By Jack D. Douglas
July 03, 2009 "Lewrockwell" -- Professional armies have traditionally been far more disciplined, especially under the stress of longer-run warfare.
BUT that does not mean they have no turning points or breaking points. In Rome the professional, imperial guard, The Praetorian Guard, was highly disciplined and bore casualties well in the early years. But over the decades of imperial struggles and military in-breeding common to such armies largely cut off from the civil population, they became bored with routine, self-centered, arrogant, puffed up with their own importance, and started deposing and imposing emperors, forcing them to put more and more of the national wealth into the military and so on. The professional military became a tyrannical force no civilians could control, so it controlled them through their imposed emperors.
That was one of the crucial reasons the American Constitutionalists were so desperate to prevent the rise of a professional army in the U.S. The professional army and navy elites of West Point and Annapolis and their minor league schools for officers grew slowly with the growth of America's imperial wars, but America relied on conscripts for mass armies, thus maintaining the civilian dilution of the professionals, until Nixon et al. moved to the professional army in the midst of rebellion by the conscripts and the conscripts to be.
There are always turning points and breaking points in military forces under the stresses of protracted warfare. Pros are better at hiding that, until it becomes so pervasive and most men feel so desperate that they quickly turn against wars and their elite officers who have failed them. When that happens, they feel far fewer restraints about rebelling than conscripts, especially when so many of them are from other nations and can escape to those if the rebellion fails.
I suspect from all the bits and pieces we can see that the U.S. imperial, professional army has turned against the war in Iraq very strongly and that is a crucial reason why the U.S. has retreated from the cities to the lonely 340 bases outside of them where they cannot be attacked easily and the men will have more time to booze and snooze and dream of girls back home. These are lonely bases and depression sets in. They will insist quietly on leaving those bases soon. The situation in Afpak is getting worse and worse and will likely follow the same pattern. The depressed professionals will insist on getting out, quietly unless their more insistent demands are not met. The growing financial crisis will also force the U.S. to curtail these trillion dollar a year military losses.
The Romans finally built a defensive wall across Britain and drew a line along the German rivers and other natural defense positions and declared an end to the long advance into Europe. They went over to the defensive and slowly but relentlessly retreated back toward Rome itself, then fled pall mall as the ever stronger "barbarians" broke through their defenses and finally sacked Rome itself.
The professionalization of an army is a clear signal that the civilian population has turned away from the imperial wars and is no longer willing to suffer to advance the imperial cause. The U.S. did it as an act of desperation as the army fell apart in Vietnam and the conscripts-to-be rioted in the streets and universities and fled to other nations not at war.
Today only a tiny fraction of America's elite young people would be willing to go into the military to fight imperial wars around the world. Almost all of them who do insist on being highly rewarded officers who move up the line fast and retire in twenty years with mucho loot. The ranks are filled with people who have few prospects in civilian society. They look ferocious in their armor with vastly superior fire power, but they are crumbling from inside because, aside from the sociopathic killers who love the gore and narcissistic sense of glory and power it gives them, most of them have weaker and weaker motivation to really "serve." They want to be paid more and more for less and less, like America's professional doctors, politicians, teachers, police, firemen, bankers, and all the other bureaucratic slackers whose hearts are not in the bureaucratic life. The same people who risk death and total exhaustion on the weekend to do impossible things with joy and no pay become depressed androids when Monday morning comes around.
The American Empire is crumbling inside the professionalized, android armies living in lonely and hellish quagmires in the deserts of the world. The American professionals are also crumbling from the inside in America. The whole Imperial System is crumbling from the inside out, as everyone insists on doing less and less for the society – the SYSTEM – for more and more money and power. The Empire is crumbling away from the inside out. The whole society will do the same unless this deadening Bureaucratic System is scrapped and the androids are allowed to become human beings once again.
The American plutocrats and top bureaucrats built the Empire. The American people have always loathed empires and, once they become aware they are spear carriers for this ghastly Empire that is losing its soul in every way, they quit, first inside and then more and more in open flight or rebellion.
The Psych problems of the American professional armies in these imperial wars is horrific. They will not put up with much more of this terrible
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Banks Own The US Government
There are smart ways to raise money and regulate the market, but Wall Street is working to kill any meaningful financial reform
By Dean Baker
July 01, 2009 "The Guardian" -- Last month, when the US Congress failed to pass a bankruptcy reform measure that would have allowed home mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy, senator Dick Durbin succinctly commented: "The banks own the place." That seems pretty clear.
After all, it was the banks' greed that fed the housing bubble with loony loans that were guaranteed to go bad. Of course the finance guys also made a fortune guaranteeing the loans that were guaranteed to go bad (ie AIG), and when everything went bust, the taxpayers got handed the bill. The cost of the bailout will certainly be in the hundreds of billions, if not more than $1tn when it is all over.
More importantly, we are looking at the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The cumulative lost output over the years 2008-2012 will almost certainly exceed $5tn. That comes to more than $60,000 for an average family of four. This is the price that we are paying for the bankers' greed, coupled with incredible incompetence and/or corruption from our regulators.
Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to think that the bankers would be keeping a low profile for a while. That's not the way it works in Washington. The banks are aggressively pushing their case in Congress and Obama administration. Not only are we not going to see bankruptcy reform, but any financial reform package that gets through Congress will probably contain enough loopholes that it will be almost useless.
In this political environment, the poor might get empathy, but Wall Street gets money, and lots of it. Even when the issue is global warming Wall Street has its hand out. The fees on trading carbon permits could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades. A simple carbon tax would have been far more efficient, but efficiency is not the most important value when it comes to making Wall Street richer.
This is why it was so encouraging to see congressman Peter DeFazio's proposal to tax trades in oil options and futures. DeFazio proposed a tax of 0.02% on trades in oil futures and options as a way to make up a shortfall in the federal government's highway trust fund. This tax could raise billions of dollars each year in revenue and make speculation in the oil market a more dangerous affair.
The logic is very simple. For someone using these markets to hedge, the tax will be inconsequential. For example, a farmer that hedges a $400,000 wheat crop will pay $80 when selling a future. Similarly, airlines that hedge by buying oil futures will barely notice the higher cost. In fact, because trading costs have fallen so much in recent decades, a tax at this level would just be raising costs back to their levels of two decades ago, a point at which there was already a very vibrant futures and options market.
However, even a modest tax will make life much more difficult for speculators. Many of them expect to make quick short-term gains, often buying and selling the same day. For these traders, an increase in transactions costs of 0.02% would be a burden.
Of course, a modest tax will not drive the speculators out of the market altogether, it is just likely to reduce the volume of speculation. For this reason, even a modest tax can still raise an enormous amount of money in a market where tens of trillions of dollars of derivatives changes hands each year.
This tax can best be thought of as a tax on gambling. Gambling is heavily taxed in every state that allows it. DeFazio's bill is effectively a tax on gambling in the oil markets. It will not stop it, but it would discourage it, and in the process raise a huge amount of money that could go to productive purposes.
The bill faces an enormous uphill struggle in Congress. As Durbin said, the banks own the place, and they are not going to just step aside and let Congress impose a tax on such a lucrative business. But, it is important that people know about the DeFazio bill. First, DeFazio deserves a place on the honour roll for standing up to Wall Street.
Also, it is important for the public to know that there is a relatively low-cost way to make up the shortfall in the highway trust fund. When Congress raises some other tax and/or cuts a useful programme, people should know that there was a better alternative. It just didn't happen because, as we know, the banks own the place.
By Dean Baker
July 01, 2009 "The Guardian" -- Last month, when the US Congress failed to pass a bankruptcy reform measure that would have allowed home mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy, senator Dick Durbin succinctly commented: "The banks own the place." That seems pretty clear.
After all, it was the banks' greed that fed the housing bubble with loony loans that were guaranteed to go bad. Of course the finance guys also made a fortune guaranteeing the loans that were guaranteed to go bad (ie AIG), and when everything went bust, the taxpayers got handed the bill. The cost of the bailout will certainly be in the hundreds of billions, if not more than $1tn when it is all over.
More importantly, we are looking at the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The cumulative lost output over the years 2008-2012 will almost certainly exceed $5tn. That comes to more than $60,000 for an average family of four. This is the price that we are paying for the bankers' greed, coupled with incredible incompetence and/or corruption from our regulators.
Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to think that the bankers would be keeping a low profile for a while. That's not the way it works in Washington. The banks are aggressively pushing their case in Congress and Obama administration. Not only are we not going to see bankruptcy reform, but any financial reform package that gets through Congress will probably contain enough loopholes that it will be almost useless.
In this political environment, the poor might get empathy, but Wall Street gets money, and lots of it. Even when the issue is global warming Wall Street has its hand out. The fees on trading carbon permits could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades. A simple carbon tax would have been far more efficient, but efficiency is not the most important value when it comes to making Wall Street richer.
This is why it was so encouraging to see congressman Peter DeFazio's proposal to tax trades in oil options and futures. DeFazio proposed a tax of 0.02% on trades in oil futures and options as a way to make up a shortfall in the federal government's highway trust fund. This tax could raise billions of dollars each year in revenue and make speculation in the oil market a more dangerous affair.
The logic is very simple. For someone using these markets to hedge, the tax will be inconsequential. For example, a farmer that hedges a $400,000 wheat crop will pay $80 when selling a future. Similarly, airlines that hedge by buying oil futures will barely notice the higher cost. In fact, because trading costs have fallen so much in recent decades, a tax at this level would just be raising costs back to their levels of two decades ago, a point at which there was already a very vibrant futures and options market.
However, even a modest tax will make life much more difficult for speculators. Many of them expect to make quick short-term gains, often buying and selling the same day. For these traders, an increase in transactions costs of 0.02% would be a burden.
Of course, a modest tax will not drive the speculators out of the market altogether, it is just likely to reduce the volume of speculation. For this reason, even a modest tax can still raise an enormous amount of money in a market where tens of trillions of dollars of derivatives changes hands each year.
This tax can best be thought of as a tax on gambling. Gambling is heavily taxed in every state that allows it. DeFazio's bill is effectively a tax on gambling in the oil markets. It will not stop it, but it would discourage it, and in the process raise a huge amount of money that could go to productive purposes.
The bill faces an enormous uphill struggle in Congress. As Durbin said, the banks own the place, and they are not going to just step aside and let Congress impose a tax on such a lucrative business. But, it is important that people know about the DeFazio bill. First, DeFazio deserves a place on the honour roll for standing up to Wall Street.
Also, it is important for the public to know that there is a relatively low-cost way to make up the shortfall in the highway trust fund. When Congress raises some other tax and/or cuts a useful programme, people should know that there was a better alternative. It just didn't happen because, as we know, the banks own the place.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
America's "Bases of Empire"
by Stephen Lendman
Global Research, June 27, 2009
Besides waging perpetual wars, nothing better reveals America's imperial agenda than its hundreds of global bases - for offense, not defense at a time the US hasn't had an enemy since the Japanese surrendered in August 1945.
So when they don't exist, they're invented as former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles W. Freeman, Jr., suggested in a May 24, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs:
"When our descendants look back on the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, they will be puzzled. The end of the Cold War relieved Americans of almost all international anxieties." As the world's sole remaining superpower, "We did not rise to the occasion."
"We are engaged in a war, a global war on terror, a long war, we are told....How can a war with no defined ends beyond the avoidance of retreat ever reach a convenient stopping point? How can we win (any war let alone the hearts and minds of millions) with an enemy so ill-understood that we must invent a nonexistent ideology" for justification.
In his 2006 book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson discussed the known number of foreign US bases by size and branch of service. According to the Department of Defense's Base Structure Report (BSR) through 2005, it totaled 737 but likely exceeds 1000 today with so many new ones built since then - some known, others secret and always others planned.
Johnson also highlighted the fallout - unacceptable noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, and abusive soldiers committing crimes that include rape and murder that often go unpunished under provisions in US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).
An excerpt from his book reads:
"Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial footprint and the militarism that grows with it....even more than in past empires, a well-entrenched militarism (lies) at the heart of our imperial adventures." To such an extreme that "each year we spend more on our armed forces than all others nations on Earth combined" to garrison troops "in more than 130 countries."
The Pentagon lists them in its annual Base Structure Report, but "its official count of between 737 and 860 overseas installations is incomplete" because excluded are numerous secret ones - for espionage, unofficially shared with host countries, or other reasons not disclosed.
The bases reflect "force projection" for global dominance and are positioned to strike any nation that might challenge it, friend or foe. But they come at a great cost - well over $1 trillion annually with all homeland, foreign, and other budget categories included. According to Johnson, a far greater one as well, the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy" as well as the end of democracy, loss of personal freedoms, and tyranny.
During WW II, Brits complained that GIs were "overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here." Despite the war, some called it the US "occupation," and UK historian David Reynolds discussed it in his book, "Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1945." He borrowed the word from George Orwell's December 1943 comment that "It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory."
Today, millions in countries globally feel the same, and with good reason. Even at peace, America's presence is intrusive, hostile, and at the expense of the host country populations.
A new book is now out titled "The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts," a collection of important articles on America's worldwide empire and military presence that enforces it.
It's edited by Catherine Lutz, Brown University Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Watson Institute for International Studies with a forward by Cynthia Enloe, Clark University Research Professor, Department of International Development, Community and Environment and Women's Studies.
Enloe dispels some common myths in her forward:
-- about Americans believing that foreign bases benefit the host country populations;
-- the notion that other countries request our presence;
-- that the US military is the most "civilized" in the world, and
-- their presence is for other nations' security "in an age of an allegedly diffuse (and ill-defined) 'global terror,' (that) trumps any other 'lesser' concerns."
Contributors to "The Bases of Empire" reflect a powerfully opposite point of view as well as Enloe in her forward and Lutz in her detailed introduction, discussed below.
Introduction - Bases, Empire, and Global Response
Lutz cites the "unprecedented....global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the US military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world." Its presence shows that America stands "able and willing to control events in other regions militarily" and proves it through numerous foreign wars and other hostile interventions, directly or through proxies.
Citing data from DOD's 2007 Base Structure Report (BSR), she states:
"Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion."
However, the numbers are misleading as they exclude the massive base and troop presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, former Soviet republics, and Warsaw Pact countries as well as unknown numbers of secret facilities in numerous other nations. They consist of three types:
-- Main Operating Bases (MOBs) like the Iraq Balad Air Base housing 30,000 troops, 10,000 contractors, and covering 16 square miles plus another 12-square mile "security perimeter." MOBs are large and permanent, have extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters, accommodations for families in non-war zones, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and nearly anything available in a typical US city.
-- Forward Operation Sites (FOSs) that are also major installations but are smaller than MOBs, and
-- Cooperative Security Locations (CLSs) that are small, austere, called 'lily pads," - to preposition weapons, munitions, and modest numbers of troops.
Lutz highlights the fallout:
"The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world's people feel (not at all) reassured by (their) global reach," and with good reason.
Farm and public land is expropriated for their use. Toxic pollution is enormous as well as extensive environmental damage. Noise levels from round-the-clock aircraft are intolerable, and around numerous bases America is at war. It also imprisons and tortures thousands, props up despotic rulers for its own advantage, and virtually holds the entire planet hostage to its extremist agenda.
Lutz says this book describes US militarism globally and campaigns to hold America accountable for the "damage and to reorient (host) countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions."
For its part, America occupies the world, reflects a hostile presence, trains about 100,000 local forces in 180 countries as partners, and turns a blind eye to human rights abuses, by its own troops and those of host nations.
Besides its presence in fixed bases, the Pentagon is involved in "jungle, urban, desert, maritime, and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape" - always intrusive and often provocative as in the Philippines. After it was forced to give up its bases in 1992, US troops remained in the country despite strong popular opposition and the Philippine constitution prohibiting the basing of foreign forces. No matter, US military and civilian personnel lobby to change local laws to accommodate America's access.
Laws are there for legitimate reasons, one of which is the focus of this book - the impact and costs that a foreign presence has on host countries' people. Lutz explores why it's there, how it's configured, popular myths, and "the global movement to push back or expel (it) altogether."
The Purpose of US Bases
They reflect empire, an aim to dominate everywhere, a sense of "racial, cultural, or social superiority," and a success when "wealth is extracted from peripheral areas and redistributed to the imperial center."
The Pentagon claims they're in place to:
-- defend the homeland with a forward or global presence; and
-- provide other nations with security.
In fact, they're to control trade, resources, local supplies of cheap labor, and political, economic, and social life of host countries. They also force them to support American imperialism, including foreign wars despite harmful fallout to local populations.
A Short History of US Bases
-- they go back to colonial America, then grew to a "frontier project" to remove Native Indians for a new nation with European settlers;
-- in 1938, 14 foreign bases existed; post-WW II "an astounding 30,000 (large and small) installations" were in about 100 countries; by 1948, it was 2000;
-- besides creating America coast-to-coast and the 1846 - 48 Mexican war, US history reflects three imperial periods:
(1) the 1898 Spanish-American war conquest and occupation of foreign territory and acquisition of bases in them;
(2) World War II and its Cold War aftermath established the "bulk of the US basing system;" even so, from 1947 - 1990, America was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela; in the 1990s and later, the Pentagon was forced out of the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico's island-municipality Vieques, Uzbekistan, and Ecuador, and decided voluntarily to leave elsewhere;
(3) post-9/11 militarism under George Bush neocons advanced the goal of "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.
Common Myths about US Foreign Bases
Why do sovereign nations and the US public tolerate them? One explanation is that "the bases are naturalized or normalized, meaning that they are thought of as unremarkable, inevitable, and legitimate," and militarism supports these notions as the way to bring order to a dangerous world.
The Pentagon argues their legitimacy on these grounds:
-- "utilitarianism and realism" as follows:
(1) to secure America by deterring attacks and preventing or removing military challenges;
(2) overseas forces represent America's first line of defense; and
(3) "potential security challenges in Asia" require American intervention to prevent or intervene to "restore order."
Strategic language justifies them to project power anywhere in the world and "contend with (any) uncertainty (regarding America's) security challenges."
Bases also "serve the national economic interests of the United States, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain the American standard of living...." Also to react to any threat, maintain trade, keep commerce routes open, and assure the dollar remains the world's dominant reserve currency. In a word, to have America's footprint everywhere with a military presence for enforcement.
US forces are a "visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower" and its goal to keep it that way unchallenged. It suggests that more bases are better and a way to project a visible presence everywhere or close by.
A second argument "sees them as positive expressions of American character, and particularly its humanitarian ethos." The Pentagon portrays itself as a benefactor, a liberator, and helper on the scene at times of natural or other disasters. We claim bases are "gifts to other nations, both as defense sites and as wealth generators. They represent American altruism and sacrifice" when, in fact, they're for hardline dominance intolerant of opposition, national sovereignty, democratic freedoms, and social justice.
They also fail on their own terms. Instead of providing safety and security, they incite antagonism, opposition and blowback against an American occupier and enemy. Yet they proliferate on the notion that "humans are naturally violent and that war can be a glorious and good venture." It's also hugely profitable for the defense establishment and related industries, energy and technology to name two.
The World Responds
"Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases." For some, just their presence is an affront to national sovereignty and pride. Others reject their purpose - aggressive wars, continued violence, and all the other above-cited fallout wherever they're located. Globally, these bases "represent a massive injustice" to host nations and communities where they're located.
Despite providing jobs for local workers, wages are poor, benefits few if any, and most Pentagon dollars flow to large military contractors, other major US corporations, and selected local business elites. Ordinary people are exploited and entirely left out, especially in developing countries, hence their opposition to militarism and foreign occupation.
"With the end of the Cold War, the central pretext for most US bases evaporated, and calls for their return were renewed." In 1991, a successful Philippine movement ousted them with a post-Ferdinand Marcos constitution declaring:
"foreign military bases, troops or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, when the Congress so requires, ratified by a majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose."
In 2003, sustained direct action campaigns and political lobbying also succeeded in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in part because naval activities caused environmental and health damage - a core issue wherever US bases are located.
"The Bases of Empire includes 10 articles by different writers, divided in two parts: Mapping US Power and Global Resistance.
Part I includes:
-- Joseph Gerson's "US Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives;"
-- John Lindsay-Poland's "US Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean;"
-- David Heller and Hans Lammerant's "US Nuclear Weapons Bases in Europe;" and
-- Tom Englehardt's "Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site."
Part II includes:
-- Roland Simbulan's "People's Movement Response to Evolving US Military Activities in the Philippines;"
-- Katherine McCaffrey's "Environmental Struggle after the Cold War: New Forms of Resistance to the US Military in Vieques, Puerto Rico;"
-- Ayse Gil Altinay and Amy Holmes "Opposition to the US Military Presence in Turkey in the Context of the Iraq War;"
-- Kyle Kajihiro's "Resisting Militarism in Hawaii;" and two other articles discussed below.
David Vine and Laura Jeffrey's "Give Us Back Diego Garcia: Unity and Division among Activists in the Indian Ocean."
Diego Garcia is an 84-square mile British-controlled Indian Ocean island in the Chagos archipelago, lying strategically half way between Asia and Africa, and the reason the Pentagon wants it.
It was home to indigenous Chagossians, British citizens, before being expelled between 1967 - 1973 to let America have their island-state as a military base. In flagrant denial of their human rights, they were mass-exiled to Mauritius and Seychelles, 1300 miles away, where they remain in abject poverty and despair. The population had no say, and those who objected were lied to and told they had no choice because their removal was "legal" under colonial rule.
In their new home, life was hellish. They were consigned to a society foreign to their simple ways and weren't able to adjust. On Diego Garcia, they had their own home, grew their own food, fished, and worked on plantations. In exile, they needed jobs to survive but couldn't get them. By the mid-1970s, most were unemployed, impoverished and began to die, but the British Foreign Office and High Commission told them to let the Mauritius and Seychelles governments handle it.
Chagossians are UK citizens entitled to the same rights as other Brits, but all they got was 1000 pounds (around $1600 today) in exchange for renouncing their right to return, agreed to on a document they couldn't read.
The history of this episode was hidden until the 1990s when declassified documents were found in the National Archives at Kew in London. They proved a conspiracy between Britain and America that the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Article 7 calls a "deportation or forcible transfer of a population (and) and crime against humanity."
Britain's action also violated the UN Charter's Article 73 that obliges a colonial government to obey its "sacred trust" to protect the human rights of its people. Instead, America and the UK engaged in cover-up and deception that continued for a decade and went to the highest levels of both governments. Involved were prime minister Harold Wilson and Queen Elizabeth along with presidents Johnson, Nixon and others.
Everything was hidden, including financial kickbacks Washington made that were concealed from Congress and Parliament. That changed once the truth came out. On November 3, 2000, the British High Court stunned the government, cited the Magna Carta, annulled the original deportation order, and effectively ruled that British subjects were entitled to go home. However, the victory was short-lived as a year later Chagossians were back in the High Court seeking compensation for their ordeal.
This time a hostile judge called their case "unmeritorious" and denied their claim. Three months later, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Chagos sent an "order-in-council" to the Queen for her automatic approval that overturned the High Court 2000 victory, banning Chagossians from ever returning home.
Nonetheless, they pursued their case, again before the High Court. On May 11, 2006, a damning verdict condemned the expulsion order as "repugnant" and overturned the Blair government's "order-in-council." Thus far to no avail, yet Chagossians still fight for their right of return and an end to their decades-long plight.
They held an April 18, 2009 meeting, met with the Royal Commonwealth Society in late May, made their case, but it remains unresolved. The UK Chagos Support Association said at the time:
"the original people of Chagos are dying of broken hearts and spirit. They are still waiting for justice to be done and it seems like this is dragging until all the people who really have the right to fight for the cause no longer have a voice. It has been 45 years and we believe it is time that justice is done and peace is found." Thus far, Britain and Washington won't agree. Imperial considerations take precedence over all else.
Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato's "Okinawa; Women's Struggle for Demilitarization."
Okinawa is Japan's southern-most and poorest prefecture. It's also home to dozens of US military bases since 1945. In his book "Nemesis," Chalmers Johnson cited a history of abuse - from 1998 - 2004 alone, 2024 reported crimes and accidents in which US forces were involved. Only one led to a court-martial, 318 others to administrative discipline, and the rest were absolved, yet they involved robberies, assaults, rapes and reckless homicides. Okinawa's women and girls suffered most.
Akibayashi is a researcher at the Institute for Gender Studies at Toyko's Ochanomizu University. Takazato is an activist fighter for women's rights, especially against the threat of US military personnel-committed rape and sexual assaults. She's also a City Council member of Okinawa's capital, Naha, and helped found Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and the Rape Emergency Intervention Counseling Center of Okinawa, established after three US Marines gang-raped a 12-year old girl on September 4, 1995.
After Japan surrendered in 1945, America wrote its constitution, and occupied the country ever since, now with 88 bases in a nation smaller than California. Thirty-seven are on Okinawa, a tiny sliver of land about the size of a large US city, so it's easy to understand why its people are long-suffering and justifiably angry.
They've been practically pushed into the Pacific to accommodate America's occupation, forced to relinquish their most valued real estate, and put up with over six decades of all the above-cited abuses. Their greatest outrage is over the SOFA's article 17 covering criminal justice. It states:
"The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component (shall) remain with the United States until he is charged."
It means when US personnel commit crimes, including rape and murder, Japanese investigative authorities have no exclusive access to suspects until they're indicted in court. That alone hamstrings investigations enough to make prosecutors reluctant to press charges because they can't get enough evidence for trials. Further, the longer things drag out, the easier it is for the Pentagon to whitewash crimes and transfer guilty parties to new locations, far removed from Okinawa.
The most serious incident was the above-cited 1995 rape. The 12-year old girl involved was also beaten, then left on a beach after which the three Marines returned to their base in a rented car. In October, 85,000 Okinawans protested. They demanded Japanese and American authorities address the issue after the Pentagon initially refused to hand over suspects to Japanese police. Usually they never do anywhere, but this case was an exception. Because of political pressure, the Marines were arrested, tried in a Japanese court, convicted and sentenced to prison terms for their crime - seven years for two of them and six and a half for the other.
This case highlights what Okinawans and other people have endured for decades. SOFAs let the Pentagon run its affairs unaccountable to host country laws, including on Okinawa. The result everywhere is that US personnel get away with rapes, drunken brawling, muggings, drug violations, reckless driving and related accidents, arson, and criminal homicide, especially in host countries with non-white populations - abuses unchanged for decades on Okinawa.
As a result, Akibayashi and Takazato concluded:
-- "Integral elements of misogyny infect military training....The military is a violence-producing institution to which sexual and gender violence are intrinsic....The essence of military forces is their pervasive, deep-rooted contempt for women, which can be seen in military training that completely denies femininity and praises hegemonic masculinity," and
-- "The OWAAMV (Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence) movement illustrates from a gender perspective that 'the protected,' who are structurally deprived of political power, are in fact not protected by the militarized security policies; rather their livelihoods are made insecure by these very policies." Gated bases don't deter violence outside them and result in local populations being oppressed and denied their rights when it happens.
America's "Bases of Empire" menace world societies. Okinawan women and young girls bear testimony to how grievously.
Global Research, June 27, 2009
Besides waging perpetual wars, nothing better reveals America's imperial agenda than its hundreds of global bases - for offense, not defense at a time the US hasn't had an enemy since the Japanese surrendered in August 1945.
So when they don't exist, they're invented as former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles W. Freeman, Jr., suggested in a May 24, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs:
"When our descendants look back on the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, they will be puzzled. The end of the Cold War relieved Americans of almost all international anxieties." As the world's sole remaining superpower, "We did not rise to the occasion."
"We are engaged in a war, a global war on terror, a long war, we are told....How can a war with no defined ends beyond the avoidance of retreat ever reach a convenient stopping point? How can we win (any war let alone the hearts and minds of millions) with an enemy so ill-understood that we must invent a nonexistent ideology" for justification.
In his 2006 book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson discussed the known number of foreign US bases by size and branch of service. According to the Department of Defense's Base Structure Report (BSR) through 2005, it totaled 737 but likely exceeds 1000 today with so many new ones built since then - some known, others secret and always others planned.
Johnson also highlighted the fallout - unacceptable noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, and abusive soldiers committing crimes that include rape and murder that often go unpunished under provisions in US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).
An excerpt from his book reads:
"Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial footprint and the militarism that grows with it....even more than in past empires, a well-entrenched militarism (lies) at the heart of our imperial adventures." To such an extreme that "each year we spend more on our armed forces than all others nations on Earth combined" to garrison troops "in more than 130 countries."
The Pentagon lists them in its annual Base Structure Report, but "its official count of between 737 and 860 overseas installations is incomplete" because excluded are numerous secret ones - for espionage, unofficially shared with host countries, or other reasons not disclosed.
The bases reflect "force projection" for global dominance and are positioned to strike any nation that might challenge it, friend or foe. But they come at a great cost - well over $1 trillion annually with all homeland, foreign, and other budget categories included. According to Johnson, a far greater one as well, the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy" as well as the end of democracy, loss of personal freedoms, and tyranny.
During WW II, Brits complained that GIs were "overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here." Despite the war, some called it the US "occupation," and UK historian David Reynolds discussed it in his book, "Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1945." He borrowed the word from George Orwell's December 1943 comment that "It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory."
Today, millions in countries globally feel the same, and with good reason. Even at peace, America's presence is intrusive, hostile, and at the expense of the host country populations.
A new book is now out titled "The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts," a collection of important articles on America's worldwide empire and military presence that enforces it.
It's edited by Catherine Lutz, Brown University Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Watson Institute for International Studies with a forward by Cynthia Enloe, Clark University Research Professor, Department of International Development, Community and Environment and Women's Studies.
Enloe dispels some common myths in her forward:
-- about Americans believing that foreign bases benefit the host country populations;
-- the notion that other countries request our presence;
-- that the US military is the most "civilized" in the world, and
-- their presence is for other nations' security "in an age of an allegedly diffuse (and ill-defined) 'global terror,' (that) trumps any other 'lesser' concerns."
Contributors to "The Bases of Empire" reflect a powerfully opposite point of view as well as Enloe in her forward and Lutz in her detailed introduction, discussed below.
Introduction - Bases, Empire, and Global Response
Lutz cites the "unprecedented....global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the US military, and the ambition with which it is being deployed around the world." Its presence shows that America stands "able and willing to control events in other regions militarily" and proves it through numerous foreign wars and other hostile interventions, directly or through proxies.
Citing data from DOD's 2007 Base Structure Report (BSR), she states:
"Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. There, the US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion."
However, the numbers are misleading as they exclude the massive base and troop presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, former Soviet republics, and Warsaw Pact countries as well as unknown numbers of secret facilities in numerous other nations. They consist of three types:
-- Main Operating Bases (MOBs) like the Iraq Balad Air Base housing 30,000 troops, 10,000 contractors, and covering 16 square miles plus another 12-square mile "security perimeter." MOBs are large and permanent, have extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters, accommodations for families in non-war zones, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and nearly anything available in a typical US city.
-- Forward Operation Sites (FOSs) that are also major installations but are smaller than MOBs, and
-- Cooperative Security Locations (CLSs) that are small, austere, called 'lily pads," - to preposition weapons, munitions, and modest numbers of troops.
Lutz highlights the fallout:
"The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world's people feel (not at all) reassured by (their) global reach," and with good reason.
Farm and public land is expropriated for their use. Toxic pollution is enormous as well as extensive environmental damage. Noise levels from round-the-clock aircraft are intolerable, and around numerous bases America is at war. It also imprisons and tortures thousands, props up despotic rulers for its own advantage, and virtually holds the entire planet hostage to its extremist agenda.
Lutz says this book describes US militarism globally and campaigns to hold America accountable for the "damage and to reorient (host) countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions."
For its part, America occupies the world, reflects a hostile presence, trains about 100,000 local forces in 180 countries as partners, and turns a blind eye to human rights abuses, by its own troops and those of host nations.
Besides its presence in fixed bases, the Pentagon is involved in "jungle, urban, desert, maritime, and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape" - always intrusive and often provocative as in the Philippines. After it was forced to give up its bases in 1992, US troops remained in the country despite strong popular opposition and the Philippine constitution prohibiting the basing of foreign forces. No matter, US military and civilian personnel lobby to change local laws to accommodate America's access.
Laws are there for legitimate reasons, one of which is the focus of this book - the impact and costs that a foreign presence has on host countries' people. Lutz explores why it's there, how it's configured, popular myths, and "the global movement to push back or expel (it) altogether."
The Purpose of US Bases
They reflect empire, an aim to dominate everywhere, a sense of "racial, cultural, or social superiority," and a success when "wealth is extracted from peripheral areas and redistributed to the imperial center."
The Pentagon claims they're in place to:
-- defend the homeland with a forward or global presence; and
-- provide other nations with security.
In fact, they're to control trade, resources, local supplies of cheap labor, and political, economic, and social life of host countries. They also force them to support American imperialism, including foreign wars despite harmful fallout to local populations.
A Short History of US Bases
-- they go back to colonial America, then grew to a "frontier project" to remove Native Indians for a new nation with European settlers;
-- in 1938, 14 foreign bases existed; post-WW II "an astounding 30,000 (large and small) installations" were in about 100 countries; by 1948, it was 2000;
-- besides creating America coast-to-coast and the 1846 - 48 Mexican war, US history reflects three imperial periods:
(1) the 1898 Spanish-American war conquest and occupation of foreign territory and acquisition of bases in them;
(2) World War II and its Cold War aftermath established the "bulk of the US basing system;" even so, from 1947 - 1990, America was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela; in the 1990s and later, the Pentagon was forced out of the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico's island-municipality Vieques, Uzbekistan, and Ecuador, and decided voluntarily to leave elsewhere;
(3) post-9/11 militarism under George Bush neocons advanced the goal of "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.
Common Myths about US Foreign Bases
Why do sovereign nations and the US public tolerate them? One explanation is that "the bases are naturalized or normalized, meaning that they are thought of as unremarkable, inevitable, and legitimate," and militarism supports these notions as the way to bring order to a dangerous world.
The Pentagon argues their legitimacy on these grounds:
-- "utilitarianism and realism" as follows:
(1) to secure America by deterring attacks and preventing or removing military challenges;
(2) overseas forces represent America's first line of defense; and
(3) "potential security challenges in Asia" require American intervention to prevent or intervene to "restore order."
Strategic language justifies them to project power anywhere in the world and "contend with (any) uncertainty (regarding America's) security challenges."
Bases also "serve the national economic interests of the United States, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain the American standard of living...." Also to react to any threat, maintain trade, keep commerce routes open, and assure the dollar remains the world's dominant reserve currency. In a word, to have America's footprint everywhere with a military presence for enforcement.
US forces are a "visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower" and its goal to keep it that way unchallenged. It suggests that more bases are better and a way to project a visible presence everywhere or close by.
A second argument "sees them as positive expressions of American character, and particularly its humanitarian ethos." The Pentagon portrays itself as a benefactor, a liberator, and helper on the scene at times of natural or other disasters. We claim bases are "gifts to other nations, both as defense sites and as wealth generators. They represent American altruism and sacrifice" when, in fact, they're for hardline dominance intolerant of opposition, national sovereignty, democratic freedoms, and social justice.
They also fail on their own terms. Instead of providing safety and security, they incite antagonism, opposition and blowback against an American occupier and enemy. Yet they proliferate on the notion that "humans are naturally violent and that war can be a glorious and good venture." It's also hugely profitable for the defense establishment and related industries, energy and technology to name two.
The World Responds
"Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases." For some, just their presence is an affront to national sovereignty and pride. Others reject their purpose - aggressive wars, continued violence, and all the other above-cited fallout wherever they're located. Globally, these bases "represent a massive injustice" to host nations and communities where they're located.
Despite providing jobs for local workers, wages are poor, benefits few if any, and most Pentagon dollars flow to large military contractors, other major US corporations, and selected local business elites. Ordinary people are exploited and entirely left out, especially in developing countries, hence their opposition to militarism and foreign occupation.
"With the end of the Cold War, the central pretext for most US bases evaporated, and calls for their return were renewed." In 1991, a successful Philippine movement ousted them with a post-Ferdinand Marcos constitution declaring:
"foreign military bases, troops or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, when the Congress so requires, ratified by a majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose."
In 2003, sustained direct action campaigns and political lobbying also succeeded in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in part because naval activities caused environmental and health damage - a core issue wherever US bases are located.
"The Bases of Empire includes 10 articles by different writers, divided in two parts: Mapping US Power and Global Resistance.
Part I includes:
-- Joseph Gerson's "US Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives;"
-- John Lindsay-Poland's "US Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean;"
-- David Heller and Hans Lammerant's "US Nuclear Weapons Bases in Europe;" and
-- Tom Englehardt's "Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site."
Part II includes:
-- Roland Simbulan's "People's Movement Response to Evolving US Military Activities in the Philippines;"
-- Katherine McCaffrey's "Environmental Struggle after the Cold War: New Forms of Resistance to the US Military in Vieques, Puerto Rico;"
-- Ayse Gil Altinay and Amy Holmes "Opposition to the US Military Presence in Turkey in the Context of the Iraq War;"
-- Kyle Kajihiro's "Resisting Militarism in Hawaii;" and two other articles discussed below.
David Vine and Laura Jeffrey's "Give Us Back Diego Garcia: Unity and Division among Activists in the Indian Ocean."
Diego Garcia is an 84-square mile British-controlled Indian Ocean island in the Chagos archipelago, lying strategically half way between Asia and Africa, and the reason the Pentagon wants it.
It was home to indigenous Chagossians, British citizens, before being expelled between 1967 - 1973 to let America have their island-state as a military base. In flagrant denial of their human rights, they were mass-exiled to Mauritius and Seychelles, 1300 miles away, where they remain in abject poverty and despair. The population had no say, and those who objected were lied to and told they had no choice because their removal was "legal" under colonial rule.
In their new home, life was hellish. They were consigned to a society foreign to their simple ways and weren't able to adjust. On Diego Garcia, they had their own home, grew their own food, fished, and worked on plantations. In exile, they needed jobs to survive but couldn't get them. By the mid-1970s, most were unemployed, impoverished and began to die, but the British Foreign Office and High Commission told them to let the Mauritius and Seychelles governments handle it.
Chagossians are UK citizens entitled to the same rights as other Brits, but all they got was 1000 pounds (around $1600 today) in exchange for renouncing their right to return, agreed to on a document they couldn't read.
The history of this episode was hidden until the 1990s when declassified documents were found in the National Archives at Kew in London. They proved a conspiracy between Britain and America that the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Article 7 calls a "deportation or forcible transfer of a population (and) and crime against humanity."
Britain's action also violated the UN Charter's Article 73 that obliges a colonial government to obey its "sacred trust" to protect the human rights of its people. Instead, America and the UK engaged in cover-up and deception that continued for a decade and went to the highest levels of both governments. Involved were prime minister Harold Wilson and Queen Elizabeth along with presidents Johnson, Nixon and others.
Everything was hidden, including financial kickbacks Washington made that were concealed from Congress and Parliament. That changed once the truth came out. On November 3, 2000, the British High Court stunned the government, cited the Magna Carta, annulled the original deportation order, and effectively ruled that British subjects were entitled to go home. However, the victory was short-lived as a year later Chagossians were back in the High Court seeking compensation for their ordeal.
This time a hostile judge called their case "unmeritorious" and denied their claim. Three months later, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Chagos sent an "order-in-council" to the Queen for her automatic approval that overturned the High Court 2000 victory, banning Chagossians from ever returning home.
Nonetheless, they pursued their case, again before the High Court. On May 11, 2006, a damning verdict condemned the expulsion order as "repugnant" and overturned the Blair government's "order-in-council." Thus far to no avail, yet Chagossians still fight for their right of return and an end to their decades-long plight.
They held an April 18, 2009 meeting, met with the Royal Commonwealth Society in late May, made their case, but it remains unresolved. The UK Chagos Support Association said at the time:
"the original people of Chagos are dying of broken hearts and spirit. They are still waiting for justice to be done and it seems like this is dragging until all the people who really have the right to fight for the cause no longer have a voice. It has been 45 years and we believe it is time that justice is done and peace is found." Thus far, Britain and Washington won't agree. Imperial considerations take precedence over all else.
Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato's "Okinawa; Women's Struggle for Demilitarization."
Okinawa is Japan's southern-most and poorest prefecture. It's also home to dozens of US military bases since 1945. In his book "Nemesis," Chalmers Johnson cited a history of abuse - from 1998 - 2004 alone, 2024 reported crimes and accidents in which US forces were involved. Only one led to a court-martial, 318 others to administrative discipline, and the rest were absolved, yet they involved robberies, assaults, rapes and reckless homicides. Okinawa's women and girls suffered most.
Akibayashi is a researcher at the Institute for Gender Studies at Toyko's Ochanomizu University. Takazato is an activist fighter for women's rights, especially against the threat of US military personnel-committed rape and sexual assaults. She's also a City Council member of Okinawa's capital, Naha, and helped found Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and the Rape Emergency Intervention Counseling Center of Okinawa, established after three US Marines gang-raped a 12-year old girl on September 4, 1995.
After Japan surrendered in 1945, America wrote its constitution, and occupied the country ever since, now with 88 bases in a nation smaller than California. Thirty-seven are on Okinawa, a tiny sliver of land about the size of a large US city, so it's easy to understand why its people are long-suffering and justifiably angry.
They've been practically pushed into the Pacific to accommodate America's occupation, forced to relinquish their most valued real estate, and put up with over six decades of all the above-cited abuses. Their greatest outrage is over the SOFA's article 17 covering criminal justice. It states:
"The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component (shall) remain with the United States until he is charged."
It means when US personnel commit crimes, including rape and murder, Japanese investigative authorities have no exclusive access to suspects until they're indicted in court. That alone hamstrings investigations enough to make prosecutors reluctant to press charges because they can't get enough evidence for trials. Further, the longer things drag out, the easier it is for the Pentagon to whitewash crimes and transfer guilty parties to new locations, far removed from Okinawa.
The most serious incident was the above-cited 1995 rape. The 12-year old girl involved was also beaten, then left on a beach after which the three Marines returned to their base in a rented car. In October, 85,000 Okinawans protested. They demanded Japanese and American authorities address the issue after the Pentagon initially refused to hand over suspects to Japanese police. Usually they never do anywhere, but this case was an exception. Because of political pressure, the Marines were arrested, tried in a Japanese court, convicted and sentenced to prison terms for their crime - seven years for two of them and six and a half for the other.
This case highlights what Okinawans and other people have endured for decades. SOFAs let the Pentagon run its affairs unaccountable to host country laws, including on Okinawa. The result everywhere is that US personnel get away with rapes, drunken brawling, muggings, drug violations, reckless driving and related accidents, arson, and criminal homicide, especially in host countries with non-white populations - abuses unchanged for decades on Okinawa.
As a result, Akibayashi and Takazato concluded:
-- "Integral elements of misogyny infect military training....The military is a violence-producing institution to which sexual and gender violence are intrinsic....The essence of military forces is their pervasive, deep-rooted contempt for women, which can be seen in military training that completely denies femininity and praises hegemonic masculinity," and
-- "The OWAAMV (Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence) movement illustrates from a gender perspective that 'the protected,' who are structurally deprived of political power, are in fact not protected by the militarized security policies; rather their livelihoods are made insecure by these very policies." Gated bases don't deter violence outside them and result in local populations being oppressed and denied their rights when it happens.
America's "Bases of Empire" menace world societies. Okinawan women and young girls bear testimony to how grievously.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Why America is a Bank-owned State
By Samah El-Shahat
June 23, 2009 "Al Jazeera" -- June 12, 2009 - In my last column I introduced the idea that America's handling of the financial crisis, and in particular the way it has refused to deal with the banks, is more in keeping with how an "emerging" economy might behave and act.
So this week, I will say that America has become a bank-owned state, allowing its banking oligarchs to suffocate the economy so they can survive at any price.
As a development economist, what always made developing and poorer countries stand out was the level of inequality between individuals.
That is, the difference between how a small percentage, usually the country's capitalists, oligarchs and those close to people in power, were overdosing on wealth as the rest struggled to make ends meet, or even survive.
Everyone in the country knew it, from the poorest farmer on the street to the richest oligarch. It was in your face, unashamed, unabated and highly discomforting.
Discomforting because it made all of us who witnessed it feel crippled at the power of the status quo, ruing the unfairness of life when merit always comes last, relative to who you know and who you are.
We took some relief from believing that this only happens because these countries were authoritarian, and not so accountable to their electorate.
Yet, if we look closer at the leading capitalist economies such as those of America and the UK, we will find that inequity raises its ugly head equally, and as starkly, when you look at the numbers.
Kept in the dark
Here too, a small percentage have the lion's share of national income in their hands, while the rest of the population experience stagnant incomes, all within a democratic, rather than an authoritarian, political regime.
Yet the real difference here is that, away from the numbers, the wider population and the electorate were mostly kept in the dark about this.
In 2006, the top one per cent of American households' share of all disposable income amounted to almost a quarter of all households' disposable income, according to Robert Hunter Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics.
In crude terms, one per cent of the population have a quarter of all the wealth.
Moreover, Wade found the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of the population remained almost stagnant after 1980, although consumption kept rising thanks to the build-up of private debt.
This means that 90 per cent of the American economy were financing their American dream on debt.
In the UK, Wade found the pay gap between the highest and average earners had widened alarmingly.
Back in 1989, chief executives pocketed 17 times more than average earners.
By 2007, those same "captains of industry" were earning 75 times more than the average worker.
That is one enormous leap and I wouldn't mind that happening to my salary!
What's good for Wall Street ...
Warning signs that the financial crisis would become the great recession were there for all to see for a long time.
But where were the alarms in the system itself to say that these countries and the individuals in them were pursuing an unsustainable way of life?
Where were the signs that things were going to end disastrously and, worse still, that the most vulnerable might end up paying the heftiest and most disproportionate price than anyone else?
I believe the status quo was allowed to go unquestioned because banks were benefiting obscenely from the interest on our debt, and governments were in cahoots with these banks. Let's not forget that governments conveniently moved away from the provision of affordable healthcare, free university education and affordable housing while the banks entered our lives, aggressively, to fill that void.
In addition, I think that this warped and unjust way of operating was not questioned because the electorate was kept in the dark in the most subtle way possible.
The whole issue was made invisible. It was kept off the radar screens of electoral politics.
The American electorate were made accomplice to this because they were convinced that what was good for Wall Street, was good for America as a whole.
It was a political sleight of hand of the highest order. And this explains the bipartisan agreement to the ill-designed deregulation of the finance sector that we have seen over the years.
America has become a bank-owned state.
Ann Pettifor, a fellow development economist who works for the New Economics Foundation, says the US administration has been hijacked, and democracy has been pushed aside in favour of what is good for the bankers, by what Abraham Lincoln called "the money power".
And how right she is. The way the banks are being bailed out is a clear example of this political edifice.
Sucking the life out of tax-payers
The fact some of these failing banks have been thrown a lifeline is a testament to the hold they have over Barack Obama's administration.
Some of the banks should be allowed to die because they are so insolvent and holding so much in toxic assets that they will forever need to be on taxpayer-funded life support.
The problem is, this life support is sucking the life out of the taxpayer in the process, as it weighs them down with ever-increasing debt.
On top of that, the money could be used to restructure the economy in a way that is less reliant on the financial sector.
Underlying this refusal to kill those banks in poor health is a faulty and, dare I say, convenient assumption, that is not backed up by reality or fact, that the banks are facing a liquidity crisis as opposed to them facing a solvency crisis.
A liquidity crisis means the banks are facing a credit shortage, and once that is sorted, all will be well. A solvency crisis means that the assets of many banks, firms and households are worth less than their debt.
And this means that these banks have to be completely nationalised.
Which leads us to Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, and his "stress tests".
The tests were meant to give a clear and final assessment of these banks' balance sheets, telling us which were healthy and which would not be able to survive and would need more cash if the recession deepens.
As in any induced test, like the ones we undergo when we have our hearts tested, the "stress tests" were meant to simulate worse-case scenarios. Well, that was the promise at least.
The hope was that some would be declared so bad, they would have to go under once and for all.
Unfortunately, the tests turned out peculiarly lacking in stress.
Nouriel Roubini, professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, says: "The government used assumptions for the macro variables in 2009 and 2010 that are so optimistic that the actual data for 2009 are already worse than the adverse scenario."
"As for some crucial variables, such as the unemployment rate – key to proper estimates of default and recovery rates for residential mortages ... and other bank loans – the current trend shows that by the end of 2009 the unemployment rate will be higher than the average unemployment rate assumed in the more adverse scenario for 2010, not for 2009."
The unemployment rate used in the worse-case scenario was assumed to average 8.9 per cent in 2009 and 10.3 per cent in 2010. But unemployment has already reached 9.4 per cent this year, and looks likely to overtake 10.3 per cent by next year.
So, there is nothing really challenging about these worse case scenarios at all.
Next week, I'll write about Timothy Geithner's plan to wipe toxic assets off the banks' balance sheets without getting rid of one single bank ... and how long before we say ENOUGH and really do something about it.
June 23, 2009 "Al Jazeera" -- June 12, 2009 - In my last column I introduced the idea that America's handling of the financial crisis, and in particular the way it has refused to deal with the banks, is more in keeping with how an "emerging" economy might behave and act.
So this week, I will say that America has become a bank-owned state, allowing its banking oligarchs to suffocate the economy so they can survive at any price.
As a development economist, what always made developing and poorer countries stand out was the level of inequality between individuals.
That is, the difference between how a small percentage, usually the country's capitalists, oligarchs and those close to people in power, were overdosing on wealth as the rest struggled to make ends meet, or even survive.
Everyone in the country knew it, from the poorest farmer on the street to the richest oligarch. It was in your face, unashamed, unabated and highly discomforting.
Discomforting because it made all of us who witnessed it feel crippled at the power of the status quo, ruing the unfairness of life when merit always comes last, relative to who you know and who you are.
We took some relief from believing that this only happens because these countries were authoritarian, and not so accountable to their electorate.
Yet, if we look closer at the leading capitalist economies such as those of America and the UK, we will find that inequity raises its ugly head equally, and as starkly, when you look at the numbers.
Kept in the dark
Here too, a small percentage have the lion's share of national income in their hands, while the rest of the population experience stagnant incomes, all within a democratic, rather than an authoritarian, political regime.
Yet the real difference here is that, away from the numbers, the wider population and the electorate were mostly kept in the dark about this.
In 2006, the top one per cent of American households' share of all disposable income amounted to almost a quarter of all households' disposable income, according to Robert Hunter Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics.
In crude terms, one per cent of the population have a quarter of all the wealth.
Moreover, Wade found the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of the population remained almost stagnant after 1980, although consumption kept rising thanks to the build-up of private debt.
This means that 90 per cent of the American economy were financing their American dream on debt.
In the UK, Wade found the pay gap between the highest and average earners had widened alarmingly.
Back in 1989, chief executives pocketed 17 times more than average earners.
By 2007, those same "captains of industry" were earning 75 times more than the average worker.
That is one enormous leap and I wouldn't mind that happening to my salary!
What's good for Wall Street ...
Warning signs that the financial crisis would become the great recession were there for all to see for a long time.
But where were the alarms in the system itself to say that these countries and the individuals in them were pursuing an unsustainable way of life?
Where were the signs that things were going to end disastrously and, worse still, that the most vulnerable might end up paying the heftiest and most disproportionate price than anyone else?
I believe the status quo was allowed to go unquestioned because banks were benefiting obscenely from the interest on our debt, and governments were in cahoots with these banks. Let's not forget that governments conveniently moved away from the provision of affordable healthcare, free university education and affordable housing while the banks entered our lives, aggressively, to fill that void.
In addition, I think that this warped and unjust way of operating was not questioned because the electorate was kept in the dark in the most subtle way possible.
The whole issue was made invisible. It was kept off the radar screens of electoral politics.
The American electorate were made accomplice to this because they were convinced that what was good for Wall Street, was good for America as a whole.
It was a political sleight of hand of the highest order. And this explains the bipartisan agreement to the ill-designed deregulation of the finance sector that we have seen over the years.
America has become a bank-owned state.
Ann Pettifor, a fellow development economist who works for the New Economics Foundation, says the US administration has been hijacked, and democracy has been pushed aside in favour of what is good for the bankers, by what Abraham Lincoln called "the money power".
And how right she is. The way the banks are being bailed out is a clear example of this political edifice.
Sucking the life out of tax-payers
The fact some of these failing banks have been thrown a lifeline is a testament to the hold they have over Barack Obama's administration.
Some of the banks should be allowed to die because they are so insolvent and holding so much in toxic assets that they will forever need to be on taxpayer-funded life support.
The problem is, this life support is sucking the life out of the taxpayer in the process, as it weighs them down with ever-increasing debt.
On top of that, the money could be used to restructure the economy in a way that is less reliant on the financial sector.
Underlying this refusal to kill those banks in poor health is a faulty and, dare I say, convenient assumption, that is not backed up by reality or fact, that the banks are facing a liquidity crisis as opposed to them facing a solvency crisis.
A liquidity crisis means the banks are facing a credit shortage, and once that is sorted, all will be well. A solvency crisis means that the assets of many banks, firms and households are worth less than their debt.
And this means that these banks have to be completely nationalised.
Which leads us to Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, and his "stress tests".
The tests were meant to give a clear and final assessment of these banks' balance sheets, telling us which were healthy and which would not be able to survive and would need more cash if the recession deepens.
As in any induced test, like the ones we undergo when we have our hearts tested, the "stress tests" were meant to simulate worse-case scenarios. Well, that was the promise at least.
The hope was that some would be declared so bad, they would have to go under once and for all.
Unfortunately, the tests turned out peculiarly lacking in stress.
Nouriel Roubini, professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, says: "The government used assumptions for the macro variables in 2009 and 2010 that are so optimistic that the actual data for 2009 are already worse than the adverse scenario."
"As for some crucial variables, such as the unemployment rate – key to proper estimates of default and recovery rates for residential mortages ... and other bank loans – the current trend shows that by the end of 2009 the unemployment rate will be higher than the average unemployment rate assumed in the more adverse scenario for 2010, not for 2009."
The unemployment rate used in the worse-case scenario was assumed to average 8.9 per cent in 2009 and 10.3 per cent in 2010. But unemployment has already reached 9.4 per cent this year, and looks likely to overtake 10.3 per cent by next year.
So, there is nothing really challenging about these worse case scenarios at all.
Next week, I'll write about Timothy Geithner's plan to wipe toxic assets off the banks' balance sheets without getting rid of one single bank ... and how long before we say ENOUGH and really do something about it.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Do Americans Have a Moral Conscience?
By Paul Craig Roberts
May 28, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- Torture is a violation of US and international law. Yet, president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, on the basis of legally incompetent memos prepared by Justice Department officials, gave the OK to interrogators to violate US and international law.
The new Obama administration shows no inclination to uphold the rule of law by prosecuting those who abused their offices and broke the law.
Cheney claims, absurdly, that torture was necessary in order to save American cities from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Many Americans have bought the argument that torture is morally justified in order to make terrorists reveal where ticking nuclear bombs are before they explode.
However, there were no hidden ticking nuclear bombs. Hypothetical scenarios were used to justify torture for other purposes.
We now know that the reason the Bush regime tortured its captives was to coerce false testimony that linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and September 11. Without this “evidence,” the US invasion of Iraq remains a war crime under the Nuremberg standard.
Torture, then, was a second Bush regime crime used to produce an alibi for the illegal and unprovoked US invasion of Iraq.
U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R,Tx) understands the danger to Americans of permitting government to violate the law. In “Torturing the Rule of Law” HERE..., he said that the US government’s use of torture to produce excuses for illegal actions is the most radicalizing force at work today. “The fact that our government engages in evil behavior under the auspices of the American people is what poses the greatest threat to the American people, and it must not be allowed to stand.”
One might think that the American public’s toleration of torture reflects the breakdown of the country’s Christian faith. Alas, a recent poll released by the Pew Forum reveals that most white Christian evangelicals and white Catholics condone torture. In contrast, only a minority of those who seldom or never attend church services condone torture.
It is a known fact that torture produces unreliable information. The only purpose of torture is to produce false confessions. The fact that a majority of American Christians condone torture enabled the Bush regime’s efforts to legalize torture.
George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, has stepped into the Christian void with a powerful book, Torture is a Moral Issue. A collection of essays by thoughtful and moral people, including an American admiral and general, the book demonstrates the danger of torture to the human soul, to civil liberty, and to the morale and safety of soldiers.
Condoning torture, Hunsinger writes, “marks a milestone in the disintegration of American democracy.” In his contribution, Hunsinger destroys the constructed hypothetical scenarios used to create a moral case for torture. He points out that no such real world cases ever exist. Once torture is normalized, it is used despite the absence of the hypothetical scenario.
Hunsinger notes that “evidence” obtained by torture can have catastrophic consequences. In making the case against Iraq at the UN, former Secretary of State Colin Powell assured the countries of the world that his evidence rested on “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” Today Powell and his chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, are ashamed that the “evidence” for Powell’s UN speech turned out to be nothing but the coerced false confession of Al-Libi, who was relentlessly tortured in Egypt in order to produce a justification for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.
Some Americans, unable to face the criminality and inhumanity of their own government, maintain that the government hasn’t tortured anyone, because water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” are not torture. This is really grasping at straws. As Ron Paul points out, according to US precedent alone, water boarding has been considered to be torture since 1945, when the United States hanged Japanese military officers for water boarding captured Americans.
If the Obama regime does not hold the Bush regime accountable for violating US and international law, then the Obama regime is complicit in the Bush regime’s crimes. (Editor's emphasis) If the American people permit Obama to look the other way in order “to move on,” the American people are also complicit in the crimes.
Hunsinger, Paul and others are trying to save our souls, our humanity, our civil liberty and the rule of law. Obama can say that he forbids torture, but if those responsible are not held accountable, he has no way of enforcing his order. As perpetrators are discharged from the military and re-enter society, some will find employment as police officers and prison officials and guards, and the practice will spread. The dark side will take over America.
NOTE:
This piece by Roberts is not as good as his usual writing. There are several problems with it. First, while it's true that torture is used to produce false confessions, it is not the only reason--torture is also utilized to send a message to enemy combatants that they will be punished severely should they persist in an unwinnable battle (rather than submitting to surrender). Moreover, on occasion it is employed simply out of spite/revenge.
Second, it is disconcerting that Roberts references a Pew poll without providing proper documentation-- "most white Christian evangelicals and white Catholics condone torture. In contrast, only a minority of those who seldom or never attend church services condone torture."-- which presumably establishes that Christians are more likely to support torture than "non-Christians" although it is impossible to determine since he instead refers to those who "seldom or never attend church services." The individuals in question could of course be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists and or Agnostics. From the information provided it is unclear whether these "Christians" who allegedly support torture are made up of Protestant Evangelicals and Neoconservative "Catholics" (both of whom--albeit for different reasons favor neoconservative foreign policy) rather than traditional/orthodox Catholics or non-Evangelical (mainline) Protestant Christians. The reader is incapable of determining given that Roberts failed to provide a detailed reference. The fact that some self-professing "Christians" mistakenly believe that the Gospel of Christ is compatible with torture does not make all or a majority of Christians--who rightly object to torture--guilty of it. That would represent a category error and a gross miscarriage of justice where the latter are concerned.
I clearly agree with Roberts that it is crucial to prosecute those who are responsible for the torture policies developed and implemented by the Bush administration. So far, it appears President Obama is more concerned about moving his agenda forward than enforcing the law and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
May 28, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- Torture is a violation of US and international law. Yet, president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, on the basis of legally incompetent memos prepared by Justice Department officials, gave the OK to interrogators to violate US and international law.
The new Obama administration shows no inclination to uphold the rule of law by prosecuting those who abused their offices and broke the law.
Cheney claims, absurdly, that torture was necessary in order to save American cities from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Many Americans have bought the argument that torture is morally justified in order to make terrorists reveal where ticking nuclear bombs are before they explode.
However, there were no hidden ticking nuclear bombs. Hypothetical scenarios were used to justify torture for other purposes.
We now know that the reason the Bush regime tortured its captives was to coerce false testimony that linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and September 11. Without this “evidence,” the US invasion of Iraq remains a war crime under the Nuremberg standard.
Torture, then, was a second Bush regime crime used to produce an alibi for the illegal and unprovoked US invasion of Iraq.
U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R,Tx) understands the danger to Americans of permitting government to violate the law. In “Torturing the Rule of Law” HERE..., he said that the US government’s use of torture to produce excuses for illegal actions is the most radicalizing force at work today. “The fact that our government engages in evil behavior under the auspices of the American people is what poses the greatest threat to the American people, and it must not be allowed to stand.”
One might think that the American public’s toleration of torture reflects the breakdown of the country’s Christian faith. Alas, a recent poll released by the Pew Forum reveals that most white Christian evangelicals and white Catholics condone torture. In contrast, only a minority of those who seldom or never attend church services condone torture.
It is a known fact that torture produces unreliable information. The only purpose of torture is to produce false confessions. The fact that a majority of American Christians condone torture enabled the Bush regime’s efforts to legalize torture.
George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, has stepped into the Christian void with a powerful book, Torture is a Moral Issue. A collection of essays by thoughtful and moral people, including an American admiral and general, the book demonstrates the danger of torture to the human soul, to civil liberty, and to the morale and safety of soldiers.
Condoning torture, Hunsinger writes, “marks a milestone in the disintegration of American democracy.” In his contribution, Hunsinger destroys the constructed hypothetical scenarios used to create a moral case for torture. He points out that no such real world cases ever exist. Once torture is normalized, it is used despite the absence of the hypothetical scenario.
Hunsinger notes that “evidence” obtained by torture can have catastrophic consequences. In making the case against Iraq at the UN, former Secretary of State Colin Powell assured the countries of the world that his evidence rested on “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” Today Powell and his chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, are ashamed that the “evidence” for Powell’s UN speech turned out to be nothing but the coerced false confession of Al-Libi, who was relentlessly tortured in Egypt in order to produce a justification for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.
Some Americans, unable to face the criminality and inhumanity of their own government, maintain that the government hasn’t tortured anyone, because water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” are not torture. This is really grasping at straws. As Ron Paul points out, according to US precedent alone, water boarding has been considered to be torture since 1945, when the United States hanged Japanese military officers for water boarding captured Americans.
If the Obama regime does not hold the Bush regime accountable for violating US and international law, then the Obama regime is complicit in the Bush regime’s crimes. (Editor's emphasis) If the American people permit Obama to look the other way in order “to move on,” the American people are also complicit in the crimes.
Hunsinger, Paul and others are trying to save our souls, our humanity, our civil liberty and the rule of law. Obama can say that he forbids torture, but if those responsible are not held accountable, he has no way of enforcing his order. As perpetrators are discharged from the military and re-enter society, some will find employment as police officers and prison officials and guards, and the practice will spread. The dark side will take over America.
NOTE:
This piece by Roberts is not as good as his usual writing. There are several problems with it. First, while it's true that torture is used to produce false confessions, it is not the only reason--torture is also utilized to send a message to enemy combatants that they will be punished severely should they persist in an unwinnable battle (rather than submitting to surrender). Moreover, on occasion it is employed simply out of spite/revenge.
Second, it is disconcerting that Roberts references a Pew poll without providing proper documentation-- "most white Christian evangelicals and white Catholics condone torture. In contrast, only a minority of those who seldom or never attend church services condone torture."-- which presumably establishes that Christians are more likely to support torture than "non-Christians" although it is impossible to determine since he instead refers to those who "seldom or never attend church services." The individuals in question could of course be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists and or Agnostics. From the information provided it is unclear whether these "Christians" who allegedly support torture are made up of Protestant Evangelicals and Neoconservative "Catholics" (both of whom--albeit for different reasons favor neoconservative foreign policy) rather than traditional/orthodox Catholics or non-Evangelical (mainline) Protestant Christians. The reader is incapable of determining given that Roberts failed to provide a detailed reference. The fact that some self-professing "Christians" mistakenly believe that the Gospel of Christ is compatible with torture does not make all or a majority of Christians--who rightly object to torture--guilty of it. That would represent a category error and a gross miscarriage of justice where the latter are concerned.
I clearly agree with Roberts that it is crucial to prosecute those who are responsible for the torture policies developed and implemented by the Bush administration. So far, it appears President Obama is more concerned about moving his agenda forward than enforcing the law and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Friday, May 29, 2009
The New Bipolar "Bread and Circus" World
Editorial Opinion by: Dr. J. P. Hubert
A strange but remarkable phenomenon now exists in the realm of social discourse. Virtually all concepts which bear upon public policy are presented to the masses as essentially, a choice between two polar opposites. For example, there is the liberal vs. conservative, right vs. left, Republican vs. Democratic views, etc., as if there are no other frames of reference by which one might consider important issues of the day. This needless to say establishes a completely contrived and false dichotomy. It is as if a very attenuated/ distorting prism or lens has been placed before our collective minds eye.
Increasingly, society seems to have embraced the binary gestalt writ-large. For example, the only format which seems to be universally embraced by the corporate (especially television and radio) media when airing debate with respect to an issue of public policy is to arbitrarily select two individuals from opposite sides of the intellectual/political spectrum. Each is then allowed to spew forth their respective “talking points” in an exchange where rhetorical flourish and rank sophistry is allowed to pass for meaningful elucidation of opinion/position(s). Sober analysis and rational discussion through thoughtful and respectful interchange of ideas is simply never forthcoming.
Rather than a situation where so-called experts are asked to come reason together, what one routinely witnesses is largely impolite jousting between two individuals each of whom function as either paid or unpaid advocates for their respective positions—presumably neither would be invited back again were they to attempt anything else. It is inconceivable that one could arrive at the truth through the employment of this commonly utilized (largely entertainment oriented) vehicle/tactic. What it resembles is something akin to a sporting event where two teams compete in a game/contest until one prevails. The viewing public is expected to enthusiastically support one or the other of the two opponents since their positions are not only (presumably) mutually exclusive but supposedly representative of the entire universe of possibilities rather than artificially truncated ones. The entire situation would be laughable if it were not so serious.
Enter Hegel (As Always)
The above enumerated phenomenon has helped create a permanent societal split or division that--while varying to a minor degree on a percentage basis from time to time--never really comes to grip with the essence or nature of any issue/problem. Perhaps an explanation for this unfortunate dilemma is that an apparent Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) has become the chosen mechanism by which our oligarchical elites attempt to program/mold mass opinion. Not only does this technique seriously limit the bounds of acceptable public discourse, it implies that all issues of social import are ultimately to be resolved on the basis of a “rough and tumble” contest of wills and sophistic verbiage rather than any real sense of absolute truth(s) which might serve as guiding principles. This no doubt is a legacy of the Enlightenment. The crucial point is that the acceptable boundary for public discussion is artificially circumscribed by the ruling elites in such a way as to control outcomes both at the level of topic selection and subsequent debate parameters and verbal/written interaction. A good example of this phenomenon is the charade which transpires every four years in which the public is treated to the spectacle of appearing to select from a large field of candidates—two individuals to vie for President of the United States. In reality, the most interesting and controversial candidates are eliminated fairly early such that the two final candidates actually differ quite minimally in terms of domestic and foreign policy preferences. Judging by the evidence, this is by design of the ruling class. In the most recent presidential election, U.S. citizens were given the choice between two seemingly different individuals, one apparently traditional (Mc Cain) the other more exotic representing “change” (Obama)--who Americans presumably preferred. Yet, both were clearly funded by and beholden to the elite power brokers whose interests would be served irrespective of which one prevailed.
It is noteworthy that after only 4 months in office, President Obama has largely followed the Bush/Cheney foreign and domestic (especially economic) policies despite campaigning vociferously against them. There is no evidence that Mr. Obama intends to dismantle the American empire or significantly reduce US militarism. There is nothing to establish that he has repudiated the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. In fact he has authorized offensive US military (armed drones) attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan which have killed innocent non-combatants and most disturbingly announced a policy of preventive detention of “terrorists.” The latter immoral and illegal policy is more aggressive than what the Bush/Cheney administration attempted in that regard.
Abandonment of Reality, Reason
In reality, there are very few issues of public policy which can be adequately considered through the prism of a binary lens--even though doing so has become the new norm. Similarly the related notion that all social/political questions must have either a yes or no answer flies in the face of reality—if true all “what” questions or those having to do with the nature or being of things would be eliminated— an unfortunate but foreseeable effect of the post-Enlightenment abandonment of metaphysics. The result is an artificial oversimplification which does not mirror reality but instead serves as a rhetorical devise by which a proponent of one particular view attempts to dis-intellectually “score points” or in contemporary parlance “spin” the target audience.
Integral to construction of the bipolar worldview is the need to carefully narrow the formulation of any potential issue or premise. For example, one is either for or against gay “marriage” for or against enhanced interrogation (torture), in favor of or against “pre-emptive” war (when what is really meant is preventive war). All are vacuous notions without a careful articulation of what is actually meant by these terms. Once adequately defined that is, with precision, it is sometimes but not always possible to take a pro or con position with respect to some of the so-called issues of the day. The Western legal system now steeped in legal positivism and based as it is in a binary adversarial process clearly contributes to this phenomenon as well.
Constant "Evolution"
A related trend is the completely ad-hoc division that has occurred over what is considered a liberal vs.: conservative view with respect to a given issue. For example, strict literal interpretations of each term (liberal/conservative) yield entirely different conclusions than can be had from a review of commonly understood usages of the terms. In other words, the monikers liberal and conservative have no fixed or foundational meaning and are constantly subject to alteration based on the changing nature of various interest groups that comprise their political bases from time to time. This leads to incompatible contradictions with regard to the policies of self-described members of each group.
It is noteworthy that traditional Paleoconservatives eschew foreign wars of conquest and oppose so-called pre-emptive (preventive) wars. Neoconservatives enthusiastically support both. Which view should be thought to characterize the conservative position? In reality it is a >matter of opinion only. Historically, Neoconservatism is clearly the aberration. The change presumably reflects the result of an internal political power struggle rather than a natural (ideological) evolution among adherents of conservatism.
Theoretically, conservatives (in the sense of preserving the status quo) should favor the continuation of whatever has gone before. If historically the United States engaged in defensive war only--than preventive war would be incompatible with conservatism and vice-versa. By analogy if abortion has become the legal norm, after decades, the conservative view should be pro-abortion. Obviously, the terms are not meant to be taken literally yet it becomes clear that there really is an ad-hoc and arbitrary nature to what is considered liberal and conservative from time to time. Neither term is based on a stable worldview (epistemology, metaphysics and moral philosophy).
Similar contradictions have occurred with respect to the policy positions held by proponents of liberalism (now referred to as adherents of progressive politics—one assumes the change in name was made ostensibly for perceived commercial advantage). Prior to 1973, liberals as defined by the Democratic Party held--along with conservatives as put forth by the Republican Party--that abortion on demand was immoral (the prevailing moral philosophy at the time was still heavily influenced by the ...Christian Ethic) and should be kept illegal as a matter of public policy or at least left to the states to regulate. As a significant percentage of the Democratic Party base became composed of individuals with an interest in liberalizing the existing laws with respect to abortion, the party became “pro-choice” meaning in favor of either federal legislation or judicial action legalizing abortion on demand. In this case, the term liberal from a literal perspective appears to be more in-keeping with the moniker. The change however was made because of the demands of an active, large and growing interest group within the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment. Does that mean that pre-1973 the Democratic Party was conservative not liberal? Yes and no, the point here is that these terms are completely fluid and ultimately without lasting/foundational meaning. What is favored today may be shunned tomorrow by either. To say that one is either liberal or conservative without clarification/amplification is really to reveal almost nothing other than the affiliation of one’s current power-base.
Will to Power
Perhaps more astoundingly, the terms liberal and conservative have no cohesive/conceptual underpinnings which might unify the various disparate strains which make up each. In some respects, liberals appear to espouse conservative policies, in others, conservatives embrace liberal ones. Neoconservatives as has already been mentioned embrace aggressive foreign policy including preventive wars of aggression. This in reality is a very liberal not conservative view. Analogously, most liberals currently oppose foreign wars of aggression and excessive U.S. militarism (in the maintenance of American hegemony) despite the fact that to do so is really a traditionally conservative position. Thoughtful persons find that neither political party has a consistent underlying conceptually unified organizing principle. What then attracts the vast majority of people to one or the other belief system? In the absence of any core worldview orientation it appears that the choice of one or the other is based solely on the need to posses a power-base from which to operate. Since third parties (political) have not been successful in the United States, the choices available are either liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican irrespective of the fact that these terms are constantly changing and without ultimate meaning.
The media (talk-radio and cable especially) essentially mirror this artificial division. For example, Fox News represents the Neoconservative position; MSNBC largely reflects the Liberal or Progressive viewpoint. Similar divisions characterize talk-radio. Traditional or Paleoconservative views are left largely unrepresented by the corporate media with a few exceptions (e.g. Patrick J. Buchanan).
Part of the current bi-polar split involves a separation between Secularism and Traditionalism as the United States progressively abandons all semblance of tradition in favor of Secular Humanism. While liberalism/progressivism almost entirely ascribes to Secularism, there remain parts of the “conservative” coalition which attempt to adhere to more traditionalist views—primarily those Paleoconservatives from whom the Neoconservatives have rested control of the Republican Party. Nevertheless, even here, there is a great deal of overlap. For example, the so-called Libertarian wing of conservatism favors the liberalization of controlled substance laws e.g. Marijuana which most Paleoconservatives oppose. In that sense, Libertarians are much more like liberals (progressives) than traditional conservatives. They are more inclined to accept gay “marriage” than are Paleoconservatives on the grounds of individual liberty or on the basis of civil or personal “rights” criteria. These rights however are fictitious in that they are ungrounded in any fixed or foundational human anthropology (nature or essence). That is to say since the Enlightenment and in the wake of Darwinism (Darwinian philosophy or metaphysical naturalism), human nature is assumed to be fluid. Modern "rights" simply refer to the constantly changing desires/choices which various individuals and groups wish to see codified in the law from time to time.
It becomes apparent that the artificial bi-polar split articulated here is completely without ideological foundation. Evidence seems to indicate that it has become a favored mechanism by which the ruling elites exercise control over the masses. In reality this amounts to a kind of not so subtle Hegelian “brain-washing” which is utilized to change public opinion by making it appear that issues are being fairly debated and democratically resolved. One feels forced to conclude that the binary worldview is nothing but a ruse--a kind of “bread and circus” extravaganza which functions to keep the proletariat pacified while the oligarchical elites proceed with advancing their goals.
A strange but remarkable phenomenon now exists in the realm of social discourse. Virtually all concepts which bear upon public policy are presented to the masses as essentially, a choice between two polar opposites. For example, there is the liberal vs. conservative, right vs. left, Republican vs. Democratic views, etc., as if there are no other frames of reference by which one might consider important issues of the day. This needless to say establishes a completely contrived and false dichotomy. It is as if a very attenuated/ distorting prism or lens has been placed before our collective minds eye.
Increasingly, society seems to have embraced the binary gestalt writ-large. For example, the only format which seems to be universally embraced by the corporate (especially television and radio) media when airing debate with respect to an issue of public policy is to arbitrarily select two individuals from opposite sides of the intellectual/political spectrum. Each is then allowed to spew forth their respective “talking points” in an exchange where rhetorical flourish and rank sophistry is allowed to pass for meaningful elucidation of opinion/position(s). Sober analysis and rational discussion through thoughtful and respectful interchange of ideas is simply never forthcoming.
Rather than a situation where so-called experts are asked to come reason together, what one routinely witnesses is largely impolite jousting between two individuals each of whom function as either paid or unpaid advocates for their respective positions—presumably neither would be invited back again were they to attempt anything else. It is inconceivable that one could arrive at the truth through the employment of this commonly utilized (largely entertainment oriented) vehicle/tactic. What it resembles is something akin to a sporting event where two teams compete in a game/contest until one prevails. The viewing public is expected to enthusiastically support one or the other of the two opponents since their positions are not only (presumably) mutually exclusive but supposedly representative of the entire universe of possibilities rather than artificially truncated ones. The entire situation would be laughable if it were not so serious.
Enter Hegel (As Always)
The above enumerated phenomenon has helped create a permanent societal split or division that--while varying to a minor degree on a percentage basis from time to time--never really comes to grip with the essence or nature of any issue/problem. Perhaps an explanation for this unfortunate dilemma is that an apparent Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) has become the chosen mechanism by which our oligarchical elites attempt to program/mold mass opinion. Not only does this technique seriously limit the bounds of acceptable public discourse, it implies that all issues of social import are ultimately to be resolved on the basis of a “rough and tumble” contest of wills and sophistic verbiage rather than any real sense of absolute truth(s) which might serve as guiding principles. This no doubt is a legacy of the Enlightenment. The crucial point is that the acceptable boundary for public discussion is artificially circumscribed by the ruling elites in such a way as to control outcomes both at the level of topic selection and subsequent debate parameters and verbal/written interaction. A good example of this phenomenon is the charade which transpires every four years in which the public is treated to the spectacle of appearing to select from a large field of candidates—two individuals to vie for President of the United States. In reality, the most interesting and controversial candidates are eliminated fairly early such that the two final candidates actually differ quite minimally in terms of domestic and foreign policy preferences. Judging by the evidence, this is by design of the ruling class. In the most recent presidential election, U.S. citizens were given the choice between two seemingly different individuals, one apparently traditional (Mc Cain) the other more exotic representing “change” (Obama)--who Americans presumably preferred. Yet, both were clearly funded by and beholden to the elite power brokers whose interests would be served irrespective of which one prevailed.
It is noteworthy that after only 4 months in office, President Obama has largely followed the Bush/Cheney foreign and domestic (especially economic) policies despite campaigning vociferously against them. There is no evidence that Mr. Obama intends to dismantle the American empire or significantly reduce US militarism. There is nothing to establish that he has repudiated the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. In fact he has authorized offensive US military (armed drones) attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan which have killed innocent non-combatants and most disturbingly announced a policy of preventive detention of “terrorists.” The latter immoral and illegal policy is more aggressive than what the Bush/Cheney administration attempted in that regard.
Abandonment of Reality, Reason
In reality, there are very few issues of public policy which can be adequately considered through the prism of a binary lens--even though doing so has become the new norm. Similarly the related notion that all social/political questions must have either a yes or no answer flies in the face of reality—if true all “what” questions or those having to do with the nature or being of things would be eliminated— an unfortunate but foreseeable effect of the post-Enlightenment abandonment of metaphysics. The result is an artificial oversimplification which does not mirror reality but instead serves as a rhetorical devise by which a proponent of one particular view attempts to dis-intellectually “score points” or in contemporary parlance “spin” the target audience.
Integral to construction of the bipolar worldview is the need to carefully narrow the formulation of any potential issue or premise. For example, one is either for or against gay “marriage” for or against enhanced interrogation (torture), in favor of or against “pre-emptive” war (when what is really meant is preventive war). All are vacuous notions without a careful articulation of what is actually meant by these terms. Once adequately defined that is, with precision, it is sometimes but not always possible to take a pro or con position with respect to some of the so-called issues of the day. The Western legal system now steeped in legal positivism and based as it is in a binary adversarial process clearly contributes to this phenomenon as well.
Constant "Evolution"
A related trend is the completely ad-hoc division that has occurred over what is considered a liberal vs.: conservative view with respect to a given issue. For example, strict literal interpretations of each term (liberal/conservative) yield entirely different conclusions than can be had from a review of commonly understood usages of the terms. In other words, the monikers liberal and conservative have no fixed or foundational meaning and are constantly subject to alteration based on the changing nature of various interest groups that comprise their political bases from time to time. This leads to incompatible contradictions with regard to the policies of self-described members of each group.
It is noteworthy that traditional Paleoconservatives eschew foreign wars of conquest and oppose so-called pre-emptive (preventive) wars. Neoconservatives enthusiastically support both. Which view should be thought to characterize the conservative position? In reality it is a >matter of opinion only. Historically, Neoconservatism is clearly the aberration. The change presumably reflects the result of an internal political power struggle rather than a natural (ideological) evolution among adherents of conservatism.
Theoretically, conservatives (in the sense of preserving the status quo) should favor the continuation of whatever has gone before. If historically the United States engaged in defensive war only--than preventive war would be incompatible with conservatism and vice-versa. By analogy if abortion has become the legal norm, after decades, the conservative view should be pro-abortion. Obviously, the terms are not meant to be taken literally yet it becomes clear that there really is an ad-hoc and arbitrary nature to what is considered liberal and conservative from time to time. Neither term is based on a stable worldview (epistemology, metaphysics and moral philosophy).
Similar contradictions have occurred with respect to the policy positions held by proponents of liberalism (now referred to as adherents of progressive politics—one assumes the change in name was made ostensibly for perceived commercial advantage). Prior to 1973, liberals as defined by the Democratic Party held--along with conservatives as put forth by the Republican Party--that abortion on demand was immoral (the prevailing moral philosophy at the time was still heavily influenced by the ...Christian Ethic) and should be kept illegal as a matter of public policy or at least left to the states to regulate. As a significant percentage of the Democratic Party base became composed of individuals with an interest in liberalizing the existing laws with respect to abortion, the party became “pro-choice” meaning in favor of either federal legislation or judicial action legalizing abortion on demand. In this case, the term liberal from a literal perspective appears to be more in-keeping with the moniker. The change however was made because of the demands of an active, large and growing interest group within the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment. Does that mean that pre-1973 the Democratic Party was conservative not liberal? Yes and no, the point here is that these terms are completely fluid and ultimately without lasting/foundational meaning. What is favored today may be shunned tomorrow by either. To say that one is either liberal or conservative without clarification/amplification is really to reveal almost nothing other than the affiliation of one’s current power-base.
Will to Power
Perhaps more astoundingly, the terms liberal and conservative have no cohesive/conceptual underpinnings which might unify the various disparate strains which make up each. In some respects, liberals appear to espouse conservative policies, in others, conservatives embrace liberal ones. Neoconservatives as has already been mentioned embrace aggressive foreign policy including preventive wars of aggression. This in reality is a very liberal not conservative view. Analogously, most liberals currently oppose foreign wars of aggression and excessive U.S. militarism (in the maintenance of American hegemony) despite the fact that to do so is really a traditionally conservative position. Thoughtful persons find that neither political party has a consistent underlying conceptually unified organizing principle. What then attracts the vast majority of people to one or the other belief system? In the absence of any core worldview orientation it appears that the choice of one or the other is based solely on the need to posses a power-base from which to operate. Since third parties (political) have not been successful in the United States, the choices available are either liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican irrespective of the fact that these terms are constantly changing and without ultimate meaning.
The media (talk-radio and cable especially) essentially mirror this artificial division. For example, Fox News represents the Neoconservative position; MSNBC largely reflects the Liberal or Progressive viewpoint. Similar divisions characterize talk-radio. Traditional or Paleoconservative views are left largely unrepresented by the corporate media with a few exceptions (e.g. Patrick J. Buchanan).
Part of the current bi-polar split involves a separation between Secularism and Traditionalism as the United States progressively abandons all semblance of tradition in favor of Secular Humanism. While liberalism/progressivism almost entirely ascribes to Secularism, there remain parts of the “conservative” coalition which attempt to adhere to more traditionalist views—primarily those Paleoconservatives from whom the Neoconservatives have rested control of the Republican Party. Nevertheless, even here, there is a great deal of overlap. For example, the so-called Libertarian wing of conservatism favors the liberalization of controlled substance laws e.g. Marijuana which most Paleoconservatives oppose. In that sense, Libertarians are much more like liberals (progressives) than traditional conservatives. They are more inclined to accept gay “marriage” than are Paleoconservatives on the grounds of individual liberty or on the basis of civil or personal “rights” criteria. These rights however are fictitious in that they are ungrounded in any fixed or foundational human anthropology (nature or essence). That is to say since the Enlightenment and in the wake of Darwinism (Darwinian philosophy or metaphysical naturalism), human nature is assumed to be fluid. Modern "rights" simply refer to the constantly changing desires/choices which various individuals and groups wish to see codified in the law from time to time.
It becomes apparent that the artificial bi-polar split articulated here is completely without ideological foundation. Evidence seems to indicate that it has become a favored mechanism by which the ruling elites exercise control over the masses. In reality this amounts to a kind of not so subtle Hegelian “brain-washing” which is utilized to change public opinion by making it appear that issues are being fairly debated and democratically resolved. One feels forced to conclude that the binary worldview is nothing but a ruse--a kind of “bread and circus” extravaganza which functions to keep the proletariat pacified while the oligarchical elites proceed with advancing their goals.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Nuremberg Set a Valid Precedent for Trials of War-crime Suspects in Iraq's Destruction
By Cesar Chelala
May 27, 2009 "Japan Times" -- -NEW YORK — The Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines established after World War II to try Nazi Party members, were developed to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles can also be applied today when considering the conditions that led to the Iraq war and, in the process, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and to the devastation of a country's infrastructure.
In January 2003, a group of American law professors warned President George W. Bush that he and senior officials of his government could be prosecuted for war crimes if their military tactics violated international humanitarian law. The group, led by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, sent similar warnings to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
Although Washington is not part of the International Criminal Court (ICC), U.S. officials could be prosecuted in other countries under the Geneva Convention, says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner likened the situation to the attempt by Spanish magistrate Baltazar Garzon to prosecute former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet when Pinochet was under house arrest in London.
Both former President George W. Bush and senior officials in his government could be tried for their responsibility for torture and other war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
In addition, should Nuremberg principles be followed by an investigating tribunal, former President Bush and other senior officials in his administration could be tried for violation of fundamental Nuremberg principles.
In 2007, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC's chief prosecutor, told The Sunday Telegraph that he could envisage a scenario in which both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then President Bush faced charges at The Hague.
Perhaps one of the most serious breaches of international law by the Bush administration was the doctrine of "preventive war." In the case of the Iraq war, it was carried out without authorization from the U.N. Security Council in violation of the U.N. Charter, which forbids armed aggression and violations of any state's sovereignty except for immediate self-defense.
As stated in the U.S. Constitution, international treaties agreed to by the United States are part of the "supreme law of the land." "Launching a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify," said Justice Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Benjamin Ferencz, also a former chief prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials, declared that "a prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity — that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."
The conduct and the consequences of the Iraq war are subsumed under "Crimes against Peace and War" of Nuremberg Principle VI, which defines as crimes against peace "(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)." In the section on war crimes, Nuremberg Principle VI includes "murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property."
The criminal abuse of prisoners in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo are clear evidence of ill- treatment and even murder.
According to the organization Human Rights First, at least 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global "war on terror," eight of whom were tortured to death.
As for the plunder of public or private property, there is evidence that even before the war started, members of the Bush administration had already drawn up plans to privatize and sell Iraqi property, particularly that related to oil.
Although there are obvious hindrances to trying a former U.S. president and his associates, such a trial is fully justified by legal precedents such as the Nuremberg Principles and by the extent of the toll in human lives that the breach of international law has exacted.
NOTE:
This article is spot-on! The United States is guilty of perpetrating a crime against humanity in light of waging an offensive war of aggression (preventive war) against Iraq. It was not only immoral by Just War Doctrinal criteria but illegal under US and international law. The only reason that nothing has been done about it to date is presumably the unbridled political/military power that the US has at its disposal. The fact that our own government refuses to hold the offenders to account means that we are now all culpable, especially the Obama administration and the new Congress.
Dr. J. P. Hubert
May 27, 2009 "Japan Times" -- -NEW YORK — The Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines established after World War II to try Nazi Party members, were developed to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles can also be applied today when considering the conditions that led to the Iraq war and, in the process, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and to the devastation of a country's infrastructure.
In January 2003, a group of American law professors warned President George W. Bush that he and senior officials of his government could be prosecuted for war crimes if their military tactics violated international humanitarian law. The group, led by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, sent similar warnings to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
Although Washington is not part of the International Criminal Court (ICC), U.S. officials could be prosecuted in other countries under the Geneva Convention, says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner likened the situation to the attempt by Spanish magistrate Baltazar Garzon to prosecute former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet when Pinochet was under house arrest in London.
Both former President George W. Bush and senior officials in his government could be tried for their responsibility for torture and other war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
In addition, should Nuremberg principles be followed by an investigating tribunal, former President Bush and other senior officials in his administration could be tried for violation of fundamental Nuremberg principles.
In 2007, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC's chief prosecutor, told The Sunday Telegraph that he could envisage a scenario in which both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then President Bush faced charges at The Hague.
Perhaps one of the most serious breaches of international law by the Bush administration was the doctrine of "preventive war." In the case of the Iraq war, it was carried out without authorization from the U.N. Security Council in violation of the U.N. Charter, which forbids armed aggression and violations of any state's sovereignty except for immediate self-defense.
As stated in the U.S. Constitution, international treaties agreed to by the United States are part of the "supreme law of the land." "Launching a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify," said Justice Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Benjamin Ferencz, also a former chief prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials, declared that "a prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity — that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."
The conduct and the consequences of the Iraq war are subsumed under "Crimes against Peace and War" of Nuremberg Principle VI, which defines as crimes against peace "(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)." In the section on war crimes, Nuremberg Principle VI includes "murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property."
The criminal abuse of prisoners in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo are clear evidence of ill- treatment and even murder.
According to the organization Human Rights First, at least 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global "war on terror," eight of whom were tortured to death.
As for the plunder of public or private property, there is evidence that even before the war started, members of the Bush administration had already drawn up plans to privatize and sell Iraqi property, particularly that related to oil.
Although there are obvious hindrances to trying a former U.S. president and his associates, such a trial is fully justified by legal precedents such as the Nuremberg Principles and by the extent of the toll in human lives that the breach of international law has exacted.
NOTE:
This article is spot-on! The United States is guilty of perpetrating a crime against humanity in light of waging an offensive war of aggression (preventive war) against Iraq. It was not only immoral by Just War Doctrinal criteria but illegal under US and international law. The only reason that nothing has been done about it to date is presumably the unbridled political/military power that the US has at its disposal. The fact that our own government refuses to hold the offenders to account means that we are now all culpable, especially the Obama administration and the new Congress.
Dr. J. P. Hubert
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