September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Sep 1, 2009
Aug 28, 2009
Khalid bin Mahfouz
http://www.terrorfinance.org/the_terror_finance_blog/2009/08/the-serial-libel-tourist-is-dead-but-libel-tourism-is-alive-and-well-1.html
The Serial Libel Tourist is dead, but Libel Tourism is alive and well.
Libel Tourism is so effective that the Western media apparently fear even to report the serial suer Khalid bin Mahfouz's death.
By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Millard Burr
Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz died in Jeddah last Saturday. The 60 year old former owner of the Saudi National Commercial Bank, and banker for the royal family, also owned a charity, the Muwafaq (blessed relief) Foundation, that funded al-Qaeda and Hamas, to name but a few.
He should be remembered not only because of his involvement with the shady Bank for Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) aka “banks for crooks and criminal,” and the illegal purchase of the First American Bank in Washington, DC, but mostly because inadvertently he led Americans to better protect their free speech rights.
Using British libel laws that allow foreigners to sue other foreigners in British courts, a practice known as libel tourism, Mahfouz became a serial suer. He, sometimes together with his sons, sued more than 40 writers and publishers - mostly Americans - because he did not like their criticisms. Single handedly, on behalf of his royal masters, he made libel tourism a multi million dollars industry for the British Bar, and made London the “Libel Capital” of the world.
Many will miss him. In Riyadh, he will be missed by the ruling members of the royal family who once used his National Commercial Bank as their own piggy bank, and often used him and his family members as fronts for their business and to fund their favorite organizations and terrorist groups. Likewise, those shady characters who ran the Saudi funded Muslim World League, the International Islamic Relief Agency and the Rabita Trust of Pakistan will miss him.
The Georgetown alum (1968) Prince Turki bin Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S. and director of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department from 1977 until ten days before 9/11, and responsible for the Saudi financial aid of the jihad in Afghanistan, will have lost an old friend.
Bin Mahfouz will certainly be missed by a circle of notorious Saudi plutocrats who make an appearance in the annual Forbes list of the world's wealthiest citizens, many defendants in the lawsuits filed by the victims of the 9/11 attacks. There are the Raji, the Bin Laden, the Al Amoudi, and such other disreputable individuals as designated terrorist Yassin al Qadi, who run some of Mahfouz’s businesses and charities such as the Muwafaq foundation, that funded al-Qaeda and Hamas.
Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Taliban leaders must be grief stricken and worried; would his sons be as generous as he was?
It is supposed that Mahfouz retained a powerful friend in Washington in James A. Baker, III. Baker, who served as chief-of-staff to Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, joined Mahfouz during the roaring seventies when Houston was known as Riyadh-west. They worked together through the heady days and even through the bankruptcy of the second-largest banking organization in Texas, MCorp, in the late nineteen eighties. During the dark days of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Mahfouz could count on Baker, his man in the White House, to keep him out of jail, no matter how persistent the pressure applied by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Obviously, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi will be thinking different thoughts as they recall the $596 million they paid for the privilege of purchasing Mahfouz’s shares in BCCI, and were then left holding the bag as the bank went under.
Irish politicians, particularly the disgraced former prime minister Charles Haughey will recall those wondrous days in 1990 he received $85,000 from Mahfouz, so that Mahfouz and nine members of his family would paying $1 million each, would obtain an Irish passport, thus allowing easy commercial entree to the European market.
Surviving members of the Hunt family of Texas likely have mixed feeling on the death of Mahfouz. Bunker Hunt, scion of one of the world's richest men had used John Connally, former Governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navy, as his go-between in an effort to entice Mahfouz to join in his play to corner the market in silver bullion. Mahfouz then induced member of the Saudi royal family to join in, and they, like Mahfouz, would lose a fortune. Nearly driven to suicide, Mahfouz was comforted by Salem Bin Laden, perhaps his closest friend ever.
On the West Coast, Boeing directors must recall with fondness the 5% they paid Mahfouz, the fixer, to win perhaps their largest contract ever. And the middlemen in Saudi Arabia who also benefited from their involvement with Mahfouz in clinching the deal must be reminiscing.
As for Osama bin Laden, wherever he is, the al Qaeda leader probably remembers with some affection the days spent with his brother, Salem bin Laden and Khaled bin Mahfouz at their jointly-held River Oaks estate in Houston, TX. With Mahfouz gone, Osama’s “golden chain” of wealthy Saudi funders, has been reduced by a link. The international law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, must be sad to have lost this wealthy and most litigious client. Likewise, the English Bar must be shedding crocodile tears, especially those lawyers who represented Mahfouz.
Justice David Eady would surely miss Mahfouz. The cases he brought before Eady whose judgments made both both Mahfouz and the Justice (in)famous for making Libel Tourism a weapon to silence critics of Saudi Arabia the world over. Even the U.N. Human rights commission warned Britain last year that its libel tourism industry has become a tool to suppress the media’s free speech rights and endangers national security.
The serial Libel Tourist Khalid bin Mahfouz is dead. But the jihad against the West he helped fund together with the pernicious British libel tourism practices, are alive and well. Unfortunately, the U.S. has done nothing to stop his activities on either front when he was alive. New York State, Florida, and Illinois have already passed anti- libel tourism laws, and another has just been passed unanimously by the California legislature.
A federal law to protect Americans’ free speech is a legacy Mahfouz never intended to leave behind. Indeed, he was so successful in his efforts to intimidate reports about him that amazingly the Western media refrained from reporting his death. However, his libel tourism led to the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, now pending in the Senate. One hopes the bill passes as soon as Congress reconvenes so that the instigative journalists and researchers can expose others like him before they do us harm.
(Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil, and Millard Burr’s Alms for Jihad, were banned in the U.K. after Mahfouz’s libel tourism hobby was rewarded, as many times before, by Justice Eady’s ruling against them in London’s High Court.)
http://www.terrorfinance.org/the_terror_finance_blog/2009/08/the-serial-libel-tourist-is-dead-but-libel-tourism-is-alive-and-well-1.html
The Serial Libel Tourist is dead, but Libel Tourism is alive and well.
Libel Tourism is so effective that the Western media apparently fear even to report the serial suer Khalid bin Mahfouz's death.
By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Millard Burr
Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz died in Jeddah last Saturday. The 60 year old former owner of the Saudi National Commercial Bank, and banker for the royal family, also owned a charity, the Muwafaq (blessed relief) Foundation, that funded al-Qaeda and Hamas, to name but a few.
He should be remembered not only because of his involvement with the shady Bank for Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) aka “banks for crooks and criminal,” and the illegal purchase of the First American Bank in Washington, DC, but mostly because inadvertently he led Americans to better protect their free speech rights.
Using British libel laws that allow foreigners to sue other foreigners in British courts, a practice known as libel tourism, Mahfouz became a serial suer. He, sometimes together with his sons, sued more than 40 writers and publishers - mostly Americans - because he did not like their criticisms. Single handedly, on behalf of his royal masters, he made libel tourism a multi million dollars industry for the British Bar, and made London the “Libel Capital” of the world.
Many will miss him. In Riyadh, he will be missed by the ruling members of the royal family who once used his National Commercial Bank as their own piggy bank, and often used him and his family members as fronts for their business and to fund their favorite organizations and terrorist groups. Likewise, those shady characters who ran the Saudi funded Muslim World League, the International Islamic Relief Agency and the Rabita Trust of Pakistan will miss him.
The Georgetown alum (1968) Prince Turki bin Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S. and director of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department from 1977 until ten days before 9/11, and responsible for the Saudi financial aid of the jihad in Afghanistan, will have lost an old friend.
Bin Mahfouz will certainly be missed by a circle of notorious Saudi plutocrats who make an appearance in the annual Forbes list of the world's wealthiest citizens, many defendants in the lawsuits filed by the victims of the 9/11 attacks. There are the Raji, the Bin Laden, the Al Amoudi, and such other disreputable individuals as designated terrorist Yassin al Qadi, who run some of Mahfouz’s businesses and charities such as the Muwafaq foundation, that funded al-Qaeda and Hamas.
Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Taliban leaders must be grief stricken and worried; would his sons be as generous as he was?
It is supposed that Mahfouz retained a powerful friend in Washington in James A. Baker, III. Baker, who served as chief-of-staff to Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush, joined Mahfouz during the roaring seventies when Houston was known as Riyadh-west. They worked together through the heady days and even through the bankruptcy of the second-largest banking organization in Texas, MCorp, in the late nineteen eighties. During the dark days of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Mahfouz could count on Baker, his man in the White House, to keep him out of jail, no matter how persistent the pressure applied by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Obviously, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi will be thinking different thoughts as they recall the $596 million they paid for the privilege of purchasing Mahfouz’s shares in BCCI, and were then left holding the bag as the bank went under.
Irish politicians, particularly the disgraced former prime minister Charles Haughey will recall those wondrous days in 1990 he received $85,000 from Mahfouz, so that Mahfouz and nine members of his family would paying $1 million each, would obtain an Irish passport, thus allowing easy commercial entree to the European market.
Surviving members of the Hunt family of Texas likely have mixed feeling on the death of Mahfouz. Bunker Hunt, scion of one of the world's richest men had used John Connally, former Governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navy, as his go-between in an effort to entice Mahfouz to join in his play to corner the market in silver bullion. Mahfouz then induced member of the Saudi royal family to join in, and they, like Mahfouz, would lose a fortune. Nearly driven to suicide, Mahfouz was comforted by Salem Bin Laden, perhaps his closest friend ever.
On the West Coast, Boeing directors must recall with fondness the 5% they paid Mahfouz, the fixer, to win perhaps their largest contract ever. And the middlemen in Saudi Arabia who also benefited from their involvement with Mahfouz in clinching the deal must be reminiscing.
As for Osama bin Laden, wherever he is, the al Qaeda leader probably remembers with some affection the days spent with his brother, Salem bin Laden and Khaled bin Mahfouz at their jointly-held River Oaks estate in Houston, TX. With Mahfouz gone, Osama’s “golden chain” of wealthy Saudi funders, has been reduced by a link. The international law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, must be sad to have lost this wealthy and most litigious client. Likewise, the English Bar must be shedding crocodile tears, especially those lawyers who represented Mahfouz.
Justice David Eady would surely miss Mahfouz. The cases he brought before Eady whose judgments made both both Mahfouz and the Justice (in)famous for making Libel Tourism a weapon to silence critics of Saudi Arabia the world over. Even the U.N. Human rights commission warned Britain last year that its libel tourism industry has become a tool to suppress the media’s free speech rights and endangers national security.
The serial Libel Tourist Khalid bin Mahfouz is dead. But the jihad against the West he helped fund together with the pernicious British libel tourism practices, are alive and well. Unfortunately, the U.S. has done nothing to stop his activities on either front when he was alive. New York State, Florida, and Illinois have already passed anti- libel tourism laws, and another has just been passed unanimously by the California legislature.
A federal law to protect Americans’ free speech is a legacy Mahfouz never intended to leave behind. Indeed, he was so successful in his efforts to intimidate reports about him that amazingly the Western media refrained from reporting his death. However, his libel tourism led to the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, now pending in the Senate. One hopes the bill passes as soon as Congress reconvenes so that the instigative journalists and researchers can expose others like him before they do us harm.
(Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil, and Millard Burr’s Alms for Jihad, were banned in the U.K. after Mahfouz’s libel tourism hobby was rewarded, as many times before, by Justice Eady’s ruling against them in London’s High Court.)
http://www.terrorfinance.org/the_terror_finance_blog/2009/08/the-serial-libel-tourist-is-dead-but-libel-tourism-is-alive-and-well-1.html
Aug 25, 2009
Obama's current kill rate #7
***************
Wahyusamputra writes "If the main problem in dealing with the Taliban is indeed that militants are holding hostage or using as shields women and children as western governments and their paid hacks insist, that makes it all the more impossible to understand why the British government is using barymetric weapons, as it has now admitted it is doing, which kill everyone in a building but leave the building standing for future use."
Aug 22, 2009
Baby Bush
The Daily Reckoning Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Baby Bush: The Worst President in History? By Doug Casey Vancouver, British Columbia
...Most of our subscribers to The Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals - i.e., people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic freedom for the individual.
The next largest group are "conservatives." It's a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone who atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things (either now, or perhaps as they perceived them 50, or 100, or 200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative someone who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means suppressing things like sex, drugs, outré clothing and customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to support economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)? It's unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on.
Which leads me to the question: Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it's because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere. Bush's tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted to Clinton's eloquence, which made him look "slick."
I'm forced to the conclusion that what "conservatives" like about Bush is his style, such as it was. Because the only good thing I can recall that Bush ever did was to shepherd through some tax cuts. But even these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests, rather than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale cut in rates.
Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I'd say he's a strong contender. He started out with a gigantic lie - that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars - and things got much worse from there. Let's look at just some of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.
No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.
Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.
Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities laws since the '30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public outside the US.
Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.
Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush's encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.
Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in US history (until OBAMA!).
Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they're now used to herd.
The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects.
Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.
The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It's become a cause of mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.
Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.
Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a police state.
Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an "enemy combatant" to be completely deprived of any rights at all.
Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals, Bush made it a US policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a guard's whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the reputation of the US ever. It says to the world, "We stand for nothing."
The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on this list, and it's still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other purposes in the future...
The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow citizens' dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God forbid you're not polite to them...
Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.
Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president in history.
The only reason I can imagine why a person who is not "evil" (to use a word he favored), completely uninformed, or thoughtless would favor Bush is because he wasn't a Democrat. Not that there's any real difference between the two parties anymore...
"Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it’s because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere."
As disastrous as he was, I rather hate to put him in competition for "worst president" in the company of Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. He is simply too small a character - psychologically aberrant, ignorant, unintelligent, shallow, duplicitous, small-minded - to merit inclusion in any list. On second thought, looking over that list of his personal characteristics, he's probably most like FDR, except he lacked FDR's polish and rhetorical skills. I suspect he'll just fade away as a non-entity, recognized as an embarrassment. Not even worth the trouble of hanging by his heels from a lamppost, although Americans aren't (yet) accustomed to doing that to their leaders. Those who once supported him will, at least if they have any circumspection and intellectual honesty, feel shame at how dim they were to have been duped by a nobody.
The worst shame of Bush - worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars - is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro- free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it.
And he's left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars.
Regards, Doug Casey for The Daily Reckoning
****************************************
"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." - Kurt Vonnegut.
Baby Bush: The Worst President in History? By Doug Casey Vancouver, British Columbia
...Most of our subscribers to The Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals - i.e., people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic freedom for the individual.
The next largest group are "conservatives." It's a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone who atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things (either now, or perhaps as they perceived them 50, or 100, or 200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative someone who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means suppressing things like sex, drugs, outré clothing and customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to support economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)? It's unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on.
Which leads me to the question: Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it's because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere. Bush's tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted to Clinton's eloquence, which made him look "slick."
I'm forced to the conclusion that what "conservatives" like about Bush is his style, such as it was. Because the only good thing I can recall that Bush ever did was to shepherd through some tax cuts. But even these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests, rather than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale cut in rates.
Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I'd say he's a strong contender. He started out with a gigantic lie - that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars - and things got much worse from there. Let's look at just some of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.
No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.
Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.
Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities laws since the '30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public outside the US.
Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.
Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush's encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.
Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in US history (until OBAMA!).
Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they're now used to herd.
The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects.
Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.
The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It's become a cause of mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.
Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.
Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a police state.
Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an "enemy combatant" to be completely deprived of any rights at all.
Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals, Bush made it a US policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a guard's whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the reputation of the US ever. It says to the world, "We stand for nothing."
The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on this list, and it's still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other purposes in the future...
The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow citizens' dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God forbid you're not polite to them...
Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.
Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president in history.
The only reason I can imagine why a person who is not "evil" (to use a word he favored), completely uninformed, or thoughtless would favor Bush is because he wasn't a Democrat. Not that there's any real difference between the two parties anymore...
"Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it’s because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere."
As disastrous as he was, I rather hate to put him in competition for "worst president" in the company of Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. He is simply too small a character - psychologically aberrant, ignorant, unintelligent, shallow, duplicitous, small-minded - to merit inclusion in any list. On second thought, looking over that list of his personal characteristics, he's probably most like FDR, except he lacked FDR's polish and rhetorical skills. I suspect he'll just fade away as a non-entity, recognized as an embarrassment. Not even worth the trouble of hanging by his heels from a lamppost, although Americans aren't (yet) accustomed to doing that to their leaders. Those who once supported him will, at least if they have any circumspection and intellectual honesty, feel shame at how dim they were to have been duped by a nobody.
The worst shame of Bush - worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars - is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro- free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it.
And he's left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars.
Regards, Doug Casey for The Daily Reckoning
****************************************
"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." - Kurt Vonnegut.
Aug 20, 2009
Ethnicity - The Golden Age
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5277040-117540,00.html
'It reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times'
Julian Borger in New Orleans Saturday September 3, 2005 Guardian
The sprawling convention centre in New Orleans was no doubt once a source of civic pride, but yesterday the concrete and glass edifice was a symbol of national shame, giving out a stench that could be smelt two blocks away.
A dense mass of people - perhaps 20,000, almost all of them black - packed the cavernous building and filled the surrounding pavement, sitting amid debris left by Hurricane Katrina and the rubbish accumulated in four days of waiting for help.
A knot of police officers, mostly white, watched the throng warily from a small side road, armed with rifles and pump-action shotguns. More police watched from the Greater New Orleans Bridge high above.
They were the only sign that the official world was aware of the plight of the crowd below - and that was as close as they got. The previous day, some military rations and water had been dropped by relief workers from the bridge on to the car park. It was as if being poor and black was a contagious disease.
If so, it was becoming a self-fulfilling dread. Inside the building, the toilets had become blocked after the first day, and by yesterday the air wafting from them was so noxious it felt like a blow to the face.
A policewoman near the centre brandishing a shotgun said she had no news of the promised help from the army and the National Guard. "They've been saying they're going to send in troops since day one. We haven't seen anything yet."
Walking from her informal checkpoint to the crowd across the road was like crossing a boundary between the first and third world. On the other side, many people were clearly too ill to walk and several seemed close to starving.
Inside the centre, no one could understand why they were being treated in this way. "If you can drive in like that, how come they can't come and get us?" Henry Carr, a 38-year-old furniture salesman, said.
Everyone was frantic to know whether the buses would turn up. For days, they had been told to stay in the centre so they could be picked up, but the promised transport had failed to materialise. Buses had arrived for the people trapped at the Louisiana Superdome stadium, a mile to the north, but it seemed the convention centre, a lesser landmark, had been forgotten. The latest rumour was that the buses would come later that afternoon, but that would already be too late for up to a dozen people who had died waiting.
Two of the bodies had been dumped by an employees' entrance. They were both old and frail women. One had died in her wheelchair; a blanket had been thrown over her face. The other woman had been wrapped in a sheet.
A man walked past the bodies dragging a pallet loaded with big bottles of ginger ale, some plates and a frying pan. To the rest of America watching the tragedy unfold on their televisions, he was one of the looters, denounced by President Bush.
But to the people inside the convention centre, he was one of a band of heroes keeping them alive. "The people who were going into the stores would give us water and food, said Edna Harris, Henry Carr's aunt. "There would be ladies with babies and they had no milk, and these guys would break in and bring them milk."
Kyle Turner, a 28-year-old dishwasher, was looking for some clean water. "My son is six months old and we got no milk. I just got two cans of powdered milk, and I need some water for it," he said.
In addition to the constant squalor, the thousands left in the centre had to contend with the fear of gangs of young men. Everybody talked about it. One woman said she held her children's hands tight all night because there were stories circulating of thugs who took young girls and boys to the upper stories of the centre and raped them. It was impossible to confirm the rumours but there was no mistaking the fear they inspired.
By late morning, a possible sign of hope had arrived. A lone soldier stood by the side of a red civilian pick-up holding a rifle and talking to some of the stranded civilians. He would not give his name, but the patch on his shoulder indicated he was from the 101st Airborne, an elite division which has spent much of the past two years in Iraq. "Kind of reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times," he said shaking his head. Then he got into his pick-up and drove off.
William Schaefer, one of the few white men in the crowd, looked on in disgust. "We're dying one, two a day here. Why don't they come for us?"
• Musician Fats Domino, 77, thought to have been missing after refusing to evacuate, was yesterday reported to be safe after being picked up by a boat with his wife and at least one of his daughters near his home in New Orleans.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*******************************
Wahyusamputra writes "In the nineteenth century, nationalism; in the twentieth century, ideology; in the twenty-first century, ethnicity."
'It reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times'
Julian Borger in New Orleans Saturday September 3, 2005 Guardian
The sprawling convention centre in New Orleans was no doubt once a source of civic pride, but yesterday the concrete and glass edifice was a symbol of national shame, giving out a stench that could be smelt two blocks away.
A dense mass of people - perhaps 20,000, almost all of them black - packed the cavernous building and filled the surrounding pavement, sitting amid debris left by Hurricane Katrina and the rubbish accumulated in four days of waiting for help.
A knot of police officers, mostly white, watched the throng warily from a small side road, armed with rifles and pump-action shotguns. More police watched from the Greater New Orleans Bridge high above.
They were the only sign that the official world was aware of the plight of the crowd below - and that was as close as they got. The previous day, some military rations and water had been dropped by relief workers from the bridge on to the car park. It was as if being poor and black was a contagious disease.
If so, it was becoming a self-fulfilling dread. Inside the building, the toilets had become blocked after the first day, and by yesterday the air wafting from them was so noxious it felt like a blow to the face.
A policewoman near the centre brandishing a shotgun said she had no news of the promised help from the army and the National Guard. "They've been saying they're going to send in troops since day one. We haven't seen anything yet."
Walking from her informal checkpoint to the crowd across the road was like crossing a boundary between the first and third world. On the other side, many people were clearly too ill to walk and several seemed close to starving.
Inside the centre, no one could understand why they were being treated in this way. "If you can drive in like that, how come they can't come and get us?" Henry Carr, a 38-year-old furniture salesman, said.
Everyone was frantic to know whether the buses would turn up. For days, they had been told to stay in the centre so they could be picked up, but the promised transport had failed to materialise. Buses had arrived for the people trapped at the Louisiana Superdome stadium, a mile to the north, but it seemed the convention centre, a lesser landmark, had been forgotten. The latest rumour was that the buses would come later that afternoon, but that would already be too late for up to a dozen people who had died waiting.
Two of the bodies had been dumped by an employees' entrance. They were both old and frail women. One had died in her wheelchair; a blanket had been thrown over her face. The other woman had been wrapped in a sheet.
A man walked past the bodies dragging a pallet loaded with big bottles of ginger ale, some plates and a frying pan. To the rest of America watching the tragedy unfold on their televisions, he was one of the looters, denounced by President Bush.
But to the people inside the convention centre, he was one of a band of heroes keeping them alive. "The people who were going into the stores would give us water and food, said Edna Harris, Henry Carr's aunt. "There would be ladies with babies and they had no milk, and these guys would break in and bring them milk."
Kyle Turner, a 28-year-old dishwasher, was looking for some clean water. "My son is six months old and we got no milk. I just got two cans of powdered milk, and I need some water for it," he said.
In addition to the constant squalor, the thousands left in the centre had to contend with the fear of gangs of young men. Everybody talked about it. One woman said she held her children's hands tight all night because there were stories circulating of thugs who took young girls and boys to the upper stories of the centre and raped them. It was impossible to confirm the rumours but there was no mistaking the fear they inspired.
By late morning, a possible sign of hope had arrived. A lone soldier stood by the side of a red civilian pick-up holding a rifle and talking to some of the stranded civilians. He would not give his name, but the patch on his shoulder indicated he was from the 101st Airborne, an elite division which has spent much of the past two years in Iraq. "Kind of reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times," he said shaking his head. Then he got into his pick-up and drove off.
William Schaefer, one of the few white men in the crowd, looked on in disgust. "We're dying one, two a day here. Why don't they come for us?"
• Musician Fats Domino, 77, thought to have been missing after refusing to evacuate, was yesterday reported to be safe after being picked up by a boat with his wife and at least one of his daughters near his home in New Orleans.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
*******************************
Wahyusamputra writes "In the nineteenth century, nationalism; in the twentieth century, ideology; in the twenty-first century, ethnicity."
Aug 18, 2009
Let them inflate!
The Daily Reckoning Monday, August 17, 2009 PRESENTS: According to the Mighty Mogambo, inflation is the worst thing that can happen to an economy. Why, then, are Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke suggesting that we permit such as disastrous economic phenomenon? Well, according to the Mogambo, it's because they're low-life ignoramuses who don't know what they're talking about - AKA Keynesians. Read on...
Let Them Inflate by The Mogambo Guru Tampa Bay, Florida
I think that Paul Krugman is one of those absurd guys that has no idea what in the hell he is talking about and who owes his undeserved prominence to being a real butt-kissing sucker-upper to Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve, and now he's doing the same thing to the laughable Ben Bernanke and his disastrous Federal Reserve, although I will admit that I don't know why anybody listens to this guy.
I say this with such obvious disrespect because Mr. Krugman is on record has having advised the Bank of Japan to purposely cause inflation, as, "The way to make monetary policy effective is for the central bank to credibly promise to be irresponsible - to make a persuasive case that it will permit inflation to occur, thereby producing the negative real interest rates the economy needs", although he never actually says where he is going to find guys stupid enough to loan money at negative interest rates, or in what bizarre alternate universe he lives where high inflation in consumer prices, particularly sustained high inflation, is anything other than a total disaster, which is why most of economics is concerned with the problem of preventing inflation while fostering growth!
In fact, he thinks that a central bank trying to reflate a collapsing economy should announce a deliberate plan to raise the level of prices (such as the Consumer Price Index) from current low levels to some dramatically higher value (a so-called "price-level gap") that it would have theoretically reached if a "moderate" and constant amount of inflation in prices had, in fact, occurred! Gaaahhhh!
To make it more Theater of the Absurd, he then says to keep creating more inflation in prices! Gaaahhhh! This is insane! This is beyond insane!
This would be bad enough coming from just another egghead academic dork from Princeton, but a terrifying quote from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, shows that he agrees with this nonsense!
In fact, Bernanke said, "A successful effort to eliminate the price- level gap would proceed, roughly, in two stages. During the first stage, the inflation rate would exceed the long-term desired inflation rate, as the price-level gap was eliminated and the effects of previous deflation undone. Call this the reflationary phase of policy. Second, once the price-level target was reached, or nearly so, the objective for policy would become a conventional inflation target or a price- level target that increases over time at the average desired rate of inflation."
This is so dangerously preposterous that one's hands shake in fear and paranoia at the calamity that awaits a nation that takes such ridiculous advice, and there is nothing to be done except to buy more gold, silver and oil, as the last 4,500 years of history have proven that these are the things that have lasting value, unlike the bitter disappointment and dismay of paper money and "true love."
"...inflation in prices is the worst thing that can happen to us, and which is exactly what is going to happen to us because the damnable Federal Reserve is creating unbelievable, staggering amounts of money and credit..."
Obviously, people do not have to be around me very long before they learn that I am perpetually scared, to one degree or another, of inflation in prices, such as the other day, for example, when I had saved up enough money to have dinner alone at a restaurant so that I could eat one lousy meal without the wife and kids all the time whining and complaining about how they need more money, and want more money, and how they want me to give it to them, and how I am a terrible person for not giving them more money, how I am too stupid to get a better job to make more money and how I am too lazy to get a second job with which to earn more money.
So instead of having to listen to them talk about how much they hate me, I am enjoying the peaceful qualities of the restaurant when a guy seated at the next table sees me eating my steak and asks me how I liked it.
So I told him, "I like it fine, except I wanted lobster! Rich, flakey lobster to dip into real melted butter so wickedly delicious that you can actually hear your arteries hardening from just looking at it; but I can't order lobster because inflation in prices caused by the Federal Reserve creating so much money and credit all these years has resulted in the ugly news that they now charge too much for lobster, and inflation is so bad that some crappy, weak iced tea is almost two bucks a lousy glassful, most of which is ice!"
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the other people in the restaurant have stopped eating and they are all looking at me. Figuring that they want me to further enlighten them, I go on, "So don't you ask to me about how I like my steak, when you should be asking me how I like inflation in prices, which I don't! Not one little bit! And if you weren't so stupid, you would realize that inflation in prices is the worst thing that can happen to us, and which is exactly what is going to happen to us because the damnable Federal Reserve is creating unbelievable, staggering amounts of money and credit so that the federal government can borrow and spend it in an orgy of deficit spending that will end badly!"
Well, pretty soon the manager comes over and tries to censor the Heroic And Brave Mogambo (HABM) by telling me to shut up and sit down, although he might have been interested in the actual inflation figures, which are pretty bad!
For instance, producer price inflation shot up 1.8% in June, and it seems especially interesting that the Labor Department figures that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.7% in June, and although 0.7% does not seem like that much in one month, it adds up to a lot over the course of time; like for instance, in a year, when this 0.7% per month inflation compounds to 8.7% per year inflation! Yow!
Until next time,The Mogambo Guru for The Daily Reckoning
P.S. And if you want another reason to buy gold, silver and oil - as if you could possibly need another reason after the trillions of other reasons to do so that are smacking you in the face every time you turn around - then this is it, although there is no reason to hurry, as this is only the beginning of something that is going to be Very, Very Long (VVL) and Very, Very Ugly (VVU).
Thank goodness buying gold and silver as investments is so easy! Whee!
Editor's Note: Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.
The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and other fine publications.
Let Them Inflate by The Mogambo Guru Tampa Bay, Florida
I think that Paul Krugman is one of those absurd guys that has no idea what in the hell he is talking about and who owes his undeserved prominence to being a real butt-kissing sucker-upper to Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve, and now he's doing the same thing to the laughable Ben Bernanke and his disastrous Federal Reserve, although I will admit that I don't know why anybody listens to this guy.
I say this with such obvious disrespect because Mr. Krugman is on record has having advised the Bank of Japan to purposely cause inflation, as, "The way to make monetary policy effective is for the central bank to credibly promise to be irresponsible - to make a persuasive case that it will permit inflation to occur, thereby producing the negative real interest rates the economy needs", although he never actually says where he is going to find guys stupid enough to loan money at negative interest rates, or in what bizarre alternate universe he lives where high inflation in consumer prices, particularly sustained high inflation, is anything other than a total disaster, which is why most of economics is concerned with the problem of preventing inflation while fostering growth!
In fact, he thinks that a central bank trying to reflate a collapsing economy should announce a deliberate plan to raise the level of prices (such as the Consumer Price Index) from current low levels to some dramatically higher value (a so-called "price-level gap") that it would have theoretically reached if a "moderate" and constant amount of inflation in prices had, in fact, occurred! Gaaahhhh!
To make it more Theater of the Absurd, he then says to keep creating more inflation in prices! Gaaahhhh! This is insane! This is beyond insane!
This would be bad enough coming from just another egghead academic dork from Princeton, but a terrifying quote from Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, shows that he agrees with this nonsense!
In fact, Bernanke said, "A successful effort to eliminate the price- level gap would proceed, roughly, in two stages. During the first stage, the inflation rate would exceed the long-term desired inflation rate, as the price-level gap was eliminated and the effects of previous deflation undone. Call this the reflationary phase of policy. Second, once the price-level target was reached, or nearly so, the objective for policy would become a conventional inflation target or a price- level target that increases over time at the average desired rate of inflation."
This is so dangerously preposterous that one's hands shake in fear and paranoia at the calamity that awaits a nation that takes such ridiculous advice, and there is nothing to be done except to buy more gold, silver and oil, as the last 4,500 years of history have proven that these are the things that have lasting value, unlike the bitter disappointment and dismay of paper money and "true love."
"...inflation in prices is the worst thing that can happen to us, and which is exactly what is going to happen to us because the damnable Federal Reserve is creating unbelievable, staggering amounts of money and credit..."
Obviously, people do not have to be around me very long before they learn that I am perpetually scared, to one degree or another, of inflation in prices, such as the other day, for example, when I had saved up enough money to have dinner alone at a restaurant so that I could eat one lousy meal without the wife and kids all the time whining and complaining about how they need more money, and want more money, and how they want me to give it to them, and how I am a terrible person for not giving them more money, how I am too stupid to get a better job to make more money and how I am too lazy to get a second job with which to earn more money.
So instead of having to listen to them talk about how much they hate me, I am enjoying the peaceful qualities of the restaurant when a guy seated at the next table sees me eating my steak and asks me how I liked it.
So I told him, "I like it fine, except I wanted lobster! Rich, flakey lobster to dip into real melted butter so wickedly delicious that you can actually hear your arteries hardening from just looking at it; but I can't order lobster because inflation in prices caused by the Federal Reserve creating so much money and credit all these years has resulted in the ugly news that they now charge too much for lobster, and inflation is so bad that some crappy, weak iced tea is almost two bucks a lousy glassful, most of which is ice!"
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the other people in the restaurant have stopped eating and they are all looking at me. Figuring that they want me to further enlighten them, I go on, "So don't you ask to me about how I like my steak, when you should be asking me how I like inflation in prices, which I don't! Not one little bit! And if you weren't so stupid, you would realize that inflation in prices is the worst thing that can happen to us, and which is exactly what is going to happen to us because the damnable Federal Reserve is creating unbelievable, staggering amounts of money and credit so that the federal government can borrow and spend it in an orgy of deficit spending that will end badly!"
Well, pretty soon the manager comes over and tries to censor the Heroic And Brave Mogambo (HABM) by telling me to shut up and sit down, although he might have been interested in the actual inflation figures, which are pretty bad!
For instance, producer price inflation shot up 1.8% in June, and it seems especially interesting that the Labor Department figures that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.7% in June, and although 0.7% does not seem like that much in one month, it adds up to a lot over the course of time; like for instance, in a year, when this 0.7% per month inflation compounds to 8.7% per year inflation! Yow!
Until next time,The Mogambo Guru for The Daily Reckoning
P.S. And if you want another reason to buy gold, silver and oil - as if you could possibly need another reason after the trillions of other reasons to do so that are smacking you in the face every time you turn around - then this is it, although there is no reason to hurry, as this is only the beginning of something that is going to be Very, Very Long (VVL) and Very, Very Ugly (VVU).
Thank goodness buying gold and silver as investments is so easy! Whee!
Editor's Note: Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.
The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and other fine publications.
Jun 20, 2009
BRIC
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson06152009.html
The Ending of America’s Financial-Military Empire MICHAEL HUDSON Counterpunch Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The city of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the end of the road for the tsars but of American hegemony too; as the place not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground.
Challenging America is the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the so-called BRIC nations –Brazil, Russia, India and China.
The attendees have assured American diplomats that it is not their aim to dismantle the financial and military empire of the United States. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, for NATO or for the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. After all, that is what a multipolar world means. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.
Yet the Yekaterinburg meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda — nothing less than the replacement of the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry, suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.
What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.
The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on “one big center of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.” At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is the fact that the United States makes too little and spends too much, particularly its vast military outlays, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.
The sticking point for all these countries is the ability of the United States to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by U.S. consumers on imports in excess of exports, U.S. buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These banks then face a hard choice: either to recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the “free market” force up their currency relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.
When China and other countries recycle their dollar inflows by buying US Treasury bills to “invest” in the United States, this buildup is not really voluntary. It does not reflect faith in the ability of the U.S. economy to enrich foreign central banks for their savings. Nor does it represent any calculated investment preference. It is simply a matter of a lack of alternatives. U.S.-style “free markets” hook countries into a system that forces them to accept dollars without limit. Now they want out.
This means creating a new alternative. Rather than making merely “cosmetic changes as some countries and perhaps the international financial organisations themselves might want,” said Mr. Medvedev at the end of his St. Petersburg speech, “what we need are financial institutions of a completely new type, where particular political issues and motives, and particular countries will not dominate.”
When foreign military spending forced the US balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative was to invest their subsequent inflows of US dollars in US Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks now hold $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves. These loans have financed most of the US Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades now! Given the fact that about half of US Government discretionary spending is for military operations – including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries – the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon and also US buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.
The main political issue confronting the world’s central banks is therefore how to avoid adding yet more dollars to their reserves and thereby financing yet further US deficit spending – including military spending on their borders.
For starters, the six SCO countries and BRIC countries intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit that the United States until now has monopolized for itself. Toward this end, China has struck bilateral deals with Argentina and Brazil to denominate their trade in renminbi rather than the dollar, sterling or euros, and two weeks ago China reached an agreement with Malaysia to denominate trade between the two countries in renminbi. Former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad explained to me in January that as a Muslim country, Malaysia wants to avoid doing anything that would facilitate US military action against Islamic countries, including Palestine. The nation has too many dollar assets as it is, his colleagues explained. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China put an official statement on the bank’s website, explaining that the goal is now to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations.” This is the aim of the discussions in Yekaterinburg.
Aside from no longer financing the U.S. buyout of their own industries and the U.S. military encirclement of the globe, China, Russia and other countries would no doubt like to enjoy the same kind of free ride that America has been getting. As matters stand now, they see the United States as a lawless nation, financially as well as militarily. How else to characterize a nation that proclaims a set of laws for others – on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners – but flouts them itself?
The United States is now the world’s largest debtor yet has avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” imposed on other debtor economies. U.S. interest-rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programs that Washington forces on other countries via the IMF and other Washington vehicles.
The United States tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors. And at home, Congress blocked, on grounds of national security, China’s CNOOK from buying Unocal, much as it blocked Dubai from buying US ports and blocked other sovereign wealth funds from buying into key infrastructure. Foreigners are invited to emulate the Japanese purchase of white elephant trophies such as Rockefeller Center, on which investors quickly lost a billion dollars and ended up walking away.
In this respect the US has given China and other payments-surplus nations no alternative but to find a way to avoid further dollar buildups. To date, China’s attempts to diversify its dollar holdings beyond Treasury bonds have not proved very successful. For starters, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs steered its central bank into higher-yielding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, explaining that these were de facto public obligations. They collapsed in 2008, but at least the U.S. Government took over these two mortgage-lending agencies, formally adding their $5.2 trillion in obligations to the national debt. In fact, it was largely foreign official investment that prompted the bailout. Imposing a loss for foreign official agencies would have broken the Treasury-bill standard then and there, not only by utterly destroying US credibility but because there simply are too few Government bonds to absorb the dollars being flooded into the world economy by the soaring US balance-of-payments deficits.
In late 2007, seeking more of an equity position to protect the value of their dollar holdings as the Federal Reserve’s credit bubble drove interest rates down, China’s sovereign wealth funds sought to diversify. China bought stakes in the well-connected Blackstone equity fund and Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, Barclays in Britain, South Africa’s Standard Bank (once affiliated with Chase Manhattan back in the apartheid 1960s) and in the soon-to-collapse Belgian financial conglomerate Fortis. But the US financial sector was collapsing under the weight of its debt pyramiding, and prices for shares plunged for banks and investment firms across the globe.
Foreigners see the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by American military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. US military power is muscle-bound, based more on atomic weaponry and long-distance air strikes than on ground operations, which have become too politically unpopular to mount on any large scale.
On the economic front there is no foreseeable way in which the United States can work off the $4 trillion it owes foreign governments, their central banks and the sovereign wealth funds set up to dispose of the global dollar glut. America has become a deadbeat –a militarily aggressive one — as it sruggles to hold onto the immense power it once earned by economic means. The problem for the rest of the world is how to constrain its behavior. Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank advisor now with China’s Academy of Sciences, suggested that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner be advised that the United States should “save” first and foremost by cutting back its military budget. “U.S. tax revenue,” he said, “is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of ‘fighting two wars.’”
At present foreign savings are what finance the US budget deficit by buying most Treasury bonds. The consequence is taxation without representation for foreign voters as to how the US Government uses their forced savings. It therefore is necessary for the financial diplomats to broaden the scope of their policy-making beyond the private-sector marketplace. Exchange rates are determined by many factors besides “consumers wielding credit cards,” the usual euphemism that the US media cite for America’s balance-of-payments deficit. Since the 13th century, war has been a dominating factor in the balance of payments of leading nations – and of their national debts. Government bond financing consists mainly of war debts, as normal peacetime budgets tend to be balanced. This links the war budget directly to the balance of payments and exchange rates.
Foreign nations see themselves stuck with unpayable IOUs under conditions where, if they move to stop the US free lunch, the dollar will plunge and their dollar holdings will fall in value relative to their own domestic currencies and other currencies. If China’s currency rises by 10 per cent against the dollar, its central bank will show the equivalent of a $200 million loss on its $2 trillion of dollar holdings as denominated in yuan. This explains why, when bond ratings agencies talk of the US Treasury securities losing their AAA rating, they don’t mean that the government cannot simply print the paper dollars to “make good” on these bonds. They mean that dollars will depreciate in international value. And that is just what is now occurring. When U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner assumed an earnest mien and told an audience at Peking University in early June that he believed in a “strong dollar” and China’s US investments therefore were safe and sound, he was greeted with derisive laughter.
Anticipation of a rise in China’s exchange rate provides an incentive for speculators to seek to borrow in dollars to buy renminbi and benefit from the appreciation. For China, the problem is that this speculative inflow would become a self-fulfilling prophecy by forcing up its currency. So the problem of international reserves is inherently linked to that of capital controls. Why should China see its profitable companies sold for yet more freely-created US dollars, which the central bank must use to buy low-yielding US Treasury bills or lose yet further money on Wall Street?
To steer round this quandary it is necessary to reverse the philosophy of open capital markets that the world has held ever since Bretton Woods in 1944. On the occasion of Mr. Geithner’s visit to China, Zhou Xiaochuan, minister of the Peoples Bank of China, the country’s central bank, said pointedly that this was the first time since the semiannual talks began in 2006 that “China needed to learn from American mistakes as well as its successes” when it came to deregulating capital markets and dismantling controls.
So an era is winding to its end. In the face of continued US overspending, de-dollarization threatens to force countries to return to the kind of dual exchange rates common between World Wars I and II: one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments, at least from dollar-area economies.
Even without capital controls, the nations meeting at Yekaterinburg are taking steps to avoid being the unwilling recipients of yet more dollars. Seeing that U.S. global hegemony cannot continue without the spending power that they themselves supply, governments are attempting to hasten what Chalmers Johnson has called “the sorrows of empire” in his book by that name – the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order. If China, Russia and their non-aligned allies have their way, the United States will no longer live off the savings of others in the form of its own recycled dollars, nor have the money for unlimited military expenditures and adventures.
US officials wanted to attend the Yekaterinburg meeting as observers. They were told No. It is a word that Americans will hear much more in the future.
Jun 19, 2009
Obama's currrent kill rate #6
"What is woman that you forsake her
And the hearth and the home acre
To go with the old grey widowmaker?"
Jun 15, 2009
Hanuman
Hanuman, Rama, Sita
Hanuman Gayatri for strength and selfless love
In hinduism on December 22, 2008 at 4:42 am
Hanuman Gayatri for amazing stamina and great health
Hanuman Gayatri is for those who want to develop a amazing stamina, the power of selfless love, great physical strength and the power to heal wounds promptly. Hanuman is the embodiment of strength, stamina, wit, loyalty and unwavering devotion. Hanuman is also fearless and never hesitating. Hanuman gayatri is an extraordinary gayatri mantra for those who want to develop qualities like Hanuman. If you are ever in need of strength Hanuman Gayatri is for you. And the strength is both physical as well as inner strength. You can get rid of your fears with Hanuman Gayatri and get rid of doubts too. Your loyalty and devotion will increase manifold and you will also be blessed with clarity of mind to see through things. For where there is clarity of mind, doubts and hesitation will be pushed out of the back door.
*****
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/mar/10/tibet-dalailama
Barbara O'Brien guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 March 2009 21.30 GMT
"...He embodies spiritual enlightenment to some and backward ignorance to others. Which of these personae is the real Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama?
"To a Buddhist, the question is absurd. A foundational Buddhist doctrine is that we all are empty of intrinsic self. There is no soul, no permanent and cohesive individual who inhabits our limbs. Our "I" is a persistent delusion, re-created each moment by our senses and nervous systems. This is true of his holiness also, the "real" Dalai Lama.
"... In Buddhism, what's called "reincarnation" or "rebirth" is not a soul migrating to another body. Rebirth might be understood as the activity or intention of one life carried over to another. Think of the energy of a wave causing another wave. The reborn individual is not the same person, but neither is he another person.
"Journalists persist in calling the Dalai Lama a "god", but this is not correct. His holiness is thought to be an emanation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, an iconic being who represents boundless compassion. Avalokiteshvara appears throughout the several schools of Mahayana Buddhism in many forms, sometimes male, sometimes female. In English, sometimes he is called a "god", and sometimes she is called a "goddess".
"However, gods and goddesses of Buddhism are not understood the same way gods and goddesses are understood by most westerners. Buddhist gods and goddesses have no intrinsic being or existence. It is a bit closer to a Buddhist understanding to think of them as archetypes. They represent aspects of enlightenment, such as wisdom and compassion. They also represent our own deepest nature.
"...To Tibetans, the role of Dalai Lama has countless layers of significance. The man Tenzin Gyatso seems not so much to live the role as to let the role live him. Now in his 70s, since the age of six he has spent at least four hours a day in meditation and study. He rises in the early morning hours to empty himself of attractions and aversions, of ego and self-clinging. He moves through the day responding to each person, each moment, fully and appropriately. This is the ideal of Buddhist practice.
"Who is the real Dalai Lama? According to Buddhist teaching, whatever you see in him is most likely a projection of the inner reality you cultivate. Whatever that is, is it more or less real than anything else you see?"
******
Jun 6, 2009
Basic Buddhism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/mar/10/tibet-dalailama
“A foundational Buddhist doctrine is that we all are empty of intrinsic self. There is no soul, no permanent and cohesive individual who inhabits our limbs. Our "I" is a persistent delusion, re-created each moment by our senses and nervous systems…
“Gods and goddesses of Buddhism are not understood the same way gods and goddesses are understood by most westerners. Buddhist gods and goddesses have no intrinsic being or existence. It is a bit closer to a Buddhist understanding to think of them as archetypes. They represent aspects of enlightenment, such as wisdom and compassion. They also represent our own deepest nature...
“In Buddhism, what's called "reincarnation" or "rebirth" is not a soul migrating to another body. Rebirth might be understood as the activity or intention of one life carried over to another. Think of the energy of a wave causing another wave. The reborn individual is not the same person, but neither is he another person…
“The man Tenzin Gyatso [the Dalai Lama] seems not so much to live the role as to let the role live him. Now in his 70s, since the age of six he has spent at least four hours a day in meditation and study. He rises in the early morning hours to empty himself of attractions and aversions*, of ego and self-clinging. He moves through the day responding to each person, each moment, fully and appropriately. This is the ideal of Buddhist practice…”
* Without the ability to separate from attraction and aversion, you are easy meat for one of the many dream merchants around. They are skilled cattle handlers.
You will know when you've arrived when you understand "There is nothing to ask, and there is no one to answer" even if you didn't have to go through a year of silence.
The answer to all other questions whatsoever may be found in the short conversation that follows: A student at a California university reported to his professor, a Chinese gentleman, that Roger Bannister's original record breaking four minute mile record had been broken yet again by an athlete who shaved two twenty fifths of a second from that record. "Really," said the Chinese professor, "and what did he do with the time he saved?"
“A foundational Buddhist doctrine is that we all are empty of intrinsic self. There is no soul, no permanent and cohesive individual who inhabits our limbs. Our "I" is a persistent delusion, re-created each moment by our senses and nervous systems…
“Gods and goddesses of Buddhism are not understood the same way gods and goddesses are understood by most westerners. Buddhist gods and goddesses have no intrinsic being or existence. It is a bit closer to a Buddhist understanding to think of them as archetypes. They represent aspects of enlightenment, such as wisdom and compassion. They also represent our own deepest nature...
“In Buddhism, what's called "reincarnation" or "rebirth" is not a soul migrating to another body. Rebirth might be understood as the activity or intention of one life carried over to another. Think of the energy of a wave causing another wave. The reborn individual is not the same person, but neither is he another person…
“The man Tenzin Gyatso [the Dalai Lama] seems not so much to live the role as to let the role live him. Now in his 70s, since the age of six he has spent at least four hours a day in meditation and study. He rises in the early morning hours to empty himself of attractions and aversions*, of ego and self-clinging. He moves through the day responding to each person, each moment, fully and appropriately. This is the ideal of Buddhist practice…”
* Without the ability to separate from attraction and aversion, you are easy meat for one of the many dream merchants around. They are skilled cattle handlers.
You will know when you've arrived when you understand "There is nothing to ask, and there is no one to answer" even if you didn't have to go through a year of silence.
The answer to all other questions whatsoever may be found in the short conversation that follows: A student at a California university reported to his professor, a Chinese gentleman, that Roger Bannister's original record breaking four minute mile record had been broken yet again by an athlete who shaved two twenty fifths of a second from that record. "Really," said the Chinese professor, "and what did he do with the time he saved?"
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