Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by William Marina
Monday, June 29, 2009
Buy America
A few of my friends have been concerned about buying what they called an “American Car,” while continuing to purchase all of the Chinese made items in Walmart, boxed as they are often beneath a huge American flag. They simply wouldn’t believe my data that the most “American Made” cars were being built by Nissan and Honda.
Now along comes some interesting information about the buying of America.
As the fearful Americans, victims of corrupt elections, and a collapsing economy, stumble around in intellectual confusion at the pronouncements of their leaders, its probably too much to imagine that such a bovine herd will take to the streets in protest as have the young Iranians. And, what will the recent “Tea Party” Republican protesters do, now that one of their leaders has returned a bit chagrined after his brief trip to Argentina?
Friday, June 26, 2009
Did The Chinese Invent Just About Everything?
Care for a toothbrushanyone?
I recall in 1986 teaching a class of 240 students in a required Business course called "Government, Business and Society," and that after a lecture on China, an Accounting Major spoke out that he saw little relevancy to American Business in talking about China's role in History.
The next day the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Chinese Science Exhibit then opening in Toronto, Canada, titled, "Did the Chinese Invent Just About Everything?" The student had the courage to openly apologize to both his teacher and fellow students.
China, of course, had an enormous impact on what we call "The Enlightenment" in Western Civilization, and when Alexis de Tocqueville later saw its result on the bureaucratization of French government and schooling, he called it "the Chinese System."
Well, folks, China is back, and the "the Chinese System" is alive and well throughout our emerging, centralized, Global Civilization.
So, for today's assignment, "Go brush your teeth!"
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Try a Neanderthal for Lunch Bunch?
Human beings appear to have coupled aggression with a desire for meat.
Iran on Father’s Day, 2009
Eric Margolis today offers a good summary of the Empire's incredible hypocrisy and continued costly meddling in Iran. Quite a stretch for a nation where election fraud in electronic voting machines, and among election officials, let alone the Supremes, in 2000, and then in Ohio, among other States, in 2004, has been quite well documented. Clearly, we would like Iran to follow the Saudi "client" model! Empire über Alles, Baby!
Also, Happy Father's Day to all Dads out there! Perhaps I will burn a candle today at the "shrine" of our Foundingist Father, the first Imperialist and advocate of an "infant Empire," in wanting to take Canada, help the reactionaries in Haiti with "foreign aid" US style, and destroy the Militia, thereby gutting the 2nd Amendment, less than a decade after it was passed -- the heroic Gen./Prez, GW! Hard to understand why Ron Paul and Ivan Eland are so enthused about this wealthiest Slavocrat at the time in the budding American "Republic!" So, “All Hail,” to the First Father of the Empire!
Friday, May 15, 2009
The 81% Tax Increase
Bruce Bartlett just sent me the following email about his Forbes.com column today:
[In my latest column, I look at the new Social Security and Medicare trustees reports. They show that the discounted present value of the unfunded liability of these programs is now more than $100 trillion—twice the private net worth of the entire country. We will need to raise income taxes by 81% to pay all the benefits that have been promised under current law. I dismiss as a pipe dream the idea that spending will ever be cut enough to matter because the percentage of the population that benefits from these programs is growing daily and the elderly vote in the highest percentage of any age group. Therefore, anyone who denies that taxes will rise sharply in coming years is “either grossly ignorant of the fiscal facts, in denial, or living in a fantasy world.”]
To read the entire column, entitled "The 81% Tax Increase":
Sunday, May 3, 2009
In Memory of Jack Kemp
A really interesting memoir/remembrance of Jack Kemp by Bruce Bartlett.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Taking Tickets: Sign Up Now for a Trip to Libra, Gliese 581 d
Rumors have it that John Galt, irritated at the direction of things here on Earth, is no longer interested in stopping the motor of this planet, but is planning an Expedition to a newly discovered planet that has many of the same climate and geographic characteristics as Earth. This appears to be the initial discovery of such a planet, and, as Galt noted, “This gives us the first opportunity to leave this wretched place that we Objectivists have basically found objectionable, anyway.”
As one scientist observed, "It (Gliese 581 e) is the first serious 'water-world' candidate." Galt is really excited about the oceans there, since Piracy is now back in vogue again, and this means his buddy, Ragnar Danneskjöld, will be free to roam the seas of the new Planet in search of prey.
Another scientist stated that the planet “was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.” In an interview Galt said, he didn’t like the undistinguished name, “Gliese 581 e,” and had thought about changing its name to “Rand,” after his creator, whom some Objectivist followers think of as something of a Goddess. When reminded that astronomers like to add numbers, etc., to these discoveries, Galt settled on the name “Rand Jan16,” after her play, “Night of January 16th.”
*Author’s disclosure – William Marina was born January 16th, but his Mother was not the forenamed, Goddess.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Finkelstein: The Coming Breakup of American Zionism
An interesting speech from last year by Norman Finkelstein, about his forthcoming book on the subject. In my opinion, well worth the almost hour and a half of listening time. One wishes there was a transcript of it, but, I look forward to the book.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Continuity in American History: The Torture Issue and Punishing Civilians
Anthony Gregory is undoubtedly correct that it is important that Americans explore the history of our massive “Warfare State.” When did it all begin?
The torture issue, much now in the news with respect to the CIA, overlaps with that of the punishment and killing of civilians as is evident almost daily in the drone missile killings of whole families in Afghanistan.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
If You Are Wealthy Enough to Afford "Conservation!"
Check out the 100 miles to the gallon Hybrid GM Hummer for those who really want to "save" on gas! And, note the huge batteries in the Hummer, which will someday have to be somehow recycled, or disposed of.
No price offered as yet, on the
Hybrid Hummer.
Sort of like the Al Gorean folks who, 4 years ago, paid about $7,000 more for a futuristic, "greenie-looking," Toyota Prius, when they could have bought, as the NYT noted in 2005, a Honda Civic Hybrid (I did so) for much less. The mileage difference was so small, it would have taken years, and hundreds of thousands of miles of driving, to recoup the price difference. (And, the Honda was slightly larger and had more interior room, than the Prius.)
One never ceases to marvel at what Americans conceive of as "Conservation!" (On his own properties at the time, Gore was using enormous amounts of electricity, far beyond the average American's usage, but, then, he was, and is, out to "save the entire Earth," as he constantly reminds us all.)
Friday, April 17, 2009
Exploring US Taxation
In the discussion of taxes few Republicans get beyond the “Teabag” stage. A conservative libertarian who does is Bruce Bartlett, whose book on Bush, early on blew the whistle on what was happening to America.
Last week at Forbes.com, he compared U.S. taxes to those in foreign countries and found that ours are relatively low. The anti-tax crowd universally denounced this analysis on the grounds that why should we care if foreigners are even more overtaxed than we are.
This week he looked at the effective tax rate on the median family income. He showed that taxes are at a historically low level. Furthermore, polls show a historically low level of dissatisfaction with taxes. He concluded that the tax protestors lack the credibility to be taken seriously.
Those libertarians who live in the real world, and don’t imagine we can simply dispense with all taxes, might find this data useful. We need to strive toward an equitable (fair) tax system at the same time attempting to prevent the Empire from further bankrupting itself with the foreign/military policies espoused by the Bush and Obama regimes, along with their domestic welfare policies as well.
A Place to Hangout if John Galt and the Objectivists are Unable to Recapture the Earth
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The Tax Bill of the “Overseer” of the Empire and His Lady
Bruce Bartlett’s last column at Forbes.com dealt with America's relatively low tax rate overall compared with most nations. Think how low it might be if Obama can cut some of the military bloat and provide an efficient health system.
As reported by Bloomberg, Obama’s income of over $2.7 million came mostly from sales of his two books, on which he paid a tax of over $850K. His new tax plan would cost him another $102K.
The Republicans and their "tea bags," have managed in the long run to find another stale issue. The real issue is equity within the tax system, along with regulation of Wall St., as well as what Mark Twain once called "the Lawyer Tribe," now about to feast vampire-like on the carcass of Lehman Brothers. American "Legalism" has made historical Chinese Legalism look like a modest-Mandarin effort!
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Finally, an Explanation of Finance Corporatism!
Bill is the proprietor of a bar in Asheville...
In order to increase sales, he asks the advice of a visitor from Boston, Barney King.
He convinces Bill to allow his loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now, but pay later.
Bill keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).
Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood into Bill's bar.
Monday, April 13, 2009
ZIM über Alles
There has been a spirited discussion here at L&P about piracy, Somalia, arming ships, etc.
There is one shipping line that has not been hit by the pirates. It is the ZIM Integrated Shipping Services.
Why is this? Because the Israeli crews are armed, to protect themselves and their ship. The pirates are not interested in taking on a crew, perhaps all of which have served and been trained in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
They, apparently, don’t need the navies of the world to protect their ships. If I were shipping by container through one of the pirate infested areas, that is the company I would use.
Other shipping companies might take a lesson from ZIM.
Hat tip to John Moore for mentioning ZIM to me.
*In 1988 William Marina was the founding Dir. of the Florida-Israel Linkage Institute at FAU.
Imperial History
A number of well-intentioned souls voted for Obama and other Democrats in the hope they might roll back the Empire.
Ain’t gonna happen!
Did any Caesar cut back on the power of his predecessor, or increase it, if he could do so?
A new Chinese dynasty always faithfully wrote up the history of the previous one it had overthrown, careful to keep the imperial dynastic idea intact. In such eyes, the Emperor always has a full wardrobe!
Here in America, Obama is not about to explore or condemn the power excesses of the previous President. Forbid it, Almighty God!
And, he has no shortage of Court Historians to help him to prepare the materials for a future history of his own dynasty.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The Arrival of Eternal Truth
Obama says so.
Maybe!
Friday, April 3, 2009
Is the Relevance of Atlas Shrugged, both as Metephor or History, Worth Making a Film About?
Roderick Long responded at length on several points about my comments on the notion of making a movie of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (see his article below).
These require a substantive response, which I make below. My initial comment is numbered and italicized, followed by his comment, and then my “Response.”
1) Rand's science fiction is another piece of fantasy for "outraged" Americans who don't want to face the real world, or deal with it.
Are you saying that a work has to be realistic in order to be relevant to the real world? Why? What about metaphor?
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Global Economic Crisis
Readers of Asia Times will have long been aware of the excellent essays by Henry C.K. Liu. Below is a link to the latest, with internal links to several others:
http://atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/KD01Cb01.html
Will is the Real Capitalist Nation Please Stand Up?
http://tinyurl.com/dlyc78
If the Gold idea flies, who will loan us the money to continue to fight our foreign wars, finance our health care, and bail out Wall St.?
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Drug Dilemma: Informational and Regulatory Failure on a Massive Scale
Perhaps no group is more “captured” by their ideology than “doctrinaire” libertarians. One example is with respect to drugs, where the standard argument is that everyone ought to be free to use such drugs as marijuana, cocaine and opium. Our esteemed leader, David Beito, for example, on March 14th, posted a video link here at L&P, see below, in which Cong. Ron Paul made the case for legalizing marijuana.
But what about other drugs created by Big Pharma? Where do we draw the line, if at all?
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Wall Street & Other Bulls: A New Proposal From Old Rome!
There have been many comparisons of late between the present Crisis in Karl Rove’s Beloved "American Empire,” and that which impacted Rome starting some two millennia ago.
One of the great theatrical aspects of the Roman Circuses, along with Chariot Races, Gladiators, and other spectacles, was the killing of various animals, especially Bulls. In various and ongoing financial crises that repeatedly afflicted the Empire, the Emperors, ever acutely aware of Roman Populism, placed Circuses over even food as a priority in the Welfare programs for the masses.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Bandow on Isolationism
Doug Bandow has an interesting piece today on Isolationism and Internationalism. My comment is offered below:
Doug,
I believe that you, like Ron Paul, are simply incorrect about several of the so-called "Founding Fathers," such as George Washington being "Non-interventionists," or "Isolationists," whichever term you prefer to use.
Monday, March 16, 2009
The Truth About Tim Geithner?
Who is the biggest fool in Barack Obama’s entourage?
Read the views of Australia’s former Prime Minister, Peter Keating, in the Sydney Morning News. See the text below.
How is it, that the same people, usually Mandarin bureaucrats like Larry Summers, often from Harvard, keep turning up, decade after decade, in key policy positions in running and ruining(?) the American Empire?
In the decline of American Power, must the Empire grow senile as well?
Why can't we just elect Caligula's horse to run things? It is a great idea, whether true or not!
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
An Obama Plan Sing-a-Long!
Both Plato and Confucius agreed on the importance of Music in our lives. Here's a little Sing-a-Long for today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYlhwAr8D6I
Occupation and Empire
With reference to the excellent letter, cited by David Beito below, by the 5 Congressmen questioning the notion that increasing the size of our occupying forces in Afghanistan will lead to eventual victory, I am always surprised at Americans ignorance of their own history, as noted by Jane Shaw in an earlier posting during the last week.
Perhaps the best contemporary history of the American Revolution, along with that of David Ramsey, is by Mercy Otis Warren, a cousin of Abigail Adams, and sister of James Otis, who coined the phrase, “taxation without representation is tyranny,” and wife of James Warren. Not only was Mrs. Warren a historian, but also perhaps our first great playwright. Finally, her view of the Revolution is best appreciated in the light of the fact that she later became a staunch Anti-Federalist, rather critical of what she saw as John Adams “monarchical” tendencies.
Friday, March 6, 2009
BRUCE BARTLETT ON A CARBON TAX VS. CAP-AND-TRADE
Several days ago Aeon J. Skoble encouraged a discussion of the “Cap-and-Trade” issue.
Here is an excellent piece on that, comparing it to a Carbon Tax, by historian and Forbes magazine columnist, Bruce Bartlett: A Carbon Tax is Better than a Cap-and-Trade.
For a discussion of other of Mr. Bartlett’s work, see my article at HNN from several years ago:
Bartlett Review.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Corporatism: FDR's 'Right Path,' is Alive and Well!
"I believe that President Roosevelt has chosen the right path. We are dealing with the greatest social problem ever known. Millions of unemployed must get their jobs back. This cannot be left to private initiative."
And, sure enough President Barack Obama's overall Budget will generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the Government sector, people who will be grateful voters in the next election. Here is the Washington Post's piece on that: I'll bet readers thought the opening quote above was perhaps by our President Barack Obama, an admitted admirer of the New Deal.
Actually, it was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, in 1933, speaking admiringly of the New Deal as the way for National Socialism to follow. In the economic realm, Hitler's chief Economic Minister was Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, a Corporatist to the core.
Schacht's reformist parents had spent time in America, and were great admirers of Greeley, the journalist who coined the phrase "Go West, young man!"
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Atlas Shrugged for the 21st Century: How to "Stop the Motor of the World"
It is now barely a half-century since the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). If the Motor of the World has not yet stopped in the emerging, and on-going, financial crisis of the last year, it is no longer running very smoothly, nor are the so-called “Captains of Financial Capitalism” certain about how much fuel (Energy) remains in the tank, either.
What is proposed herein, in promoting and distributing some of the fundamental ideas in the novel, such as entrepreneurship, individual initiative, wealth generation, and prosperity, is to look at these anew from the perspective of the dawning of the 21st century. Before discussing, however, the means of disseminating these ideas, let us look at the historical context of the novel as well as what has occurred globally in the half-century since its publication.
Friday, February 27, 2009
The Myth of Bill Gates
Any historian who studies the development of the computer, especially software, is aware of what might be called the Legend (make that Myth) of Bill Gates, whose ugly, DOS OS, purchased from someone else, but promoted to prominence by then dominant IBM to avoid the antitrust breakup that had then just hit AT&T, came to dominate the market. In Boca Raton, where the IBM PC was developed, some of us used to joke that PC, meant "piece of crap," and that is still true of MicroSoft, especially some of its recent product farces! It is perhaps among the least innovative companies in history. [See the film, "Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a small part of this story.]
Gates and his hirelings, such as Michael Kinsley, continue to promote that Myth, with what has become a fabric of lies, around the supposed genius of Gates' and his newly discovered "Creative Capitalism." When he accepted his honorary degree from Harvard, the drop-out conveniently omitted the role of his dead mother, Mary, in talking IBM's CEO into giving DOS a shot. IBM's management chose DOS over the advice of its own engineers precisely because of its poor quality as they anticipated, incorrectly it turned out, they could take over the OS aspect as well as hardware, after the heat was off with respect to antitrust. Gates' Foundation has also made some incredible boo-boos, documented by The LA Times in a 3-part series last year! For info on Mary Gates extraordinary foundation work, see here.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Outlaw Torture, Defend the Torturers & A Rigid Foreign Policy
Here is another example of the incredible contradictions in US policies. We are going to close Guantanamo as a detention center for torture (let us not discuss what is still going on in prisons in Iraq, and, apparently Obama is going to ratchet up Rendition), while our Gov't will spend millions of $$ to defend the likes of John Yoo. If, as some demand, Dubya, Cheney, Rummy and other higher ups, who instituted these policies (Yoo only sought to justify them) are also brought to trial, can you imagine the comedy of one part of the Justice (?) Dept. bringing these charges, quite apart from Int'l Courts, while another part of the Gov't shells out more millions to defend these people? And, of course, the great Demos, the Vox Populi, who elected, and then re-elected them, are not responsible for any of this, are they?
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Honest Harry the Haberdasher
Here are some quick thoughts about Thomas Fleming pro-Truman HNN article, Obama's from Chicago ... Why that Shouldn't Worry Us:"
How fortunate that Honest Harry chose Mr. Fleming to help his daughter.
No mention by Fleming of how Truman in heading the Senate investigation into war-profiteering in WWII sanitized it to the benefit of his Party. (See Bruce Catton, The Warlords of Washington.
That certainly went a long way to his replacing Wallace as VP in 1944.
No mention of Truman's decision to drop the A-Bombs when Japan was already defeated.
No mention of his decision to reverse FDR's policy on Indo-China and help place the French back in power there.
Not to worry, David McCullough's over 1,000 page Pulitzer Prize winning biography doesn't mention Harry's role in early Vietnam policy either.
Finally, Truman set another precedent in getting the US into a UN "police action," in Korea with no Declaration of War, thus greatly increasing Executive Power. Well, Harry WAS an "honest" proto-Caesar in promoting the Empire!
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Collector is at the Door
The following from Tom Dispatch is of interest, especially towards the end when Dubya is quoted:
"Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property -- the USA -- is worth a good deal less than on November 4, 2000. George W. Bush is a discredited president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world gone bust.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
American Conservatism is "Gone With the Wind"
Both parties now represent wings of Corporatism, much like Germany in the 1930s & 40s under Hitler.
The Republicans represent on the whole Big Business, with a few like Rubin in the other party but also well financed by Wall St. These are increasingly like the German Big Business conservatives of that era backing Adolf.
In the other wing of the Nazis, Adolf's true friends, the Socialist radicals backing all sorts of things from health fads to their idea of Eugenics to homosexuality, etc., much like the Demo Left today, a total welfare program, even for the German hausfraus! And, the universities, as Fulbright understood, are very much a part of that Corporate mix.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Keynesianism's Last Stand?
It appears to me that with respect to Keynesianism today, it is more appropriate to use the term, "Comeback," although one might argue that when Richard Nixon announced, "We are all Keynesians now," that was rather a recognition of its triumph here.
I do prefer the term "Corporatism," rather than Mercantilism to describe what is happening globally, and the triumph might best be called, "El Duce's," or "Benito's," or "Mussolini's Triumph." Or, perhaps HHG Schacht's, as his minions were literally in the saddle even in Japan after 1946, and up to the present.
Monday, October 6, 2008
2nd Amendment..."Gone With the Wind"
Slightly over 100 years ago, the major architect of the new Empire, Elihu Root, serving in the capacities under TR of both Sec.State and Sec. War, one after the other, used the so-called "Militia Act" to effectively eliminate same, replacing it with the Nat'l Guard. That the Congress was threatened with Martial Law if it did not pass the Bailout Bill, demonstrates our Rubicon was actually crossed years ago. The recent discussion and case on the 2nd Amend., arguing that you could have a gun is almost irrelevant. A bunch of individuals having guns is not what the Amend. was all about, and not the same as a "well-regulated Militia."
The Centralization is fundamental to the overall Empire scenario in everything from finance and economics to so-called Defense, with, of course, other items such as Health and Education (Schooling) thrown in for good measure. A truly bipartisan effort by the two Parties! Several years ago when I spoke to staff members of the NSC in the old Exec. Office Building next to the White House about "decentralized war," they could hardly be bothered. The NeoCon mentality was already alive and well, and little has changed since 1981. They clearly wanted Imperial Strike Forces, essential for any variant of the various "Doctrines" enunciated by every Prez since Harry T.
Now they have made it clear, they will use the troops at Home as well. Too bad we don't have a "No Standing Armies Act" like the Brits passed in 1694.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Public/Self-Help Housing
Today I made the following about an article on public housing at HNN:
While I would not quarrel with what you say about public housing in New York, there is also a crisis with respect to single family homes, in fact, in the epicenter of the sub-prime mess. Habitat for Humanity, using what might be called 18th century Amish barn raising technologies has provided some homes, built by volunteers for those who qualify. This is, however, a drop in the bucket!
America was once known for its self-help, can-do attitude.
Professional builders might not like it, but the US Forest Service has developed a very simple Frame Truss technology which enables several people to "dry-in" a 1,200 sq. ft home in about a week. Coupled with a "temporary final" from a city or country, this would enable a couple or family to move in and complete the house for about the total price of a mid-size car.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Cappie We Hardly Knew You!
We have been in what a number of writers from Hobson to Quigley identified as "Finance Capitalism," otherwise known as "Corporatism," since at least 1929, if not earlier. El Duce's ideas now seem rather pervasive, and who knows what the future will now bring! Imagine Deng with a hat on like Mussolini's! Wonder what Chaplin could do with that?
We could use an updated version of RA Brady's, Business as a System of Power (1943), a favorite of C. Wright Mills, which candidly described in the midst of WWII, the political economies of all of the major powers. Corporatism is now clearly the big winner, and will have a harder time disguising itself as any kind of Capitalism.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
George Washington: Initiator of the Imperial Presidency
Here is my response to Stephen Chapman’s article, "The Imperial Presidency is Here to Stay: And Obama, Clinton and McCain seem fine with that," at Reason Online.
While I agree with the central theme of your article, it is depressing that you go on at the beginning, and again at the end, about the supposed anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism of George Washington, who, in my view, was the initiator of the Imperial Presidency.
Certainly, your view is reflected among a number of so-called libertarians, including Ron Paul and the folks at LRC and Antiwar.com, which recently had a piece on GW's supposed anti-militarism by a Law Prof. at the U. of Colorado. Their intellectual confusion, however, is reflected in the fact that the Mises Institute (linked at LRC as well) also recently published, "Generalissimo Washington: How He Crushed the Spirit of Liberty," excerpted from Murray Rothbard's classic, Conceived in Liberty, each of the 4 volumes of which, as they appeared, I had the opportunity to review in Reason magazine many years ago. If Rothbard's analysis is correct, and I believe it is, then you, Paul, LRC, Antiwar, and others, are in error in your overall views about Washington as anti-imperial, or opposed to intervention.
I have written on this extensively, and most of the articles are at one or more of the web sites in my Signature below. Therefore, I have time for only a few observations.
Washington, like Franklin, wanted a structure (representation) that would allow the Americans to eventually dominate the British Empire (as we now have today). They rejected peace overtures in 1778, when the Brits then began their real counter-insurgency policy. This group wanted Canada as a first war objective, early on. Adam Smith in a letter to George III, discovered in the 1930s, sized that group up nicely, perceiving they wanted Empire. For one group in the revolutionary coalition, the war was always about Empire!
Washington disliked the Militia, and wanted a traditional European type war, as did his inheritors, the South's leaders, many years later. In 1781, at the so-called "crisis" of the Revolution in the South, he sent La Fayette north to mount another assault to take Canada. Ethan Allen & the Green Mtn Boys, by then understood his game, and demanded "double pay, double rations & plunder," which meant the end of that imperial scheme.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Haven't the Chinese heard about Kelo?
What is this "just" compensation stuff, anyway?
From tomorrow's Financial Times:
Making Mother Nature Cry?
Dear Lew Rockwell,
You make an excellent point about Katrina from Pop. Mech. in LRC today, which relates also to Hans Hoppe's piece on Insurance.
In the 3rd ed. of HistFL, I discussed much of the same with respect to hurricanes, but also the role of liability in Capitalism. I shall be expanding on this in the 4th ed., next year, because not only does the Fed. Flood Insur. encourage reckless actions, this is also abetted by the Army Corp. of Eng. program, which results in severe erosion even in much milder storms. Jeb Bush rec'd over $8Bil from Dubya to "Restore the Everglades," but much of it has been used to squeeze out more water for the big builders, which is the power base Jeb comes from (in case you haven't guessed, Dubya's was/is oil). A new study also shows the general role of Fed/state land and forestry policies in this mess. The same is true in all of the gulf states, but FL's long coast line, etc., exacerbates all of these factors.
With Environmentalism of this sort, Mother Nature must cry a great deal!
Regards, Bill Marina
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Guess Who Said This!
"I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.
"What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?
"I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."
Monday, February 27, 2006
“Imperial Schism? The Firing of Bruce Bartlett as a Lesson for Historians”
Two economists were in the news this week, with respect to having been, in effect, fired!
One of them, Lawrence Summers, is the President of Harvard University. He is resigning, effective in June, rather than face a long period of nasty confrontation with a part of the faculty. He can, however, salve his wounds with the long-term financial remuneration of a tenured senior professorship, and on the lecture circuit, should he choose not to go into either the business world or return to a career in government.
The other is Bruce Bartlett, whose book, Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, is due out February 28th. Bartlett, of course, was fired last October from a conservative think-tank in Dallas, Texas, The National Center for Policy Analysis. The reason? His book hit too close to President Bush’s responsibility for the policies of his administration. The president, directors and some donors to NCPA, apparently believe policies can somehow be divorced from those who make them. What a novel view!
Both firings open up some interesting questions about the intellectual establishment in this country, ranging from universities to think-tanks. For now, let’s focus on the example of Bruce Bartlett’s.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Not to Worry! And, It's Not About Oil!
"Saving the World from Bird Flu"
Last night on late TV our beloved President announced he is launching a Preemptive War Against Bird Flu (PWABF), because Karl Rove suggested that's where the WMDs might really be hidden!
To seal off any threat from the East, American bombers attacked the Canary Islands. Naval warships are moving to surround the Islands and shell them with depleted uranium. After that, Poodle Blair can send in some of the Brits leaving Iraq to round up the survivors to rendition to Guantanamo.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
The Dubai Ports Issue is Really Wal-mart and Toyota All Over Again!
Good Heavens! George Bush is threatening to veto a piece of Congressional legislation, breaking his record of never having used the veto. What's going on?
A coalition of Democrats led by New York Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, joined by Republican Senate leader, Bill Frist, as well as Christian conservatives such as Cal Thomas, see Dubai's acquisition of P&O's port concessions as a threat to American security. Why, two of the 911 bombers came from that small nation!
Bush's "War on Terror" having cried "wolf" everywhere, including Saddam's Iraq, is now having the issue come back to, as it were, "bite the President in the ass."
Beneath all of this "security" clamor, it's really the Wal-mart question again, in a slightly different guise!
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Bringing the United Nations Back In
Today Juan Cole offers a program for peace in Iraq.
"informed Comment" by Juan Cole
There will be anti-War protests in the coming month, as the 3-year anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq approaches.
I think it is time to demand a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq. I suspect a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians want that. The Sunni Arabs demand it. The Sadrists demand it. It is time. Saying that the guerrillas would take advantage of a timetable, given the carnage we saw on Monday (see below) is frankly silly. They are taking advantage of the current situation. We have to create a new situation, with which they might be happier so that they stop blowing things up. Staying this course is untenable.
But that step will not necessarily resolve the crisis.
I think the peace movement has a real opportunity here to make a push for much heavier United Nations involvement in Iraq. I say, let's make up placards calling on Kofi Annan to get involved, and calling on Bush to let the UN come in in a big way, with proper protection.
Here are the advantages:
Cheney to Head National Archives?
Today's New York Times reports that the government is secretly reclassifying numerous documents, many already published, back into secrecy.
Maybe, now that Cheney says he wants no future elective office, Bush can nominate him as Head of the National Archives to remove just about everything there back into the secrecy of the agencies from whence the materials came. Remember Edward Shils' book, The Torment of Secrecy? God forbid some of those old century plus documents from the BIAs (both Indian and Insular) detailing the Army's massacres of both Indians and Filipinos be allowed in the Archives for future historians to see, part of our first "War on Terrorists." Wonder if the NSA is listening in on discussions between those "suspicious" archivists? Some with a beard may just be part of al Qaida.
Now "History" can be written the Empire's way, just as in 1984!
Thursday, February 9, 2006
With Wolfie in the "Darkest" Third World
That great genius of instant "shock and awe" and brilliant "Democratic nation building" appears to have had an interesting year at the World Bank.
Financial TimesFebruary 9 2006
"Observer: Dialogue of the deaf"
Paul Wolfowitz was always going to have a rocky first year at the World Bank, given his role as architect of the war in Iraq.
It has not helped matters that he relies so heavily on a core team of advisers from the Republican party, who have very little expertise in development matters. But, Observer wonders, are his staff trying to make it work?
In a recent survey only 48 per cent of more than 10,000 respondents said they had a good understanding of the direction in which the bank's senior management - namely, Wolfowitz - was leading them.
That is down from 67 per cent at the time of the last survey, two years ago. That is not particularly surprising - the bank has a long history of unsettling transitions, the inevitable result perhaps of a process in which the president is chosen based on close links to the White House rather than knowledge of the bank and its work.
But what was surprising was the answer to a question that Wolfowitz himself inserted into the survey.
"My annual meeting speech [last September] gave me the chance to provide my views on the general direction and priorities for our institution. Have you read it?" Forty-five per cent of the respondents said they had not.
As a public service, Observer would like to point out that they can find it on the bank's website, on Wolfowitz's page, under the heading "Recent Speeches".
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Our Brilliant Managers
A pre-Super Bowl news weekend special:
Baseball insiders say they knew Dubya was nuts when in 1989 he traded Sammy Sosa to the Cubs. What with running Harkin Oil into the ground, and then the US, its been downhill ever since.
The Seattle Times indicates the War in Iraq is now costing $100,000 per minute, totaling half a trillion $, about what the 13 year Vietnam War cost. This is, of course, conservative when compared to the analysis done by the Nobel Laureate in Economics, George Stiglitz. And the CB's have now left New Orleans and are back in Iraq building our permanent air bases there as part of the Pentagon's 20 year plan. And, I thought only the Soviets developed such centralized, long range plans!
The Independent, UK, reports another leaked Memo about how Bush and Blair talked about a plan to provoke the War early on. and Bush opined, "it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups" afterwards. Right!
Meanwhile Rummy, Negroponte and Condi are spending millions to support Venezuelan groups apposing Chavez. Rummy complains that, like Hitler, Chavez was popularly elected. Speaking of elections, 13 of the elected Palestinians are in Israeli prisons, but then it appears that much of so-called Palestine is a rather walled-in place anyway. One might suggest that the most apt comparison with Hitler is Dubya, trying to provoke a war, as Adolf did in 1939 dressing up the Wehrmacht in Polish uniforms.
PS: Dabya says he wants to conserve oil. Has anyone told him that our tanks in that War he declared "victory" in, in May, 2003, when re-armored against bombs, get ONE mile to the gallon? Another comparison with Adolf's Tiger Panzer tank, which was also a fuel guzzler.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Democracy and War
Timing is everything! A recent academic “splash” has been made by the E. Mansfield & J. Snyder new book, Electing to Fight, the subject of a meeting at the Cato Institute. Rather than listening to that session, or bothering with the book, I recommend “Spengler’s” piece discussing it. Although he has their first names reversed, the links to their work and the Cato meeting are included, along with several of his own articles that are of interest, certainly that on one of David Beito’s favorite people, Victor Davis Hanson, ”No true Scotsman starts a war”.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Hamas & Zionism
I have read the, at this point, eight brief comments to David Beito’s posting yesterday about Hamas’ victory.
For background on Israel, I recommend this piece by Michael Neumann, and have ordered his book. I also suggest this article on the election by
Juan Cole.
For identification purposes, I ought to mention that in 1987, as Director of International Studies at Florida Atlantic University, I was also the founding Co-director of the Florida-Israel Institute, and wrote the legislation establishing it, dedicated to promoting education, cultural and economic ties between the two entities.
I was in Gaza in December, 1987, about two weeks before the initial Intifada developed. By my fourth visit to Israel in 1990, it was clear my efforts were over. Florida’s AIPAC leaders were not enchanted with the notion of bringing free market ideas to that essentially socialist/corporatist nation, and so informed the University. At that time about 94% of Israel’s economy was under government ownership or control. Eat your heart out, Fidel!
It is well to recall that Zionism was not only socialist, but in the 1930s a number of such leaders in Israel were enthralled by the ideas of two chaps, one in Italy, the other in Germany, both of whom had come from a national socialist background.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
The New American "Secret" Uniformed Police
Paul Craig Roberts has some interesting comments on our newest Secret Police.
The great American historian, Mercy Otis Warren, long before FDR in 1941, referred to the British occupation of Boston in Oct., 1768, as a "day of infamy." In modern America, that day arrived in 2005, and most Americans were unaware of it. Of course, we have been using such forces "out there" for years, but have now brought them down below the Rubicon.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the White House, those doyens of style, Laura Bush, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and Lynn Cheney, are probably spending some time designing the new uniforms. Ah, but, will they wear Jackboots?, that is the question! Of course, if Hillary is elected in 2008, they will be redesigned, anyway!
I am reminded of 1965, when those several of us at FAU seeking to speak out against the Vietnam War had our signs torn down with the sanction of the administration, even when Sen. Ernest Gruening, one of two who had voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, was the speaker. The only intellectual sanctuaries were at the Quaker Meeting Houses, the Unitarian Fellowships, and the Catholic College for women, then nearby. As the siege mentality purposefully exploited by the expansion of the "War on Terror" increases, those days may soon be with us again, in spades.
Some now talk of leaving America, but I am reminded of the Ancient Taoist proverb, also found, as I recall, somewhere in Isaiah, "Go straight to the heart of danger, for there you will find safety."
When I was consulting years ago in the late '60s, I once boarded a plane in WPB, and Teddy Kennedy came aboard with two guys I assumed were Secret Service agents. Why did I think so? — they both had on the same style tie with a series of "S.S."s embroidered all over it. I wonder if Abe Lincoln originated that idea before Dr. Goebbels or Himmler?
Friday, December 2, 2005
Where is John Galt?
Why John left.
The Saturn workers thought they could influence decisions on building the car and also the market.
As Astonishing As Elvis!
For those readers who would like to learn more about a group of fanatics perhaps as out of touch with reality as Dick Cheney or the Fundamentalists, click here.
We're off for a three week cruise around the Horn, but will continue to read L&P on the ship.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The Ultimate Big Pharma: Legalizing Opium Warlords
Afghani opium is about to be declared medicinal. A partial triumph for the boys at the Cato Institute! As a Bush administration advisor declared last year, reality within the Empire is whatever they declare it to be.
The emerging drug regulatory agency in Afghanistan reminds me of the "Anti-Counterfeiting" agency in Taiwan with whom I met some years while on a Fulbright studying economic development in Asia.
They did give out the nicest gifts, but it was apparent they weren't really trying to "stop" the pirating of books, films, recordings or other products, but rather to regulate them a bit as would any good cartel.
Perhaps Halliburton/KBR will be given a no-bid contract to regulate the opium distribution. They are ever so useful! Wonder if Medicare will give it away to seniors? Given the competition with Chavez in Latin America, perhaps Cocaine will also be declared a medicine! Free Opium/Coke Dens, now that would really narcotize the American public. No need to worry about hurricane damage, inflation, corruption, Iraq. Whee!
So now we can begin to see what a Bush looks like; coca leaves and poppy flowers.
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
From Andy Rooney to Vladimir Putin, With Love
A year or so ago, "Sixty Minutes," Andy Rooney, floated the idea of a group of professorial advisors to the President of the United States. If not the "best and the brightest" these would certainly be among the most influential of the bureaucrats inhabiting Washington, DC, what some of us lovingly refer to as the "anal sphincter" of the Empire. This idea went nowhere, probably because Dick Cheney has that position.
Now The Christian Science Monitor reports that Putin is setting up such a
"parallel parliament" in Russia:
ANNUAL NEOLOGISM CONTEST
Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words. The winners are:
1. Coffee (N.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (V.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (V.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (Adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (Adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (V.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (N.), olive-flavoured mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (N.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (N.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (N.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (N.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (N), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (N.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (N.), The belief that, when you die, your spirit flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (N.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Are We Slow Learners?
Mr. Marina is Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University, a Research Fellow of the Independent Institute, Oakland, CA, and Exec. Dir. of the Marina-Huerta Educational Foundation. He lives in Asheville, NC.
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. . . . We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
A senior Bush administration adviser, 2002
A large number of Americans believe we are an "Exception to History”; brighter, richer, and just all around more Providentially Blessed, even when it appears this year with respect to wars, hurricanes, and just plain corruption and lies, that our leader may have lost the "Mandate of Heaven."
It may be that we are just, as a People, simply slow learners!
Friday, October 28, 2005
A Reply to Montaner Regarding My "Mistakes"
Thank you Alvaro for contacting Montaner in order to correct my "mistakes."
Carlos Alberto Montaner on Cuba & Iraq
I read with interest the article by Montaner at the link provided by Alvaro Vargas Llosa, that is in Spanish rather than English.
I find Montaner's recounting of US-Cuban relations of a century ago very partial, and perhaps misleading when then applied to the situation in Iraq today.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
On the Death of Ba Jin
The great Chinese anarchist writer, <a href+”http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5349362,00.html”>Ba Jin</a> died, October 17th, at the age of 100.
In all of the nonsense written about the “clash” of Civilizations, it is amazing how little effort is given over to exploring the “borrowing” back and forth, for better and for worse, between cultures and nations.
In viewing, for example, the excellent presentations at the recent Mises Institute conference on Fascism, I saw nothing about Fascism in China or Japan, surely as important as Argentina.
One cannot understand Japanese history since 1945, for instance, without realizing that New Dealers in the Occupation helped bring Fascist bureaucrats back from Manchukuo to run the Finance Ministry in Tokyo because they both hated corporations.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Happy Cristobal Colon Day!
Readers may wish to read my piece on Colon and Political In-Correctness at: http://hnn.us/articles/16960.html
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Impeach the Lout!
This Op-Ed piece, by the NYT's Bob Herbert, pretty much sums up my views:
Monday, September 19, 2005
FEMA & Microsoft: True Love?
CNET reports the following:
"A government for the people by…Microsoft?
According to Slashdot, the U.S. Patent Office is considering making the online patent registration process available via Internet Explorer only. Well, FEMA's already gone that route. If you try using Mozilla Firefox on the FEMA application site, you get this message: "In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer version 6. Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register." Good luck calling FEMA these days; I was able to get only a recorded message when I tried.
Many alternative browsers support ActiveX or make allowances for it, so I fail to see why the U.S. government would insist that Katrina victims use only one browser--a browser with a long history of security flaws, some of the more serious ones having to do with ActiveX Controls. It seems wrong to me that FEMA or any other government agency should restrict access to one browser. I hope this is a temporary oversight."
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Firearms Refresher Course/Katrina
My cousin, Joe Marina, sent me the following note, which has, apparently, been making the rounds on the Internet.
"Subject: Firearms Refresher Course:
If you consider that there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq Theater of operations during the last 22 months; that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.
The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.
Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington, D.C."
Here is my response:
Monday, September 5, 2005
Look What "Jumper"ed Out of the Black Box? Cuba, All Over Again?
Mr. Marina is Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University, a Research Fellow of the Independent Institute, Oakland, CA, and Exec. Dir. of the Marina-Huerta Educational Foundation. He lives in Asheville, NC.
Air Force Gen. John Jumper has announced that the American Empire's idea of Iraqi "Democracy" includes four, huge, permanent Air Bases, with all of the troops, etc., that will be needed to protect such enormous facilities in perpetuity. Welcome to four new versions of Guantanamo, East, folks!
Probably, that won't be in the new Constitution, but rather tacked on as a treaty, as we did in Cuba after 1898. Incredible, how the face of Empire changes so little over a century!
Sunday, September 4, 2005
Black Hawk Up, the Counter-Insurgency at Home!
Hopefully, the Army can finally "win" a Counter-Insurgency!
Will George W Strut Down Bourbon Street in a Flight Suit?
"Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans"
Army Times, September 2:
NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” ...
Dozens of military trucks and up-armored Humvees left the staging area just after 11 a.m. Friday, while hundreds more troops arrived at the same staging area in the city via Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.
“We’re here to do whatever they need us to do,” Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon, of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 1345th Transportation Company. “We packed to stay as long as it takes.”
While some fight the insurgency in the city, other carry on with rescue and evacuation operations....
Saturday, September 3, 2005
Corruption, Inc. Strikes Again?
Who would have thunk it?
Halliburton has been hired for the cleanup of three Naval bases in Mississippi damaged by hurricane Katrina. As soon as it is safe, it will also be doing the damage assessment for other Naval facilities in the New Orleans area. Wonder who'll get the contracts to repair those?
Friday, September 2, 2005
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Trump and Stewart are trying to keep it under wraps, that the Sorcerer (Dick Cheney)'s Apprentice (George W.) may be auditioning for their shows.
The question is, what job to Apprentice him into, and should we wait 3 more years?
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Jude Wanniski, RIP
I first became acquainted with Jude Wanniski through his great book, The Way the World Works, which I used as a text in one of my classes when I returned to teaching in the 1990s after a stint in administration. I treasure the email exchanges that followed, especially during the last several years.
His columns on questions ranging from the economy to Louis Farrakhan, to gassing Iraqis, to bombs in North Korea, to justice for the Palestinians, were an ongoing voice of reason within America. One memorial to him would be to go back to his web site and read a few of these.
Dams and Guns: The Empire Has Sprung Another Leak!
The latest leak is in Louisiana, not Iraq, where the big bucks are being spent. Not to worry, the water is in its "last throes," and VP Head Dick, will see if Halliburton can ride to the rescue with another no-bid contract in Cajun land. This is clearly all Cindy Sheehan's fault for raising the wrath of God against America.
Check out: New Orleans.
Today's Quiz:
How many fingers does GW have to stick in the dike?
Answer: As many as he needs, since the Empire creates its own reality.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Telling It Like It Is
God, I do thank, evangelist, the Rev. Pat Robertson for telling it like it is.
Earlier, he told us, “God’s blessing is on him [George W. Bush]. It’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor.” I think GeorgeII/43 must have liked that!
Now, Robertson announces its time for the CIA to take out Hugo Chavez. Well, its probably easier than attempting to invade Iran.
Readers of John Perkins', Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), will recognize this as the approved intermediate tactic of the American Empire, in between economic pressure and invasion, and often practiced on the Latinos.
Just as the Roman Emperor Constantine, sought a union of the Empire with Christianity, proclaiming the notion of the Trinity by a vote of his stooges at Nicea, and making him God's Man here on Earth, so the convergence of Church and State marches on in the modern Empire.
Just as Jesus had to get off by himself for 40 days of contemplation, so George needed to retire to his ranch. During that time, Satan tempted Jesus, and GeoII/43 now has Cindy Sheehan picking at him.
Hey, may there is divine retribution, after all!
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Jack Douglas' Essays
Essays by the sociologist, Jack D. Douglas, are now a new feature at www.billmarina.com/. The recent essay is entitled, "America's Raging Inflation: The Official Statistics Are The Standard Big Political Lies."
To go to the web site, Click Here.
The author of many books and articles, among them, The Myth of the Welfare State (1989, Jack is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of California at San Diego.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Chew on This!
Who says an American company can't compete in China? The Chinese chew Wrigley says The Asia Times.
Sunday, August 7, 2005
"The Best Damn Medal Writer in the U.S. Army?"
See,The Man Who Invented Audie Murphy. Or, HNN: News From Abroad .
Saturday, August 6, 2005
Russian Affirmative Action?
Yesterday’s Financial Times contains a review, by James Harkin, of a remarkable new book:
Hugh Barnes, Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg (2005).
"By what criteria should recherche historical figures be plucked from obscurity and granted a fresh lick of paint for a modern audience? Insofar as the reputation of Gannibal endures, it is chiefly because he is known for being the greatgrandfather of Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. Hugh Barnes, journalist and Russian scholar, wants to make amends for that, and succeeds brilliantly in his task.
The boy Abram Petrovich Gannibal, from humble origins in Ethiopia, became a godson to the Russian tsar Peter the Great via the unusual route of being bought as a child slave in Constantinople. He was initially regarded as nothing more than a curiosity; he was brought to Russia at a time, as Barnes records, when black people were routinely depicted as alien bogeyman figures. Very soon, however, Gannibal became much more important than that. By the age of 12, he was a soldier in the Russian army and was winning garlands for his courage in fighting in the war against Sweden. Very soon, he became Peter’s adviser and house-intellectual, as well as one of his most educated officers.
Peter hoped to introduce Russia to the outside world to create a more cosmopolitan kind of Russian, and his exotic godson became the perfect ambassador for his reformist ambitions. Gannibal became, says Barnes, “a polymath in the Enlightenment mould, a man of eclectic skills: a linguist, a diplomat, a cryptographer, a spy, and also on occasion an able military commander”.
The philosopher-soldier Gannibal was soon talking differential calculus with Leibniz and philosophy with Voltaire. His intellectual and practical career, Peter wrote proudly, “furnished the most striking proof of the injustice of that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority. He has immense spirit, a prodigious facility for study... [and] was blessed with a mobile and elevated character and an incorruptible probity”.
Gannibal’s chief talent, however, was for military strategy and intrigue. In a brilliant career he fought as a commissioned officer for the French against the Spanish, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-engineer.
He became the tsar’s spy in Paris, and even used his engineering genius to build a wall of fortifications around Russia from the Arctic Circle to China.
That a black slave should have shot up so high in the Russian elite is in itself a marvel. But Barnes wants to use the breadth of Gannibal’s experience as a foil for a much larger story, one which takes on everything from Russian literature to the geopolitics of Muslim slave-trading in Africa. For an essentially military man, Gannibal’s fate was supremely intertwined with Russia’s literary culture. Following his death, he seems to have pricked the conscience as well as the muse of Russian writers - his greatgrandson Pushkin, for example, wrote an unfinished and rather sentimental account of his ancestor, titled The Negro of Peter the Great. In the 20th century, Nabokov was moved to write an essay about Gannibal’s life. Even the man who first bought him from a slave market in Constantinople, the Russian ambassador Pyotr Tolstoy, was an ancestor of the novelist and author of War and Peace, Barnes points out. In an attempt to further enhance his mercurial hero, Barnes wants to make a case for him as the “Russian Othello” - a literary allusion too far, possibly. But then Gannibal’s personality, at least in Barnes’ telling, does resemble that of a Shakespearean hero - he was an insomniac who worried ceaselessly about his ancestry and his place in posterity.
Gannibal died in 1781, at the plum age of 85, in relative obscurity after having fallen foul of shifting court loyalties. His tombstone pays tribute to “a Russian mathematician, a builder of fortresses and canals”, but makes little mention of his military career.
In Barnes’ story, Gannibal appears as a self-shaper nimble enough to make a myth out of his own circumstances. It was only during his time in France, for example, that he began signing his name Gannibal, a Russian variant of Hannibal. Like other former enslaved Africans who made their way to the top of western societies, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho, Gannibal was something of a canny operator - he seems to have played his colonial hosts at their own game, alternately revelling in his exoticism and suggesting the nobility of his African origins, a claim which he never managed to corroborate.
That this former slave eventually became the owner of slaves is a delicious irony for a biographer. But Barnes makes it clear that even Gannibal’s formidable presence could do little to overturn intellectual racism. Even Montesquieu, he records, who tended towards the view that Africans were lazy and immoral, was impressed by Gannibal. Among friends such as Voltaire and Richelieu, says Barnes, “it was as if Gannibal’s wit bleached the pigment of his skin”.
Barnes has dug himself up a most engaging subject. He carries his story along in an unpretentious fashion, wearing his research lightly and never failing to intrigue. Only when it descends into travelogue - when Barnes walks around the places associated with Gannibal trying to sound reflective - does the pace begin to falter. The story is so rich that it has no need of being dressed up in this way.
Gannibal’s life made for an almost unique encounter between Europe and Africa. His story is all the more relevant, Barnes argues, because of the recent resurgence of racism in post-Soviet Russia. Nowadays, he says drily, many ordinary Russians take a rather dim view of the dark-skinned Muslim peoples of Chechnya and other republics. They are known disparagingly as the chorniye, or the blacks, of Russia. Among some Russian scholars, too, it remains controversial to point out their national poet should have had a negro ancestor.
While this may sound a little worthy, what Barnes has written is an intelligent Boy’s Own story, an adventure stuffed full of encounters with history - a ripping good yarn which has the merit of being entirely true."
Thursday, August 4, 2005
How Soon We Forget!
"Al-Zaman reports that US troops are billeted in 1700 homes in Fallujah. The newspaper says that owners are largely refusing to accept rent, and just want the soldiers out of their homes." Juan Cole
America's historical amnesia allows it to forget the quartering of the British standing army in Boston in 1768.
The great feminist republican, Mercy Otis Warren, who, in 1805 published her multi-volume History of the American Revolution because she feared Americans had already succumbed to a pursuit of wealth, called this October "Day of Infamy," the day upon which the American Revolution began. FDR's speech writers on December 8, 1941, never bothered to give her credit for the phrase!
We do unto others what we would not allow done unto us. But, then, no one has ever accused the American Empire of consistency, even in its immorality, although many still deny its hypocrisy.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Imperial Investment
Here's a chance for all the Warriors to support Bush I, Carlucci and all of the other Empire Guys at the Carlyle Group and join with our Brit Jr. partners in making a few $$ while supporting the Empire:
"Financial Times News alert: Qinetiq acquisitions set to double US revenues
The acquisition, which is expected to be announced with a smaller deal to acquire Planning Systems Inc., a privately held US engineering group, will nearly double Qinetiq's sales coming from the US to $600m, or about a third of group revenues.
The company has been emphasising its push into the US ahead of an expected £1.1bn public offering in November. Qinetiq and its shareholders, the defence ministry and US-based private equity group Carlyle, sent letters to a dozen banks last week to gauge interest in an IPO.
Privately held Apogen, based in suburban Washington D.C., is a provider of software and IT systems to both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security and generated $205m in revenues last year a technology services group created by Apogen.
"This has been part of our strategy for a while," Sir John said.
"We have enormous technological capabilities here in the UK, and the US is the largest market for what we have to sell."
Sir John would not rule out further acquisitions in the US, saying the company continued to talk to "all sorts" of potential take-over targets.
Following the two latest acquisitions, which must be cleared by US security agencies, Qinetiq would have more than 2,500 employees in the US, compared with 10,000 in the UK."
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Our "New" Barbarians
A century after being introduced into the American Empire, Filipinos and others are getting citizenship by joining the US Army. Check out The Asia Times and The New York Times.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Ibsen and Hayek
Dear Yumi,
A very nice piece of yours today in lrc.com/ on Ibsen, whose plays I first enjoyed in high school, long before I met Hayek.
You omitted, however, an important aspect of the conclusion of "An Enemy of the People." Dr. Stockmann does not just decide to stay in town, he chooses to fight back!
He asks his daughter, Petra, to round up some ragamuffins whom he intends to offer a real liberal education. When she asks how many, he replies, in a typical Ibsen reference to Christianity, that, as a start, "twelve will do."
It is in that context that one understands his declaration, "A man is strongest when he stands most alone." (Various translations).
With respect to the press, you may have noted that in several other plays Ibsen also calls the press person, "Aslaksen." A Norwegian friend told me that translates as "ass kisser!"
I have long referred to Washington, DC, as the "anal sphincter" of the American Empire, and Ibsen's choice of words might well apply to most of the Media inhabiting that Beltway and beyond!
Regards,
Bill Marina
Monday, July 18, 2005
“Big Brother” Moves From the Military into Business
One needs to be reminded that National Football League “tests” are not very accurate at predicting future stars in the actual game:
Financial Times July 18, 2005
Employers take a psychometric view of hopefuls
By Ruth Sullivan
Psychometric testing, which can help to assess personality traits, is enjoying a renaissance. This approach - allowing companies to build up a fuller picture of job applicants and to select executives with leadership potential - is being used by a growing number of top companies.
The practice dates at least as far back as the second world war, when the British army experimented with the technique to measure officers' ability and leadership skills. Companies have been trialling it mostly since the 1970s, and its growing importance was signalled 18 months ago, when James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son, was obliged to take a psychometric test as part of the selection process for the chief executive job at BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster that is part of his father's media empire.
Now, a new survey of FTSE 100 companies - conducted by The Test Agency Hogrefe, a psychometric test publisher - shows that most large corporations are using some form of psychometric testing: of the 73 responding to the survey, 59 said they did so.
"It has taken a long time to get through to corporate use," says Nigel Evans, a chartered psychologist and psychological testing verifier at the British Psychological Society. So why the growing popularity? One reason is that, with the rise of the internet, companies are receiving large volumes of applications, especially from recent graduates. Yet, intriguingly, managers are the employees most subjected to psychometric testing, with 80 per cent of the respondents using tests on this group. Some 13 per cent of the responding companies revealed that they use psychometric testing for board- level appointments.
Wendy Lord, chief psychologist at The Test Agency, says that a good mix of psychometric tests can help to find the right person - and this, in turn, is likely to lead to more job satisfaction, better performance, higher productivity and a greater likelihood of retaining staff.
The most popular psychometric tests are those measuring aspects of behavioural style or motivation - usually in the form of questionnaires - and those assessing intellectual power or the potential to learn in particular areas.
A classic questionnaire includes the question: " 'Most of what happens in life depends on being in the right place at the right time.' How much do you agree? Strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree or strongly disagree?" Such inquiries attempt to determine the extent to which a person believes they are captain of their own destiny.
Some companies have seen a rise in the retention of staff following the use of testing. Virgin Mobile, the virtual mobile phone operator and a FTSE 250 company, saw the retention rate of new recruits show an encouraging rise after it started using psychometric testing more consistently two years ago. Phillip Mather, head of human resources business delivery, says the biggest improvement in retention has come from giving candidates personality tests: "They have helped us better identify which individuals would enjoy and fit our culture". Previously newcomers to the company have arrived and it has taken up to 12 months for them to realise that Virgin Mobile's self-directed culture is not for them, he says.
"Recruitment is expensive and as companies focus on the bottom line they realise they can reduce the risk [in recruitment]," says Mike Dodd from Academy HR, an independent consulting company. Over the past five years the consultancy has seen a large rise in the use of psychometric testing in large and medium-sized companies.
But some employers, especially smaller companies, are still put off by the cost and time involved, particularly the expense of using qualified professionals - whether in-house or outsourced - to choose and interpret tests.
While 95 per cent of respondents revealed that they use psychometric testing only for recruitment purposes, some - notably Rolls- Royce - use them for staff development. The company can, for example, establish which employees are team players or team leaders.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Hear, Hear, Libertarian Gaggism!
I suppose there will always be those who prefer the "civility," shall we say, of the feckless US Congress these days, to the rowdy behavior of the British Parliament. Everyone to their own taste!
American politics also used to be a bit rowdy. Dr. Joseph Warren, for example, the great orator, killed battling the British at Breed's Hiil, used to bait the British officers in speeches during their occupation of Boston, 1768-76.
By all means, let us have no nasty discourse, better none at all. Pity, some are so squeamish.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
911 & 7/7, Coincidence? Hardly!
From SRA:
BBC 5, July 7, 2005
A radio interview on BBC 5 during the evening hours of July 7 with the managing director of a Crisis Management Firm tells: Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attacks
This scenario echoes the 9/11 wargames in New York.
A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.
On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.
Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch. Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.
Audio Interview clip
The transcript is as follows.
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on. . .
The fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. Power said the drill focused around 'simultaneous bombings'. At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but the BBC reports just today that the bombings were in fact simultaneous. . .
This is precisely what happened on the morning of 9/11/2001. The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.
Disappearing Deficit?
WSJ, July 12, 2005;
Why is it that the dreaded federal budget deficit only commands screaming headlines when it's rising, not falling? And why is it that the deficit is portrayed as a fire-breathing, hydra-headed monster only when the press can portray the villain as "irresponsible tax cuts," not runaway federal spending?
We ask these questions in the wake of the great unreported fiscal story of 2005: the shrinking federal deficit. It's down by at least $100 billion because federal tax receipts have skyrocketed this year by 14.6% (or $204 billion) through June. Private economic forecasters now believe the budget deficit may come in at about 2.5% of GDP, which is in line with the historical average for the past 40 years. Given that we're fighting an expensive, must-win war on terror, these deficit numbers aren't too shabby.
Not even the most unbridled supply-sider predicted that President Bush's investment tax cuts would unleash such a spurt of tax receipts this year. But thanks to sustained economic growth, more Americans working and improved business profits, individual income tax receipts have shot up by 17.6%. Even more astonishing is the nearly 41% spike in corporate revenues. There's a fiscal lesson here that bears repeating: The best way to grow tax revenues is to grow the tax base, and that is what has happened this year.
Alas, what hasn't happened in Washington this year is federal spending restraint. Despite pious pledges from Mr. Bush and Republicans in Congress to trim spending growth to 4% this year, so far total nonmilitary spending is up 7.3%. Thanks to a 10% boost in Medicare (even before the prescription drug program hits next year), we now devote a larger share of the budget to health care than national defense -- notwithstanding that Congress has a clear Constitutional mandate to spend money on national security, but not so when it comes to funding gall bladder operations or Viagra.
During last year's Presidential campaign, Democrats ripped Mr. Bush for underfunding education -- which is incredible given that the Department of Education budget has jumped by a gravity-defying 20% this year and has more than doubled over Mr. Bush's tenure. One gets the sense that Republicans have thrown up their hands in despair and are pleading: Stop us before we spend again. All of this is to say that Washington doesn't have a budget deficit problem, it has a spending problem. Thank goodness for Mr. Bush's tax cuts or things would be much worse.
Friday, July 8, 2005
The Mother of all Immigrations!
“When Adam delved, and Eve, span, who was then the Gentleman?”
Radical slogan of the English Revolution
Judaism traces lineage through the Mother. It’s easy to see why!
The latest birth statistics in the US for 2002, show that 23% had a foreign born mother, exceeding the old high of 1910. One out of ten were from Mexico, and 59% overall were Hispanic. Out of 4 million births in 2002, 915,800 were Hispanic. In some places, like an urban county outside of Atlanta, foreign births accounted for 41.3% of all births.
Boy, the Old South was never like this! A New South is certainly rising again, and, a New America is in the offing. And, as our beloved President has put it, "no child will be left behind."
Data source, The Miami Herald, 7/8/05
Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Internet Protectionism?
How much does the US government really believe in the principles of Free Trade?
In another example of unilateral diplomacy, the government has announced it intends to keep control of the Internet and the whole process of DNS addresses, rather than allow it to go international as was once agreed upon. Read the article here.
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
Non-Citizen Soldiers
Immigrants with green cards, mostly Mexican, now make up about 7% of America's active fighting forces. They seek not only advancement in the Army, but American citizenship, according to an article in The Christian Science Monitor.
Whether Bush's War brings "Democracy" to Iraq, or not, these soldiers will ultimately obtain American citizenship. This is in the grand tradition of both the Chinese and Roman Empires, and more recently the French, although citizenship was not always a part of the package.
I knew a Ukranian who was in the Polish army and was captured by the Germans, and given the opportunity of joining the army to fight the Russians, or probably prison or death. He won the Iron Cross, 2nd Class.
Now if we can just find some of those middle echelon, Iraqi Missing Officers.
Monday, July 4, 2005
A Special Place, Outside the Constitution
"I see," said Mr. Dooley, "Th' supreme coort has decided th' constitution don't follow th' flag." . . .
"An' there ye have th' decision, Hinnissy, that's shaken th' intellicts iv th' nation to their very foundations, or will if they thry to read it. 'T is all r-right. Look it over some time. 'T is fine spoort if ye don't care f'r checkers. Some say it laves th' flag up in th' air an' some say that 's where it laves th' constitution. Annyhow, something's in th' air. But there 's wan thing I 'm sure about."
"What's that?" asked Mr. Hennessy.
"That is," said Mr. Dooley, "no matther whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns."
The anti-imperialist satirist, Finley Peter Dunne, commenting on the Insular Cases in 1901
It was these cases which made Guantanamo a special place, outside of the Constitution. If you can torture there, I suppose our imperial Court might even agree you caan burn a flag there.
Sunday, July 3, 2005
Iraqi Officers?
My latest comments on Mr. Bush's War have just been posted at HNN. Buckle up for a long and bloody Insurgency!
Friday, July 1, 2005
'Indians are bastards anyway': Henry Kissinger
Some recently released tapes demonstrate the past perfidy of the American Empire in Asia. No wonder GeorgeII/43 is spending over $300 million to "improve our image." Lots of luck, George!
Check out this article in Asia Times
Win-Win, for the Bush Dynasty!
As George W. Bush seeks to divert attention from his twin wars in Asia by pretending to protect Americans from the Chinese bid to acquire Unocal, joined by a cadre in Congress, has anyone noticed the short blurb in The Financial Times indicating that if the Chinese win, a nice portion of the funding will be handled by the Carlyle Group?
If you want to see how Globalization works for the Imperial Family, try Googling "Carlyle Group," and read on, and on!
Is this what Thomas Friedman means by a "flat earth," level playing field?
We really didn't need the Kelo decision to learn that Corporatism is alive and well in the good old USA. Have a Happy Fourth of July weekend, Folks!
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
"Onward, Imperial Islamic Soldiers, Marching as to War, with the Crescent of George W., Going on Before"
No sooner had President George W. Bush finished his speech, than the television talking heads and the press, that Big Media , which the government relies upon to help define their Imperial Reality for us, were hard at it, interpreting every possible nuance or inflection of his address.
Did he say anything new? Hardly. But what he omitted spoke volumes!
The real test of the effectiveness, of his speech, however, will come, not from the Media, or those millions of passive Americans and most of the Congress that have supported his war, but among the youth ranging from some of the "red" states of the South and the Mid-west, to the inner cities ghettoes and barrios. Will these young people, inspired by the President's rhetoric, buy into the notion that Iraq has been worth the cost? Bottom line: will they enlist in Mr. Bush's War?
I rather think not!
They are more likely to heed the warnings of some of our more cautious and realistic military men that the insurgency will last years, a position even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged with the statement that it might take a dozen years.
Bush is hoping that the Iraqi army will begin to shoulder the overwhelming burden of the war, and mentioned the figure of 160,000, as if it was the sheer number that mattered, rather than morale.
The most perceptive observation made on the "Charley Rose" show discussing the speech, was that the US was having trouble finding middle echelon officers to staff the Iraqi army, and that we intended to put in a number of American officers into those positions.
Now, it is certainly true about the importance of the middle echelon officers in any war, especially an insurgency, where the nature of the warfare demands instant decisions, without the time for debate or consult with those of a higher rank, up the chain of command.
It has been clear for months now, that this crucial sector of Saddam's old army did not, nor has not yet, come over to the side of the new government sponsored by the Americans.
I would not want to be in the shoes of, say, an American captain, thrust into the midst of an Iraqi unit. We know the insurgents have infiltrated men into these units. How difficult would it be for one of these men to frag the American officer, or simply shoot him in the back?
Fragging was, of course, a problem in Vietnam, and there has already been at least one case in Iraq. A newspaperman friend of mine from the Vietnam era told me there were rumors that Max Cleland, the triple amputee war hero, and later Senator from Georgia, attacked by Republicans for his lack of enthusiasm for Iraq, had actually been fragged. If this is true, it makes the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire look almost tame in comparison.
Certainly, the morale and training of the middle echelon officers is critical. Some military historians have suggested that in WWII, the creative, and gung-ho 11,000 or so young recruits in that position were a great weapon in achieving victory.
There are already indications that some of our best young officers, often West Point graduates, in which the country has a considerable investment, are opting out of the Army for commensurate managerial jobs. Perhaps the task of integrating with the Iraqi army will fall to the mercenaries hired by companies such as Halliburton.
In Vietnam, quite apart from the fragging, the increasing disillusionment of the middle echelon officers was an early sign the war was not going well. Anyone who has read many of the letters of these middle echelon British officers in the American Revolution, often young Scots, who wrote back to their families about going out into the wilderness, perhaps never to return, will recognize this pattern. The British referred to the area around Charlotte, North Carolina, as the "hornet's nest," and it was the defeats around that area which led to the retreat toward Yorktown.
Clearly, a segment of the American military shares the administration's hope that it will be possible to build a US supported regime, perhaps on the model of what was done in the Philippines over a century ago; not that that nation has been a great example of economic development of late.
Americans seem amazed by the degree of solidarity among the insurgents, that some are willing to not only die for the cause, but to do so as a suicide bomber. Part of the Media approach has been to glorify the whole idea of "Empire." A new television show of that title aired June 29th, in which we are suppose to identify with Julius Caesar's heir, Octavian, soon to be Caesar Augustus.
The Founding Fathers of the American Republic, despising Empire as they did, would not have admired that whole theme. Their heroes were Brutus, Cassius, Cicero and Cato. It is well to remember that a wounded Cato ripped off his bandages so that he might die, so much did he hate the notions of Despotism and Empire. Suicide was preferable to life in the Empire.
As in the Philippines, we have found no shortage of bureaucrat Compradors, ready to be our "willing executioners" of their own people, in running "our" Iraqi government. Whether we can find American recruits as well as Iraqi officers to continue the war in the face of a growing public disenchantment, is the major question facing the Bush administration in the months ahead.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Rule of Law?
An Italian judge has just ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents who two years ago abducted an Egyptian and "renditioned" him off to Mubarek, Hernando de Soto's favorite partner for ending "terrorism." Now, if we could just get someone to do the same with Mossad agents.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/24/news/suspect.php
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Daily Life in the Empire
The Democrats have been grumbling that the US ought to close its prison-torture facility in Guantanamo, Cuba, because it poses a bit of an "image problem." Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, of course, defended the jail.
The Pentagon meanwhile announced that a fancier, air conditioned facility will be built there. Who will get the $ 30 million contract? Why, Halliburton, Dick's old company, naturally, a subsidiary of KBR. Wonder who else dared to bid on the deal, or if, as in so many past deals involving KBR, there was no bidding allowed? View Article Here
Bush's propagandists such as Max Boot(licker) and Victor Davis Hanson continue to spread the virtues of the Roman Empire as a model for the American one. Why "slow decline," don't you know, old chap, is good!
If Prof Hanson can pull himself away from such things as discussing the virtues of Total War as practiced by one of his heroes, William Tecumseh Sherman, who in his quest to serve that great Empire builder, Abe Lincoln, argued that killing the 300,000 or so hard core states' righters, would be a great start, perhaps Hanson might glance at such books as Ramsay MacMullen's Corruption and the Decline of Rome.
MacMullen does not see nearly as long a period of "decline," and I especially recommend his Chapter Four, "The Price of Privatizing Government." I am tempted to believe that Cheney read this somewhere along the line and used it as a "how to" book.
The decline of Rome, of course, goes back earlier than was discussed by MacMullen, and can be seen in such classics as The New Deal in Old Rome. or The Coming Caesars. Julius Caesar's biggest backers were from the Roman military-industrial complex, just as are George's, Dick's and Don's.
So also the American military-industrial complex goes back earlier than when Eisenhower called attention to it in 1961. Read, for example, Bruce Catton's The War Lords of Washington detailing his inside experiences in the home front during WWII. Catton soon found out it was safer and more lucrative to write about the Civil War.
In the meantime, not to worry, the War Machine has also announced it will spend $300 million on public relations to improve our "image" in the Islamic world. If genetics has any play in things, I would suggest as a part of that effort that Pentagon workers scrape up a bit of Goebbels DNA and clone the guy. But then, he was burned up with his idol back in the bunker in 1945, wasn't he? Anyway, some KBR subsidiary, or other Bush crony, will get most of that money as well.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
The Mandarinization of American Schooling
Wendy McElroy has written an important piece about Missing Males in colleges, which can be read at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy79.html
With respect to why this is occurring, I would suggest it is part of the larger Imperial Syndrome. The Chinese were the first to deal with developing an imperial, bureaucratic schooling system, which was later debated by Jefferson (a sinophile via France) and John Adams. Tocqueville also recognized the triumph of "the Chinese System" in France.
As noted recently by a teacher at American University, to avoid instant responses by students including threats, use number rather than letter grades and get the hell away from campus and the computer after listing your grades at the last second. I got an early taste of this when I started teaching on the Internet in 1997.
I recall in high school after having won a city wide prize for American history, and having the highest average in the 11th grade class, getting "B"s because I would not cut out little articles, mount them, and bring them into class. All of the young ladies did so to "earn" the "A." The teacher, a woman, asked me why I wouldn't conform, and I asked why she couldn't reconsider her system?
I suspect that women by nature and by early training are better suited to this kind of schooling that has little to do with a real education, which is not so easy to evaluate with either a number of a letter grade.
Wendy suggests privatization, but if the private schools have the same Mandarin training structure, how will that help?
If males take the approach of the Taoists and simply drop out, that need not, as Wendy suggests, consign them to blue collar jobs. It may lead them into the market, entrepreneurship and small business. The spate of new books about the corporate corruption in universities suggests that is a viable alternative to schooling, certainly these are now more ethical.
I often wonder what my life might have been like had I turned down the academic scholarships and fellowships that took me through to the doctorate, as I had turned down the athletic ones, and had simply gone into construction from the get-go? Even operated as a sideline, one year I earned more from the latter than from teaching, until Reagan's "tax reform." In neither effort was my primary motivation monetary, but I did enjoy working with some craftsmen more than with some of the academics at the university. There was never the nastiness, pettiness and envy one sees among so-called intellectuals.
See also my article "Capitalism and the Tao," in The Free Market for Jan. 1998 at Mises.org.
eBay & China
Financial Times 6/16/06
EBay on Thursday laid out plans to become a conduit for Chinese exporters as it announced an alliance that could make it easier for Chinese goods to find their way on to the online auction site.
The internet company said it had formed an alliance with Global Sources, a Singapore-based business-to-business media company that helps Chinese and other Asian manufacturers reach potential customers around the world.
The arrangement will give eBay's "powersellers" its most active users access to Chinese-made goods so that they can buy products for resale on the online auction site.
EBay's move echoes attempts by other ecommerce companies to provide an easier way for smaller Chinese manufacturers to reach a global market, and for potential customers to find suppliers in the country.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Contractors & Marines Clash in Iraq
Tom Palmer in an earlier comment indicated there was only one report of a clash between regular American forces and contractors in Iraq, as if the number of reports was of great significance. Well, Tom, it certainly took a long time for the American media to get around to even mentioning the Downing Street Memo.
But here is a piece from the Christian Science Monitor, one of the better papers on what has been going on in Iraq. As noted these tensions have been around for a while.
http://csmonitor.com/2005/0613/dailyUpdate.html
One should remember it was the abuses by contractors in Falllujah that precipitated things a year ago April. There is little control over the highly paid contractors who the regular forces have to protect.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
The New Face of War: Bringing (Most of) the Troops Home!
“Revolutionary advances in technology are transforming war in our favor. And in the decades ahead, the changes will be even more dramatic. . . . We can now strike our enemies with greater effectiveness, at greater range, with fewer civilian casualties.”
George W. Bush, Commencement Speech, Annapolis, 2005
Rumsfeld is having trouble getting recruits, even with perks including $40,000. What needs to be done is to make the pitch to all of the guys, and some gals, who have been playing video games and manipulating joy sticks since they were toddlers.
"Become a War Hero, While Never Leaving the USA," might be a typical ad, to some of these kids, even high school dropouts. Given the skills needed, do they really even need to be 18 to join up? Maybe all that should be required is a skill certificate from Sony or Nintendo.
After the bonus and a tour of duty(?) at regular combat pay (?), a "Drone Jockey" can then sign up with some private contractor such as Halliburton for the really big bucks, until time to retire before the age of 40. This will give a new definition to "Combat!"
If we had had such a force in the Vietnam years perhaps even George and Dick might have gone into "Combat."
Hey, they need a suitable anthem for the Joy Stick Air Force. How about, "Take to the Air Junior Joy Stickers?" sung to the old Air Force song music? Boy, what Gilbert & Sullivan could do with this theme! "When I was a lad, I used to work, as a Joy Stick Flyer in the Drone Air Force . . ."
To read more about our Drone Force, and its growing effectiveness, check out these links:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/drones_pr.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/drones.html?pg=4
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,67655,00.html
Thursday, June 9, 2005
John Deutch on Iraq
As usual, our vigilant media appears asleep when anyone associated with the establishment makes a questioning statement about the Bush policy in Iraq. Here is a Harvard Commencement talk given by John Deutch:
Harvard Magazine, June, 354th Anniversary Phi Beta Kappa Oration, June 7, 2005
“Iraq,” by John Deutch, Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and former Director of Central Intelligence (1995-1996) and Deputy Secretary of Defense (1994-1995)
I am pleased to have been asked to be this year’s Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Orator. Let me begin by saluting the new members of Phi Beta Kappa. Achievement in scholarship is important for its own sake and because of its value to an individual’s future professional development and personal enjoyment. I envy your energy and especially your youth. Your education enables you to make a significant contribution to our society; do not fail to do so.
I have chosen to discuss Iraq in part because there are over 150,000 Americans serving there in the military, as well as U.S. civilians: government officials, and supporting contractors. Every week between one and two dozen of these individuals are killed or gravely injured and our presence is costing taxpayers about $1 billion per week. It is far from clear that we are making significant progress on our political and security objectives in Iraq, or that our continued presence is serving our country’s interests in the region or in the rest of the world, or that our presences is helping the people of Iraq. But there is no indication of a timetable for withdrawal. How did we get into this mess and what should we do now? I bring to this discussion my experience as a policymaker in the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the intelligence community.
In the decade following the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein remained a source of instability in the region, was judged to possess usable chemical and biological weapons, and continued to oppress the Iraqi people. Despite recent efforts to rewrite history, Saddam was not an active sponsor of terrorist groups around the world, but he did not hesitate to have his enemies assassinated overseas.
In Clinton’s second term, the replacement of Saddam became declared U.S. policy, but with no agreed path to achieve this end. It was only after the attacks of 9-11, in the first George W. Bush administration, that the United States decided that the time had come to go to war to replace Saddam. While there was justification for seeking to replace the Saddam regime, the reasons why the Bush administration chose March 2003 for armed intervention remain somewhat obscure. At the time, the compelling reason that garnered much public and overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate was Saddam’s capability for the “imminent use of weapons of mass destruction.” It turned out that Saddam did not possess stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons that the CIA and the intelligence services of other governments believed to be present.
It may be that the Bush administration was only using an argument, as all administrations do, to convince Congress to approve a desired and already decided action. I accept that the Bush administration believed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, but I do not believe this was the moving reason for the timing of the administration’s decision to intervene. I believe the deeper reason is the one I take issue with today: the administration conviction that U.S. military intervention to topple Saddam would result in a near spontaneous conversion of Iraq, and with luck, the entire Middle East, to a democratic society.
There was never any doubt that the United States, because of its military strength, would rapidly defeat the Iraqi army, but it was completely predictable that, under the circumstances prevailing on the ground, a rapid transition to a stable and secure coalition government would not occur. First, there were no credible individuals or a nascent government in exile with the necessary stature or legitimacy to effect a smooth transition. Second, once the decision was taken to disband the Iraqi army, an impossible security situation was created: a combination of hostile ethnic factions, demobilized armed military and security units, and surrounding nations actively supporting warring factions. An aggressive insurgency against both U.S. occupation forces and any provisional government was inevitable. Third, the nations surrounding Iraq – Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran – which have vital stakes in the region, have no common understanding of how a successor government would share power among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunni. This uncertainty motivates the neighboring states to meddle in the internal affairs of Iraq. Such a security situation cannot be overcome easily by either U.S. military forces or immature Iraqi security forces.
It is folly to engage in a distant part of the world without first building significant support in the affected region. In this regard, consider the difference in the way President George H.W. Bush entered Iraq in 1991 and the way President George W. Bush intervened in Iraq in 1993. Bush “41” entered with the support of a substantial local coalition including Kuwaiti, Saudi, and others paying the greater part of the cost, while Bush “43” entered in 2003 with little support in the region. There was much wisdom behind the still often maligned decision of President George H.W. Bush in first Gulf War not to proceed to Baghdad to topple Saddam: the countries in the neighborhood had no common view about a successor regime, although they all despised Saddam; there was no credible Iraqi leader or group ready to assist in a transition; and, most importantly, there was no way of knowing how or when American troops would get out of Baghdad.
It is always preferable for the United States to have the support of the United Nations and our European allies before intervening somewhere in the world. But, in the case of Iraq, the absence of international support was much less important than the absence of support of the countries in the region. On this separate matter, there is debate about whether United States intervention in a foreign country is legitimate without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council. A U.N. process that sanctions intervention by no means assures that the chance of error will be avoided or even significantly reduced. So I do not believe the Iraq experience is evidence that the United States should forgo its sovereign discretion to decide on when to intervene until it has the approval of the United Nations or any other international body.
***********
The intelligence community mistake in predicting that Iraq still possessed a chemical and biological weapons inventory after the destruction of stock and weapons that occurred at the end of the 1991 Gulf War and through the actions of U.N. weapons inspections deserves comment. The estimate of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction inventory was a major reason for congressional support of the intervention, especially among Senate Democrats. The mistaken estimate has caused widespread cynicism about the administration’s willingness to misuse intelligence information to achieve a desired political outcome. The failure creates doubt that U.S. leaders have accurate information on which to base their decisions. Both inside and outside the United States, official statements about our estimates of North Korean and Iranian nuclear capability will understandably be viewed more skeptically, indeed rightfully so.
The combination of this mistaken estimate of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capability with the failure to predict the 9-11 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington led to an understandable public and congressional call for a reorganization of the intelligence community. No one should imagine that the deficiencies in intelligence responsible for these two failures could be remedied entirely, or even primarily, by reorganization. A good deal of the responsibility for the mistakes should be placed on poor professional performance, especially with regard to intelligence analysis and sharing of information between agencies.
After several commissions and much debate, Congress passed the 2004 intelligence-reform legislation intended to remedy the deficiencies that led to the intelligence failures of 9-11 and the estimates of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. However the legislation contains many ambiguities that will take considerable time to work out. The situation is reminiscent of the history of the creation of a strong secretary of defense. The 1947 legislation created a defense establishment, but the position of secretary of defense was not created until 1949, and the secretary’s authority was not clearly defined until 1958. It took 10 years before authority and responsibility were relatively clearly defined. I fear that during the lengthy period of time that may be required to resolve the ambiguities in responsibility and authority, many critical intelligence functions will suffer. Worse yet, there is no assurance that the new system will perform any better than the old.
***********
Beyond the current situation in Iraq and the deficiencies of U.S. intelligence, I want to address a more fundamental question: What does our involvement in Iraq say about how the United States forms its goals for its foreign policy and the criteria for use of military force?
It seems evident to me that our foreign policy should be guided by two principles: first, to advance our country’s security and political interests, and second to encourage prosperity and responsive government for people around the world. It may be that with our encouragement and example, other nations will choose to adopt democracy and a market economy, presumably adapted to their local culture and society. Clearly, at the end of the Cold War, every Eastern European nation made this choice. But, it may be that some nations will follow a vastly different road for some period of time, perhaps indefinitely. China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea come to mind as examples.
It may be that ethnic differences, poverty, and historical and religious traditions make a reasoned choice not a realistic possibility, at least for some years. Our nation embarks on a especially perilous course when it proactively engages in some region of the world with the intention of achieving an outcome of establishing a government based on our values. It is one matter to adopt a foreign policy that encourages democratic values and institutions in other parts of the world; it is quite another matter to believe it just or practical to achieve such results on the ground with U.S. military forces. This is true whether our involvement is alone, as is largely the case in Iraq, or as part of an international coalition.
The notion of intervening in foreign countries with the purpose of building a society that conforms to our preference is not exclusively a Republican or conservative failing. The corresponding Democratic or liberal failing is the view that this nation has a duty to intervene in foreign countries that egregiously violate human rights and a responsibility to oppose and, where possible, remove totalitarian heads of state. This Democratic rhetoric quickly moves from “peacekeeping” in a country torn by strife to “peacemaking” and “nation building.”
The Clinton administration’s intervention in Bosnia is an example of just such a failing: from an initial laudable objective of stopping the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnians to a fantastical goal of creating a “multi-ethnic” society with peaceful coexistence among three groups – Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs – that have a history of enmity.
Whether the offered justification is “democratization” or “humanitarian,” our country has become willing to embark on foreign involvements that go beyond the traditional foreign policy goals of encouraging peace and advancing our interests to a much more ambitious purpose of intervention to change the societies of other countries. I believe this is a major mistake for U.S. foreign policy, and I believe Iraq is a vivid example of why.
Let me be clear that I am not opposed to intervention for the purpose of saving lives that are in immediate danger. For example, the decision of the United States not to intervene early to prevent mass murder in Rwanda certainly marks a major failure of American foreign policy. I am opposed to intervention that has as its driving purpose replacing despotic regimes with systems of government that resemble our own. It is not that I believe the purpose is unworthy, but rather that I believe it is naïve and impractical. Basic values can differ and we should respect and tolerate these differences rather than seek, by force, to change them to conform to our own.
***********
The policy instruments that we have and are willing to deploy to achieve nation building are not up to the task. Broadly speaking, we have three types of instruments: diplomacy, trade and economic assistance, and military force. Diplomacy is useful for aligning interests and creating circumstances that encourage evolutionary change toward common ends. Trade and economic assistance are powerful incentives for nations to adapt their ways in order to enjoy better economic benefits. Even the dark North Korean state saw the advantages, for a period of time, of constraining their nuclear weapons activities for the economic benefits that accompanied the 1994 “framework agreement.” Libya, more recently, retreated from its policy of secret pursuit of weapons of mass destruction apparently based on the sole expectation of economic benefit. The change in the apartheid regime in South Africa shows what sometimes can be done by collective economic action through an embargo. We should be more willing to use our considerable economic strength, combined with diplomatic efforts, to proffer carrots as well as sticks to nations whose behavior we seek to influence. This means spending more on foreign aid and other forms of economic assistance.
What about using the military as an instrument of change? Well, the answer to this question is simple, but many people don’t seem to like it: The U.S. military, which is the best in the world, is built to fight and win wars, not to police, build civic infrastructure, or reshape governments. We can ask the marines to defeat Republican Guard divisions or destroy Fallujah, but, as now constituted, it is not part of their mission, capability, or training to maintain local security, broker political alliances, and run local water systems, hospitals, power plants, and schools.
When asked to do civic action, marines and Army Special Forces Units do admirably – Haiti and Afghanistan are examples – at working constructively with the local community, as an occupation or peacekeeping force. But, in general, we train and equip our military forces to fight, not to occupy. It is a mistake to ask the Department of Defense and joint military commands to perform the nation-building functions that are required to carry out our political objectives in Iraq or Bosnia.
We can imagine reshaping our military to have more capability for the activities that the Pentagon euphemistically calls “stability and security” operations. But such a reshaping will come at a cost — both in potentially compromising the war-fighting capability of our military forces and in resources needed to support the civic action that underlies nation building. If political change is unlikely to work, it seems both expensive and foolhardy to reshape our military in a major way for this purpose.
**********
This leaves the question of what should be done today. There is a widespread view that we have a responsibility to stay in Iraq until certain minimum conditions are achieved: some degree of security for the Iraqi people, a reasonable start on stable and representative self-government, and partial reconstruction of the civilian infrastructure. Any thought of prompt withdrawal is considered unthinkable by most Republicans and Democrats, because it is difficult to envision an early withdrawal that leaves a peaceful Iraq in its wake. A withdrawal followed by a violent collapse of the nascent Iraqi regime would signal failure of our Iraqi policy and possibly invite further unrest in the region. So the expectation is that the United States will be in Iraq for several years, perhaps in a somewhat reduced presence, spending considerable money and lives, working to achieve the minimum objectives mentioned above.
The reasonableness of this approach depends on a judgment on how much progress is being made on achieving the conditions required for withdrawal. However, there are two additional important factors to consider: first, how much are United States interests in the region and in the Arab world generally being harmed by our continued presence in Iraq; and second, how much does the United States presence in Iraq reduce our ability to deal with other important security challenges, notably North Korea, Iran, and combating international terrorism? Those who argue that we should “stay the course” and believe that early withdrawal will affect our credibility in the region must consider the possibility that the United States will fail in its objectives in Iraq and suffer even greater loss of credibility at the time of a later withdrawal.
I believe that we are not making progress on our key objectives in Iraq. There may be days when security seems somewhat improved and when the Iraqi government appears to be functioning better, but the underlying destabilizing forces of a robust insurgency and warring factions supported by outside governments are undiminished.
So my judgment is that the United States should withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible, say by the end of the year. In January, Senator Edward M. Kennedy suggested five measures that I believe are a sensible start to achieving a successful withdrawal: (1) progressive political disengagement by the United States, with Iraqis making more of their own decisions; (2) adoption of a clear exit strategy and a timetable for withdrawal; (3) beginning to withdraw military forces; (4) conducting regional diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors and the Arab League to discourage external intervention in Iraq; and (5) continued training of Iraqi security forces.
Such measures cannot guarantee a secure and democratic Iraq free of external domination. But they are first steps toward adopting a posture that will permit the United States to pursue successfully its long-term interests in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
John Quincy Adams, a former Harvard Phi Beta Kappa orator, said it well in 1821:
“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.…The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.…She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Gambling (Your Life) in Nevada?
If you're interested in the environmental impact of some of the adventures of the American Imperialists, Jeffrey St. Clair's piece, March 30th, "Bush Administration Kills Nuclear Fallout Study: Downwinders Be Damned," in CounterPunch might be worth reading. Click here.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Does Ward Churchill Even Exist?
In the academic freedom cases of Hans Hoppe and Ward Churchill, I chose to support Hoppe, but not Churchill. Those who supported the latter, might wish to read the following piece by Victor Davis Hanson If Murray Rothbard, with his penchant for sensing conspiracies, was still alive, perhaps we might have seen it earlier! The Wall Street Journal (3/4/05) has an interesting article "The Book-Club Snub." Unfortunately, the online link lacks the marvelous chart of several book clubs, and what they are reading, featured in the print edition. Gosh, Georgeii/43, Here are links to two differing perspectives on Feminism: Shades of Ellsworth Toohey! Does this apply to America, as we have been Rupert Murdoched as Well? Those who have followed the Social Security debate touched on in L&P by Sheldon Richman and others, may find this essay in the Harvard Magazine by Jeffrey B. Liebman of the JFK School of Gov't & Public Policy of interest. The book review media is right now filled with ethical comments about Adam Hochschild's new book on the British Anti-Slavery movement, Bury the Chains, including a lengthy one at HNN, reprinted from Tom's Despatch. John Nichols has just compiled a volume entitled, Against the Beast: A Yesterday it was announced that the updating of the huge television screens and advertisements thereon in the more than 5,100 Wal-Mart stores made it instantly into one of the major players in television advertising. For all the Randian idealists panting after the "free market" here in America, Jim Snyder's "K Street Phones Wall Street," from The Hill is useful in understanding the reality of life in the American Empire. In rereading Chodorov's "United We Fall," kindly provided as a link below by Ken Gregg in his celebration of the former's birthday, I was struck by the depth of his philosophical historical determinism with respect to the cycles of civilizations; Spengler and Toynbee, with an overtone of Freedom, Are those of us attempting to say something in behalf of Freedom during what appears as an era of its decline caught in an historical cycle about which we can do very little? The NYT reports on a new HIV strain that appears resistant to drug treatment. The individual passing it along had unprotected sex with over 300 persons. If that is not taking a short-run time preference as argued by Hoppe, what is? Wow, certainly a lot of blogging of late here at the old Liberty and Power Blog, mainly about Ayn Rand and then homosexuality, almost to the obscuring of the Hans Hoppe case itself, as well as other issues. Dear Jason, L&P bloggers who have been following the Lawrence Summers flap over women in Science may find Steven Pinker's views of interest. It is with some frustration and despair that that I read the terminology of "isolationism" introduced b y RJ Rummel and accepted by some libertarians. It is understandable that imperialists would seek to perpetuate the "internationalist" vs. "isolationist" dichotomy, placing themselves in the position of righteous internationalists. If I recall correctly, Rudy Rummel was peddling this same nonsense in Reason magazine almost a quarter century ago. I note Chris Sciabarra takes Robert Wright's NYT commentary piece, "The Market Shall Set You Free," as if that title had any real relevance to what he then proceeded to say. Me, I'm not worried, I put my faith in Bubba! Ya'll, let's all sing together, now, "What a faith we have in Bubba, all our sins and griefs to bear....." For our Randian Cadre here at the Blog, here is a
review of the new biography of Ayn Rand.
When I read her novels, I always wondered how her heroines, Dominique Francone & Dagny Taggert, in her two major novels, could be so stupid as to take hundreds of pages to grasp what most of the "good" people, even if minor characters, gathered rather quickly about our stalwart heroes. And, how could the heroes have tolerated such obtuseness! Must have been great lays.
I recall attending a seminar in Dallas with a student, about 1963, when Barbara Branden was holding forth on a tape about how AR had rediscovered Aristotle for us. I didn't know that since the late Middle Ages, he had been lost. For those with dualistic, black and white worlds, she is a great reenforcer, and never mind the complexity of Corporate
Empire, its really Capitalism, stupid!
I do thank AR for her play about The Night of January 16th, since that is my birthday!
Go, Randroids, go! The FBI has acknowledged that its once hyped and feared "Carnivore" Technology doesn't work and that it is now using commercial, off the shelf software for its Court approved wiretaps. William Polk’s piece in The American Conservative is, indeed, of interest, both for what he includes, and what he leaves out. The United States is not alone, among the "Coalition of the Willing" in losing control of troops engaged in counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq, with respect to actions violating the Geneva Convention. Check out this article at: The Times, UK. To: The Editor, Financial Times With all of the attention to Sy Hersh's new piece at The New Yorker, some of you may have missed this article at theCSM. In his latest comment to me from Earth, Justin Raimondo says that the Pentagon may adopt William Lind's strategy to get the US out of Iraq, but he is rather pessimistic that will occur. Yeah! The Army is preparing a review of our policy in Iraq. Maybe they can get William Lind as a part of the team! No doubt Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo will offer great recommendations on his behalf. In a series of replies to my recent Blog here, the heroic Internet journalist at antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, labeled me an “idiot.” If he meant the way in which Doestoyevsky used that term in a book, then I especially thank him. H.L. Mencken didn’t tell us all we needed to know about Puritans, but he offered a couple of key insights: Prof. Donald Boudreaux dumps on poor old Louis XVI as an “absolute monarch” who “created no wealth,” but rather was a “predator” who “destroyed wealth,” one assumes, by taxation. Those readers who wish to understand the "heroic" face of American Corporate Capitalism, and its relationship to Liberty & Power, will find this review essay from the New York Review of Books of interest. It is entitled "Inside the Leviathan," by Simon Head, click here. I usually do not make an extended critique of a article here, but since Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. is the President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think-tank, who tells us for openers that “Year’s end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine,” and several fellow L&P bloggers have recommended reading the piece, without offering any critical comments, perhaps it is worthwhile making an effort to do so. John Ray, a self-described "former anarcho-capitalist," at Dissecting Leftism has responded to our HNN article comparing the foreign policy of T.R. and GWB:
Defense, indeed! People who have lost touch with reality tend to project their own motives on to others, but then, I hardly need tell a psychologist that. Certainly, powerful leaders have done so throughout history.
TR's blather about the threat of Spain, certainly was a rationale to take what was left of her Empire. I hardly think attacking Iraq had anything to do with defending against Terror; oil & Israel, most likely.
As to Left/Right; the Neocons now masquerading as Conservatives, are part of the old Trotskyite to Democratic Left. I think you might also consider much of your own comment in the "silly" category.
The Spectator reports on a new British, private mercenary, corporation to rival Halliburton. The Moscow Times has an interesting piece on the development of what might be called Feudal Capitalism in Russia. Rather than the gangs of several years ago, it is now increasingly Putin's bureaucracy that runs the show. Moscow Times My latest piece is linked below. In addition to Charles Freeman's book, discussed in the text, readers may also wish to consult Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead. For those who still believe the propaganda about Iraq handed out by the Bush adminstration: Several weeks ago, I wrote an article, “The Russians are Coming . . . ,” tracing Russian efforts to possibly send troops to Iraq in the next several months:
The notion of “Reality Based,” as opposed to what the Bushians create as “Reality” within the Empire, is just another way of saying that when the Emperor, standing there naked, says, “I have on a beautiful crown and gown,” the rest of us are supposed to bow, make no arguments, and accept that as the “real” Reality.
I enjoyed Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s comments below about Empire and William Appleman Williams, with the link to Joe Stromberg’s excellent article on WAW at antiwar.com. I imagine Joe’s first exposure to Williams was in my class on American Foreign Policy at FAU, where earlier I had invited WAW as a speaker in 1966. Although more bibliographic than polemic/critical in format, some of my own views can be found in my essay, “William Appleman Williams,” in Vol. 17 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Twentieth Century American Historians (1981). I also found Mark Danner’s comments most insightful when I read them several days ago in the NYRB. With respect to Mark Lilla’s comments, one might ask, “Was the Straussian Mind Ever Open?”
My first encounter with what would become known as the Neoconservative worldview was in a seminar in Switzerland in 1972, also attended by Rothbard, Hayek, Bauer, and Weyl, among others. In comments with Irving Kristol, also a participant, it became apparent to me, and, I think also to Rothbard and Bauer, that he was essentially an unreconstructed Trotskyite.
Many of my own writings, see a few at http:www.independent.org/, have tried to stress the view that Empire is a systemic evolutionary process in which the domestic growth of the State cannot be separated from its foreign policy, ie., Imperialism. The Anti-Imperialists of 1898 understood this very well.
I believe that the great tragedy of Rothbard’s early death was that it cut short his effort to develop that relationship, dating back at least to his collaborative effort with WAW in the 1960s. I, will, in a future article at II, explore the sad decline of American Anti-Imperialism since 1898.
Carroll Quigley demonstrated the evolution to Empire in The Evolution of Civilizations (1961), and see my Bibliography Notes comment in the 1979 Liberty Press edition. It was the Military-Industrial Complex that backed Julius Caesar, and, I recall, as I viewed the opening scenes of the film “Gladiator,” wondering who had the contracts for those catapults, the Guided Missiles of their day. The domestic side of Rome’s Imperialism can be seen in H.J. Haskell’s fine book, The New Deal in Old Rome (1938, 1943).
And, so, America is not very exceptional at all, but rather following in the evolutionary path of other Empires in History. It is said, George W. Bush reads very little, perhaps not even in The Bible. If he does so at all, I would hope he might cast his eyes, not just on the Book of Revelation, although the writer obviously despises the Roman Empire, but back to the Old Testament, to the Book of Daniel, where whatever their apparent upper body strength, Empires are described as having feet of clay.
There is the old joke about God being interviewed about some aspect of social change, and whether he might allow it, and his reply, “Not in my lifetime.” I fear that America will not change from its Imperial path, certainly not in my lifetime. The American Empire continues to search for suitable locals to give legitimacy to our interventions. To read my latest comments on this, click here. To read the latest on the Israelis use of bulldozers as mentioned in a link in my piece below check out: Dear Chris,
While I think it a good thing that someone like George Will now questions the war in Iraq, I do not see that his questioning of the tactics of Empire is the same as turning against Empire. People like Michael Scheuer, the “Anonymous” author Imperial Hubris are not against Empire, but simply the recent tactics of same.
It is perhaps more significant to observe how lewrockwell.com and antiwar.com have become part of those arguing for a more efficient war effort. William S. Lind, of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, has become a regular columnist at both sites. Given his constant writing about a more effective development of what he calls Fourth Generation Warfare, I find it difficult to relate his views even to “Kultural Konservatism.”
One of Mr. Lind’s heroes is the Israeli strategist Martin Van Creveld, an admirer of Stalin, who has been criticized by others at antiwar.com for his statements about killing as many Palestinian civilians as is necessary, 5,000 or more. Van Creveld has also been a favorite of the Mises Institute.
It was Van Creveld who advised the US over a year ago to use the Israeli tactics in Iraq, simply bulldozing whole towns as we are now doing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927780,00.html
Now Lind tells us in his latest that the 4th Generation Warfare Seminar will be meeting again with the notion of updating the Marines’ Small Wars Handbook, which when completed, will be published in its entirety at lewrockwell.com. In the meantime, those interested in better military tactics for the Empire can read his Maneuver Warfare Handbook (1985). Perhaps, if the new Handbook is read by a large number at LRC, the Marines will publish it for their commanders. After all, it might be a little difficult for a Marine in the field to pull out his laptop and log in to LRC. To quote Lind:
“The Fourth Generation seminar met Friday for the first time since last spring, and we have decided to write our own field manual on Fourth Generation war. It will be modeled on the excellent field manuals the U.S. Marine Corps issued when General Al Gray was Commandant. We plan to have it out in the first half of next year; LRC will offer the whole FMFM.”
My own comments on the Marine Handbook can be found at:
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1286
Those of us who oppose Empire have always differentiated between: 1) anti-war, which can also be examined on a spectrum from absolute pacifism to those who oppose aggressive war-making; 2) anti-intervention, which can also mean using powerful economic levers even to the point of starving people; and 3) anti-imperialism, opposing a whole system of Statist centralization, encompassing all of the above.
The above cited sites have been very good up to recently in giving us a day to day listing of articles about the three above factors, if a little light on the last, but accepting such war making columnists on a regular basis, seems to me far worse than anything that these people have accused the Cato Institute of, with respect to capitulating to the folks around the Beltway. Some of you may wish to check out my latest piece at: Senator Kerry wants to enlarge the army by 40,000 troops to "win' the war in Iraq. Where will he find them? As Washington DC politicians negotiate with the Major League Baseball cartel about a new team for the digestive bowel of the Empire, offering bonds and taxes for a $440 million new stadium, the Pentagon plays its own version of Corporatist fraud, let's call it "Cheney Ball." Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Dem., CA) exposed the latest CIA plan to "help" the "free" elections in Iraq. Condi Rice was not pleased. Bottom Line: in a scaled back effort, we will continue to "run a number of overt programs to support the democratic electoral process, " and as Time notes, "as the U.S. does around the world." With respect to Iraq, Tom Palmer asks, "What do we do now?" In reply to Keith Halderman’s comments below: The American and Russian Empires may be converging in the Middle East. Why not put GeoII/43 in the tank and let him teach the fish about "democracy" and "free elections"? Can Halliburton, KBR or Bechtel resist bidding to construct nuclear plants in Iraq?
Not all Free Market advocates are opposed to Hugo Chavez. Jude Wanniski, under the title "Three Cheers for Hugo Chavez," posted a link to the column by the BBC’s Greg Palast, along with this comment:
"There`s been lots of ink spilled on the recall election of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, but most of it that I`ve seen in the major media gave little indication why we should have expected his victorious outcome in Sunday`s voting. Yes he`s a lefty, but what have the right-wing political leaders of Latin America done for their economies in recent years? All Chavez needs is a little more supply-side advice on macro-economics and Venezuela could boom, even with lower oil prices. Greg Palast, who covers Venezuela for the BBC`s "Newsnight", got his arms around the relevant issues in this analytical piece that appeared in the London Guardian Monday."
Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band. The Atlantic September issue has an interesting comment on "Prison Islam." To view the Justice Dept. Report, click here. The opening of the Olympics mentioned another myth; that Pythagoras invented the mathematics theorum named after him in the West. Chinese mathematicians had developed it about 500 years earlier, and it was tranmitted across the Persian Empire into the Greek world. Pythagoras was more Persian than Greek anyway, wearing the Persian trousers, living in the Asia minor area, and the leader of the aristocratic conspiracy which hated Greek democracy and science. That great Brit Imperial Drum Beater, Niall Ferguson, now teaching History at Harvard, but on vacation in London as befits any European in August, has some choice observations for Americans, "Bone-Tired? You Need a Job in Europe:The work ethic in the EU wanes as time on the job expands in U.S."
Pity that Americans have such little leisure time. With all of the comparisons with the Roman Empire, we have many less official Circuses. Those Europeans just don't understand about the virtues of the Protestant Ethic, and how that is all part of being "born again" and "saved." In reading David Beito & Charles Nuckolls, "Wrong Song of the South: The Dangers of Confederate Multiculturalism," at Reason Online, I couldn’t help but examine the two links to the League of the South’s website, one on “flags,” the other on the “Celtic background” of “Southern Culture.” My thanks to David Beito, our esteemed leader, for mentioning my article on “the American Revolution and Iraq,” at The Independent Institute web site. The last of the two articles from which it was partially excerpted appeared today at the HNN web site, entitled, "Was the American Revolution a People’s War?" To read that piece, click here. A excellent example of the squandered aid effort in Iraq which I discussed here yesterday can be found in today's New York Times op-ed column by Paul Krugman, "Who Lost Iraq?."
While Paul Bremer screamed about the need for "Privatization," key positions went to relatives and cronies of the Bush administration with little or no expertise in the fields in question, and massive, often no-bid contracts went to those corporations close to operatives like the Vice President, Dick Cheney.
Imperialism seldom changes its real face, however much cosmetics are applied. Anyone exploring American adventures in national building such as in the Philippines at the turn of the century or Vietnam later, will find the same pattern, also present in many of our aid programs around the world.
For those with a little Spanish, Latinos in the 1960s used to laugh at JFK's "Alliance for Progress," by saying it with emphasis on the word "para," "La Alianza Para El Progreso!" -- The Alliance "Stops" Progress.
Now the search goes on, minus Chalabi, for some Iraqi cronies who will do our bidding in exchange for a share of the "state building" loot, such as taxes and oil revenues. While the Marxist/Leninist explanation of Imperialism missed the mark badly in assessing that phenomenon, I always liked their use of the term "Compradors," to describe the stooges, or middlemen, that Imperialism used to attempt to legitimatize Western Imperialism in China and elsewhere.
Ironically, American policy makers often criticized "our" Compradors such as Fulgencio Batista for modestly opposing a few American actions. Some Americans couldn't comprehend that to have any legitimacy at all with their own people, our Compradors had to show a little nationalistic solidarity.
In the Philippines, our military administrators in the Bureau of Insular Affairs (BIA2), not to be confused with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA1), which administered Imperialism on our Indian tribes in the U.S., and who really ran the Philippines, often understood this Comprador relationship better than civilian administrators such as the Governor-General, William Howard Taft. The BIA records in the National Archives offer ample evidence of this Comprador relationship and of efforts to explain it to people like Taft. Of course, many in BIA2, had received their training in BIA1, just as some of our commanders in the Philippine Insurgency had learned their counterinsurgency tactics against the Indians on the Great Plains. The command, "The Indians must be punished," issued by a General in Kansas in 1864, is not all that different from the cry in the Philippines in 1898, of "Civilize 'em with a Krag [rifle]!"
For a more extended discussion, see my essay on Taft in John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, or the edited audio-tape of same, both available from the Mises Institute, at www.mises.org.
Such growing Imperial bureaucracies going back into the 19th century offer a refutation to the silly notion that the US is a "reluctant," "ambivalent," johnny-come-lately to the Empire Game, which has somehow been "thrust upon us." Now our new Ambassador, John Negroponte, replaces Bremer. Given Negroponte's experience in American Imperialism in Latin America, does anyone question who will be running the show and why he was appointed to do so?
When a young Henry Stimson was going out to run the Philippines, he wrote his fellow Yale man, William Howard Taft, asking how he should comport himself. Taft, replied, "as a Proconsul." I don't think anyone will need to tell Negroponte that is his role in Iraq.
What is often missed in describing this Corporatist, financial cronyism, is the intellectual cronyism which accompanies it. Some writers appear to argue that intellectuals, such as Niall Ferguson's recent books on Empire, suggested that alternative to the politicians and policy makers. That is nonsense!
The Caesars had their Imperial Toadies, or Court Intellectuals, but Roman Imperialism both preceded them and would have gone forward without them.
The Caesars also had their equivalents of today's think-tanks and Chairs in universities, and that was part of the reward for "intellectual cronyism"; the effort to legitimatize Imperialism.
American universities today are, of course, deeply a part of the Empire Game, but that will have to wait as the subject for a future discussion.
The most honest warning about the consequences of intellectual cronyism that I know of was issued by the great Progressive writer, Walter Weyl, one of the founders of The New Republic when his fellow founder, with Walter Lippman, Herbert Croly went off to, as Croly imagined it, influence Woodrow Wilson. Weyl predicted that Wilson would use Croly for his own ends, and that is what happened. Today's would-be Court Intellectuals might benefit from that tale.
Americans have always believed that schooling -- even outside the context of a real liberal education - is, as the Jeffersonian mechanic William Manning, put it over two centuries ago, "The Key of Libberty."
Much of our "aid" in Iraq has supposedly gone in this direction, to "win the hearts and the minds" of the people by helping the schools.
A recent piece by Dan Murphy in The Christian Science Monitor, "Quick school fixes won few Iraqi hearts," illuminates some of the fundamental problems the Coalition Forces have faced in bringing "Democracy" to that country after bombing it for a dozen years.
American aid programs date all the way back to the unilateral policy of President George Washington's effort in Haiti in 1792 to keep control of the emerging revolution there in the hands of the Creoles rather than the Blacks. We all know what a great triumph that 212 year span effort has achieved!
In Iraq, the Bechtel Corporation, one of the Corporatist, supposedly private contractors, with a billion dollar contract, complains that dealing with sewage wasn't a part its whitewashing the walls of the schools program, and apparently much of the money appropriated never reached anyone but the company's stockholders.
The toilet problem reminds me of 1981, when the USIA sent me out to the Philippines to lecture for several weeks after the Vice President, one George H. W. Bush, later known as George I/41, had boo-booed by getting drunk in the Palace and embracing the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in violation of careful instructions given him by the State Dept. My speeches, I learned later, were a means of inviting many of the Aquino people and informally telling them to disregard Bush's actions, and that American policy was moving away from Marcos.
I guess if Vice President Cheney can use the "F" word to a Senator, I can reveal that what the State Dept. officer really said was that Bush was "full of shit," much as are the toilets in many Iraqi schools.
I had been invited to Washington, sometimes unkindly referred to as "the anal sphincter of the American Empire," to serve for a semester as an Economist with the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress, to study affordable housing because, while I was a professor, I was also director of the Small Business Development Center at my university, and headed Marina Construction Co., developing affordable properties in south Florida. I was sent to the Philippines with less than a day's notice after it was determined I was the only one around with a Ph.D. in American Studies for a conference in Tagaytay City, spoke Spanish, and had written on the Philippines.
Since I was studying affordable housing, my USIA hosts happily took me out to a project of 500 houses outside of Manila that was supposed to be one of the "crown jewels" of the American aid program. There was only one slight problem; while all of the houses had nice new toilets, someone had forgotten such a system had to be hooked up to a central sewage system.
Not to worry, however, because the Filipinos are not only a patient people, but also a very inventive one, as their efforts in the "informal economy" have demonstrated for many centuries. They had discovered that a dry, empty toilet makes a wonderful place for a chicken to roost on some hay and lay eggs. Well, I suppose, an egg-aid program is better than nothing, and there was not the stench of sewage as in Iraq.
Maybe, what we really need is a program, not to "win hearts and minds," but rather a program "to save noses from smelling." I recall an ecologist pointing out that in the acid smog that surrounds many ancient cities today, almost the first thing to erode away are the noses on the old statues. A blessing to the ancients, that at least the statues don't have to breath and smell the acid smog.
With any luck, perhaps our aid to Iraq can soon tackle the shit-smell problem there as well. Let's begin by "winning the noses of the students!"
The General who is head of US Intelligence in Iraq remains untouched, as yet, by the growing prisoner abuse scandal -- but, she's a woman and has been one of the "Stars" of the "new" Army. To read the story, click here.
More books and movies about Hitler, while the crimes of Stalin, far greater, are relatively ignored by the media.
Check out "The Nazi Seduction". Ron Bailey, the Science Editor of Reason Magazine, has an excellent review of Paul Ehrlich's new book, written with his wife, Anne, One With Ninevah in the May 20th Wall Street Journal, entitled "What Doom Will Look Like This Time Around."'
Ehrlich has an unbroken record since 1968 of being wrong about all of his predictions of "Doom and Gloom," He is, of course, a hero of the Environmetnalist movement and has received numerous awards including a MacArthur "genius" Prize.
He predicted, for example, famine in the 1970s, while world food production has tripled since then. In the 1990s he lost a famous bet with the geographer Julian Simon since the world was not running out of a number of natural resources and minerals as preidicted by Ehrlich.
To read the article click here. Leon Fuerth, a former national security adviser to vice-president Al Gore, and a research professor of international affairs at the George Washington University, has an interesting article in the Financial Times May 19th.
He points out that the prisoner abuses in Iraq are not a mere anomoly, but, like much of the actions of the Bush administration, an example of the growig power of the Executive branch of government. Fuerth calls for the Congress to once agin reassert itself into the separation of powers, even as more judges are appointed sympathetic to the executive point of view.
Gerard Baker has a satirical pice in the Financial Times of May 19th. It is listed as an article dated March 27th, 2026, in which Alan Greenspan celebrates his 100th birthday and appoinment to an 11th term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
A quote attributed to Greenspan is indicative of how the Chairman can appear to be all things to all people, and remains the great obfuscator:
"There is proliferating evidence that centenarian policymaking is producing markedly salutary benefits on the long-run performance of the global economy. This transformation in the work-leisure balance of the superannuated is occurring without serious impairment to productivity levels and is significantly enhancing the prospects for intergenerational knowledge transfers,"
Asian Times May 19, 2004
How India funds Bush's campaign
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - There is more than one reason US President George W Bush should thank Indians, whether in the United States or India, as the buildup to elections in the US slated for November gathers steam. Indians are contributing handsomely to Bush's campaign funds while, until recently, there was a band of more than 100 dedicated call-center executives who were handling Bush's fundraising and vote-seeking campaign for the Republican Party from the outsourcing hubs of Noida and Gurgaon, which adjoin the national capital Delhi.
While the Internet provides fertile ground for spoofs on Bush's job being outsourced to India, his task is certainly being made a lot easier by Indians. Until recently, HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing (BPO) arm of Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies, handled Bush's nationwide fundraising campaign over the telephone.
HCL has been very reluctant to provide information about the project, but now that it is over it is more forthcoming, though strictly off the record. According to reports, for 14 months between May 16, 2002, and July 22, 2003, HCL eServe had more than 100 agents working in seven teams soliciting financial contributions for the Republican Party. A report that appeared in the Hindustan Times this Sunday says the task was to mobilize support for President Bush and solicit political contributions ranging between US$5 and $3,000 from legions of registered Republican voters. The report further adds that the voters' database was provided by the Republican National Committee (RNC), the party's premier political organization. The contract for running the campaigns was originally awarded by RNC to Washington-based Capital Communications Group, which provides consulting services to government and private clients for cultural and political networking. For cost and efficiency gains, the company outsourced the work to HCL Technologies, which in turn sent it offshore.
Nobody from HCL BPO Services is willing to go on record to talk about the deal, but sources in the company told Asia Times Online that such a project was under way for a long time, with more than 10 million registered Republican voters contacted for pledging funds. Estimates put the extent of funds pledged due to efforts from India at more than $10 million, with the retrieval of the money being followed up by the RNC. According to the sources, the calling process involved a high degree of automation in order to limit human intervention, with voice recording and recognition technology. In this way the US respondents would not have any idea where the calls were coming from, with foreign-accented instead of Indian voices being used.
HCL eServe also ran at least seven other campaigns to gauge voter moods, including simple yes-or-no polls on such issues as abortion rights. Though HCL executives are tight-lipped, there is a possibility that there are still some projects on hand, with respondents being asked about their views on the war in Iraq.
While it seems that the fundraising contract was called off because most Republican voters had been covered, sources also say that the backlash against outsourcing in the United States as well as pressure from the anti-outsourcing lobby within the Republican Party might have also contributed to the cancellation. It may be recalled that the Indian BPO sector has seen exponential growth over the past few years, with estimates that the information-technology-enabled sector will exceed $20 billion by 2008.
Bush's India connection, however, does not end with the call centers. There's also a lot of money being contributed by Indian-Americans.
It was former US president Bill Clinton who actively sought to build bridges as well as cultivate the Indian community in the United States, recognizing their numbers - more than 2 million - as well as their immense money-power as global information-technology (IT) pioneers. The 2004 US elections are witnessing Indian-Americans reaching out to Republican Bush as a reaction to the virulent anti-outsourcing campaign being orchestrated by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Further, given the strides that Indo-US relations have taken under Bush, politically, economically and militarily, the Indian community feels much more comfortable in maintaining this continuity. Bush has himself indicated his pro-India proclivities by promising that he will visit the country next year if he wins re-election. Although India has been unhappy with some of the recent steps taken by the Bush administration, including the granting of special non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) status to Pakistan, India's relations with the United States have been by and large on the ascent.
In an interview to the Economic Times before the results of the elections in India were declared, Sharad Lakhanpal of Texas, a doctor and president of the American Association of the Physicians of Indian Origin who is one of the biggest fundraisers for Bush, said: "Indo-US relations are at an all-time high under the current administration. There has been good chemistry between President Bush and the [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee government. President Bush told me himself that [Prime Minister] Vajpayee has been a good friend and is a good man.
"The current administration has appointed several Indian-Americans to high positions. The fundraising will pay dividends for the Indian-American community and for Indo-US relations if the president wins ... re-election. Indians are increasingly recognized in the mainstream US politics," Lakhanpal added.
Although business has reacted with alarm at the Sonia Gandhi Congress-Left combination taking over from the Vajpayee dispensation, there isn't likely to be much of a rollback in the economic reforms program in India. After all, the man tipped to be finance minister, Manmohan Singh, is the original architect of India's liberalization agenda.
Though Indian-Americans have been seen as close to the Democrats, it is estimated that the community has already raised more than $500,000 for the Bush campaign. Bobby Jindal, Republican candidate for Congress, raised more than $800,000 in the first quarter ending March 31, and has $760,000 cash on hand. More than $575,000 of the contributions came from Louisiana donors. A Republican rally in that state that raised more than $1 million for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential ticket late last year had several prominent Indians in attendance.
In a speech widely quoted in India, Congressman Joe Wilson recently praised Lakhanpal and Narender Reddy, a doctor from Georgia, for raising more than $100,000 each for the president and categorized them as Bush pioneers. He said longtime Bush supporters Zach Zachariah and Raghavendra Vijayanagar from Florida each raised more than $200,000, calling them the "Bush rangers". "These leaders have rallied the Indian-American community behind Bush," Wilson said.
Dr Vijaynagar serves as chair of the Indian American Republican Council, while Mammen Zachariah, a cardiologist at Holy Cross Hospital in Florida and Zach's brother, is a big fundraiser. Zach co-chairs Bush's Florida re-election campaign and his connection to the family dates back to George Bush Sr, for whom he organized several successful fundraisers. Zachariah also raised more money for Bush's 1992 campaign than any other individual. Florida Governor Jeb Bush appointed Mammen to the Florida campaign, while Zach helped found the Indian American Policy Institute, a think-tank to promote Indian-American interests, and chairs the Florida Council on Economic Education.
While praising the Indian community, Wilson, who co-chairs the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, said: "I am proud of the Indian-American community for their loyal support to President Bush."
It all augurs well for India if Bush is re-elected. If he is not, there will remain a bunch of call-center executives who will always be informed about the Republican way of electioneering.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.
Yesterday in the Preakness, "Smarty Jones" blew away the field winning by 11 and a half lengths, a new record. "Imperialism" finished out of the money.
Now the Question of the Day is, did Bush, Rummy, Wolfie, Condi & all the Neocon tooters for Empire bet on their nag Imperialism, or even go out to Maryland to see him run? Blog viewers who have been reading about the emerging atrocities issue in Iraq may find the following artcle of mine, just posted at The Independent Insitute web site, of interest. It deals also with the Philippines and Vietnam. To view it, Click Here. It is typical of Limbaugh's loose thinking that he was probably bastardizing Jefferson's observation about a "Revolution" every 20 years; that the Tree of Liberty must be Watered by the Blood of Patriots.
There is a great difference between a Revolution to advance Liberty and a War to keep the Status Quo, or even, in some cases, to move back toward a thoroughly Reactionary society.
Our move in Iraq to now put in place Saddam's old commanders and troops, tells you exactly the thoughts of American leadership on the subject. We helped put Saddam in power, and he proceeded to destroy virtually every vestige of Civil Society in Iraq.
It is a great tribute to the Iraqi people that they have withstood this onslaught to the extent that they have. It was revealed this week, that on top of the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Iraqi urban areas, both US and British soldiers have become involved in torture as well. At the same time, comparing the three overall interventions, some writers have drawn attention to parallels with Vietnam a generation ago, and the Philippines a century earlier.
Massive civilian deaths and torture are characteristic of all three Imperial Interventions.
Our Philippine adventure resulted in the creation of The Anti-Imperialist League, in which a number of noted Americans, ranging from former General/Senator Carl Schurz to Mark Twain sought to draw attention to what the Army was doing in the Islands.
By 1902, the Senate, controlled by imperialists such as Henry Cabot Lodge, had initiated another of its often feckless investigations into the conduct of a war. The “antis,” developed a parallel investigation culminating in the publication of a small book, “Marked Severities”: Secretary [of War Elihu] Root’s Record in the Philippines. As it became clear the “antis” would focus on atrocities, some like Andrew Carnegie, withdrew the $5,000 he had promised to help with the investigation.
Calling attention to atrocities always causes the imperialists to drape themselves in the flag and denounce all such criticism as “unpatriotic.”
The estimates of civilians killed in the Philippines range from 200,000 to a high of perhaps 600,000 -- no one really knows. This writer has seen pictures smuggled out by American soldiers of pits filled with the bodies of dozens of Filipinos. One soldier wrote of troops killing a village of about a 1,000 after someone had fired upon them from there.
The “water cure” was the approved torture of the day. With the mouth held open by a knife, a water hose was thrust down the victim’s throat. Whether he talked or not, most often death came later from the infection of the stomach lesions caused by the water pressure. “Civilize ‘em with a Krag” [rifle] was our great battle cry of the era.
The massive burning and killing of Vietnamese -- including the whole village of My Lai -- was much more publicized, of course, in the counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Again, total deaths are hard to estimate, but were certainly well over a million Asians.
Less so was the torture. One of my former students, in American intelligence, refused to participate in it. The Koreans for centuries have been employed for torture by the Chinese, and the US often used them in that capacity in Vietnam. A common method was to jamb wire through the hands and wire them together. The person was then taken up in a helicopter, and pushed out the open door if he refused to talk. Of course, as with the "tiger cages," we often let our South Vietnamese ally do much of the nastier interrogation work.
Now, of course, in Iraq, we are repeating the "shock and awe," kill civilians-torture the enemy tactics of our earlier imperial interventions. It is unclear to me how this will ever result in “winning the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. I recall an interview in Vietnam where an American officer admitted our tactics had lost the present generation of Vietnamese, but we would win over the next one. I wondered who he thought would father this new generation? Even General William E. Odum acknowledges we have lost legitimacy in Iraq, and a number of our military professionals warned against the adventure in the first place.
Sy Hersh has an expose of our massive prison complex at AbuGhraib in the forthcomg issue of The New Yorker. It appears the worst Torture abuses were under the direction of the CIA, and other "private contractor" intelligence people. No wonder the people in Fallujah hated these contractors so.
One item that I have not seen discussed is that some contractors also use bullets outlawed under the Geneva Convention, which will literally cut you in half. Who will stand responsible for those kinds of atrocities?
One thing is certain, just as Elihu Root could concoct these policies for the Philippines, and good ‘ol “fog of war,” Robert MacNamara could do so for Vietnam, they would never personally be involved in such killings and torture -- leave that to the soldiers in the field! The same goes for Bush and Cheney today, both of whom appear in “plausible denial," and will blame it all on underlings.
What a century of this Imperialism has done to Americans is not apt to be mentioned by those who glorify Empire such as Niall Ferguson or William Kristol. Perhaps these are the people who ought to be trained to do the torturing for the greater glories of the Empire!
To talk about the Philippines as a “great aberration,” as once did the historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, is errant nonsense. Our Imperial policies, and especially the “national security” bureaucracies and military forces to carry them out, have been developing for at least a century now. They were not disbanded after Vietnam, and the frustrations of Iraq are not likely to cause them to be dismantled into the future.
Remember that the Dictator Julius Caesar was heavily backed by what one might today call the military-industrial complex of Ancient Rome. They used "private contractors," too, and the missile weapon of mass destruction was the catapult, as one sees in the opening scene of "The Gladiator." Someone had the contracts to supply all of that!
It will be interesting to see how this develops given George Bush’s fundamentalist fanaticism. Recall the definition of a fanatic, as someone who redoubles his effort when he has lost sight of his goal. Of the many books I have read of late on Iraq, I believe the best is Toby Dodge's, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (NY: Columbia UP, 2003).
Dodge begins with the British efforts late in WWI and continuing into the era of the League of Nations Mandate System afterwards, to create a nation in the area we now call Iraq. It is a story of trial and error, starts and stops. What strikes one, however, is that the Brits learned from their mistakes and appreciating the rising nationalism, made forward progress, despite everything.
In contrast, the US, that is George Bush, his Neocon advisors, and shifting list of Proconsuls, seem Hell Bent (Bush might say "Heaven Bent"), on denying all of that, and making matters worse. Whatever Nation Building will be done, apparently, will occur after Iraq has been leveled into a sort of tabula raza.
I do not intend this as a book review, but urge you to purchase this small book and read it.
As someone who taught on the Internet for six years and maintained his own web site, I have been surprised at the ignorance and ineptitude of many people at learning how to buy books through the Internet.
Probably the most obvious way is to go to a convenient link to Amazon.com/. That may not, however, be the least expensive way to buy a book, although Amazon does sometimes have the best new or used book price. Unless you want to write a review to bolster the ranking of some book at Amazon, which you can also do without purchasing it there, I suggest you try Fetchbook.info/, a consortium of some 40,000 book sellers, which includes Amazon as well. It offers the best comparison of prices on new and used books.
Given the corruption in the BIA (the Bureau of Indian Affairs) not be be confused with the BIA (Bureau of Insular Affairs, staffed by our military, that used to run the Empire in the Philippines and elsewhere) as described in this article in The Village Voice,, maybe the "Neocon Tribe" can do a little "Nation Building" with Halliburton right here in the Good Old USA. The Lumbees here in NC, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, much intermarried with Caucasians and whose war veterans in the 1960s chased the Klan into the night, have now also discovered the virtues of being "An Indian." As Tonto (the Fool) once said to the Lone Ranger, "What you mean 'us,' "White Man?" Isn't there a song from "Annie Get Your Gun" that would allow all of us to qualify for the largesse?
Perhaps my favorite in the Government's "the Assumption of Sovereignty" for the Indians, which I mentioned in an Indian section in A History of Florida, was the effort by the Choctaw, in landlocked Oklahoma, to go into Offshore Banking. The tribe found out quickly, as the Iraqis will soon, about our politicos notion of "Limited Sovereignty," -- a wonderful oxymoron! Since we're into Outsourcing everything else, I guess it was natural our Proconsuls would soon be Outsourcing some Sovereignty as well. After all, Empires always have a surplus of that. I suppose it's too outrageous to suggest an individual might like to buy a little too! Maybe Wal-mart will start selling it soon.
I once had a great interview with Patrick Hurley, the Irish-Choctaw, Oklahoman, Harvard lawyer who handled the oil claims for the tribe. Philippine Commissioner, later SecWar & leader of a mission to China. A millionaire in his 20s, he used to tease his wife, Jane, the daughter of Adm, Wilson & tracing back to James Wilson, about having to marry down to a lowly Injun. Apropos of Pat Lynch's comment about not automatically going to amazon.com, to purchase a book, probably the best place to buy both new and used books on the Internet is at fetchbook.info/. It offers comparative prices on both new and used books, from over 40,000 book dealers, and it is obvious that Amazon is not always the best buy, even on new ones.
To go to fetchbook.info/, click here. Art, films and literature often offer insights which help to explain human situations perhaps better than does history. This Easter season, “The Passion of the Christ” provided us an example of the way in which imperial occupiers, and some of their Quislings, treated dissidents.
My favorite, however, on the integral interaction between occupiers and those being occupied, is John Steinbeck’s 1942 book, The Moon is Down, shortly thereafter made into a film starring Cedric Hardwicke, Lee J. Cobb and Henry Travers. I first saw the film in the 1950s. Since the Vietnam era it has been little shown, if at all.
It is a story about the German invasion of a small town in Norway in 1940, and the developing reactions of the inhabitants as the Nazis seek to insure that the mine nearby continues to send coal to the Third Reich's war machine.
Readers this year may be tempted to replace the term “Norway” with “Iraq,” “coal” with “oil,” and “Germany” with the phrase “Coalition.”
The story even has a “fifth column” Ahmed Chalabi like character, who sets up the town for an easy occupation, imagining he will be dearly beloved by the people.
The central confrontation, however, is between Mayor Orden, and the German officer in command, Col. Lanser, a Wehrmacht veteran of occupied Belgium over two decades earlier, who urges cooperation rather than violence, which will lead, he warns, inevitably to more violence on the part of the Germans.
Woven through all of this are the increasingly violent acts of “the People.” Early on, Lanser’s mind wanders back to a friendly, little, old, gray-haired Belgian lady who killed 12 Germans with a 12 inch hat pin, before she was caught and shot. He still retains the hat pin at home.
Of course, the violence begins at once, and the Germans retaliate on a much larger scale on the Norwegian people. At the same time, many of the German troops, yearning to go home and for some companionship, begin to develop various symptoms of psychological stress.
The Germans, like imperial conquerors back to the Romans and beyond, seek to legitimatize their occupation in the eyes of the people. They understand that Quislings won’t work in the long run. John Lukacs devoted a large part of his book, The Last European War: September, 1939 - December, 1941, (1976) to demonstrating how they failed in a attempt to establish legitimacy over the nations of occupied Europe.
“Legitimacy,” to paraphrase, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Ah, there’s the rub!” Incidentally, the movie version of the book opens with a quote from Roosevelt about the example of the resistance of Norway explaining the meaning of W.W.II.
At the end, the Quisling, having obtained authority from the Nazi command in Oslo, orders Col. Lanser to execute the old Mayor and the town doctor, if the people begin to use the dynamite, dropped by parachute by British airplanes, to destroy the mine. As the explosions begin, the two are executed as the Mayor repeats an old speech he used many years before, the last words of Socrates to the Athenian people.
It is clear the occupiers, despised by the people, are in for a long and bloody time ahead.
In a New York Times (4/11/04) op-ed piece, “Nasty, Brutish and Short,” Thomas Friedman, mentions the word “legitimacy” four times, and flip-flops on whether it can be bought with cash or compelled with force, before finally concluding that the U.S. cannot do so, and that with all of the retaliatory killing, “we have a staggering legitimacy deficit.”
I wonder if legitimacy is something you can have in gradations as he suggests? Either one is a bastard, or one is not!
As reported in The Telegraph (4/11/2004) among our major partner in the so-called Coalition, the British, senior officers, speaking anonymously, have already expressed a growing sense of "unease and frustration," about American tactics in the occupation. Part of the problem, a British officer said, is that Americans tend to see the Iraqis as “untermenschen,” the term for “sub-humans,” -- Jews, Slavs and Gypsies --used by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
British rules of warfare allow troops to open fire only when attacked, and to use the minimum force necessary, and at identified targets, not a massive use of firepower in urban areas, as do the Israelis on the Palestinians, and now American troops on the Iraqis.
In short, The Moon is Down, again. The Nation has an interesting review on Tocqueville.
Sy Hersh, in The New Yorker, discusses the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan.
And, Theodore Dalrymple, in the City Journal, explores "When Islam Breaks Down" just as we see the growing nationalism in Iraq. I don't agree with much of Wolf's worldview as he remains a Keynesian.
Bonds dropped a half point this last week and mortgage rates went up by the same amount, due, I think, to the news about unemployment being down, however inaccurate that figure might be. The article of mine below, with photo, will appear in the Asheville Citizen-Times, NC, Sunday edition. If it appears a bit dated at this point, it is because it was originally written a week ago. A shorter version was posted yesterday by the Independent Institute at antiwar.com:
By William Marina The death and mutilation of four American private contractors in the Sunni dominated city of Fallujah was followed by the subsequent uprising in at least six cities across Iraq by some of the more radical elements of the Shia militia. The early American response to events in Fallujah was a promise that “we will pacify that city.”
Now the nationalistic uniting of the two religious groups, suggests the insurgency has taken a significant step toward a situation perhaps best described as a “people’s war.” Even the police trained by the U.S. have retreated in the face of this uprising, with some reported to have given their flack jackets to the militia.
With less than two months left until the promised return of some powers to the Iraqis, the increased militarization of the situation means probably more American troops and an uncertain future.
How did the explosive events of the last week come to pass?
The Shiite uprising was caused by the U.S. occupation authority’s closing of a Shiite newspaper for printing allegedly false stories, the arrest of the militant cleric, Moktada al-Sadr’s chief aide, and the issue of an arrest warrant for Sadr.
These events clearly precipitated the crisis; the real question is why did our proconsul, Paul Bremer, choose to do this?
Rumors are rife in Washington that the military was concerned that its role in Iraq would soon diminish as diplomats sought to build some kind of legitimacy leading toward June 30th. If that is so, then clearly the short run winners have been the Iraqi radicals and the American military, because we are now faced with the widespread insurgency, many hoped to avoid.
Only a little over a year ago, neo-conservative pundits were assuring the American people that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq would be a piece of cake. (General Eric Shenseki was sacked from command for suggesting otherwise.)
One of those was Max Boot, a journalist formerly with The Wall Street Journal and now with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Boot's fame rests upon his book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars & the Rise of American Power (2002), which made him, apparently, a kind of instant neo-con guru on these kind of interventionist counterinsurgencies. One chapter in that volume, based essentially on secondary sources, recounted the U.S. defeat of the Filipino insurgency a century ago.
Few seemed to disagree when Boot put that forward as a model to be followed in Iraq. In the early months of the occupation of Iraq, he visited there, returning with glowing accounts of U.S. success. The neo-cons did not mention that other American intervention, Vietnam, which was a military disaster, and hardly an example of nation-building.
But Iraq and the Philippines are very different. For example, the insurgents in Iraq, while apparently lacking the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration claimed existed, have no shortage of conventional weapons. The Filipinos, on the other hand, were extremely short of them. One might argue that the turning point in the Filipino insurrection came before it had actually begun--when U.S. diplomatic pressure was sufficient to dissuade the Japanese from shipping 5,000 rifles to the insurgents. Our "Benevolent Pacification," as we called it, resulted in the death of 220,000 Filipinos, with 2,000 Americans killed.
How is it that the United States again finds itself in an incipient insurgency with so little real study of past conflicts? In the case of the Philippines, Captain John R. M. Taylor tried for years to get his five-volume study published, arguing in the late 1930s that we might need it in case the U.S. was ever involved in another guerrilla war in Asia.
Fissures existed among the Filipino revolutionary coalition, and the U.S. was able to exploit these to eventually quash the rebellion. The U.S. counterinsurgency also was helped immeasurably by the Filipinos’ choice to fight a more conventional war rather than a real guerrilla insurgency, or people's war.
But a people’s war is what the Iraqis, especially the majority Shia, are now preparing to exploit in the face of a continued American occupation.
The first step in such a war, as can be seen in the Shia’s destruction of the Iraqi village of Kiwali, is to make certain that the Iraqi population understands that there will be no "free riders," and that the population will commit to the side of the insurgents. That process, if it succeeds, will take a while, as it did in the American Revolution against Great Britain. If that occurs in Iraq, helped by a popular reaction to U.S. counter-violence, ours will, indeed, be a very long intervention and occupation.
The insurgents are now also making it clear that Coalition partners and contract companies will not have a cheap ride either. With insurance policies going up by 300%, how many besides V.P. Cheney's old company, Halliburton (now KBR) will choose to stay the course? And, our service men and women, not paid $100,000 to $200,000 for enlisting as are private contractors, are becoming increasingly disillusioned as well. The 15,000 private contractor “security guards” are almost double the 8,000 British soldiers there.
The US military has announced that it is not waiting until the end of this war to assess its successes and mistakes, but is already involved in a Strategic Study of the intervention in Iraq. Given our propensity to use the term "pacify," and its continuity to earlier imperial counterinsurgencies, it will be interesting to see if we select that term to characterize our new program in Iraq.
In the Philippines, of course, we called it, "Benevolent Pacification," and in Vietnam only "Pacification," but the latter was the exact same term adopted by the British in America in 1778, after some American leaders had rejected their peace overtures in favor of Empire -- seeking to gain Florida and Canada as well.
By far the bloodiest part of the War came after that.
The official cheerleader publication for the neoconservatives effort to rejuvenate the American Empire’s interventionist agenda around the world, The Wall Street Journal, carried a page one article April 7, 2004, entitled “For Guidance in Iraq, Marines Rediscover A 1940s Manual.” It highlighted that “Small-War Secrets Include: Tips on Nation-Building, The Care of Pack Mules.”
Considering the exploding insurgency in Iraq this week, the insurgents might well proclaim what Gen. George Patton supposedly commented about Gen. Erwin Rommel, “I read your book.!” And, that’s just what is needed in Iraq; some tips on how to care for mules.
Apparently numerous Marine officers have taken the book with them to Iraq, and it has been cited by gung ho congressmen for its insights. Max Boot, then a Journal writer, built a whole book around it two years ago, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars & the Rise of American Power, and has often since written on how the Philippines provide a model for nation building in Iraq.
The Journal article hints, since the Small Wars Manual wasn’t rediscovered until 1972, it might have helped the U.S. win in Vietnam. William Luti, an advisor to Donald Rumsfeld, keeps a copy in his Pentagon office.
Americans love a good “How To” book, and the Journal has long touted this 446 page one, which details how “from 1898 to 1934, the Marines fought a number of small wars, in the Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, China, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.”
What no one bothers to mention is that the great Marine hero Gen. Smedley Butler (2 Medals of Honor, in combat), turned against all of this interventionism in which he had participated (a kind of early Whistle Blower!), in his 1934 book, War is a Racket, listing the nations in which he intervened for American global corporations such as Standard Oil, United Fruit, and the National City Bank. Butler observed that Al Capone operated in three Chicago districts, the Marines on six continents. He concluded, in short, “I was a gangster for Capitalism [Imperialism?]!”
The Journal does point out the Manual may be popular in Iraq not because of its “excellence” but because there is “little serious competition,” and “in the absence of anything better.” What a comment on the intellectual bankruptcy of the Tactics of Empire!
Granted, that it does discuss a bit of what is today called nation building, one wonders if any of its advocates have examined the list of its so-called successes in any dimension other than the short-run military put-down of an insurgency.
The Philippines: The U.S. won because the insurgents had few guns, and with fissures in the revolutionary coalition, never really adopted the tactics of people’s war. The Philippines are rife with corruption and insurgents today, and were in 1981 when this writer lectured there for the USIA. With 220,000 dead Filipinos, and 2,000 Americans, this was a small war? Only if you consider Asians not worth counting!
Cuba: Now there’s a great example of the success of America’s interventionist nation building skills.
Honduras: Not noted as a great success, but under “H” the Journal forgot to mention Haiti, where the Marines intervened several times. Ask Bill Clinton about what a great success story that has been.
China: A growing success, but I‘m not sure about the role played by the U.S. and the Marines in all of that since 1900.
Nicaragua: The Marines in the 1920s made A.C. Sandino a hero all over Latin America for his successful tactics against them and their use of the auto-gyro, the ancestor of the helicopter used with such success in Vietnam and Mogadishu. Our trained police thug and later dictator, the first Somoza, with the knowledge of the American ambassador murdered Sandino as he was coming in under a flag of truce. Well, things are quiet there for now after the events of 1979.
The Dominican Republic: Like Haiti, with the inflation there, hundreds of people are taking to rafts, floating into the shark infested Mona Passage hoping to reach Puerto Rico, since Miami is too far away.
Mexico: The Journal didn’t mention it, but Butler did. Pollsters might ask a wetback swimming the Rio Grande what he thinks about American interventionism.
Russia: Not mentioned by the Journal, but let's remember that the Marine intervention force of 1918-19 had to be recalled because many of the grunts were fraternizing with the Bolsheviks in Vladivostok.
“How To” books deal with Tactics, not whether you should be doing whatever it is you’re trying to do, just as Condi Rice blathered on yesterday about the Tactics of Empire. When will some American leader take on the questions of Strategy and Grand Strategy; What Empire is doing to corrupt America?
In the meantime, with respect to the success of our “small” war interventions, to paraphrase King Pyrrhus, “ A few more successes like Iraq, and we may be undone.” The United States Imperial actions have always had a rather Orwellian tendency in the way in which its spinmeisters distort words, but the new definition of "Sovereignty" sets an even lower standard.
The Coalition -- that's us Folks, where even our private contractors, 15,000 at last count paid up to $1,000 a day, are almost double the number of British troops at 8,000 --
will keep control of a number of key areas of decision-making.
As we move toward setting up a Quisling government in Iraq, with a requested increase in troops while talking of handing over power June 30th -- our Kommandant in Guantanamo has just been sent to Iraq to supervise more prisons there (some exit strategy !) -- we should not forget the events which continue to unfold in Israel. A Financial Times piece, for subscribers only, is pasted in below.
You might also want to check out this NYT piece describing the growth of Islam in Rwanda, based in no small part on the Muslims heroic efforts to protect people from the killers ten years ago, while it would appear many Christians, especially Catholics, were complicit in the affair.
Also, here is a piece of mine on Iraq, linked as well at antiwar.com:
A somewhat lengthier and updated version of this will appear in The Asheville Citizen-Times next Sunday. http://www.citizen-times.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Financial Times April 6 2004
Sharon's gamble could trigger holy war
By Henry Siegman
Since September 11 2001, Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, and members of his government have insisted that there is not much difference between al-Qaeda and Hamas and that indeed Israel's war with Hamas places Israel in the vanguard of President George W. Bush's global war on terror.
It is this conception of Hamas that underlies not only Mr Sharon's justification for the assassination two weeks ago of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, but also the difficulty Mr Bush seems to have in objecting to Mr Sharon's resort to extra-judicial executions.
The analogy between Hamas and al-Qaeda is false. Hamas, for all its fundamentalist Islamic passions, is a movement for Palestinian national liberation with a clear political agenda - the establishment of a Palestinian state. While its convictions define the Palestinian national goal as a return to all of Palestine, the goal of statehood is so central for Hamas that Sheikh Yassin offered an open-ended ceasefire ( hudna ) if Israel were to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and return to the pre-1967 borders.
Israelis view those who attach any seriousness to such Hamas declarations as hopelessly naive. They are convinced that no one understands Hamas and Palestinians better than they do because they live with them and next to them. But for all this geographic intimacy, the understanding that many Israelis have of Palestinians is profoundly and pathologically distorted. The two peoples' century-long conflict has resulted in demonisation of the other, not deeper mutual understanding.
An Israeli security expert who sees the situation in entirely different terms is Ephraim Halevy. Mr Halevy was until last September the head of Israel's National Security Council and Mr Sharon's national security adviser. In an interview published in the newspaper Ha'aretz (September 4 2003), Mr Halevy said: "Anyone who thinks it is possible to ignore so central an element of Palestinian society [as Hamas] is simply mistaken." While Mr Halevy advocated "a strategy of brutal force" against its terrorist activities, he urged Israel's government to encourage Hamas' political and religious leadership to "enter the fabric of the Palestinian establishment". He added: "In the end, there will be no way around Hamas being a partner in the Palestinian government". Mr Halevy also insisted that the conflict between Judaism and Islam was "resolvable" and that the two could achieve "a historic hudna such as existed between Islam and Christianity for the past 300 years".
When Abu Mazen was appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority last year, Hamas leaders declared a hudna partly because they did not want the US or their own activists to see their conflict with Israel as connected to al-Qaeda's ideological war with the west. They feared that such a perception would discredit the Palestinian national struggle and permanently alienate Washington. Despite their political and ideological extremism, Hamas' leaders are pragmatic and understand that, ultimately, Palestinian statehood cannot be achieved without US support. That is why when Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a hard-liner who replaced Sheikh Yassin as Hamas' leader in the occupied territories, threatened to launch terrorist attacks against the US, he retracted the threat the following day.
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Jeddah told me in 1999 that Saudis saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in political, not religious, terms. Therefore, if the two parties were to reach a reasonable compromise based on the pre-1967 borders, Saudi Arabia would establish normal diplomatic ties with Israel.
Mr Sharon's decision, however, to assassinate a man seen as a religious leader by both Palestinians and Muslims risks transforming what most Muslims have so far considered to be a conflict over competing national and territorial claims - albeit claims that have religious resonances - into a religious conflict whose claims are absolute and existential.
The insistence by Mr Sharon and so many Israelis that Sheikh Yassin deserved his fate is beside the point. To be sure, Hamas had no right to demand immunity for someone who provided religious legitimacy for the brutal killing of Israeli civilians. But if the assassination is transforming Israel's conflict with the Palestinians into a religious war, the Israeli civilians in whose name Mr Sharon carries out these extra-judicial killings may yet pay a far more bitter price.
The writer is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations
In reply to Roderick Long's comments on my earlier observations about his previous discussion of differences between Abraham and Mrs. Laney:
Since I have never myself talked to God, in any of his/her/its various manifestations in a number of religions, I have some doubt that others, among them Abraham and Mrs. Lacey, did so.
Certainly, Mrs. Lacey may have thought she did so, but most of us would consider that God to be a very perverse one in ordering a mother to kill her two sons.
Abraham found himself in a culture where infanticide of the first-born male as a sacrifice to the God Molach-Baal was accepted practice. Given the many years and several different scribes who created those first books in what became common scriptures for Jews and Christians, derived as they are from many stories common in the several civilizations in that area -- and my doubts that Abraham conversed with God -- I cannot determine what social pressures, including the envy I discussed, might have been at work causing him to place his son on the sacrificial alter in the first place.
His decision not to kill his son formed the beginning of Judaism. It was a brilliant stroke to rationalize that as an order from God. Abraham's seeming willingness to kill his son on God's order, resulted in God sparing him and making promises about the future; if that is not a Covenant, I don't know what one would call it.
Nowhere did I imply that dietary practices were mentioned in that passage, but rather noted, "On a related point," and then discussed those as a means whereby religious groups have sought to create, perpetuate and separate themselves from others, a special problem for the pastoral Jews, located as they were at the intersection of several advanced urban civilizations. I doubt Mr. Long is a poor reader and conclude he was simply distorting things to make debate points.
One does not have to be either a Jew or a Christian to conclude that these religions are ethically superior to the worship of Moloch-Baal and that this was a step forward in the development of civilization.
Finally, the Carthaginians developed one further cultural barbarity, crucifixion, unfortunately borrowed by the Romans to dramatize what happened to those who challenged the Empire. Ah well, without that cultural adoption Mel Gibson would have had difficulty making such a bloody film.
The difference, Roderick, between Abraham and Mrs. Laney is the difference between day and night.
The difference between Abraham and Laney is that Abraham's action, whether true, myth or allegory, to remove Issac from the alter and replace him with the offering of a ram was THE decisive moment in the development of Judaism, and indirectly of Christianity, even taking into account the Christ mythology created by Paul and others.
First, and foremost, is that, unlike Laney, who killed her two sons, Abraham did NOT kill his son, Issac, but instead made a Covenant with Yahweh. Tit for tat, monotheistic worship and rewards as a Chosen people, in exchange for no more human sacrifice. The idea of the Covenant, of course, is central not only to Judaism but to much of Christianity as well. My favorite among comments on the idea, are those of Mark Twain in his insightful essay on anti-Semitism written after a trip in both Austria and Germany late in the nineteenth century.
It is important to understand that the Jews were on the periphery of several civilizations which stressed human sacrifice, especially Canaanite civilization which encompassed both Phoenicia and later Carthage. The Jews were constantly falling back into involvement with the corruption of this urban civilization, of which Delilah's hold on Samson was one illustration.
Archeologists have found the remains of perhaps 20,000 first-born males of the Carthaginian aristocracy, burnt to assuage the blood lust of Moloch-Baal, the most blood thirsty of all of the Gods of the Ancient World. It is thought the offerings were also meant to blunt the envy of the lower class masses in that commercial civilization, often called the first Capitalist one.
On a related point, Geneticists have long pointed out, as C.D. Darlington phrased it, "that people who don't eat together, don't sleep together." And, going back to earliest times, woman's control over what might be called "the power of the pot," has meant that the wife is simply NOT going to cook two separate meals, one for herself and another for her husband. The point is to develop a breeding group that has separated itself from others with cultural traits deemed harmful.
Diets, the more restrictive the better, therefore, become key factors in separating one group for another. Jewish dietary laws were meant for this purpose, to contrast with those of the Canaanites, not because of some sanitary purpose. If the fear was because the shellfish, pork, etc., might spoil, then the injunction would have been to eat it within an early timeframe. This is the real reason for such diets today among groups such as the Jews, Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists.
The important thing, ultimately, was to do everything to separate the Jews from the blood lust Moloch-Baal worshiping Canaanites.
To compare the significance of the important story of Abraham and Issac to that of the poor Mrs. Laney's murder of her two children, whatever her motivation, is, well, just plain silly!
PS:
The dietary laws have some interesting economic aspects as well as the in-group genetic ones.
Since the Mormons believe each Stake should have a year's supply of food stored up, they tend to buy in bulk with great savings. I ate better than most on my graduate fellowship because a Mormon friend allowed me to buy food at their prices.
The Jews, of course, have done well peddling Kosher foods, not only for themselves but to others. In high school I worked on a wholesale milk truck and used to take the old stamp with the rabbi's seal on it and stamp the heck out of cartons of cottage cheese as needed.
The Adventists, pound for pound, have done best with their health food thrust even into medicine where, ironically, for Fundamentalists, some of the most advanced work is done in their hospitals. Going back to Kellogg's, the companies they control have done very well, especially discovering uses and patenting of the soy bean long before the government became aware of its qualities. They have more medical people per capita than any group, and with tithing, for example, give several times more than other Christian sects. The death and mutilation of four American private contractors in Falluja suggests the insurgency has taken another step toward people's war. Iraqis indicate the violence was a retaliation for the First Marine Expeditionary Force's, newly arrived from Camp Pendleton to replace the Army's 82nd Airborne, attacks last week on the Fallujans to "put them in their place." While the Marines, fearing an ambush, did not intervene yesterday to halt the carnage, the American high command has indicated "we will pacify that city."
Meanwhile, in another part of Iraq, Shia militia have utterly destroyed the village of Kawali, famed since the 1920s when the British imperialists initiated their rule, for its dancers and prostitutes. No doubt the ladies and their sponsors were looking forward to some rich rewards as the Coalition forces settled in for an extended occupation.
One is reminded of the problems in Iran when that bevy of whores and their pimps known as the "Greater Southeast Asia Floating Crap Game," fled Saigon in 1975, and settled outside of Tehran where the private contractor, Bell Helicopter, had hired many of their old American soldier boyfriends from Vietnam to train the Shah's fledgling pilots. The drinking and carousing offered the mullahs a great opportunity to promote anti-Americanism.
April 1st, on Charlie Rose's television program, the former Secretary of the Navy and currently member of the 9/11 Commission, John Lehman, acknowledged that many of our policy makers, including himself, were still caught in a Cold War mind set, and ill-prepared to deal with the emergence of Al Qaida, or the events in Iraq.
Although only a little over a year ago, it seems a longer time that some of the Neocon intellectuals were assuring the American people that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq would be a piece of cake, and that General Eric Shenseki was sacked from the Army for suggesting otherwise.
One of those was Max Boot, a journalist formerly with The Wall Street Journal and now with the Council on Foreign Relations. That path to policy analyst in itself tells us a great deal about upward mobility among the American elite.
Mr. Boot’s fame rests upon his book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars & the Rise of American Power (2002), which made him, apparently, a kind of instant Neocon guru on these kind of interventionist counter-insurgencies. One chapter in that volume, based very much on secondary sources, recounted America’s defeat of the Filipino Insurgency a century ago. Few seemed to disagree when Boot put that forward as a model to be followed in Iraq. In the early months of the occupation he visited there, returning with glowing accounts of our success.
But the two are very different, indeed. It is evident, for example, that the insurgents in Iraq, while apparently lacking the weapons of mass destruction that we claimed existed, have no shortage of conventional weapons. The Filipinos, on the other hand, were extremely short of them. One might argue that the turning point in the Insurrection came before it had actually begun when American diplomatic pressure was sufficient to dissuade the Japanese from shipping the 5,000 rifles promised to Emilio Aguinaldo by a Captain Yamamoto. Most admirers of the .45 pistol can tell you it was developed with sufficient firepower to stop a drugged up Filipino charging at you with a bolo knife. Why would anyone, with enough guns, resort to knives?
To detail all of the crucial differences between the two interventions, however, would require at least a monograph.
How is it that the United States again finds itself in an incipient insurgency with so little real study of these events? In the case of the Philippines, Captain John R. M. Taylor tried for years to get his 5 volume study published, arguing in the late 1930s that we might need it in case the U.S. was ever involved in another guerrilla war in Asia. In that case it was because William H. Taft and other politicos did not want it revealed that the Filipino leaders in 1898 were on their way to Europe with the monies obtained earlier in the truce with the Spanish, in which they had surrendered their guns, and turned around only when they heard Admiral George Dewey had arrived in Hong Kong. Some committed revolutionists!
That event tells us volumes about the fissures among the Filipinos which the American leaders used to our advantage, helped immeasurably by the fact that the Filipinos chose to fight a more conventional war on the whole, than a real guerrilla insurgency, or a people’s war.
That is what the Iraqis, especially the majority Shia, are now preparing to do in the face of a continued American occupation.
It is amazing that Americans and their historians have so little studied their own Revolution with respect to people’s war. A Yale historian has said that the American Revolution was not a guerrilla war. Well, of course not, except in a few small areas, since the British during the whole period of the war occupied few places for any length of time, outside of New York City. A guerrilla war presupposes the enemy occupies large areas for long periods, as we are attempting to do in Iraq.
It was, however, a people’s war, and the first step, as we see in the destruction of the village of Kiwali, is to make certain that the Iraqi population understands that there will be no “free riders,” and that the population will commit to the side of the insurgents. That process will take a while, as it did in the American colonies. If it succeeds, helped by our counter violence, it will be a very long intervention and occupation.
The insurgents are now also making it clear that Coalition partners and contract companies will not have a cheap ride either. With insurance policies going up by 300%, how many besides V.P. Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, now KBR, will choose to stay the course? And, our grunts, not paid $100,000 to $200,000 salaries as with private companies for enlisting, are becoming increasingly disillusioned as well with Mr. Bush's War.
The US military has announced that it is not waiting until the end of this war to assess its successes and mistakes, but is already involved in a Strategic Study of the intervention in Iraq. Given our propensity to use the term "pacify," and its continuity to earlier imperial counter-insurgencies, it will be interesting to see if we select a variant of that term to characterize our new program in Iraq. In the Philippines, of course, we called it, "Benevolent Pacification," while in Vietnam only "Pacification," but that was the exact same term adopted by the British in America in 1778 after the American leaders had rejected their peace overtures in favor of Empire -- seeking to gain Florida and Canada as well. By far the bloodiest part of the War came after that. Just a short addendum to Chris Sciabarra's observations about this being the 87th anniversary of our entering WWI. While I am no friend of interventionism, much of the mercantilism and cartelization he mentions, certainly the railroads, much predates the War, going back to before the Civil War. Even Wilson's move on centralized banking was completed before the War as shown in detail in a great essay by Murray Rothbard. But is the War, therefore, a "Watershed," or simply another ratcheting up in a longer trend?
If you bring in that great historian, Ayn Rand, rather than simply citing Arthur Ekirch, then it is perhaps worth mentioning she had a vested interest as an emigré from Russia, if not a bias or prejudice, in what transpired later.
We need to learn from History, and we seem to have learned little from our interventions. Certainly, a case can be made that had we not done so on the side of the Allies, a different kind of peace might have eventuated in Western Europe.
But what about Russia and events after the War? Once we were in, and with the events of the Revolution unfolding in Russia, it became increasingly clear that the great objective of Wilson's 14 points and of his League was to offer a challenge to the Bolshevik Revolution, and to all of those other revolutionary situations across the holdings of the Old Empires, and including Mexico, China and even Japan.
In the face of this effort against Russia, Lenin's adoption of the NEP might have led to greater cooperation and not have eventuated in a Stalin. Even with that, isolation of Russia meant a deal with Germany on their part as early as 1925. Lacking any cooperation with Russia on the West's part, the Nazis and Japan had a relatively free hand to move forward.
My great disappointment with Thomas Fleming's new book on Wilson, The Illusion of Victory is that he so totally ignored William Borah, and so misunderstands the whole issue as both Wilson and Borah understood it by 1919.
H.C. Lodge and T.R. until he died, argued for the same kind of unilateralism today pursued by George Bush. Wilson was ready to share power with the Old Empires, and, despite his rhetoric, go along with much of the imperial status quo much as the US has done for most of the past century even as we gradually displaced it with an American Imperium.
Only Borah, mentioned only twice and peripherally at that by Fleming, understood that America must stand, as Willliam Appleman Williams later put it, for an "Open Door," for social revolution in the Third World, and including Russia. Borah had a great confidence that most would not opt for socialism, or one of its variants. None of our subsequent leaders have had such confidence, and have always resorted to interventionist force to maintain "stability," that is no change.
It is for that reason that Borah was venerated in Third World, from China to Latin America, and his speeches carried over the radio in Spanish. Name me one other American leader in the last century respected in that fashion! Today's NYT, April 2, 2004, carries an article about the larger context of the story of the 4 Americans whose bodies were mutilated in Iraq, "Private U.S. Guards Take Big Risks for Right Price".
While the mutilation of these human beings in Iraq was tragic, and will not be made right by the mullahs promising to halt such barbarities in the future, it is important for Americans to recognize what has been developing for some years now as an integral aspect of the American Empire.
Even when the soldiers (private guards) are from the U.S. rather than Great Britain or elsewhere, they are really part of an American Foreign Legion. These soldiers are a part of the kind of volunteer, standing army that some of the Founding Fathers, Classical Republicans, warned about as the essence of Empire. These men do not need to pledge allegiance, with or without the phrase "Under God," to the United States of America, or to its Constitution.
It is well to remember that in the popular movie, "The Gladiator," the heroic Spaniard/Roman's last words had nothing to do with "Restore the Republic," or any such impossible nonsense, but rather, "Free my Men," an acknowledgement that the personal loyalties of a nascent feudalism had already replaced the Rule of Law in Rome.
It would appear that the American Government has no such feelings of responsibility for its hired guns, and which makes the title of a World War Two movie, "They Were Expendable," take on a whole new meaning. This is no April Fool's joke, but rather an addition to my earlier comments on pieces offered by Steven Horwitz. The huge inflationary/derivatives Bubble that I mentioned is Global in nature, not confined to the US. I have included the entire article below because it is available to only Subscribers of the FT. Downloads of the papers mentioned therein are $5 each from the NBER.
Financial Times March 30 2004
The Fed is forced to fuel a global boom
By Martin Wolf
You may think the Federal Reserve is the US central bank. But it is much more than that. It is the central bank of more than half the world. That explains much of what is happening in the world economy. Fed policies are driving the rest of the world quite as much as the US.
Today, the world's important economies are divided into those within a zone of fixed or quasi-fixed exchange rates against the US dollar and a zone of currencies that float relatively freely against it (see charts). In the 1960s, the European and Japanese currencies were tied to the US dollar via the system established at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. Now, Asian currencies are tied, more or less informally, to the dollar.
This illuminating description of the global monetary regime was advanced by Michael Dooley of the University of California at Santa Cruz and David Folkerts Landau and Peter Garber of Deutsche Bank in a paper published last September.* They have followed it up with a new one.** The Asian tail, they argue, is wagging the US dog.
This new dollar zone can be divided into a US core, an inner circle and an outer circle. The inner circle contains currencies tied very closely to the US dollar. The outer circle includes currencies whose movement is constrained by large-scale intervention (see chart). The former group consists, above all, of China: the US and China are in effect one economy. The latter adds India, Indonesia, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The inner circle generates 35 per cent of world gross domestic product, of which 31 per cent is inside the US, and contains 26 per cent of world population, of which 21 per cent is in China. The outer and inner circle generate 53 per cent of world GDP and contain 52 per cent of world population. Together, the US and Japan generate 42 per cent of world GDP, while China and India contain 38 per cent of world population.
What are the implications of the emergence of this dollar zone?
First, the Fed's aim is to expand the US economy until it reaches full employment. But to do so it must stimulate the whole of this vast dollar zone: a proportion of the extra spending that the US authorities generate spills directly over into imports and so expansion abroad; but dollar-zone economies are also stimulating their economies by keeping interest rates low and intervening heavily in foreign currency markets. Developing members of the dollar zone have easy access to advanced technology, high rates of capital formation and colossal supplies of underemployed labour. The US has a high rate of productivity growth and highly stretched consumers. Japan has suffered from years of deflation. For these reasons, the stimulus needed is enormous and the inflationary pressure that results is minimal.
Second, the US wants a currency depreciation, to keep as much of this stimulus as possible at home. Blocked by the actions of members of the dollar-zone currencies, it is all the more important for it to enjoy a depreciation against significant currencies outside the zone. The monetary policy the Fed is pursuing naturally generates that result.
Third, dollar short- and long-term interest rates remain much lower than one might normally expect. Short-term interest rates are low to generate the needed stimulus. But interest rates are also kept down by the reserve accumulations of dollar-zone central banks. At the end of last year, more than two-fifths of US Treasuries were held by the Fed or foreign official sources. This year, buying of US Treasuries by foreign official sources may reach another $750bn. The impact, argues the paper, is to keep real interest rates up to a percentage point below their historic norm.
Fourth, dollar-zone central banks cannot diversify out of the dollar and into, say, the euro without undermining their dollar peg. If they purchase euros, they must intervene to avoid an appreciation against the dollar. This will, again, support the dollar and the prices of US Treasury securities. But should they go ahead with diversification, upward pressure on the euro might become intolerable for the eurozone members, though be of little concern to anybody else.
Finally, it is perfectly possible for the foreign central banks to continue to buck the market indefinitely. The view that the market can always defeat central banks is half true and half utterly mistaken. It is impossible for a central bank to defend a currency that the market wishes to sell, but simple to defend one the market wishes to buy, provided it does not care about (or can manage) the monetary consequences. The Bank of Japan and the People's Bank of China can create infinite quantities of yen or renminbi should they wish to do so. At present, they do.
How might this saga end? To answer the question, we need to examine the motives of the participants: the US is able to enjoy low real interest rates and a large excess of spending over income; members of the dollar zone achieve more stable growth by subsidising manufactured exports and minimising vulnerability to volatile capital flows. The US might attack the policies of its dollar-zone partners if the administration found the political drawbacks of trade deficits greater than the advantages of low interest rates. Its partners might change their policies if they found the dangers of overheating, or US protectionism, greater than the advantages of competitive exchange rates.
In the meantime, as the more recent of the papers concludes, "the unwillingness to accept the inevitable downward slide in the US dollar, due to a massive labour surplus in much of Asia and cyclical fears in Japan, is leading to intervention flows that are unprecedented . . . We are experiencing an official sector effort to reverse global private capital flows on a scale that we have never seen, even at the end of Bretton Woods."
The Bretton Woods system was broken by US protection against imports and worldwide inflation. Either could recur. But timing is unpredictable. Meanwhile, efforts to expand the US economy are driving a global boom. Enjoy!
* An Essay on the Revised Bretton Woods System, Working Paper 9971, September 2003, www.nber.org; ** The Revised Bretton Woods System: The Effects of Periphery Intervention and Reserve Management on Interest Rates and Exchange Rates in Center Countries, Working Paper 10332, March 2004, Steven Horwitz has dished up another pile of statistical data, M2, annual inflation rates and all that. I have become less than enthusiastic for many of the statistics generated for us by government economists. The total number of unemployed may be a "subjective call," but it sure hurts if you are among that number.
In the larger picture, of course, we all have taxes, and eventually death. There is plenty of blame to go around with respect to government's handling of the economy, with very little to praise.
Basically, I envisage two possible scenarios within the years I have remaining in my lifetime. One, is a continued decline in American economic and political freedoms much as Wendy McElroy described at the beginning of her comments mentioning the Index of Economic Freedom in which this country has in one year dropped from 6th to 10th.
A second is that the Big Bubble finally bursts as a result of the monetary policies we have discussed, and what has happened in the derivatives market in which no one really knows how many trillions are involved. Any statistical data on the latter, Steven, beyond the story covered in Frank Partnoy's F.I.A.S.C.O. and Infectious Greed.?
The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and one can imagine that the continuation of the former will, at some point. lead to the latter. In the meantime enjoy the bread and circuses provided by the New Roman Empire! I have several questions about the arguments offered by Steven Horwitz. If the inflation rate is really so low, one would think the government would be doing more to publicize this "wonderful" situation. The Bush Adm. has had no difficulty in repeating a great deal of questionable data with respect to Iraq as detailed in the latest Report offered by Congressman Henry Waxman.
My understanding is that there is no "fixed" basket, but that the government has shifted the mix with items which did reflect less of a cost increase than others.
Even if productivity is rising as suggested by Horwitz, lowering some commodity prices, the Federal Reserve continues to inflate the money supply. This has been a factor in rising stock prices, as in the 1920s, and especially with respect to home prices today much like, for example, the Florida land boom in that same decade.
At the same time with this flood of cash in the economy, there is considerable unemployment so that many persons are no longer actively looking for jobs, and with very low interest rates set by the Fed, a great deal of cash is seeking investment opportunities.
Today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece about the crisis in mobile home building and the large number of foreclosures. This is part of the whole Fannie May problem in which the Bush Adm. proposed a program of NO down payment for such homes. Surely, that would exacerbate the number of foreclosures among the 22 million Americans who now live in such manufactured homes. While we spend billions of dollars for nation-building and to bring democracy to Asia, our own people face a terrible employment and housing crisis.
With all of this conflicting economic data and controversy around, I can only reflect on my personal experiences of late.
I retired this year and we are selling a home in downtown Fort Lauderdale, FL.
The price recommended by realtors, since this is a "hot" area with few properties available, is roughly four and a half times what we paid for it 15 years ago. The land alone now is apparently worth three times what we paid for the house and land together.
We also sold a triplex built and owned by Marina Const. Co., holding a note paying 7.25%. There is so much money out there searching for investments, that we have literally been besieged by mail, phone and email with investors seeking to purchase the note to the extent that we can bid one against the other. But in an environment flooded with cash, and low interest rates, where would I get a return like that, if I sold at, say, $ .95 cents on the dollar?
I'm sorry Steven, but with all due respect to your extensive financial data, I "perceive" from my recent experiences that we are in a period of Stagflation, and I need to make my investment decisions based on that assumption. For the latest example of America's skill at "nation-building," check out the article below:
Financial Times March 28 2004
UN warns on Afghanistan reverting to terrorism
By Hugh Williamson in Berlin and Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad
A United Nations body will warn this week that Afghanistan is in danger of reverting to a "terrorist breeding ground" with an economy dependent on the illegal drug trade unless the international community significantly increases development funding to the war-torn country.
The warning comes in a UN Development Programme report to be presented to the international Afghanistan conference, which opens in Berlin on Wednesday.
The report, obtained by the Financial Times, complains that "aid . . . has been much lower than expected or promised. In comparison to other conflict or post-conflict situations Afghanistan appears to have been neglected".
Afghan president Hamid Karzai announced that parliamentary and presidential elections - which had been scheduled for June, will be postponed until September - a tacit acknowledgment that reconstruction efforts have stumbled.
The UNDP report notes Iraq is receiving "10 times as much development assistance with roughly the same size of population". Development inflows amount to $67 per person, compared with $248 in Bosnia Herzegovina and $256 in East Timor, according to the report.
The report's strong language increases the likelihood of tough financial negotiations at this week's conference, to be co-chaired by Afghanistan, the UN, Germany and Japan.
The Afghan government is due to present a seven-year, $28bn funding programme, while western governments have indicated that funding commitments, lasting four years at most, are unlikely to exceed the $4.5bn pledged by donors in Tokyo in 2002.
Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP head, is likely to be the most senior UN official in Berlin, as the attendance of Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general is uncertain.
The report, which compiles the UN's latest data on Afghanistan, says the country's $4bn estimated GDP is small compared with the $14bn in "military costs" spent annually in Afghanistan by western powers.
Over half the population live in extreme poverty and only Sierra Leone ranks below Afghanistan on the UNDP's human development index. Life expectancy, at below 50, is "similar to that which prevailed in the 19th century in Europe".
Separately, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, insisted the US had not over looked the terrorist threat from Afghanistan in the days before and after the September 11 attacks.
"If one looks at what was done, we went to Afghanistan - we didn't go to Iraq," he told ABC News.
"It certainly took away their training, their haven and it certainly destroyed the Taliban and eliminated them from running the country. That's what the president's action was. It wasn't Iraq. It was Afghanistan."
Check out this latest assault by Power on Liberty:
Channel 6 New Orleans
Court Opens Door To Searches Without Warrants
POSTED: 3:55 pm CST March 26, 2004 UPDATED: 4:36 pm CST March 26, 2004
NEW ORLEANS -- It's a ground breaking court decision that legal experts
say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a
search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or
business.
Leaders in law enforcement say it will provide safety to officers, but
others argue it's a privilege that could be abused.
The decision was made by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of
Appeals. Two dissenting judges called it the "road to Hell."
The ruiling stems from a lawsuit filed in Denham Springs in 2000.
New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new
power will go into effect immediately and won't be abused.
"We have to have a legitimate problem to be there in the first place, and
if we don't, we can't conduct the search," Defillo said.
But former U.S. Attorney Julian Murray has big problems with the ruling.
"I think it goes way too far," Murray said, noting that the searches can
be performed if an officer fears for his safety -- a subjective
condition.
Defillo said he doesn't envision any problems in New Orleans, but if
there are, they will be handled.
"There are checks and balances to make sure the criminal justice system
works in an effective manor," Defillo said.
Copyright 2004 by TheNewOrleansChannel.com. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
March 28, 2004 -- (Reuters) - Sensing a threat to President Bush's re-election, his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice will step into the arena where her former aide first made incendiary charges that Bush ignored pre-Sept. 11 warnings about al Qaeda. Rice will be interviewed on CBS's "60 Minutes" -- the influential television news program where counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke a week ago accused Bush of mishandling the terror threat.
Salon.com March 26, 2004
"We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001"
By Eric Boehlert
A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.
Referring to the Homeland Security Department's color-coded warnings instituted in the wake of 9/11, the former translator, Sibel Edmonds, told Salon, "We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available." Edmonds is offended by the Bush White House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice [Washington Post Op-Ed on March 22] where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie."
Edmonds' charge comes when the Bush White House is trying to fend off former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's testimony that it did not take serious measures to combat the threat of Islamic terrorism, and al-Qaida specifically, in the months leading up to 9/11.
The entire article is available to subscribers of Salon.com
Washingtonian.com 3/26/04
Clarke’s Coziness With the Media Might Help Him Win War With Bush
By Harry Jaffe
If you want the real book on Richard Clarke—minus the Bush-administration attacks and Clarke’s self-promotion—read Ghost Wars, Steve Coll’s new book on the CIA in Afghanistan.
“His enemies regarded him as not only mean, but dangerous,” writes Coll, managing editor of the Washington Post. “So palpably did he thrive on an air of sinister mystery,” Coll writes, that Clarke chose Oliver North’s old White House office.
Coll is not the first journalist to detect and use Clarke’s knowledge of the sinister and mysterious. While Clarke was White House terrorism czar, he often showed up in news dispatches as an unnamed source. Interviews with reporters on the terrorism beat suggest that Clarke has always been savvy in using the press.
“He was known to be a source for a select group of journalists,” says one print reporter.
Adds a TV reporter: “There were periods when he was available and periods when he went underground.”
Clarke was mentioned by name in nearly 1,000 stories over the years, and he was the unnamed source for many more. Fox News reporter Jim Angle this week outed Clarke as the source of a White House background interview.
“Over the years he’s been in contact with a lot of journalists in town,” says Coll in an interview on Friday. Coll himself spent many hours with Clarke.
Clarke’s history with journalists does not bode well for his detractors in the Bush White House. As they try to discredit Clarke, they are running into journalists who have known him for years. Most reporters came away trusting Clarke.
“Credible?” asked one reporter. “I think he is.”
Coll portrays Clarke as a gruff bureaucratic infighter who did his best to fight terrorism before terrorism was thought to be a real threat.
Coll’s 695-page tome has set the stage for Clarke’s own book— Against All Enemies —and his explosive testimony before the September 11 panel, in which he contended the Bush administration ignored his pleas to combat terrorism before 9/11.
“Clarke revels in public theater,” Coll said in an interview. “A hearing, in the middle of a presidential campaign—he loved it.”
Coll describes Clarke as “a shadowy member of Washington’s permanent intelligence and bureaucratic classes . . . who seemed to wield enormous power precisely because hardly anyone knew who he was or what exactly he did for a living.”
Coll writes that Clarke sometimes acted as a freelance power broker and trickster abroad. When he was at the State Department, investigators “concluded that Clarke had usurped his superiors, turning himself into a one-man foreign policy czar and arms-trafficking shop.”
Clarke worked his way up to become President Clinton’s terrorism czar in 1998, where he began his crusade: “Clarke declared that America faced a new era of terrorist threats for which it was woefully unprepared.”
In an interview, Coll says Clarke’s status was extraordinary: “He’s an amazing figure in that way. He rose effectively to Cabinet rank.”
From that job, Clarke put Osama bin Laden in his crosshairs and “sometimes pushed harder for action on bin Laden than the CIA’s own officers recommended.”
When the Bush administration took over in 2001 and decided to reduce Clarke’s power, Coll writes what Clarke this week told the 9/11 committee: He tried to warn Bush officials that terrorism was a major threat, but they ignored his pleas.
Now that both books are on the stands and Clarke is on TV, Coll has become a reservoir of information for Post reporters looking for guidance on Clarke. Given Coll’s respect for Clarke, it’s fair to assume that he will get fair if not favorable coverage from the Post.
Coll did come away from watching Clarke’s testimony with one question: “It’s a mystery why he chose to deliver the force of his moment so explicitly against the Bush administration,” he says in an interview. “Clinton’s people were involved as well.”
Some would even call it a sinister mystery.
March 26, 2004 | Daily Mislead Archive
White House, 4/01: Focus on Bin Laden "A Mistake"
A previously forgotten report from April 2001 (four months before 9/11) shows that the Bush Administration officially declared it "a mistake" to focus "so much energy on Osama bin Laden." The report directly contradicts the White House's continued assertion that fighting terrorism was its "top priority" before the 9/11 attacks 1.
Specifically, on April 30, 2001, CNN reported that the Bush Administration's release of the government's annual terrorism report contained a serious change: "there was no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden" as there had been in previous years. When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus, "a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden." 2.
The move to downgrade the fight against Al Qaeda before 9/11 was not the only instance where the Administration ignored repeated warnings that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent 3. Specifically, the Associated Press reported in 2002 that "President Bush's national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions" 4. Meanwhile, Newsweek has reported that internal government documents show that the Bush Administration moved to "de-emphasize" counterterrorism prior to 9/11 5. When "FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents" to deal with the problem, "they got shot down" by the White House.
Sources:
1. Press Briefing by Scott McClellan , 03/22/2004.
2. CNN, 04/30/2001.
3. Bush Was Warned of Hijackings Before 9/11; Lawmakers Want Public Inquiry , ABC News, 05/16/2002.
4. "Top security advisers met just twice on terrorism before Sept. 11 attacks ", Detroit News, 07/01/2002.
5. Freedom of Information Center , 05/27/2002.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
George W. Bush: Agent for Islamic Fundamentalism?
Today, the New York Times reports that the Bush Administration, in "a sharp policy reversal," in the face of Hezbollah's power in Lebanon, is now ready to accept the notion of that organization having a leading role in that nation's future.
In Iraq, it is evident that the January elections have resulted in a great increase in the power of the Shia fundamentalists there. If Mubarek holds a really democratic election in Egypt, the fundamentalists will increase their power there also.
Hezbollah's emerging power is apt to affect events in Palestine as well, while the situation in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, is far from settled. In the hills, off from the flourishing poppy fields, Osama bin Ladin still makes his tapes to broadcast to the world. Not to mention Iran.
Bush proclaims all of the above as a great victory, but it would appear that the net result, thus far, of American interventionism, has been to all but destroy the secular states once emerging in the Middle East.
One might argue that the Neocons around the President simply sold him a bill of goods about ruling the world, but Murray always said, go for the most parsimonious explanation!
Maybe, when George "found" God, who helped him stop drinking, it was Allah, rather than the Christian God. After all, Jesus was always doing his thing with wine and miracles, while it is Islam that is into real abstention.
In explaining the development of America, Mark Twain once noted that it was whiskey that initiated our westward expansion, or, as he remarked, "Westward the Jug of Empire makes its way."
As George W. reverses that trend, and takes teetotalism eastward, the tourist mecca of Islamic Dubai had better watch out. In that den of iniquity the hotels and bars feature at least a half dozen kinds of German beer on draft, let alone the hard stuff. Besides, a city that size may just be the place where the American Army can successfully wage Fourth Generation Warfare, and sustain Democracy, Law, Order and Stability.
Or, as Twain might have put it, "Eastward the Holy Grail of Empire makes its way."Friday, March 4, 2005
Our Education President, & What the Pseudo-Elites are Reading
In studying the evolution of civilizations for over four decades, especially the Empire phase, I have always been fascinated by the cultural dimensions of same.
Empires have always been urban-mass societies, sometimes euphemistically referred to as republics, or democracies. In such circumstances it is important for "Big Daddy," to help, not only with sanctifying the welfare "bread," but also with the entertainment "circuses" to keep the minds of the masses, and even many of the pretended elite, from any serious analysis of what was transpiring in the area of the political economy.
In Rome, apart from chariot races and gladiatorial contests, often between the bored children of the upper classes, killing animals, ala Teddy Roosevelt, was one of the preferred entertainments, with 9,000 killed in one year in one of the coliseums for which we have records. The carcasses of bulls and other animals, were then raffled off to be eaten.
One can just picture George II/43 swaggering down to the tailgate of a Roman wagon, where such an animal was being roasted, to slather it with Texas Bar B-Q sauce from a five-gallon bucket. What fun!
Today, of course, the range of mind-numbing entertainments is far wider. The active elite, as opposed to couch potatoes watching television, prefers expensive sky-boxes with one-way glass so that one can party, free even of the camera lens.
Internet Blogging is also another of these diversions, but which has, on occasion, bitten some of the elite on the ass!
But the pretentious middle class pseudo intellectuals, ignoring the war in Iraq and other such unpleasantries, seem to like exclusive books clubs, which can reject many of the aspiring applicants. Of the many books mentioned in the WSJ article, only two, Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas and Anatol Lieven, America Right Or Wrong come remotely close to analyzing what is happening to this nation, or on the world scene.
Even our "education" President, eschewing newspapers, reads more serious books than most of these book club members.
I noted in a previous article that Imperial Ages where characterized by increasing religious ignorance, but also ought to have mentioned that this has also true of much of the secular "civic humanist" elite as well.
It is doubtful that many of the intellectual social climbers inhabiting the many book clubs will devote themselves to any serious discussion of what is happening to America. Karl Rove and his minions, in fact, are counting on that! And so, let us Blog On, and On and On!Thursday, March 3, 2005
Trade Deficit for Quarter Widens to Record $167.4 Billion
Getting up there toward what we're spending to bring our version of Democracy to the rest of the World -- you know, as in our Congress, where only 35 of 435 seats are even vaguely at risk, thanks to the special interests. What a great system -- the whole world really needs it, badly! Preach on, Oh Great Leader of the American Empire.
The Financial Times.
Two Perspectives on Feminism, Power & Freedom
Feminist Hysteria
The Meaning of Wife
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Go Ellsworth!
The Spectator, UK 2/26/05
Cover Story -- Time to fight back
By Douglas Hurd
It is 7 a.m. and across Britain sober citizens awake to switch on the BBC Radio Four news. They expect perhaps to hear about Iraqis killing Iraqis, about some hope in Palestine or Gordon Brown’s latest boasts on the economy. Instead, at the top of the bulletin they learn what the BBC judges the most important news of the day. With all solemnity it announces that the Duchess of York has voiced support for Prince Harry in the argument about a swastika at a fancy dress party. How low can the BBC sink in obeisance to the triviality of the popular press? No one should blame the Duchess, who needs all the headlines she can get. But the BBC is a public-sector body, at present arguing its portentous case for continuing the licence fee. That day it led with a story of supreme triviality simply because the press were running it hard.
There is nothing new about the triviality of the tabloids. What is growing fast is the link between that triviality and power. That power is exercised over the BBC, over what used to be called the quality press and, most dangerously, over the politicians whose laws shape our lives. We are becoming a nation of strong journalists and weak politicians.
In its triviality, the press supposes that we cannot absorb sustained argument. It prefers to deal in symbols. These are selected to stimulate one of the three qualities which the press particularly favours in its readers — brutality (including envy and blame), fear and sentimentality. These qualities seem to be particularly highly regarded in the Daily Mail.
Everyone can understand, and many can be brought to envy, the fact that the Prime Minister took an exotic New Year holiday. Every prime minister deserves a decent holiday and every prime minister I have known, except Margaret Thatcher, knows that they need one. No one giving the matter a moment’s real thought could suppose that in an age of instant communication anyone would be a whit the better off if Tony Blair had cut his holiday short and bustled self-importantly home after the tsunami disaster. We should always suspect the argument that such and such an action gives ‘the wrong message’. Actions should be judged on their substance, not on some supposed secondary message. What Indonesian fisherman would have found his grief or anxiety allayed by the news that Blair was back in Britain? The disaster itself was excellently covered, but within hours the laws of triviality resumed their sway. The story had to be kept going. Instead of putting the tsunami in the context of greater but less dramatic misery in Africa, the press cast about for someone to blame — the Prime Minister, foreign service officials, the UN, God. None of these was much good at answering back.
Anyone interested in prisons or our criminal justice system knows how the public are pushed towards brutality by part of the press — by the reporting of court cases, the exploitation of the understandable misery and anger of vulnerable victims. Prisons are caricatured as palaces of luxury. Efforts to prevent re-offending are neglected, as is the Prayer Book’s concept of ‘time for amendment of life’. The Daily Express leads with the horror story that paintings by prisoners are actually to hang in the new Home Office.
Fear comes next. Fear of crime is a social evil in itself, blighting the lives of many whose lives are relatively safe. The ‘war against terror’ is even better for the press, particularly when they can tempt politicians and police officers to pretend that the whole life of the nation is actually at stake, as it would be in a real war.
Sentimentality adds sugar to the poison. We can all remember the overflow of mourning for Diana, Princess of Wales. The Prime Minister uses a particular catch in his voice on such occasions.
The press seizes a genuine popular reaction and then inflates and prolongs it beyond reason. Or it links two events which have nothing to do with each other: for example, London’s Olympics bid and a trivial fracas between Ken Livingstone and an Evening Standard reporter. The headlines blaze and attract the attention of the Prime Minister. The incident is none of his business. But in he steps, presumably in his capacity as high priest of apology, and tells the Mayor to be sorry.
Consistency is not required. It is possible for the same paper to denounce over-regulation vociferously while clamouring for a clampdown on some particular activity which it for the moment dislikes.
Does all this really matter? Or is a trivial press just something we have to put up with? After all, we can go out and buy the Herald Tribune if we actually want to know what happened in the world yesterday. It is comforting to watch how people read their tabloids in the Tube. A glance at the headlines, then settle down to the news about celebrities or sport. Entertainment scores five, instruction nil. Prime ministers do not travel on the Tube; so they tremble excessively at the power of the press. A similar experience awaits candidates who contest a general election. It was always refreshing to leave the heated artificial world of politicians and the press, and begin work among real people in a real town or village. Real people are nicer and more intelligent than the newspapers which they buy for entertainment. But two warnings are relevant. The bad drives out the good. Since any story we read about a situation within our own experience is usually inaccurate, we tend to dismiss all stories equally. But good journalists are still indispensable in rooting out abuse and exposing bureaucracy, particularly now that the Commons has made itself so feeble.
The second warning is to the politicians. A real danger arises when they allow their judgment to be distorted by press campaigners. They may feel bound to bend before the wind when it blows strongest, their morale weakened by opinion polls taken in the heat of the moment. But reeds should not break; when the wind passes they should stand upright again. Politicians are there to use their judgment; if they abdicate that task too often, there is no point to them. We can remember dangerous dogs, the firearms legislation after Dunblane, and, more recently, questions of gambling and drinking hours. Politicians should indeed test opinions before making up their minds, and the press has a part in that. But this is different from succumbing to a whirlwind press campaign.
I suspect that every home secretary would agree with Charles Clarke’s final conclusion that there was no advantage in altering the present law which permits the reasonable use of force against burglars. The exact text of the law is important to the judge in summing up, and also in passing sentence after a guilty verdict. But it is the verdict that matters. The jury which decides that verdict is overwhelmingly concerned with the circumstances and personalities of each particular case, not with the text of the statute. That was indeed the view expressed at the beginning of the press campaign both by the Prime Minister and by the Leader of the Opposition, men with Home Office experience. Yet when the storms blew at full strength both wobbled away from their considered judgment. Hard press campaigns can make bad law. Remember what Tom Stoppard wrote: ‘I’m with you for a free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’
None of this is an argument for a new press law which would certainly be inept. Nor should we pull up the Press Complaints Commission by the roots and start again. The essential point is more simple. Politicians should be ready to get together to resist pressure which they agree is unreasonable. One minister, after telling me of a paper paying a large sum to buy criticism of his department, said it was useless to expose this kind of abuse since the opposition would always side with the press against the government. But the opposition too has an interest in resisting unreasonable pressure. Baldwin stood up against the press lords in 1931. Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere were determined to overthrow him as leader of the Conservative party. But in the famous by-election at St George’s Westminster he and the official candidate, Duff Cooper, changed the issue to the dictatorship of the press — and won handsomely. Our present politicians are in a stronger position than Baldwin because they have means of reaching the public direct which did not exist in his time, notably television and the Internet. One day, on some well-chosen issue, the politicians should be ready collectively to turn the tables on the press and stand up for their own genuine opinions. They might be surprised by the welcome which such a stand received.
Douglas Hurd is working on a biography of Sir Robert Peel.
The Social Security Imbroglio
I was fortunate as a teacher in Florida to have the option of not being a part of the Social Security system, and continued in that mode over the fifteen years in which we were pressured with some penalties to switch over, investing these funds in the property developments of Marina Const. Co.
My concern is with being taxed in the future to support a mess I have tried to avoid, even though I did, over the years have to contribute to it for several years early in my career.Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Bury the Chains?
I made the following comment there:
"While I would not deprecate the efforts of the British Anti-Slavery movement, it is worth noting that it coincided with the rise of the contract labor movement using Indians and Chinese.
Slavery had supplanted indentured servitude of whites as better terms and costs rose. Likewise, the cost of slavery, as it rose, made contract labor more attractive.
How convenient that the economic and moral motives of those benefitting from such labor, now so nicely coincided!" The economic motives for keeping Slavery were dropping greatly.
George Washington: Anti-Imperialist?
Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), coupled with a Nation Online article, "The Anti-Imperialist GW", the "GW" referring to George Washington.
While it is important to remind the American people at this juncture in our history, with a number of pundits and policymakers beating the drums for World War IV and the glories of an American Empire, that the United States once had an Anti-Imperialist tradition, one might question exactly how George Washington fits into that story?
Two instances, one during the American Revolution, another during Washington's presidency, suggest GW was something less than a consistent opponent of Empire.
Writing on what he perceived as a rather "empty gesture" of a President's Day, Nichols argued that Washington has become an "inconvenience" for men such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte "and their ilk" pushing America toward a "greedy, self-absorbed, and frequently brutal empire." He holds Washington forth as the "father of the anti-imperialist movement" in America, as well as the father of the country.
Two examples are offered to sustain this view. The first is Washington's Neutrality Proclamation of 1793, which found American opinion divided with respect to the struggle then being waged between France and Great Britain, the second, that Nichols considers even more significant, was Washington's Farewell Address of 1796, warning not to "entangle our peace and prosperity," and to "steer clear of permanent alliances."
Now, neutrality is not the same as anti-imperialism, as even Nichols seems to sense, but the Farewell Address can just as easily be interpreted as advocating the Unilateral foreign, economic and military policies pushed by Neoconservatives today.
Let us explore Washington's actions, and not his words, to determine whether he can be viewed as the "father" of American opposition to Empire.
In 1775, after the confrontation at Bunker Hill, the first American offensive was an expedition to take Canada. Initially successful, costly, and ultimately a failure, it made a hero of Benedict Arnold. Could not these resources have been better used in New York, where Washington almost lost his army, reprieved, some historians suggest, only because of the Whiggish sympathies of the Howe brothers, still hoping for a reconciliation with the Americans?
Fast forward to 1781, after the Americans' greatest defeat of the War, the loss of some 5,000 troops at Charleston, South Carolina. Washington finally freed Nathaniel Greene, his most brilliant general, from quartermaster duties and sent him South in what one must perceive as the great crisis of the Revolution. Yet, he also spread his assets thin by sending the Marquis de La Fayette North to talk to Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys militia about launching another expedition to conquer Canada, which by this time had made it clear did not wish to be a part of an Anglo-Protestant Confederation.
This imperial thrust failed only because the militia demanded "double pay, double rations, and plunder" for what they clearly perceived is an effort to take Canada as a part of an expanding American Empire. When La Fayette replied he has no authority to grant such terms, the whole venture collapsed. No wonder Washington disliked militia!
The militia understood that if the Anglo-Canadians and French-Canadians wished to break with the British Empire, there was nothing preventing them from doing so, and joining the American revolt. They did not need the Vermonters intervening and occupying the country in order to give them the "blessings of Liberty." Washington's proposed expedition is closer to the vision of George W. Bush today, inflicting Freedom with a gun, than it is to any tradition of Anti-Imperialism.
In 1792, a year before the Neutrality Proclamation, Washington offered "foreign aid" to Haiti, that nation which has become the "basket case" of the Western Hemisphere, despite, or because of, over two centuries of intervention, occupation and aid.
This help was meant for the French Creoles there, to assist as the French Revolution spread to that nation, in keeping the Blacks from power. That effort failed, but if that is not non-neutrality and intervention, and, against the self-determination principles of the American Revolution, what would be? American Southern slaveholders had a morbid fear and loathing that Black revolutions in the Caribbean might spread north to the mainland.
This same American attitude was evident a century later, in the emerging age of segregation, when William McKinley intervened in Cuba to halt the success of the revolutionary forces led by the Black leader Antonio Maceo, and in the Philippines, where the Insurgents under Emilio Aguinaldo had the Spanish surrounded in Manila before the American army arrived. American leaders had grown to fear both revolution and race.
It is more accurate to view Washington, not as the father of American Anti-Imperialism, but as an American slaveholding, land speculating Nabob, like Ben Franklin, seeing the American colonies as the evolving potential center of a British Mercantile Empire, which, denied by London, soon began to develop "a rising empire" of its own. Even neutrality could be violated, if necessary, and a non-entangling policy espoused until the nation was strong enough to pursue a forceful, unilateral policy worthy of a world power.
Americans today badly need to understand such issues as expansion, empire, colonialism, and economic imperialism in the history of this nation, as well as many of the euphemisms often substituted for them. One can only hope that Nichols' book does a better job on these questions than does this confused article arguing that GW is the father of American Anti-Imperialism.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Who Needs John Galt? The Wal-Martization of the World
Today Forbes described a new Wal-Mart program for buying energy needs for these stores that will place it on the way to becoming the new Enron. While your in the store buying some groceries, furniture, or whatever, why not pick up a few kilowatts of electricity?
Friday, February 18, 2005
Political Crony Capitalism in America
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Frank Chodorov & the Cycle of Freedom/Empire
It is for this reason that I admire the work of the historian Carroll Quigley, especially his The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (1961, 1979) and suggested that Liberty Fund publish that latter edition to which I contributed a Bibliographical Note.
His concept of developing a new "instrument of expansion" suggests a way out of the determinism of these other writers, including Chodorov. How might this work out in today's historical era?
In a striking passage written before the Vietnam War, Quigley saw that the confrontation between the then two super powers was not the most important struggle of our age, but rather that the technology of weaponry (he also did a book on that subject) was changing, with decentralized, guerrilla insurgencies coming to the fore, especially in the Third World.
The overall solution for breaking the cycle moving toward Empire, or Universal Empire, lay in developing a new instrument of expansion that would get entrepreneurial economic development growing again, instead of its being overwhelmed by Corporate Mercantilism such as has occurred. His solution involved developing new sources of energy to replace both nuclear and fossil fuels with all of their attendant problems, In short, developing the energy offered us by the sun, which is estimated to be available for the next 6-8 billion years, give or take a few million.
After one has listed all of the forces pushing for a welfare-warfare state and even global hegemony; the politicians, the military, the business interests, the intellectuals, the media, and all of the huge bureaucracies there to attending (evident also in other Empires such as Rome), control of energy remains the central factor of the modern epoch, as well as in American foreign policy.
Controlling nuclear energy has been a problem since 1945. In my view the most important document of the Cold War was one of its first, retiring Secretary of War Henry Stimson's letter to President Harry Truman, September 13, 1945. First he pointed out that the bomb was not a secret, but a process that could be reproduced by any advanced, industrial nation within a period of 4 to 20 years. That being the case, the conservative Stimson radically suggested we share it with our Allies, the British, French and Russians, rather than brandishing it as a threatening weapon that he predicted would lead to a long period of confrontation.
He was, of course, absolutely correct as to what happened later.
In 1919 Senator William E. Borah predicted the Have-Powers would attempt to use the League of Nations to protect their empires and put down revolutions around the world. Since 1945 that task has fallen to the United Nations, with the US stepping in with make-shift coalitions, or even unilaterally whenever the UN would not do its bidding.
All of which brings us to North Korea and Iran today, as the impossible dream of controlling nuclear energy continues.
I feel certain that terrorists understand that you do not need to detonate a bomb to damage America in the nuclear area. More than two decades ago, Alice Tepper Marlin, the environmental economist of the Council on Economic Priorities pointed out that trucks loaded with nuclear wastes routinely drove up and down our highways, as well as train loads hauled out into the desert. Imagine an "accident," arranged or otherwise, that scatters this contaminated waste in a populated area.
In an economic sense, once you strip government subsidies away, several studies have shown that nuclear power is no more cost efficient than scrubbed coal.
Which leaves us with oil.
Even before 1948, when Israel also became a factor in American foreign policy in the Middle East, oil was the priority. The documents show that by 1944 the Cold War was emerging there as the US began to warn the Russians to stay out, as the British had done earlier, while at the same time beginning to push the British out of Iran.
We are now building permanent bases in Iraq, and urging the UN to help us put down Iranian nuclear development, with the ultimate aim of again controlling her oil. From articles in the Financial Times, it appears whatever kind of political solution emerges in Iraq, the US is about to privatize the oil fields in a move reminiscent of the Crony Capitalism inflicted on Russia over a decade ago, and which Vladimir Putin is now attempting to reverse.
How many trillions of dollars of the wealth of the American people have been spent on this imperial thrust of over half a century by the web of financial agencies, military resources and corporations to sustain this Empire, even a portion of which might have gone into research on solar energy?
Perhaps the most important facet of John Perkin's recent book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man are not the revelations about his role in this endeavor, but his description of the environmental degradation that has accompanied this mad quest for black gold!
And, last week, the data revealed that the heavy truck has displaced the SUV as the weapon of choice among macho American drivers on the highways!
Actually, there has been a revolution going on in the development of decentralized, appropriate technology alternatives in housing, food production for families, utilization of former wastes, etc., which there is not space to detail here now, except to say that I think Chodorov and Quigley would have loved them for the opportunities for Freedom which they open up, especially in the less developed world. Use of the energy of the sun is as yet a modest, but important, part of that effort.
The so-called Modern World may be caught in the institutionalization discussed by Quigley, and described by the historian L.S. Stavrianos as the "Law of the Retarding Lead." Sunday, February 13, 2005
Some Final Reflections on Homosexual Behavior, the Hoppe Question & Universities
Hoppe is a really clever fellow. He has the ACLU defending him, always anxious to show it is bias free across the political spectrum, and was the one who raised the issue with the media. All of which should help his lecture schedule and book sales considerably.
And, all over a reprimand letter in his files – which one might consider a red badge of courage – and docking him some salary. It is a matter of principle, of course, but the poor guy was lying awake at night, he says, and suffering all sorts of mental anguish. Was it that much money involved? I believe I smell lots of publicity, and a large settlement from good, old UNLV. Sock it to 'em, Hans!
It is good to pursue an opportunity to present the argument for academic freedom. I was much influenced on becoming a teacher by an article by a neurosurgeon in the The Dalhousie Review in 1937, the year I was born, arguing that the faculty was the very heart of that corporate entity known as a university.
The reality I experienced in teaching a little over four decades, was nothing like that, nor in the research data evident in finishing now a second book on the history of a university.
Faculty senates and committees tend to be involved in little "chicken shit" questions, to used the metaphor of Fritz Perls, rather than the
"elephant shit" high theory ones relating to the real substance of what a university is all about.
They long ago capitulated to professional specialization and sponsored research – mostly from the Feds – since that is where the fame, money, and time are – rather than teaching, least of all about the meaning of life. The amount of research money, of course, is one of two major facets of how universities are ranked.
While the administration controls things, it is not much interested in really re-defining the university for the technologies of the 21st century, or restoring its mission dating back to the Middle Ages. That is too radical a conservatism.
Like the bureaucrats in Washington, keeping reality from the Congress and the public, its main effort is to keep reality from the students, alumni and trustees.
Since Teddy Roosevelt tried to regulate football, college sports of all kinds have become one of the featured circuses in the American Empire. Good coaches make more than presidents, and private stadium sky boxes cost corporate sponsors (usually alums) a small fortune. You can really party in one of those!
I remember when I was recruited by the Florida Gators, among a number of schools, the head scout, aptly named "Bird Dog," told me that, unlike the Univ. of Miami that used graduate students, they tutored you with professors, and my grades appeared high enough I might major in something other than phys ed. I thought I wouldn't need tutoring, but when I asked about the ethics of the Florida situation, he replied, no one had ever asked about that before.
Although Miami claimed to go by the rules, they offered me three times the then allowed allocation for the aptly named "laundry money." Naturally, I signed there in the fall, until I received an academic scholarship in the spring and turned back the athletic one.
Auburn University recently seems to have gone a step further. The same wealthy alum that tried to fire the coach last year, pays a substantial amount of the salary of a chaplin-advisor to the jocks. Nothing like having God on your side, if you want to be a winner. And, I thought Auburn was a State university! Maybe someone at the Mises Institute there, can offer us a study of it all, perhaps like "God, and 'Human Action 'at Auburn," or is God still at Yale, Bush's alma mater?
I must confess, I have found universities about as corrupt as most institutions in America, although, perhaps, a bit more pious about it all.
Given the mandarin system here, first admired and advocated by Jefferson, it is probably important for most people to get their credentials in the system. In the few years I operated Marina Const. Co. on the side, developing properties in So. Florida, however, it wasn't that difficult to surpass my university salary and build a retirement nest egg.
Is this a great Empire, or what!Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Reflections on Homosexual Behaviors
If Blogs had meta tags like web sites, and if the name of the Blog was determined by the content, our ISP might suggest ours be called something like the "HomoRandian" Blog. Or, did La Rand make the ultimate pronunciamiento on that as well?
Since others have held forth at length on the above, please allow me to make a few comments.
As I argued many years ago in Egalitarianism and Empire, there are three sources from which we can ultimately derive a value such as Equality; Supernatural law (God), Natural Law (Nature) and Positive Law (the State).
Although a number of religions condemn homosexual behaviors, no God(s) have ever communicated with me on the subject, and I reject State pronouncements on the question, which can change between sneezes by bureaucrats or judges. That leaves us with studying Nature for some clues about such behavior.
I believe one does not have to look very far in Nature, among a number of species, to observe what appear to be homosexual behaviors.
Testosteroneless Tabbys:
Perhaps the most thorough study was done by the French and reported in Realité in the late 1960s. I regret I cannot provide the exact citation since a number of my books and papers remain packed from my auto accident, while others were soaked, damaged and destroyed.
The French observed what occurred to those so-called beta lions in the Pride who lost out in the fight to become the top alpha male, of which it takes very few to continue the species. Did the fight renew itself the next year?
No! The defeated males formed a sort of bachelor colony, lying around grooming each other, looking very handsome, indeed. The females, however, wanted nothing to do with them, apparently sensing they were threats to their cubs. The most interesting finding though, was that at the end of a year the testosterone levels of the defeated males had dropped to zero. The alpha males looked a bit like beleaguered husbands, with no one to groom them, and consumed with such activities as protecting the Pride and servicing the females, not a small task in and of itself.
The Luver Lion:
Fast forward a bit to the story of Frasier the Lover Lion in the San Diego Zoo as reported by Time, and then also again when he died, copulating with the females 26 times that day, before just keeling over. As retold by the magazine it was evident the zoo keepers had not the slightest knowledge of the French study.
It seems the Zoo needed some cubs, and so they tossed a couple of well groomed, young males in with the females, expecting amor to ensue, but the females literally attacked the poor guys.
In frustration, someone remembered there was an old male named Frasier pining away in the nether recesses of the Zoo. He had lost his mate, but years before he had fathered cubs. So, he was tossed in with the females with very low expectations by his keepers.
But the females could apparently sense/smell? the testosterone and cued up for old Fraz, with an ensuing cubs a-go-go until the old boy died.
I could tell some interesting tales about raising a litter of Doberman pups in which two dominant males fought it out for hierarchy and the Vet predicted which would win based on who attacked first.
Galtian Monkey Business:
But, for the sake of our Randian cadre, let skip to the story of Spike, or, as I nicknamed him, John Galt. As some may know, Japanese anthropologists have for over 4 decades studied the behavior of a monkey colony on one of their outlying islands.
Given the males fighting over hierarchy, it was an entrepreneurial female who managed to modify the culture by changing the cleaning of foods from rubbing them in the sand to washing them in the ocean.
At one point an interesting thing happened; 3 old males came to share power, ceremoniously mounting each other, and beating down together any challenge by a strong, young male.
At this point Galt was born.
Rather than grow up in the colony and subject himself to this defeat, he left the colony to live alone on an off lying hill. As he grew one could see the females yearning to meet him and Galt exchanging the feeling, for he was becoming one hell of a giant stud, Still, he hung back. Then, one day he surged in taking on the old Troika, and beating them all until they slunk off into oblivion, whereupon the cycle of monkey life returned to normal.
While I would not want to read too much into this, I think it tells us as much as does the work of some philosophers about the relationship of leadership to the masses and the intervening roles of aristoi elites,
Human Homosexual Behaviors:
What do we know about the origins of homosexual behaviors in human males - of Nature and Nurture, with the intervening variable of the hormone, testosterone?
One of the defining characteristics of human society is that we have a large plurality of potential hierarchies, at least in complex, market ones, so that individuals can seek one in which to compete successfully, rather than being confined to one alone, with whatever the hormonal consequences of defeat, if any.
We also know that testosterone kicks in at two different points in the life of the male, the first at about six months in the womb. Some have suggested that a failure to do so may occur if the mother finds herself in a situation of traumatic stress at that crucial point in time, and that this may be factor in subsequent homosexual behaviors,
The second kick-in period occurs at puberty. I believe that is a reason societies will accept some measure of homosexuality but not a blatant culture seeking to attract young males at this point, or priests also seeking to seduce them into such behaviors.
In the evolution of civilizations, Imperial Ages have been characterized by a demographic decline among the elites, a breakdown in the structure of the family, and a rise in the acceptance of homosexual behaviors. There was a similar woman's revolution in Rome, with the women running the political clubs, and old conservatives like Cato complaining, "how is it that we Romams, who rule over all other men, are ruled by our women?" (Again, see, E&E).
I have homosexuals in my own family whom I love and respect, as well as a number of friends. On the other hand I understand how religions have not condoned such behaviors. Dietary laws are also not really health related, but rather concocted to develop an in group, and, growing out of the insight from perhaps cave times, that the female is not going to cook two different meals, and she does have "the power of the pot."
And so, to sum up, I think Imperial Ages will tolerate more homosexual behaviors than some earlier epochs, but that these also will find opposition when homosexuals develop an overt culture and attempt to recruit/seduce among the young, especially those in the years of puberty.
Ideas and Concepts
I have returned from Camp LeJeune. As to your question about my differentiation between ideas and concepts. As an opener for a discussion, may I suggest the following piece, especially the first two paragraphs, by the Physicist, Robert Laughlin.
Regards,
Bill
Summers, Hoppe & All That!
In the light of the more recent case of Hans Hoppe's comments on homosexuals discussed here, I am reminded of a comment I used to make over the years in some of my classes, especially in a course I taught on Socio-gEnetiXs and History.
There is some data indicating that men, for whatever reason, sleep on the average, about an hour less per night than women. If that is so, I suggested, then in terms of waking hours, over a life span, men actually live about as long a conscious time as do women. Even if one wanted to count "dream time," this tends to occur in a short period just after going to sleep, and just before waking, so that the amount of sleeping flex time in between is not very relevant.
That observation seemed to make a number of female students quite angry; as if I had somehow challenged the natural superiority of women. God forbid, anyone do that! Thankfully, I was never reported to either the Inquisition or the Thought Police!
Saturday, February 5, 2005
The Nonsense of "Isolationism" vs. "Internationalism"
William Appleman Williams, one thought, swept this nonsense away in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. There were at least four positions revealed in the debate in 1919, and which remain with us today. Despite all of the blather today about Wilsonian idealism, pro and con, he was nothing of the sort. He was an advocate of a League of the "have" powers running the world, a kind of shared imperialism. His illness simply left the door open wider for the British and the French to meddle in the Middle East.
HC Lodge was not an isolationist, but a unilateral imperialist. His posture reveals the silliness of using term isolationist to describe any of the positions in these debates.
Neither does it make any sense to describe the now forgotten man of American diplomacy, Sen. William E. Borah, as an isolationist in the same boat with Lodge. He was a hero to the Chinese even as the British slaughtered them in the Shanghai riots in 1925, defended the Nicaraguan Revolution, Mexico, and the Cuban Revolution of 1933 even as FDR smashed it. Borah's speeches were carried in Spanish all over Latin America on the radio, not FDR's.
I believe it an unchallengeable truth that Borah was the most highly regarded American of the 20th century among those in the third world for his anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist views. Attempting to create a situation where others might be able to carry out their own battle for liberty against imperialism, is not isolationism, but in the tradition of the American Revolution as Tom Paine saw it.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Put Your Faith in Clinton?
But, while Wright suggests Bubba needs to unstrap his six-gun, and stop preaching in the street, the Saloon he wants him to enter for a drink as did Billy Clinton, is hardly a Free Market, but rather the Saloon rooms upstairs where all of the whores work the suckers. He mentions the name of one of them, The World Trade Organization, but there are others that Billy also liked such as NAFTA, the World Bank & the IMF.
Good 'ol Bob MacNamara has been doing his mea culpa about Vietnam now for several years such as in "The Fog of War," but he says nothing about his work at the WB.
These organizations have long been the means, along with the Fed, by which America's economic imperialism is orchestrated. If you have not already read the latest discussion of this, John Perkins, The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, check it out. Although Jude Wanniski had not read the book, he had some good comments about it at his web site. The book is well worth reading!
Gates Shorts $$
Bill Gates appears to be putting his faith in the Euro and China, not the dollar. But, what do he and Warren Buffett know anyway?Thursday, January 27, 2005
New Biography of Ayn Rand
Monday, January 24, 2005
"Carnivore" is Toothless! Another Triumph of Government Technology!
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Re: Guerrillas Always Win!
The American Revolution is not considered a classic guerrilla insurgency because the British during most of the war controlled very little of America beyond New York City. On the guerrilla activity outside there, see my article on the Dutch-American Guerrillas in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction and reprinted in M. Norval, ed., The Militia in 20th Century America. The British two times ventured inland, both times losing armies to American forces composed in great part of troops engaged in partisan warfare. The Brits evacuated Philadelphia because, as the leader of the Hessians admitted, they couldn’t keep it supplied in the face of American partisan attacks along the short, 15 mile route from Chester. This was occurring even as Washington’s shrunken army of marginal men (most of the farmers with land had returned home until spring) survived at Valley Forge. See several other of my pieces on the Revolution in the Commentaries at www.independent.org.
The Guerrillas don’t always win!
Neocons, such as Max Boot, then of the Wall Street Journal, now of The Council on Foreign Relations, early on argued that the Filipino Insurgency was a perfect model for invading Iraq. Had he explored other than several books, he might have learned why the Filipinos failed, in no small part because of lack of firearms, having to resort instead to bolo knives in many battles. Again, see several of my articles on this at the above web site.
On a global scale by the 1880s the technology of firearms and their acquisition was beginning to tip toward insurgents, who, unlike the warrior Zulu in Africa, chose to use guerrilla tactics rather than charge head long into gatling guns. East African tribes, having obtained guns from the Belgians, were able to effectively fight the British, who were later able to shut off this source of supply and achieve victory.
It is my own belief that the decision of the Berlin Conference to give King Leopold the Congo was related to this development. The American delegate in this, Henry Sanford, after whom a city in Florida is named and where his papers are, was thick with Stanley, the Brit imperialist of Dr. Livingstone fame.
The Marine Corps Handbook of 1935, which some are attempting to rewrite today, was an early effort to condense American experiences on counter-insurgency warfare. Even as this was done, Army Capt. John R.M. Taylor was still trying to get his study of the Philippine adventure published in case the US ever found itself engaged in another such war in Asia. W.H. Taft had stopped its publication because the study compromised too many Filipinos who had become "our" guys.
After WWII, and until the present, the American military, drawing on Wehrmacht experts and others, has made an intensive study of this type of warfare and how to combat it. They certainly never needed the advice of Mr. Boot! That this failed in Vietnam and other places is, of course, evident, and why the advocates of Empire are now more desperate than ever for a success.
The real problem today is that the guerrillas not only have guns, they have discovered Terror, even at the sacrifice of their own lives. Note the anonymous observer: "A Terrorist is someone with a bomb, but without an air force."
It remains to be seen how Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, etc., will develop tactics to deal with this in their "War on Terror." Some have taken to calling the development of such tactics, "rational war," or "Fourth Generation Warfare."
Meanwhile, the Iraq adventure is proving a bit troublesome. We are beginning to see the clay foundation upon which the Age of Empire was built!
Perhaps the best book on this at present is George Friedman, America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between American And Its Enemies (2004).
Brits Admit Losing Control of Troops
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Terrorists must be denied child recruits?
Sirs:
PW Singer ("Terrorists must be denied child recruits," FT, 1/19/05) describes the use of young people in Terrorist attacks, even in suicide ones.
That a 14-year-old sniper shot a soldier should surprise no one.
Surely, Singer is aware of the youth who served in the American Revolution, where the average age of the male population of the colonies was only slightly above 25 years of age. Fourteen year-old soldiers were quite common!
In Judaism, and some Christian sects, young people are considered moral agents at the age of 12. Islamics often think likewise.
When the US uses counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq as it did in Vietnam, to kill civilians, these acts are observed by the very young.
At the height of the Vietnam War an American officer conceded that in killing so many (Robert MacNamara mentions 3.2 million) the US might have lost that generation, but hoped to win over the "hearts and minds" of the next one.
Perhaps Singer has a new theory of genetics, but it would appear that killing heavily in the parents' generation, would impact the youth, who might just have lost their parents.
Sincerely,
William Marina
Prof. Emeritus in History, Florida Atlantic University, and Research Fellow, The Independent Institute, Oakland, CATuesday, January 18, 2005
Terror Detainees & America's Gulag
Monday, January 10, 2005
Assassination Squads?
In the meantime Newweek carries an interesting piece about the US adopting the Salvador Option.
That stands to reason as Amb. John Negroponte was Reagon's boy back then in the 1980s when the President was already conveniently forgetting about Iran-Contra, etc.
These assassination squad tactics have really never stopped since the Phoenix Squads in Vietnam and before. They are a sign of desperation, and will not "win the hearts and minds" of anyone. We now have 8 guards hovering around each member of the governing council, whatever that rubber stamp group might be.
A Prof. friend of mine reports that one of his former grad students, a former Phoenix guy, was called back in some months ago, to do sniper killings in Afghanistan. He has just returned to again rehabilitate himself to "AMERICAN LIFE." Will the Pentagon count him as a psychological casualty of the war in Asia? Don't count on it! Saturday, January 8, 2005
Exploring 4th Generation Warfare?
To read the story, U.S. General to Review Policy, Iraq Training, click here.Friday, January 7, 2005
Can Justin Raimondo Understand English?
If not, I still thank him, for this may be a case of “it takes one to know one,” and without his splendid insight, I might never have become aware of my condition.
Despite his rather intemperate tone, what concerns me is his seeming inability to read and understand English. ¡Si queres, Justin, nos podemos comunicar en español! I have for years read his columns with interest, but now the question arises, can I trust his research any longer?
For example, he writes that “in a long, rambling piece …[Bill Marina] complains about libertarians ‘getting into bed’ with the Left”
What I wrote was “I just don’t think I want to climb into bed with True Believers with the goal of some kind of misguided, military, FGW [Fourth Generation War], Futile Crusade to make the world safe for American ideas of Liberty.”
I said nothing about anybody else climbing into bed, referring only to myself not doing so, and nothing about anyone doing so “with the Left.” The two people I mentioned, with whom I was dissenting, were William Lind and Lew Rockwell, both, as Raimondo acknowledges, clearly from the Right.
I spent some time describing Puritans as True Believers before relating that to today’s versions. Is that “rambling,” and too hard to follow?
Here’s another Menckenism on the Puritans: “A Puritan is someone who’s afraid that somewhere, somehow, somebody might be happy.” Justin sounds to me, not only very angry, but perhaps unhappy as well, and not just about me. Are you also a Puritan, Justin?
As I have observed over the years, what happens to libertarians who dissent, from within that dwindling group, I have increasingly defined myself primarily as a Taoist, as I first did over 40 years ago.
One theme that came through in the comments was that “we” are such a small group, “we” need to stick together and not quarrel. I have never placed that need over open dissent.
As a Taoist, I have valued the view that one can be “ a majority of one,” and especially Dr. Stockmann’s observation in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” that “a man is strongest when he stands most alone.”
Justin complains that I am so negative, that I mentioned no one whose work appears to satisfy me: “is anybody good enough for you?” Again, it appears he cannot read very well. I mentioned HL Mencken, Murray Rothbard, William Appleman Williams, Carroll Quigley, Adam Smith and the Tao. If it will help to make you happy, Justin, I can give you the names of many other writers whose works I have found enlightening.
Justin goes on at me: “I am sick unto death of ‘libertarians’ who sit on the sidelines carping, kvetching, and coughing up all sorts of ‘objections’ to what we do at antiwar.com.” As a reader and supporter, my only comment, Justin, was that you might reconsider running Lind’s writings as a regular column, doing some of them as you might Paul Wolfowitz’s writings, in telling us about the aims of the Empire. As it is, you have institutionalized the work of someone whose goal is to improve the technology of warfare. Is that antiwar?
I am again saddened that you are so unhappy about all of those “carping” libertarians who have complained to you. I guess you can understand why I define myself primarily as a Taoist.
Justin says I nowhere cite or quote Lind. That is true, I thought a reader might go to antiwar.com among the links on the right side of the L&P site, and read for themselves. That’s what they are for. Justin also says I have “lied” about Lind’s position.
So, Justin, here’s a quotation from Lind at the end of his article in the lewrockwell.com Archives for October 7, 2004, which I believe says it all:
“The Fourth Generation seminar met Friday for the first time since last spring, and we have decided to write our own field manual on Fourth Generation war. It will be modeled on the excellent field manuals the U.S. Marine Corps issued when General Al Gray was Commandant. We plan to have it out in the first half of next year; LRC will offer the whole FMFM.”
I am opposed to war as a means of solving human problems or as means of enhancing State Systems.
Military strategists have been attempting to figure out ways to suppress “people’s war” for well over two millennia. While I doubt he will, if Mr. Lind now succeeds in developing more “humane” counter-insurgency tactics, he will certainly be a hero with the Marines, and all of the thuggish dictators around the world, who will adopt these tactics in putting down their own people.
And at least two libertarian, anti-state, anti-war web sites will be helping to disseminate that information. Now, maybe that will make you happy, Justin!
I haven’t totally sat “on the sidelines,” Justin. Interested readers can consult some of my writings on Peoples War, Marine Handbooks, weapons technology, etc, among the several articles under my name at independent .org. Here are two, that relate to the above, and that will link to many others:
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1283
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1286
What really disturbs me, however, is not your calling me an idiot, or seeming to misread my words, but rather your own:
“Lind is working from the assumption that we are indeed at war, and that there is a rational way to fight it: not in Iraq, not against states whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, but against what Michael Scheuer calls the "worldwide Islamist insurgency" represented by Osama bin Laden and the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.”
If I understand you correctly, Lind’s manual will help the Marines find bin Ladin, something we have not yet been able to do.
A “rational way to fight” war; and, I mistakenly thought you were antiwar. Apparently an erroneous “assumption.” “Rational War” — pronounced with a slight Russian accent, sounds like something out of Ayn Rand, as when she used to tell her husband, Frank, to go out for a “rational walk” so that she could have sex with Nathaniel Branden. I hope Osama will listen to your reason.
Scheuer, dear Justin, appears to be writing about a war of ideas somewhat different from a new Handbook modeled along lines of that of the Marines.
Are you the official spokesperson for antiwar.com? If the aims of antiwar.com are as you state them, to develop new means of “rational” war, rather than to oppose war per se, then you really ought to get rid of that “negativism” you accuse me of, and perhaps change the name of your web site to “rationalwar.com,” along with proclaiming that the aim is really to fight the "worldwide Islamist insurgency." Given your aims, that is certainly more logical, straight forward and honest, for a group that is really not fundamentally antiwar, but rather seeking ways to wage rational war. For openers that should attract a number of Randians!Thursday, January 6, 2005
Of Puritanism, Socialists, Today’s Liberals, Conservatives and Other True Believers
“A Puritan is someone who, in a Bear Baiting Contest, always bets on the bear.”
“The Puritans fell, first upon their knees, and then upon the Aborigines.”
I note today at lew rockwell.com that Anthony Gregory, of the Independent Institute, has taken up the Rockwellian notion that libertarians ought to build bridges with those on the Left, citing, among other things, a Maoist friend who admires Congressman Ron Paul.
I recall, based on a common opposition to the war in Vietnam, Murray Rothbard and William Appleman Williams editing a book together on the subject. But what came of that, other than perhaps David Horowitz moving over to become a hard-core Conservative?
I should perhaps mention that my own anarchism is genetic — probably more from my Spanish side (Celtic, Sephardic from the mountains of northern Spain, where they still wear the skirt and dance to the bagpipes) than from my American Celtic, Scot-Irish, side in Alabama.
I began reading the Fabians in high school, and was a friend of William Appleman Williams, based on some common ideas about Imperialism, long before I read, and came to know, Murray Rothbard.
The fundamental methodological assumption I have accepted is taken from Taoism, as also articulated by the historian Carroll Quigley; that virtually everything in nature, science, politics, etc., is best observed as a continuum, rather than some sort of Aristotelian, or Manichean, dualism.
That is certainly true when it comes to notions of Political-Economy within a given State, State System, Empire or Universal Empire.
Thus, one can share some ideas with those across a spectrum of positions; joining those from the left, right or whatever, in criticizing the “globaloney” of the Bushian Neocons, without harboring any illusions that a coalition with our fellow critics, to obtain power, could ever be possible.
That, as Mencken understood, was the problem with the Puritans!
The Puritans were excellent as a minority, out of power, opposing the growing authoritarian, absolute monarchy ideas of the Stuarts, but in power, whether in England, or Massachusetts, they brooked no dissidents to their True Believer views. Just ask Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, the Quakers, or the Salem “witches,” among others!
Oliver Cromwell once said, “Consider, in the bowels of Christ, that you might be mistaken.” A noble statement, much better than that my old high school home room teacher (thank God, I never in 5 years, had her for a class), who used to tell us she “might be mistaken, but I am never wrong!”
But that didn’t stop Cromwell from a genocide in Ireland that was much more thorough, although obviously on a smaller scale, than that of Herr Hitler against the Gypsies, Slavs and Jews. In the 1960s (pre-DNA) the great British geneticist, Cyril D. Darlington, estimated there were few, if any, real Celts left in Ireland; most of what were later thought of as Irish, were the off-spring of British soldiers in the service of Cromwellian imperialism. Ah well, so much for any Celtic notion of “limpieza de sangre!”
The enormous deaths from Mother Nature’s recent Tsunami remind us, of the sheer numbers of such genocides, some of which boggle the imagination, along with what imperial butchery has done in the last centuries. American historians, for example, have settled on the estimate of 200-220,000 Filipinos killed a century ago, but no one has done any study, such as has been done in some cases of recent plagiarism and falsification in History, to really refute the work of the Anti-Imperialist League, that closer to 600,000 were killed. The American Army’s figures sound “better,” or more “reasonable,” just as they do today in Iraq.
When Charles II was restored to the Throne, and this was pre-Salem witch trials, he marveled that the Puritans had “killed more people in that God forsaken wilderness (New England), than ever I did to avenge the death of my Father.”
It is worth recalling that Adam Smith’s liberalism grew out of his boyhood experience of seeing witches burned in Scotland, the last country to stop it, and he later noted that his short obituary defense of his friend David Hume brought down more wrath on his head than did his two volume critique of Mercantilism, The Wealth of Nations.
Fanatics throughout history, like George Bush today, have always been people who redouble their efforts, even as they lose sight of their original goal. Apparently Americans admire such determination!
The favorite torture of the Puritans, especially for Quakers, apart from burning people at the stake, was the hot iron pushed through the tongue. Now, that will really shut someone up! Historians are always blathering on about our great heritage from New England, but few — shades of Abu Ghraib — mention some of the seedier history aspects of American history as noted by Mencken above. Borrowing from our relations with the American Indians, the Philippines, the Germans during WWII, Vietnam, and our own extensive domestic prison system, etc., the US is one of the few, perhaps only, nations where the military has written books on the subject of torture and conducts “how-to” Schools in teaching its “practical” application.
William Lind, a Cultural Conservative, and regular columnist for LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, has been writing for several years about the mistake, for example, in Iraq, of the US military not adopting methods of what he calls “Fourth Generation Warfare (FGW),” and, who, if I understand him correctly, is now conducting a seminar on same, which when the results are published, and urged on the American military, will also be available on-line at lewrockwell.com. Will that be required reading, on-line, for places like, the now renamed, but formerly School of the Americas, for which we will need a Spanish version?
Now, I challenge Mr. Lind, and his sponsor Lew Rockwell, who has recently challenged us to break free of old assumptions in order to achieve “a new liberty,” to educate me about their emerging vision of FGW, which is really, after all, Lind’s “high falutin” terminology for counter-insurgency warfare., which does not end up with internment camps, torture, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians both by ground forces, and especially from the air, as it sets out to “win the hearts and minds” of the natives. I do not believe that anything short of the above will achieve "Victory,"as the military defines it.
In the case of bombing, I especially like the anonymous observation that “a terrorist is someone with a bomb, but without an air force.”
The British, led by our old friend, Winnie, were among the first to use such bombing on the Iraqis in the 1920s. From there, it was only a natural progression to the Italians in Ethiopia, the Wehrmacht over Guernica and London, “Bomber Harris” over Germany, Curtis LeMay and Robert MacNamara over Japan and Vietnam, the US in Iraq, and now, in particular, Fallujah
That Mr. Lind, the advocate of FGW, as a more efficient version of counter-insurgency warfare, is listed as a columnist for antiwar.com is enough to make one rethink his monthly contribution to that web site.
In Rockwell’s case, and the Mises Institute, this has gone so far as to admire the writings of the Israeli military advisor-historian, Martin “Bulldozer” Van Crevald, who has been an advisor on Iraq, but is now a critic of the emerging quagmire there. I agree with the comments over the years of the Israeli, Ran HaCohen, whose column at antiwar.com has been an on-going indictment of Van Crevald’s notions of FGW as applied to the Palestinians.
If Courts of International Justice had any meaning, then such advisors ought to be in the dock, along with those underlings who have carried out the dirty work.
And, so, Anthony and Lew, while I have no problem in joining in critiques with those across a continuum from the extreme left to the extreme right about what is going on in America and abroad, I just don’t think I want to climb into bed with True Believers with the goal of some kind of misguided, military, FGW, Futile Crusade to make the world safe for American ideas of Liberty.Tuesday, January 4, 2005
In a Partial Defense of the Bourbons
While I am no great defender of the Bourbons, apart from their having helped the American Revolution, I believe the history of that period, and ours, is a bit more complex than that.
Whether ill gotten or not, a major motivation for the ostentatious display of wealth in a given social system is to establish status and hierarchy. A great virtue of the American system is that it has made it possible, for example, for virtually everyone to own an automobile as a means of transportation
It, therefore, becomes essential to establish the car as something much more than that! An Acura model has the only overall 5 star safety rating, but that brand (really a spruced up Honda Accord) has never achieved the status of a Lexus, Mercedes, Rolls, or Jaguar, and is rather boring because it is never in the repair shop as much either, which makes it something of a best-buy in the luxury category.
One could extend that example indefinitely to other items, the more related to “conspicuous consumption,” the better – that are not really important as an essential part of a decent lifestyle. Good ‘ol Thorstein V. called it “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” and I have always had a certain sympathy for the wealthy caught in that cultural syndrome, even if their wealth was in some cases a bit tainted.
The Bourbons were caught in a very different situation. The great historian Carroll Quigley, for one, pointed out in The Evolution of Civilizations (for which I am proud to have contributed a Bibliographical Note) that the French system was not that centralized, absolute structure argued by many historians, but rather much less centralized than the emerging British system of that time.
In short, the French system was much more feudal than the British, with the aristocrats in the provinces having considerably more power.
While the Parliament in GB might ameliorate some of the absolute power of the British monarch after the English Revolution, it was also part of a very powerful emerging British “State System,” including a much more efficient tax system with which, in Boudreaux’s terminology, the State could expropriate “wealth.”
The on-going fiscal problems of the French State were a reflection of its still relatively feudal condition. The ostentatious nature of Versailles, ironically, was in no small part an effort to partially curtail the real power of the aristocracy by bringing them there for fun and games for extended periods, thus luring them away from their provincial power bases.
The real centralization of State Power in France was, of course, brought about by the French Revolution and Napoleon.
Interestingly, the French system can be seen in an even purer form in the Tokugawa system in Japan at roughly the same time, a brilliant plan to break the power of the feudal aristocracy by keeping them at court for part of the year in a carefully thought out virtually checker-board pattern, thus keeping feudal lords from cooperating against the center.
The story of “The 47 Ronins,” Japan’s greatest story of the period is a magnificent recounting of that system, and draws new versions each year, even today.
So, I would suggest, Louis’ power was less than absolute, and he was having to try all sorts of schemes to make ends meet, all of which rather exhausted a guy also keeping a few mistresses on the side.Monday, January 3, 2005
Corporatism: American Style
Sunday, January 2, 2005
Comment on Lew Rockwell’s “The Reality of Red-State Fascism"
Rockwell notes:
“The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
He then quotes from an unpublished 1994 memo of Murray Rothbard’s ascribing all sorts of libertarian implications to the Republicans taking control of Congress, and warning that the gains of this “revolution” might be lost.
That this occurred, Rockwell blames on the fact that “the establishment somehow managed to pin” the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing “to right-wing libertarianism,” and that so much energy was expended in focusing on the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for his attempt to cover up his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Rockwell then leaps ahead to the situation today. His great lament is that so many Republicans, especially since 9/11, have gravitated to what he calls “Red State Fascism.” Thus, the greatest danger to American liberty is no longer from the left, but from the right.
He concludes:
“There has never in my lifetime been a more urgent need for the party of liberty to completely secede from conventional thought and established institutions, especially those associated with all aspects of government, and undertake radical intellectual action on behalf of a third way that rejects the socialism of the left and the fascism of the right.
I certainly agree with that statement, and my comments below are offered in the spirit of the “urgent need” he expresses. At the same time, I do not believe that it is possible “to completely secede from conventional thought and established institutions” or “undertake radical intellectual action” without cutting free from the parameters of many of his historical assumptions, as well as the conclusions that he has drawn from them.
Let’s begin with his, and Rothbard’s, assessments of the election of 1994. I do not think it had anywhere near the libertarian component they imagined. Where is Congressman Newt Gingrich in their analyses? Yet, most at the time attributed Republican success to the traditional decline after a party had won the presidency, with Clinton’s ineptitude in handling the health issue led by Hillary, his poor handling of such issues as gays in the military, and the way in which Gingrich led the Republican criticism of these issues.
Given the libertarian emphasis of the Rothbard-Rockwell analysis, even through Gingrich is not mentioned, one would imagine Gingrich was in the forefront of some sort of libertarian resurrection. Years earlier, Bruce Bartlett, then in Jack Kemp’s office, observed that Gingrich used to come over occasionally, and the staff would attempt to teach him a bit about supply-side economics, but that hardly qualifies as hard core libertarianism.
In my course on American Studies in those years, I used to show a few segments from the video tapes of Gingrich’s course on American Civilization, specifically where he talked about the origins of his Republicanism, especially the influence of Teddy Roosevelt on a relative, an uncle as I recall, who had in turn influenced Newt.
Gingrich was quite open in speaking about his Rooseveltian worldview, and my point in showing his lecture to my students was to demonstrate what an odd kind of conservatism the Republican leader was championing. It didn’t occur to me that Rothbard then, and Rockwell now, would see this as some kind of libertarian revolution.
TR was, of course, neither a conservative nor a libertarian, but a radical Progressive, who advocated a massive statism at home, as well as colonialism and imperialism abroad. It is no wonder today that Clinton, Gingrich and George W. Bush, all have talked about themselves as inheritors of TR’s mantle.
It would take considerable space to discuss all of what I consider Rockwell’s misperceptions about 1994. He says, for example, without offering any evidence, that “the state was seen as the enemy of education.” Conceding that schooling and education are quite different things, while Americans are aware of the failings in their dominant state schooling system, the hope springs eternal that it can be reformed. At the same time, some interests have been quite adroit in pushing a state-controlled charter school system as an alternative to really promoting private schools.
So shallow was this Gingrich-led “libertarian” revolution that Clinton was again elected in 1996, helped by the monetary efforts of the Fed, and his simple “triangulation” toward the Center. And Newt? The leader of this so-called great revolt was soon essentially out of the political ball game.
While I agree with Rockwell about the developing fascism in America, and have discussed it in a number of my articles at independent.org, its origins go way back beyond any supposed shift after 1994.
I will discuss the history of these developments in some future contributions to the L&P blog, and then endeavor to explore a viable alternative to this historical tendency.Friday, December 31, 2004
Reflections on Rockwell’s Fascism
I guess I just don’t find Lew Rockwell’s end of the year column — “The Reality of Red State Fascism” — all that perceptive, as do Steven Horwitz and others.
Fascism has become a buzz word these days, to be applied to anything that a writer dislikes. Nowhere does he define what he means by that term; one surmises some sort of growing statism, which is undesireable to to sure, but rather vaguely described.
Rothbard’s 1994 Memo, quoted at length, enthuses about an emerging libertarianism that just didn’t materialize. As I recall it, Bill Clinton won another term as President in 1996, and in sheer numbers both parties remained closely divided in the elections of 2000 and 2004.
Statism has been around in America since at least Alexander Hamilton’s mercantilist program in the 1790s, and the Leviathan State has been growing ever since as described by writers such as Robert Higgs.
In 1971 Rothbard offered one definition of the reality of Fascism when he described Richard Nixon taking the country off gold as “the day Fascism came to America.”
Empires have always offered a welfare entitlement program, so it ought to come as no surprise that this is pushed by almost all politicians in one form or another. A good book on examining this is Jack D. Douglas’, The Myth of the Welfare State (1989).
Rockwell’s argument that the Oklahoma bombing incident in 1995 “somehow managed” to derail this supposed emerging libertarianism is superficial at best.
To the growing centralized statism of the last two centuries, the last century has witnessed an increasingly aggressive imperialist foreign policy as well, rationalized for years as an opposition to Communnism.
What has declined is a broad anti-imperialism today as compared with the opposition to the emergence of imperialism in 1898. Oh, a pious Senator Robert Byrd will rail in the Senate against the intervention in Iraq, but he has always been at the head of the line for his serving of pork.
The events of 9/11 have enabled the government to accelerate the creation of an empire built on fear, created through a massive manipulation of the media, suppression of information and public lies.
But again, empires have always been characterized by “mass society politics,“ rather than any meaningful democracy
In this climate of lies and massive denial of reality, I am reminded of Japan in the 1930s. Having bogged down in an attempt to control China, the Japanese came to believe that the answer to their problems was to attack the United States, even as the US provoked them into doing so. They could not simply withdraw from China.
Now our leadership elite is pushing the idea that the only way to “solve” the problem of "Terror" is to confront Iran and beyond. I simply don’t see what light Rockwell really sheds on this problem. What does he mean by “secede” in this context?
Friday, December 17, 2004
Dissecting a "Silly" Argument
"There is a rather silly article here which compares
GWB to Teddy Roosevelt on the grounds that both
Presidents have sent U.S. armed forces to intervene in
foreign countries. Although TR was a Republican
President, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats
were clearly Leftist or Rightist in TR's days and TR
was a notable supporter of the "Progressive" (Leftist)
wing of the GOP. He even left the GOP at one stage and
set up his own "Progressive" party. And his actions
abroad were thoroughly imperialistic -- under a very
thin cloak of righteousness. They were certainly not
driven by defence needs. GWB, by contrast, is simply
responding as best he can to the war on America
declared by the Islamic extremists. And the difference
between a defensive war and a war of expansion is
surely of considerable importance. As is shown here
American wars abroad are normally the work of the
American Left. It is only the needs of defence that
have got GWB into such wars."
Monday, December 13, 2004
Blood Money: Invest Now!
I wonder if Dick Cheney will like our coalition partners, the Brits, getting into the "gun for hire game." We keep saying that the Brits are the second largest force in Iraq, but the last time I checked "our" private armies, were up toward 30,000 with Halliburton & others training more each week.
These have a heavy South African, Israeli & Latin American mercenary contingent. I always liked the French for calling theirs, honestly, a "Foreign Legion."
In the meantime, CounterPoint, carried a piece about how our Marines around Pendleton and LeJeune, struggle on less than $1,400 a month, while prey to loan sharks.
The mercenaries make the big bucks, upward of $200,000 a year, and as some of our troops finish their enlistment, are signing up.
Last week Gary North's column mentioned the Iraq counterinsurgency in the context of the Apaches & the Winchester '73. I suspect he is unaware this was an early example of US government bureaucratic bungling. The Interior Dept. gave the Indians those guns to hunt game, and they sure did, the two-legged variety. Gen. Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, and the Territorial Governor of New Mexico Territory (the Brit imperialists tended to use civilians for this kind of governance) complained bitterly to the War Dept. about the old, single-shot, Civil War vintage rifles issued to his Territorial Militia, with which they were supposed to hunt the Indian raiders. In both Vietnam and now Iraq, we have ended up supplying the insurgents in a somewhat more indirect method.
Our private armies in Iraq use a bullet outlawed by the Geneva Convention, which we, of course, ignore in other respects as well. Manufactured in Arkansas, instead of wounding a person, it tends to cut him in half, much to the amazement of some of the first veteran soldiers who used it. It will be interesting to see what happens when the insurgents, excuse me, "terrorists," get hold of some of these cartridges.
I do think the slogan of the Neocons ought to be, "perpetual intervention for perpetual peace and democracy."Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Russian Feudal Capitalism, American Feudal Growth Mgt & China
In America property owners in Oregon are fighting back at the Growth Management bureaucrats who, getting rid of notions of strict liability, attempted to control land use — the fundamental basis of the old Feudalism. If there is a need to allocate land in Oregon, it has been to force the federal and state government to disgorge some of the 55% of the land which they control there.
Florida, where several academics were in the vanguard of the development of Growth Management nationally, is in a similar situation. The irony is that Florida Trend magazine, a leading business journal, has recently selected one of these, Prof. Lance DeHaven-Smith of FSU, as one of the State's precious academic assets.
In China also, the city government bureaucrats are in the process of taking land from the farmers. New York TimesFriday, November 12, 2004
Empires as Ages of Religious Ignorance George W. Bush’s Crusade and American Fundamentalism
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1418Friday, October 22, 2004
"Precision-strike Democracy"
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ22Ak04.html
The article, by Pepe Escobar, is based on a number of Asia Times sources in and around Falluja.Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Putin Calls a Bush Loss a Victory for Terrorists
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1368
Now Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that a loss in the presidential election by George Bush, would be a victory for Terrorists:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/10/19/002.html
And, apparently, Zarqawi and Al Qaeda like Bush also:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7099.htm
Monday, October 18, 2004
Reality Based Communities
Empire and Imperialism
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Three New Stooges and the First American Stooge
Sunday, October 10, 2004
The Trouble With Bulldozers
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7023.htm
Updating the Marine's Empire Handbook
Monday, October 4, 2004
George Bush and the "Mandate of Heaven"
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1372Friday, October 1, 2004
Kerry's Army?
Today's New York Times reports that the Army is already planning to lower standards in order to try to fill its existing quotas of 20-30,000 troops, in the face of complaints from soldiers about pressure being used to try to keep them in the armed forces: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/01/politics/01recruit.html?hp
Imperial Corporate Welfare
Charles Lewis' Center for Public Integrity continues to expose the billions of fraud, as detailed in a recent report: http://www.publicintegrity.org
Since 1998, 40% of the Pentagon's contracts have been awarded without bidding, over $362 billion, with only one contractor in the top ten winning more than half its dollars in competitive bidding.
Halliburton and Boeing remain under investigation in this regard, but does anyone seriously believe that someone in Government or within any of these Corporations will see as much by way of fines or jail time as has Martha Stewart?
She was, of course a "Scape Goat for Empire," to borrow the title of the book on which the Australian movie of several decades ago, "Breaker Morant," was based.Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Helping the "Free" Election in Iraq
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1101041004-702122,00.htmlMonday, September 27, 2004
Hi Ho Silver!
I am reminded of the Lone Ranger's comment to Tonto (the Fool) when they were surrounded by Indians, and the LR, said, "Well, old friend, this looks like the end for us," & Tonto replied, "What do you mean 'us' White Man?"
What do mean, "we," Tom?
If you wish to associate yourself with the American Empire, that is your business, I choose not to do so."
As the Roman Empire collapsed, some Pagan Humanists sought to enlist the Christians in saving the decaying structure. and many Christians, if not the formal church structure which had gotten in bed with Caesar, simply said, "No Way,"
The US, Russia, Iraq, and Empire
To expand on his final comment, first: I did not have space to place all of the Russian comments in the article, but their intent, if they come into Iraq, would be to aid the American military in the Sunni sectors, not the Shia ones, which form the majority of territory. I mentioned this was the Izvestia observation.
I certainly agree that our government has no business trying to pressure the Russians toward some of our own ill-conceptualized notions of Democracy.
Whether the Russians join us in Iraq, and with their own growing problem in Chechnya they may have the same military manpower problems as the US, my major point was that the two Empires are “coming” to resemble each other in their growing Statism.
As I noted in a graphic in A History of Florida (3rd ed., U. of Miami Press, 1999), while discussing that State’s conceivable role in the Caribbean, there are at least three levels of possible interaction between two nations; people, business and government. Under the rhetoric of ‘Public Diplomacy” the US has increasingly relied on gov’t-gov’t relations, especially military solutions. As Bob Woodward quotes, GeoII/43 in Bush at War (p. 115), I doubt our beloved President has any concept of real Public Diplomacy as espoused by Cong. Dante Fascell over his whole career.
America is an Empire, and is just beginning to realize some of the consequences of that seemingly exalted status.Sunday, September 26, 2004
The Russians Are Coming! — To Iraq?
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1368Thursday, September 23, 2004
Captive White Shark
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0923/p01s03-usgn.html
Here Comes Halliburton?
Poor Dick Cheney — caught in a quandary!
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI24Ak02.htmlTuesday, August 17, 2004
Three Cheers for Hugo Chavez
Saturday, August 14, 2004
American Prisons as Universities for Radical Islamicists
Another Greek Myth
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Work in the Empire
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Those Rascal Celts Were Everywhere!
Between them, these two links mention “Anglo-Celtic civilization” no less than five times as forming the basis of Southern culture. I was reminded of my own Celtic background, albeit somewhat different than that envisaged by the League.
At some point in the evening, after a few glasses of wine at dinner during a Liberty Fund seminar in Houston some years ago, the historian Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama asked me if anyone had ever mentioned to me that I had a purely “Celtic” face? I replied, “Well, yes, but the Celticness was probably more from my Spanish ancestors than from those who had matriculated to Florida from southern Alabama.” He looked very puzzled by my answer.
He had apparently not realized the heavy Celtic background of Asturias and other areas in northern Spain, where even today, on a Sunday afternoon one might find the natives dancing in kilts to the music of bagpipes. I doubt, although the League may inform me otherwise, that there is any such Celtic “kultur” around in towns in today’s American South.
The Anglo-Celts in my family were not exactly big on multi-cultural diversity. When my Father proposed to my Mother in 1936, her brothers, all members of the Klan beat up my Father, dumping him on the edge of the Everglades, with the threat that they would not stand for their sister being married to some “Spanish-Nigger.” Well, my Mother had other ideas!
Their ignorance was exceeded perhaps only by the anti-nativist Klan members in North Carolina, who in the early 1960s staged a rally in the county that had the largest Indian population east of the Mississippi. The Klanners were chased into the woods by hundreds of Indian-American war veterans.
So, League of the Southers, what is the real cultural basis of this “Anglo” version of the Celtic heritage, other than a propensity to try to bully others? As McDonald learned, much of what Anglo-Celts think of as “theirs,” is common to Celtics around other parts of Europe.Monday, July 5, 2004
Was the American Revolution a People’s War?
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Iraq: "Privatization," or "Crony Corporatism?"
Monday, June 28, 2004
Iraq: Whitewash, Cosmetics and Stinking Toilets
Friday, May 28, 2004
US Army Intelligence Chief in Iraq Unscathed
Friday, May 21, 2004
Why Does Nazism Still Fascinate Us?
Thursday, May 20, 2004
What Doom Will Look Like This Time Around
"Congress Must Curb A Runaway Executive"
"When Greenspan Really Gets Going"
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
How India Funds Bush's Campaign
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Imperialism Loses, Again!
Monday, May 3, 2004
Torture & Civilian Deaths in Three Counterinsurgencies
Sunday, May 2, 2004
On Rush Limbaugh
Saturday, May 1, 2004
Torture & Civilian Deaths in Three Counterinsurgencies
Thursday, April 29, 2004
Inventing Iraq & How to Buy the Book
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Of Indians, Iraqis & Sovereignty
Friday, April 23, 2004
Buying Books Online
Saturday, April 17, 2004
The Moon is Down, Again!
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Reflections on Tocqueville, Afghanistan & Islam
Friday, April 9, 2004
Wolf & Bears
Iraq: Is This the Beginning of a “People’s War”?
The Marines’ “How To” Handbook for Empire
Wednesday, April 7, 2004
An Orwellian Definition of "Sovereignty"
Israel/Rwanda/Iraq
Sunday, April 4, 2004
Reply to Roderick Long
Saturday, April 3, 2004
The Difference Between Abraham and Mrs. Laney
Iraq: The "People's War" is Just Beginning
Friday, April 2, 2004
What About Interventionism After the War?
Corporate Warriors, Sometimes Foreign Legions
Thursday, April 1, 2004
The Global Bubble
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
More Statistics for the "Larger Picture"
No, Steven, It's My Stagflation to Have to Deal With
Monday, March 29, 2004
With the Bush Team's "Nation-Building" in "Darkest" Afghanistan
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Two Dissenting Justices: “The Road to Hell”
Rice Takes to Airwaves in Counterattack
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Another Whistle Blower
Dick Clarke: The Ultimate Anonymous Source?
White House, 4/01: Focus on Bin Laden "A Mistake"