stop the dollar collapsing and ruining the game has gone about as far as it can, and China is doing a slow tanker turn to pour its production into improving the lives of its own population, (the Chinese can do attitude at three thousand years old is even more impressive than the American can do attitude at three hundred years old) as also are Brazil, Venezuela, and most other developing countries. (India has itself temporarily entangled in a proposed US nuclear deal and fighting in Kashmir, but will probably end up doing the same.)
With most western countries essentially bankrupt (America heads the list, closely followed by Britain, France, and Italy, to name only a few) and the majority of world trade in the hands of Brazil, China, and India, the west is marginalized. Even occasional military adventures like Georgia, and Poland in the north, where the hatred between Poles and Russians is ancient and virulent, seems unlikely to halt this tidal change.
[1] The phrase freedom of the press, or free speech, or the right to free expression can only be used in cases where a properly constituted panel of experts have scientifically established, e.g., the most offensive thing one could possibly say in respect of a certain group (say, Moslems) and then proceeding to create, print, and publish the said scientifically designed project, i.e., to drive twenty per cent of the world’s population into a frenzy of rage, such as, for example, the cartoons of the prophet created in Denmark and published as widely as possible. Other “freedom of speech” projects may have no such scientific basis.
The difference in cultures might be illustrated by imagining what the threat to humiliate him by draping women's knickers over his head might have done to a Viet Cong combatant? He'd have laughed in your face and blown his nose on the knickers, right?
MBIA stock rose on Thursday 8/28/08 because the company had agreed to reinsure $184 billion in municipal bonds.
(Yes, you’re right, MBIA was not asked from where it was going to get $184 billion to make good on the insurance if municipalities should fail – one county in Alabama has just declared bankruptcy.)
The US is to crack down, says the news banner, on prosecutors pursuing white collar crime, of which this would be a clear example, of insurance fraud – MBIA is undertaking risks it has no way of paying for.
The message is clear, however, continue as if nothing is wrong and everything is as it was before. Keep up the pretence. With imminent bankruptcy barreling down, and the land crumbling under climate change, not the most reassuring action, one feels.
If you manage to ignore the Tara-ra-boom-dee-ay of the Democratic Convention, and watch what’s actually happening, the thought “Do these clowns really know what they’re doing?” is bound to occur.
I mean, the awful question is beginning loom "Why are we fighting in Afghanistan at all?" "Yeah, I know about this feller Osama you're chasing for knocking down your two towers, but he ain't here, see? Left with no forwarding address. They say he's in Pakistan. Now will you please stop air strikes on our wedding parties and get your butts out of here?" an attitude beginning to seep into the pronouncements even of Mr. Karzai. And with the Taliban almost having their hands round the throats of the capital Kabul, well, hey guys, how about listening to what they wanna say?
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