Nov 2008
From General to Profiteer
Nov 29, 2008 21:43 Filed in: War/Military
I remember General Barry McCaffrey well. I was at a National Prevention Network conference in Buffalo when he gave a speech to the conference. McCaffrey, as you will recall, was the drug czar for the Clinton administration, placed in charge of solving the drug problem and expected to direct the national effort to rid the nation of the curse of people putting various substances into their bodies and getting high.
It was an imperial entrance, complete with lictors, aids, praetorian guards, and lacked only a flourish of trumpets from Aïda to complete the effect. He ascended to the stage, delivered several platitudes clothed in the language of the masters of the Universe, and then made a ceremonial exit. I was both offended and amused that anyone took this pompous ass seriously.
The tune that went through my head was the Liberty Bell March.
Now Barry McCaffrey has made the front page of the New York Times, but not on behalf of the drug war. Having been retained by those heavily invested in the Iraq war, he has now become an exemplar of the old-boy, back-scratching, profiteering, arms-selling military-industrial complex. using his rank and connections to advance the interest of his clients.
What the NYT doesn’t say is that this is a routine, repeated over and over in Washington, D.C., that makes millions, nay billions, for the entrepreneurs that play the game the right way.
And where does all this money come from? Yourselves, the taxpayers. Enjoy the fireworks, chumps.
It was an imperial entrance, complete with lictors, aids, praetorian guards, and lacked only a flourish of trumpets from Aïda to complete the effect. He ascended to the stage, delivered several platitudes clothed in the language of the masters of the Universe, and then made a ceremonial exit. I was both offended and amused that anyone took this pompous ass seriously.
The tune that went through my head was the Liberty Bell March.
Now Barry McCaffrey has made the front page of the New York Times, but not on behalf of the drug war. Having been retained by those heavily invested in the Iraq war, he has now become an exemplar of the old-boy, back-scratching, profiteering, arms-selling military-industrial complex. using his rank and connections to advance the interest of his clients.
What the NYT doesn’t say is that this is a routine, repeated over and over in Washington, D.C., that makes millions, nay billions, for the entrepreneurs that play the game the right way.
And where does all this money come from? Yourselves, the taxpayers. Enjoy the fireworks, chumps.
Comments
Interesting articles discovered on the way to something else
I updated all the links on the Kosovo Pages.
Al Giordano on Hillary Clinton and Human Rights - a Cautionary Tale
From Sam Smith’s Progressive Review: What the Banks, Academics, the Media and Politicians Don’t Tell You About Money
Naomi Klein: In Praise of a Rocky Transition
Al Giordano on Hillary Clinton and Human Rights - a Cautionary Tale
And if - as the mass media seems to agree right now - US President-elect Barack Obama is about to install someone as the next Secretary of State who has shown zero understanding of, much less passion and action for, human rights in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere (except in isolated cases where the same mass media has turned a particular case into an international cause celébre), we're going to see more of the same terrible story happen over and over again.
From Sam Smith’s Progressive Review: What the Banks, Academics, the Media and Politicians Don’t Tell You About Money
The power to create money is an awesome power - at times stronger than the executive, legislative or judicial powers combined. It's like having a "magic checkbook," where checks can't bounce. When controlled privately it can be used to gain riches, but more importantly it determines the direction of our society by deciding where the money goes - what gets funded and what does not. Will it be used to build and repair vital infrastructure such as levees to protect major cities? Or will it go into warfare or real estate loans, creating asset price inflation - the real estate bubble.
Thus the money issuing power should never be alienated from democratically elected government and placed ambiguously into private hands as it is in America in the Federal Reserve system today.
Indeed most people would be surprised to learn that the bulk of our money supply is not created by our government, but by private banks when they make loans. Most of our money is issued as interest-bearing debt.
We are borrowing this money system from private banks when instead we should own the system, not rent it. Our government has the sovereign power to issue money (Art.1, Sect.8) and spend it into circulation to promote the general welfare through the creation and repair of infrastructure, including human infrastructure - health and education - rather than misusing the money system for speculation as banking has historically done. Our lawmakers must now reclaim that power. . .
Naomi Klein: In Praise of a Rocky Transition
The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.
Chossudovsky on the Financial Collapse
Nov 16, 2008 22:08 Filed in: Economics
Professor Chossudovsky interprets the current financial crisis. He is not optimistic about the outcome.
The Great Depression of the 21st Century: Collapse of the Real Economy
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca.
I became acquainted with Chossudovsty’s writings around the time the Clinton administration decided to bomb Serbia, ostensibly on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo. Chossudovsky, in his paper, Dismantling Former Yugoslavia,
Recolonising Bosnia (1996), exposed the deliberate and ultimately successful campaign to dismantle Yugoslavia by the western powers. A later article also posted on this website, NATO’s War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia: An Overview (1999), is a powerful indictment against the entire war. There are some interesting tidbits in that report:
Interestingly enough, the Kosovo Pages on the Jackson Progressive, even though seldom updated now, are some of the most frequently-visited pages on this website. It is as though the entire Balkans have slipped down a memory hole.
The Great Depression of the 21st Century: Collapse of the Real Economy
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca.
I became acquainted with Chossudovsty’s writings around the time the Clinton administration decided to bomb Serbia, ostensibly on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo. Chossudovsky, in his paper, Dismantling Former Yugoslavia,
Recolonising Bosnia (1996), exposed the deliberate and ultimately successful campaign to dismantle Yugoslavia by the western powers. A later article also posted on this website, NATO’s War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia: An Overview (1999), is a powerful indictment against the entire war. There are some interesting tidbits in that report:
The reader will recall that prior to 9/11, hardly anyone in the U. S. had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, and even fewer were aware that he was allied to the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization that the U. S. was supporting.An Unholy "Marriage of Convenience"
In addition to the dispatch of Western special forces, Mujehadeen mercenaries and other Islamic fundamentalist groups (financed inter alia by Iran and Saudi financier Osmane Bin Laden) have been collaborating with the KLA in the ground war.
"[B]y early December 1997, Iranian intelligence had already delivered the first shipments of hand grenades, machine-guns, assault rifles, night vision equipment, and communications gear... Moreover, the Iranians began sending promising Albanian and UCK [KLA] commanders for advanced military training in al-Quds [special] forces and IRGC camps in Iran.....
Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida allegedly responsible for last year's African embassy bombings "was one of several fundamentalist groups that had sent units to fight in Kosovo, ... Bin Laden is believed to have established an operation in Albania in 1994 ... Albanian sources say Sali Berisha, who was then president, had links with some groups that later proved to be extreme fundamentalists".
Interestingly enough, the Kosovo Pages on the Jackson Progressive, even though seldom updated now, are some of the most frequently-visited pages on this website. It is as though the entire Balkans have slipped down a memory hole.
The Center?
Nov 13, 2008 09:28 Filed in: Politics
I would like someone to define the political “center.” Is it possible to come up with a series of centrist propositions, precisely midpoint between the left and the right?
Logic requires that in order to define the center, we must first define the left and right and then (if politics is what mathematicians call a metric space) find the average or mean of the two positions. The aggregate of average positions on major issues would, by definition, be the “centrist” position.
The political space, however, is probably not a metric space—the latter roughly defined as a mathematical structure that includes a way to measure the distance between two elements of the structure—and thus there really is no way to be sure that any policy described as centrist is actually in the political center.
Logic requires that in order to define the center, we must first define the left and right and then (if politics is what mathematicians call a metric space) find the average or mean of the two positions. The aggregate of average positions on major issues would, by definition, be the “centrist” position.
The political space, however, is probably not a metric space—the latter roughly defined as a mathematical structure that includes a way to measure the distance between two elements of the structure—and thus there really is no way to be sure that any policy described as centrist is actually in the political center.
What is the Significance of the Election of Barack Hussein Obama?
Nov 11, 2008 15:39 Filed in: Politics
There is only one thing of which we can be certain: a majority of the voters have become so dissatisfied with the direction of this nation that they are willing to elect a person they perceive to be significantly different from the incumbent, in the hope that he will bring about positive change. The closeness of the popular vote, however, makes it clear that a sizable percentage of the voters who believe that the country is going in the wrong direction still voted for a candidate virtually certain to keep it going in the same direction and to continue unchanged the policies of the Bush administration. This segment of the electorate bears careful watching and study. Some of it can be attributed to racial prejudice, pure and simple. The Moslem-sounding name may have alarmed some voters too lazy to inquire any further, perhaps the same voters that chose to remain ignorant of Bush’s questionable past when they voted for him in 2000 and 2004.
But now that Obama has become the president-elect, we would be wise, in our celebrations of electoral victory, to remain mindful of the powerful forces that make it very difficult for a chief executive to bring about substantial systemic change. Too many institutions have grown fat on the generosity of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and there is nothing to which they will not stoop to retain what they are now getting. This is particularly true of the beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion and occupation but it is also true of all well-connected businesses and organizations that have been favored over their less Republican competitors. In addition, the promiscuous number of governmental agencies, particularly those related to “national security”—a term that has now become a euphemism for the maintenance and extension of the American Empire—with powerful constituencies in and out of government, have come to regard their fiefdoms, often concealed behind the shield of secrecy, as sacrosanct.
That Obama is not a wild-eyed radical was clearly revealed by the faces lined up behind him the other day when he delivered his short press conference on the economic crisis. Dinosaur Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve System, appears to be in the forefront of Obama’s economic advisors. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Wall Street operatives who played a major role in deregulating the securities and banking industry, and who thus bear considerable responsibility for the present crisis, are said to be on the short list for Treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen legitimately described as a diehard Likudnik, will be Obama’s chief of staff, so the likelihood of justice and a real homeland for the Palestinian people appears to be off the table.
A friend writes: “I predict that Emanuel and Summers will be the least of what’s objectionable about the new White House crew. Zion siegt! Apparently neither perps nor victims ever learn, only historians.”
By definition, historical perspective is ex post facto. I recently read that President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing Greek with the other. He died too quickly from an assassin’s bullet for his performance as president to be assessed.
Obama likewise is an intellectual. He taught constitutional law for years at one of the finest law schools in the nation. He reads; he reflects. The most influential philosophers in his life are Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche, which puts him an unusual category. This guy carries in his head a substantial quantity of apperceptive mass.
It remains, however, to be seen whether he—or anyone, for that matter—can stand upright in the face of the tsunami of late-stage finance capitalism, broken and corrupt as it may be. But if he fails—and failure is likely—his fall will at least have a tragic component.
Tragedy is always preferable to farce, at least when the future is at stake.
Emerson wrote that the great confide themselves childlike to the genius of their age. Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the time and circumstances demanded a monarch. Peracles led Athens because Athens had reached a point in its development (empire) that demanded a person with his talents. Like a surfer catching the right wave, Lincoln rode the tide, the Zeitgeist, into greatness, but at the cost of his own life. Roosevelt swept into power on a wave of suffering and revulsion at the crookedness and predations of Wall Street, and enacted the New Deal.
The question today is not so much Obama, but the direction of the tide. Jimmy Carter was a good and able man, I believe, but from the viewpoint of career-enhancement, he was swimming in the wrong direction. The right wing think-tanks, foundations, and mass media in the service of the corporate and rentier class had changed the mindscape of the nation. The delusions of supply-side economics—an intellectual fraud of the first water—conditioned the voters to accept the systematic dismantling of much of the New Deal that has occurred since January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.
In the wake of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the increasing third-worldization of our nation, together with the burst of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial meltdown, this nation might be ready to listen to someone who can articulate alternative paths, who doesn’t mouth uncritical hymns to the virtues of laissez faire capitalism while filling the coffers of the wealthy out of the public purse, who doesn’t believe that social Darwinism is the answer to all the problems of the world, and, perhaps most important of all, doesn’t believe that the only path to national prosperity lies in plundering the rest of the world, especially the poorer nations who cannot resist.
Maybe.
It is, however, already beginning to look as though the financial elite may succeed in keeping the genie of real change in the bottle this time around. Clearly, they saw the crisis coming, and probably were intending for the collapse to happen after the presidential election, when an increasingly senile Republican president-elect and his raptorial vice president-elect would offer no resistance to whatever plans that had already been made to complete the transfer of vast public wealth into private hands. It will not be as smooth as originally planned, but when Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, he will still be presented with a fait accompli that will require years to undo, that is, if it is even possible to undo all the damage. In this quest, he will be bitterly opposed by all those powers that profited from the previous regime.
So, dear reader, the question we must ask is not whether Obama is ready to be president, but whether the time is right for the changes that must be made to preserve our republic, and ultimately human life on the Earth. Is it we who are ready, in other words? Absent this precondition, the most able and prepared president hasn’t a chance.
Remember Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Brutus participated in the killing of Caesar, but when he afterwards explained to the mob that he killed his friend and benefactor Caesar to save the republic, there were immediate calls from the mob to make him king. Brutus was resisting a current that ultimately swept him away on the plains of Phillipi. The Roman republic had already ceased to exist in the hearts of the people; there was no republic to save.
So far, I have not seen the kind of willingness that makes for positive revolutionary change, but I live in Mississippi, which is hardly a representative sample of the U.S. Nevertheless, I still suspect it will require something far more serious than the current public discomfiture to render the collective psyche capable of accepting what every sensible and knowledgeable individual knows should have been done twenty years ago. It would have been easy then. Too bad.
My expectations today are not high, but I would like to be pleasantly surprised.
Update: If you think Obama is a socialist, read what the socialists are saying about him.
But now that Obama has become the president-elect, we would be wise, in our celebrations of electoral victory, to remain mindful of the powerful forces that make it very difficult for a chief executive to bring about substantial systemic change. Too many institutions have grown fat on the generosity of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and there is nothing to which they will not stoop to retain what they are now getting. This is particularly true of the beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion and occupation but it is also true of all well-connected businesses and organizations that have been favored over their less Republican competitors. In addition, the promiscuous number of governmental agencies, particularly those related to “national security”—a term that has now become a euphemism for the maintenance and extension of the American Empire—with powerful constituencies in and out of government, have come to regard their fiefdoms, often concealed behind the shield of secrecy, as sacrosanct.
That Obama is not a wild-eyed radical was clearly revealed by the faces lined up behind him the other day when he delivered his short press conference on the economic crisis. Dinosaur Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve System, appears to be in the forefront of Obama’s economic advisors. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Wall Street operatives who played a major role in deregulating the securities and banking industry, and who thus bear considerable responsibility for the present crisis, are said to be on the short list for Treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen legitimately described as a diehard Likudnik, will be Obama’s chief of staff, so the likelihood of justice and a real homeland for the Palestinian people appears to be off the table.
A friend writes: “I predict that Emanuel and Summers will be the least of what’s objectionable about the new White House crew. Zion siegt! Apparently neither perps nor victims ever learn, only historians.”
By definition, historical perspective is ex post facto. I recently read that President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing Greek with the other. He died too quickly from an assassin’s bullet for his performance as president to be assessed.
Obama likewise is an intellectual. He taught constitutional law for years at one of the finest law schools in the nation. He reads; he reflects. The most influential philosophers in his life are Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche, which puts him an unusual category. This guy carries in his head a substantial quantity of apperceptive mass.
It remains, however, to be seen whether he—or anyone, for that matter—can stand upright in the face of the tsunami of late-stage finance capitalism, broken and corrupt as it may be. But if he fails—and failure is likely—his fall will at least have a tragic component.
Tragedy is always preferable to farce, at least when the future is at stake.
Emerson wrote that the great confide themselves childlike to the genius of their age. Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the time and circumstances demanded a monarch. Peracles led Athens because Athens had reached a point in its development (empire) that demanded a person with his talents. Like a surfer catching the right wave, Lincoln rode the tide, the Zeitgeist, into greatness, but at the cost of his own life. Roosevelt swept into power on a wave of suffering and revulsion at the crookedness and predations of Wall Street, and enacted the New Deal.
The question today is not so much Obama, but the direction of the tide. Jimmy Carter was a good and able man, I believe, but from the viewpoint of career-enhancement, he was swimming in the wrong direction. The right wing think-tanks, foundations, and mass media in the service of the corporate and rentier class had changed the mindscape of the nation. The delusions of supply-side economics—an intellectual fraud of the first water—conditioned the voters to accept the systematic dismantling of much of the New Deal that has occurred since January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.
In the wake of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the increasing third-worldization of our nation, together with the burst of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial meltdown, this nation might be ready to listen to someone who can articulate alternative paths, who doesn’t mouth uncritical hymns to the virtues of laissez faire capitalism while filling the coffers of the wealthy out of the public purse, who doesn’t believe that social Darwinism is the answer to all the problems of the world, and, perhaps most important of all, doesn’t believe that the only path to national prosperity lies in plundering the rest of the world, especially the poorer nations who cannot resist.
Maybe.
It is, however, already beginning to look as though the financial elite may succeed in keeping the genie of real change in the bottle this time around. Clearly, they saw the crisis coming, and probably were intending for the collapse to happen after the presidential election, when an increasingly senile Republican president-elect and his raptorial vice president-elect would offer no resistance to whatever plans that had already been made to complete the transfer of vast public wealth into private hands. It will not be as smooth as originally planned, but when Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, he will still be presented with a fait accompli that will require years to undo, that is, if it is even possible to undo all the damage. In this quest, he will be bitterly opposed by all those powers that profited from the previous regime.
So, dear reader, the question we must ask is not whether Obama is ready to be president, but whether the time is right for the changes that must be made to preserve our republic, and ultimately human life on the Earth. Is it we who are ready, in other words? Absent this precondition, the most able and prepared president hasn’t a chance.
Remember Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Brutus participated in the killing of Caesar, but when he afterwards explained to the mob that he killed his friend and benefactor Caesar to save the republic, there were immediate calls from the mob to make him king. Brutus was resisting a current that ultimately swept him away on the plains of Phillipi. The Roman republic had already ceased to exist in the hearts of the people; there was no republic to save.
So far, I have not seen the kind of willingness that makes for positive revolutionary change, but I live in Mississippi, which is hardly a representative sample of the U.S. Nevertheless, I still suspect it will require something far more serious than the current public discomfiture to render the collective psyche capable of accepting what every sensible and knowledgeable individual knows should have been done twenty years ago. It would have been easy then. Too bad.
My expectations today are not high, but I would like to be pleasantly surprised.
Update: If you think Obama is a socialist, read what the socialists are saying about him.
Obama elected president
Nov 04, 2008 22:54 Filed in: Politics
At 10:00 PM this evening, CNN announced that it projected Obama elected the next president.
We can now hope that things will improve, both domestically and internationally. So many things have been neglected, so much deliberate wreckage to our republic, Obama is faced with a titanic task to repair the damage.
He is a person of intelligence, depth and integrity. It is reasonable to trust him and to hope that he will fulfill our highest expectations.
We can now hope that things will improve, both domestically and internationally. So many things have been neglected, so much deliberate wreckage to our republic, Obama is faced with a titanic task to repair the damage.
He is a person of intelligence, depth and integrity. It is reasonable to trust him and to hope that he will fulfill our highest expectations.