Deceptive Economic Statistics:
While the economists lied the US economy died
By Paul Craig Roberts
August 18, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- On August 17, Bloomberg reported a US government release that industrial production rose twice as much as forecast, climbing 1 percent. Bloomberg interpreted this to mean that “increased business investment is propelling the gains in manufacturing, which accounts for 11 percent of the world’s largest economy.”
The stock market rose.
Let’s look at this through the lens of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com. Williams reports that “the primary driver of a 1.0% monthly gain in seasonally-adjusted July industrial production” was “warped seasonal factors” caused by “the irregular patterns in U.S. auto production in the last two years.” Industrial production “shrank by 1.0% before seasonal adjustments.”
If the government and Bloomberg had announced that industrial production fell by 1.0%in July, would the stock market have risen 104 points on August 17?
Notice that Bloomberg reports that manufacturing accounts for 11 percent of the US economy. I remember when manufacturing accounted for 18% of the US economy. The decline of 39% is due to jobs offshoring.
Think about that. Wall Street and shareholders and executives of transnational corporations have made billions by moving 39% of US manufacturing offshore to boost the GDP and employment of foreign countries, such as China, while impoverishing their former American work force. Congress and the economics profession have cheered this on as “the New Economy.”
Bought-and-paid-for-economists told us that “the new economy” would make us all rich, and so did the financial press. We were well rid, they claimed, of the “old” industries and manufactures, the departure of which destroyed the tax base of so many American cities and states and the livelihood of millions of Americans.
The bought-and-paid-for-economists got all the media forums for a decade. While they lied, the US economy died.
Now, back to statistical deception. On August 17 the census Bureau reported a small gain in July 2010 residential construction housing starts. More hope orchestrated. In fact, the “gain,” as John Williams reports, was due to a large downward revision” in June’s reporting. The reported July “gain” would “have been a contraction” without the downward revision in June’s “gain.”
So, the overestimate of June housing not only made June look good, but also the downward correction of the June number makes July look good, because starts rose above the corrected June number. The same manipulation is likely to happen again next month.
If the government will lie to you about Iraqi weapons of mass production, Iranian nukes, and 9/11, why won’t they lie to you about the economy?
We now have an all-time high of Americans on food stamps, 40.8 million people, about 14% of the population. By next year the government estimates that food stamp dependency will rise to 43 million Americans. So last week Congress cut food stamp benefits. Let them eat cake.
Wherever one looks--food stamps, home foreclosures, bankrupted states, mounting joblessness, the message to long-suffering Americans from “their government” is the same: go eat cake, while we fight wars for Israel that enrich the military/security complex and while we bail out banksters whose annual incomes are in the tens of millions of dollars and up.
It is impossible to get any truth out of the US government about anything. If private companies used US government accounting, the executives would be prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated.
“Our government” is committed to fighting wars to enrich the military/security complex and Israel’s territorial expansion at the expense of cuts in Social Security and Medicare. All most members of Congress, especially Republicans, want to do is to pay for the pointless wars by cutting Social Security and Medicare.
When they worry about the deficit, it is usually Social Security and Medicare--so-called “entitlements” that are in the crosshairs.
You don’t have to be smart to see that Wall Street’s and the government’s response to the amazing US budget deficit is not to stop the senseless wars and bailouts of mega-millionaires, but to cut “entitlements.”
I will end this column on unemployment. “Our government” tells us that the unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, a figure that would have wrecked any post-Great Depression administration. But, again, “our government” is lying. The reported unemployment rate is just below 10% because the US government no longer, since the corrupt Clinton administration, counts Americans who have been unemployed for longer than one year. Once the unemployed hit one year and one day, they are dropped from the unemployment roles and no longer counted as unemployed.
Compare this fact with the number you read from the financial press. Right now, if measured according to the methodology of 1980, the US unemployment rate is about 22%. Thus, the reported rate of unemployment hides more than half of the unemployed. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)
And Secretary Treasury Tim Geithner welcomed us in the August 2 New York Times to “the recovery.”
Utterly amazing.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
American Empire and the New World Order
Editor's NOTE:
I am extremely pleased to be able to publish this essay by Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons a scholar of the first order, author and private business entrepreneur. Dr. Gibbons earned double doctorates in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University respectively. His latest book entitled: The Empire Strikes a Match in a World Full of Oil is an excellent read and can be obtained through Amazon.com HERE.... I wholeheartedly recommend it to readers of this blog.
While Dr. Gibbons and I disagree on some matters, in the main I concur with his thoughts on American Imperialism and the increasingly officious domestic US police state.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Rethinking the New World Order
By: Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons, PhD Economics (University of Chicago), PhD Mathematics (Northwestern U.)
Logistics Research and Trading Co. at www.logisticresearch.com
Saint Joseph, Michigan, 49085
August 17, 2010
Paul Craig Roberts writes HERE... of the dangerous overextension of American military might and of its cost. A large coterie of observers who write from many different vantage points – former C.I.A. advisors, retired military men, and journalists from around the world – make the same case. When we understand the depth of this dangerous program and its cause, we can judge fully the danger and also perhaps begin to formulate a preferable alternative. The American enterprise that goes popularly by the name New World Order – but also known more darkly as the Empire – has grown in our midst without being properly understood.
A short excursion in a most bizarre bit of economic policy serves to put the matter in perspective. For many years now – I don’t know exactly when this began but figure something like twenty to twenty-five years ago – our Export-Import Bank has laid out billions of dollars to promote a rather surprising program: a program to maximize imports! Any manufacturer of goods in America could arrange to have his goods made anywhere else. He would them buy them from the foreign manufacturer and become their distributor in America, and the Ex-Im Bank would make it happen. Specifically, the foreign manufacturer would have to put up ten per cent of the investment capital to get up and running, and the Ex-Im Bank would lend the new joint venture the other ninety per cent of the required capital. It was shall we say, not unheard of that the silent partner in the new venture would happen to be perhaps the vice president of the benefiting country. The foreign partner would have its risk removed by virtue of a long term purchase agreement from the American manufacturer/distributor. Why would we pay well connected foreign capitalists to take our industries away from us?
Let me introduce you to a new class of persons: Citizens of the Empire. They come from every nation, though not from every condition of life. They come from the elite of every nation, and their loyalty is owed to that empire. As the saying goes, “Where their treasure is, there also will their heart be.” They are by no means all foreign born of course. Americans are not so foolish or so self-sacrificing as to provide this cushy status only to others. By far the largest number are Americans, Americans who work in a few fields of utility to the empire, and most notably on Wall Street. One thing is certain: they don’t make anything. Their motto is “We think; they sweat.” In writing this I do not want to diminish their work. This worldwide economic system, this “empire,” is in its way a brilliant innovation, and it has certainly served its citizens very well while it has also served the rest of us rather well too. We live extraordinarily well even when we have to pay our children’s college tuition ourselves. Never has the world been so prosperous because never have the productive capacities of the peoples of the world been so effectively harnessed in the service of all. We have opened the whole world and it has opened before us like a beautiful flower. Not only trade, but tourism and resettlement bespeak a world without borders. So while the world of economic affairs is by conventional standards quite bizarre, it works in surprising ways.
At the same time, it visibly does not work, in rather more conventional ways. It has bequeathed an America military burden that is totally unsustainable. Endless acreage of overseas military bases, endless wars, echoing whispers warning of hidden enemies lurking in every airport and even here at home. Countless spy cameras peering down on seemingly innocent shopping malls and street corners. Above all, endless mistrust and fear. There is something fundamentally inconsistent about this kind of empire. Something that pretends to defy the simple laws of something: economics? Sociology and anthropology? Human nature? The empire has triggered forces of unknown magnitude that we think are being kept at bay, but only at a cost that we cannot continue to pay indefinitely. The more smoothly and efficiently the empire functions, it seems, the more people hate it and us. More to the point, the more people seem willing to strap on bombs to kill their equally poor neighbors just to spite us.
We know that our eight-hundred-something foreign military installations cost too much and make too many enemies. If this empire is really to be the great benefactor of the world, why does it survive only at the point of a bayonet? It seems rather implausible that it would be the rather backward foreign workers who have at last gotten work in a factory or workshop somewhere who are the enemies of this empire. Compared with their former station, they are among the greatest beneficiaries. Human nature being what it is, it is hardly surprising that there are going to be malcontents and rabble-rousers and opportunists who want a bigger slice than chance has apportioned to them. At worst however they would be a police problem. After all, we have our bank robbers too. Above all, at worst they would be a local problem to be dealt with by local police and courts. What are our soldiers, and German soldiers and Italian soldiers, doing policing their streets and rounding up – or simply immolating – their miscreants? What are our drones doing patrolling their skies? An army has only one job: to confront and defeat other armies. Defeating the public is never a military mission, and that truth cuts across not only military practicality but natural law and rights as well.
What seems hard to fathom is how is it that anyone, anyone at all, could have become so deluded as to think that defeating civilians could ever be a military mission. It is at this point that we confront the logic of this empire: the steel underneath the velvet glove as it were. As it is presently constituted, the empire is Our empire. We built it and we run it. There are other centers of power who, while by no means hostile to the benefits that the world without borders provides, would rather it not be ours. Whether they dream of replacing us, or merely of sharing it with us is a mystery, but above all they don’t want it to be Ours. Any large and advanced country would naturally see things that way: Russia, China, India, perhaps Brazil. Let’s say that they just want to share. We don’t want to share. I think I speak for the American people in that matter, though quite obviously I do not actually speak for myself. It is not in some narrow sense a cost of the new world order that is too high; it is the cost of attempting to monopolize it that is too high. The very same empowerment of people all over the world, or drawing them into our technological civilization, that accelerates their development and makes more serious competitors. As but one little example, the day is not far off when China will be the source of computer chips to rival Intel Corp, and computers based on them to rival Microsoft. Russia has always had its own designs, and only their lack of infrastructure for mass production of both hardware and software have kept their computers of our shelves.
We find ourselves the greatest beneficiaries of a unified world, but a world that is also becoming, or seen as becoming, a growing threat to our hegemony. We are, in a word, in precisely the situation that the Athens of long ago, the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, found herself in. Master of the seas at that time; with trading outposts stretching from the Spanish coast to the Crimea and the eastern shores of the Black Sea, but gripped with fear that this all of this could be taken away at any time. The fall of Athens is now understood to have been not a murder but a suicide. Murdered by fear.
There are too many other powers for us to control even with ten times our number of bases. In fact, the bases have long since become counterproductive because their expense is draining our wealth. Our defensive actions are not limited to arms and wars. We have pursued a program of reducing the population of the world, especially the poorest parts of the world, by “family planning.” Why is it that this new world order, this great engine of advancement of every sort, this world without borders, should require eliminating the people it benefits – why does it not work better the more people it benefits? This is also a fundamental contradiction.
More recently another presumed inherent limitation has been advanced: it is supposed to be some sort of threat to the climate of the whole planet, of such great extent that fundamental freedoms must be surrendered to Save us from ourselves. The exposure of the scientific hoax of “global warming” perpetrated by a small coterie of ambitious climatologists and exploited by cunning and unprincipled political leaders is warning enough of this contradiction. (Editor's NOTE: Dr. Gibbons and I apparently disagree on the issue of climate change) In summary, whether it is because the new world order has enabled our rivals to gain the technological and economic tools to challenge us, or has enabled the poor of the Earth to outnumber us, or has enabled all of us to suffocate us – the story goes – the order cannot continue. This is the greatest contradiction: that our success is killing us.
Well, it is a contradiction. Our success is not our enemy. Neither foreign powers nor abundant foreign peasants nor foreign SUVs are plotting our ruin. If that is not our fate, what is the alternative? Two principles have to be accepted. The first is that this is a multipolar world. It is already a multipolar world even though no single rival can challenge us. If we want this to be Our empire we will have to fight for it, but it is a fight that will destroy the very way of life we would be fighting to preserve. The other principle is that, since we will not be empowered to make the laws and impose them, everyone including us will need to submit to a true Rule of Law in which all are equal before the law. This law is not just an ephemera. It needs courts and administrators of justice, just as our courts do now. I can think of few greater services that our leaders and legal experts could offer the new world order than to actually deliver the legal framework for keeping order.
To contact Joel Clarke Gibbons, E-mail him at: jgibbons@logisticresearch.com
I am extremely pleased to be able to publish this essay by Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons a scholar of the first order, author and private business entrepreneur. Dr. Gibbons earned double doctorates in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University respectively. His latest book entitled: The Empire Strikes a Match in a World Full of Oil is an excellent read and can be obtained through Amazon.com HERE.... I wholeheartedly recommend it to readers of this blog.
While Dr. Gibbons and I disagree on some matters, in the main I concur with his thoughts on American Imperialism and the increasingly officious domestic US police state.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Rethinking the New World Order
By: Dr. Joel Clarke Gibbons, PhD Economics (University of Chicago), PhD Mathematics (Northwestern U.)
Logistics Research and Trading Co. at www.logisticresearch.com
Saint Joseph, Michigan, 49085
August 17, 2010
Paul Craig Roberts writes HERE... of the dangerous overextension of American military might and of its cost. A large coterie of observers who write from many different vantage points – former C.I.A. advisors, retired military men, and journalists from around the world – make the same case. When we understand the depth of this dangerous program and its cause, we can judge fully the danger and also perhaps begin to formulate a preferable alternative. The American enterprise that goes popularly by the name New World Order – but also known more darkly as the Empire – has grown in our midst without being properly understood.
A short excursion in a most bizarre bit of economic policy serves to put the matter in perspective. For many years now – I don’t know exactly when this began but figure something like twenty to twenty-five years ago – our Export-Import Bank has laid out billions of dollars to promote a rather surprising program: a program to maximize imports! Any manufacturer of goods in America could arrange to have his goods made anywhere else. He would them buy them from the foreign manufacturer and become their distributor in America, and the Ex-Im Bank would make it happen. Specifically, the foreign manufacturer would have to put up ten per cent of the investment capital to get up and running, and the Ex-Im Bank would lend the new joint venture the other ninety per cent of the required capital. It was shall we say, not unheard of that the silent partner in the new venture would happen to be perhaps the vice president of the benefiting country. The foreign partner would have its risk removed by virtue of a long term purchase agreement from the American manufacturer/distributor. Why would we pay well connected foreign capitalists to take our industries away from us?
Let me introduce you to a new class of persons: Citizens of the Empire. They come from every nation, though not from every condition of life. They come from the elite of every nation, and their loyalty is owed to that empire. As the saying goes, “Where their treasure is, there also will their heart be.” They are by no means all foreign born of course. Americans are not so foolish or so self-sacrificing as to provide this cushy status only to others. By far the largest number are Americans, Americans who work in a few fields of utility to the empire, and most notably on Wall Street. One thing is certain: they don’t make anything. Their motto is “We think; they sweat.” In writing this I do not want to diminish their work. This worldwide economic system, this “empire,” is in its way a brilliant innovation, and it has certainly served its citizens very well while it has also served the rest of us rather well too. We live extraordinarily well even when we have to pay our children’s college tuition ourselves. Never has the world been so prosperous because never have the productive capacities of the peoples of the world been so effectively harnessed in the service of all. We have opened the whole world and it has opened before us like a beautiful flower. Not only trade, but tourism and resettlement bespeak a world without borders. So while the world of economic affairs is by conventional standards quite bizarre, it works in surprising ways.
At the same time, it visibly does not work, in rather more conventional ways. It has bequeathed an America military burden that is totally unsustainable. Endless acreage of overseas military bases, endless wars, echoing whispers warning of hidden enemies lurking in every airport and even here at home. Countless spy cameras peering down on seemingly innocent shopping malls and street corners. Above all, endless mistrust and fear. There is something fundamentally inconsistent about this kind of empire. Something that pretends to defy the simple laws of something: economics? Sociology and anthropology? Human nature? The empire has triggered forces of unknown magnitude that we think are being kept at bay, but only at a cost that we cannot continue to pay indefinitely. The more smoothly and efficiently the empire functions, it seems, the more people hate it and us. More to the point, the more people seem willing to strap on bombs to kill their equally poor neighbors just to spite us.
We know that our eight-hundred-something foreign military installations cost too much and make too many enemies. If this empire is really to be the great benefactor of the world, why does it survive only at the point of a bayonet? It seems rather implausible that it would be the rather backward foreign workers who have at last gotten work in a factory or workshop somewhere who are the enemies of this empire. Compared with their former station, they are among the greatest beneficiaries. Human nature being what it is, it is hardly surprising that there are going to be malcontents and rabble-rousers and opportunists who want a bigger slice than chance has apportioned to them. At worst however they would be a police problem. After all, we have our bank robbers too. Above all, at worst they would be a local problem to be dealt with by local police and courts. What are our soldiers, and German soldiers and Italian soldiers, doing policing their streets and rounding up – or simply immolating – their miscreants? What are our drones doing patrolling their skies? An army has only one job: to confront and defeat other armies. Defeating the public is never a military mission, and that truth cuts across not only military practicality but natural law and rights as well.
What seems hard to fathom is how is it that anyone, anyone at all, could have become so deluded as to think that defeating civilians could ever be a military mission. It is at this point that we confront the logic of this empire: the steel underneath the velvet glove as it were. As it is presently constituted, the empire is Our empire. We built it and we run it. There are other centers of power who, while by no means hostile to the benefits that the world without borders provides, would rather it not be ours. Whether they dream of replacing us, or merely of sharing it with us is a mystery, but above all they don’t want it to be Ours. Any large and advanced country would naturally see things that way: Russia, China, India, perhaps Brazil. Let’s say that they just want to share. We don’t want to share. I think I speak for the American people in that matter, though quite obviously I do not actually speak for myself. It is not in some narrow sense a cost of the new world order that is too high; it is the cost of attempting to monopolize it that is too high. The very same empowerment of people all over the world, or drawing them into our technological civilization, that accelerates their development and makes more serious competitors. As but one little example, the day is not far off when China will be the source of computer chips to rival Intel Corp, and computers based on them to rival Microsoft. Russia has always had its own designs, and only their lack of infrastructure for mass production of both hardware and software have kept their computers of our shelves.
We find ourselves the greatest beneficiaries of a unified world, but a world that is also becoming, or seen as becoming, a growing threat to our hegemony. We are, in a word, in precisely the situation that the Athens of long ago, the Athens of Pericles and Socrates, found herself in. Master of the seas at that time; with trading outposts stretching from the Spanish coast to the Crimea and the eastern shores of the Black Sea, but gripped with fear that this all of this could be taken away at any time. The fall of Athens is now understood to have been not a murder but a suicide. Murdered by fear.
There are too many other powers for us to control even with ten times our number of bases. In fact, the bases have long since become counterproductive because their expense is draining our wealth. Our defensive actions are not limited to arms and wars. We have pursued a program of reducing the population of the world, especially the poorest parts of the world, by “family planning.” Why is it that this new world order, this great engine of advancement of every sort, this world without borders, should require eliminating the people it benefits – why does it not work better the more people it benefits? This is also a fundamental contradiction.
More recently another presumed inherent limitation has been advanced: it is supposed to be some sort of threat to the climate of the whole planet, of such great extent that fundamental freedoms must be surrendered to Save us from ourselves. The exposure of the scientific hoax of “global warming” perpetrated by a small coterie of ambitious climatologists and exploited by cunning and unprincipled political leaders is warning enough of this contradiction. (Editor's NOTE: Dr. Gibbons and I apparently disagree on the issue of climate change) In summary, whether it is because the new world order has enabled our rivals to gain the technological and economic tools to challenge us, or has enabled the poor of the Earth to outnumber us, or has enabled all of us to suffocate us – the story goes – the order cannot continue. This is the greatest contradiction: that our success is killing us.
Well, it is a contradiction. Our success is not our enemy. Neither foreign powers nor abundant foreign peasants nor foreign SUVs are plotting our ruin. If that is not our fate, what is the alternative? Two principles have to be accepted. The first is that this is a multipolar world. It is already a multipolar world even though no single rival can challenge us. If we want this to be Our empire we will have to fight for it, but it is a fight that will destroy the very way of life we would be fighting to preserve. The other principle is that, since we will not be empowered to make the laws and impose them, everyone including us will need to submit to a true Rule of Law in which all are equal before the law. This law is not just an ephemera. It needs courts and administrators of justice, just as our courts do now. I can think of few greater services that our leaders and legal experts could offer the new world order than to actually deliver the legal framework for keeping order.
To contact Joel Clarke Gibbons, E-mail him at: jgibbons@logisticresearch.com
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Any Solution to US Economic Nightmare: Keynesianism, Austerity or Revolution?
Editor's NOTE:
Every great empire runs the risk of imploding due to overextension and moral decadence. The American empire is currently troubled by both.
Instead of a Defense Department we actually maintain a trillion dollar per year "war department" with almost 1000 foreign bases and so-called "hot wars" in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Paul Craig Roberts is correct that we cannot continue to waste over a trillion dollars each year in war-making and hope to survive as a nation. It alone will bankrupt us.
Moreover, the fact that the oligarchs in their hedonistic greed, successfully transferred virtually all of our manufacturing base overseas has meant the almost total destruction of our middle class and in its place the establishment of a permanent underclass while the elites become unconscionably rich.
The economy is so threatened that experts disagree about what if anything can be done in way of trying to save the nation. It may already be too late. I agree with Roberts that the one major thing that could be done is to end our foreign empire and current wars. That alone could save over half a trillion dollars per year. The closing of most of our foreign military bases would save hundreds of billions more dollars each year. Additional money could be saved by bringing the hundreds of thousands of US troops home that are stationed abroad. Over 30 thousand are based in South Korea for no reasonable purpose.
Ergo: End the Empire and end the wars!
Roberts is also correct that multinational corporations must be forced to pay a heavy price for utilizing foreign labor at the expense of American jobs.
Ergo: Tax multinational corporations for their use of foreign laborers!
Paul Krugman presents an alternative solution below in short further fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing allowing the potential inflation rate to exceed 2%. I have no problem with additional short term stimulus. A depression era make-work jobs bill to boost infrastructure would be good in the near-term. I do not favor printing more money if that is what Krugman thinks is the way to increase the inflation rate. In any case, all will ultimately be lost if the "elephant in the room" which is our constant foreign wars and growing empire is not dealt with definitively post haste!
We simply must excise the war and empire portions of the federal budget which are not only unaffordable but which are also counterproductive and morally unjustified. The prescription is obvious albeit not easy.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
The ecstasy of empire: How Close Is America’s Demise?
By Paul Craig Roberts
August 17, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times Column, “Welcome to the Recovery.”
As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echos from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David Stockman, who excoriated the Republican Party for becoming big spending Democrats.
It is encouraging to see a bit of realization that, this time, Washington cannot spend the economy out of recession. The deficits are already too large for the dollar to survive as reserve currency, and deficit spending cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been moved offshore.
However, the solutions offered by those who are beginning to recognize that there is a problem are discouraging. Kotlikoff thinks the solution is massive Social Security and Medicare cuts or massive tax increases or hyperinflation to destroy the massive debts.
Perhaps economists lack imagination, or perhaps they don’t want to be cut off from Wall Street and corporate subsidies, but Social Security and Medicare are insufficient at their present levels, especially considering the erosion of private pensions by the dot com, derivative and real estate bubbles. Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15% of their earnings all their life, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.
Tax increases make even less sense. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of households cannot survive on one job. Both husband and wife work and often one of the partners has two jobs in order to make ends meet. Raising taxes makes it harder to make ends meet--thus more foreclosures, more food stamps, more homelessness. What kind of economist or humane person thinks this is a solution?
Ah, but we will tax the rich. The usual idiocy. The rich have enough money. They will simply stop earning.
Let’s get real. Here is what the government is likely to do. Once the Washington idiots realize that the dollar is at risk and that they can no longer finance their wars by borrowing abroad, the government will either levy a tax on private pensions on the grounds that the pensions have accumulated tax-deferred, or the government will require pension fund managers to purchase Treasury debt with our pensions. This will buy the government a bit more time while pension accounts are loaded up with worthless paper.
The last Bush budget deficit (2008) was in the $400-500 billion range, about the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and OPEC trade surpluses with the US. Traditionally, these trade surpluses have been recycled to the US and finance the federal budget deficit. In 2009 and 2010 the federal deficit jumped to $1,400 billion, a back-to-back trillion dollar increase. There are not sufficient trade surpluses to finance a deficit this large. From where comes the money?
The answer is from individuals fleeing the stock market into “safe” Treasury bonds and from the bankster bailout, not so much the TARP money as the Federal Reserve’s exchange of bank reserves for questionable financial paper such as subprime derivatives. The banks used their excess reserves to purchase Treasury debt.
These financing maneuvers are one-time tricks. Once people have fled stocks, that movement into Treasuries is over. The opposition to the bankster bailout likely precludes another. So where does the money come from the next time?
The Treasury was able to unload a lot of debt thanks to “the Greek crisis,” which the New York banksters and hedge funds multiplied into “the euro crisis.” The financial press served as a financing arm for the US Treasury by creating panic about European debt and the euro. Central banks and individuals who had taken refuge from the dollar in euros were panicked out of their euros, and they rushed into dollars by purchasing US Treasury debt.
This movement from euros to dollars weakened the alternative reserve currency to the dollar, halted the dollar’s decline, and financed the massive US budget deficit a while longer.
Possibly the game can be replayed with Spanish debt, Irish debt, and whatever unlucky country swept in by the thoughtless expansion of the European Union.
But when no countries remain that can be destabilized by Wall Street investment banksters and hedge funds, what then finances the US budget deficit?
The only remaining financier is the Federal Reserve. When Treasury bonds brought to auction do not sell, the Federal Reserve must purchase them. The Federal Reserve purchases the bonds by creating new demand deposits, or checking accounts, for the Treasury. As the Treasury spends the proceeds of the new debt sales, the US money supply expands by the amount of the Federal Reserve’s purchase of Treasury debt.
Do goods and services expand by the same amount? Imports will increase as US jobs have been offshored and given to foreigners, thus worsening the trade deficit. When the Federal Reserve purchases the Treasury’s new debt issues, the money supply will increase by more than the supply of domestically produced goods and services. Prices are likely to rise.
How high will they rise? The longer money is created in order that government can pay its bills, the more likely hyperinflation will be the result.
The economy has not recovered. By the end of this year it will be obvious that the collapsing economy means a larger than $1.4 trillion budget deficit to finance. Will it be $2 trillion? Higher?
Whatever the size, the rest of the world will see that the dollar is being printed in such quantities that it cannot serve as reserve currency. At that point wholesale dumping of dollars will result as foreign central banks try to unload a worthless currency.
The collapse of the dollar will drive up the prices of imports and offshored goods on which Americans are dependent. Wal-Mart shoppers will think they have mistakenly gone into Neiman Marcus.
Domestic prices will also explode as a growing money supply chases the supply of goods and services still made in America by Americans.
The dollar as reserve currency cannot survive the conflagration. When the dollar goes the US cannot finance its trade deficit. Therefore, imports will fall sharply, thus adding to domestic inflation and, as the US is energy import-dependent, there will be transportation disruptions that will disrupt work and grocery store deliveries.
Panic will be the order of the day.
Will farms be raided? Will those trapped in cities resort to riots and looting?
Is this the likely future that “our” government and “our patriotic” corporations have created for us?
To borrow from Lenin, “What can be done?”
Here is what can be done. The wars, which benefit no one but the military-security complex and Israel’s territorial expansion, can be immediately ended. This would reduce the US budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. More hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by cutting the rest of the military budget, which in its present size, exceeds the budgets of all the serious military powers on earth combined.
US military spending reflects the unaffordable and unattainable crazed neoconservative goal of US Empire and world hegemony. What fool in Washington thinks that China is going to finance US hegemony over China?
The only way that the US will again have an economy is by bringing back the offshored jobs. The loss of these jobs impoverished Americans while producing over-sized gains for Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate executives. These jobs can be brought home where they belong by taxing corporations according to where value is added to their product. If value is added to their goods and services in China, corporations would have a high tax rate. If value is added to their goods and services in the US, corporations would have a low tax rate.
This change in corporate taxation would offset the cheap foreign labor that has sucked jobs out of America, and it would rebuild the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society.
If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.
Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to Americans. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.
The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire.
The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.
Without a revolution, Americans are history.
____________
US unemployment: Don't let the elite pass the buck
Congress and the Federal Reserve should be pulling out all the stops to create jobs –not seeking to move the economy's goalposts
Paul Krugman
The Observer,
Sunday 15 August 2010
Growth is slowing and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That's bad. But what's worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn't care – that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is becoming the norm. And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is "structural", a permanent part of the economic landscape – and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they'll turn that excuse into dismal reality.
Not long ago, anyone predicting that one in six American workers would soon be unemployed or underemployed, and that the average unemployed worker would have been jobless for 35 weeks, would have been dismissed as outlandishly pessimistic – in part because if anything like that happened, policy makers would surely be pulling out all the stops on behalf of job creation.
But now it has happened and what do we see?
First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.
We're told that we can't afford to help the unemployed – that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the "bond vigilantes" will send US borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks' imagination – far from fleeing US debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fear-mongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything – everything, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.
The point is that a large part of Congress, large enough to block any action on jobs, cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1% of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can't find work.
Well, if Congress won't act, what about the Federal Reserve? The Fed, after all, is supposed to pursue two goals: full employment and price stability, usually defined in practice as an inflation rate of about 2%. Since unemployment is very high and inflation well below target, you might expect the Fed to be taking aggressive action to boost the economy. But it isn't.
It's true that the Fed has already pushed one pedal to the metal: short-term interest rates, its usual policy tool, are near zero. Still, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has assured us that he has other options, like holding more mortgage-backed securities. And a large body of research suggests that the Fed could boost the economy by committing to an inflation target higher than 2%. (Editor's NOTE: It's unclear whether he has in mind here printing more money [so-called quantitative easing] which would be inflationary) But the Fed hasn't done any of these things. Instead, some officials are defining success down.
For example, last week Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, argued that the Fed bears no responsibility for the economy's weakness, which he attributed to business uncertainty about future regulations – a view that's popular in conservative circles, but completely at odds with the evidence. In effect, he responded to the Fed's failure to achieve one of its two main goals by taking down the goalpost.
He then moved the other goalpost, defining the Fed's aim not as roughly 2% inflation, but rather "keeping inflation extremely low and stable".
In short, it's all good. And I predict – having seen this movie before, in Japan – that if and when prices start falling, when below-target inflation becomes deflation, some Fed officials will explain that that's OK, too.
What lies down this path? Here's what I consider all too likely. Two years from now unemployment will still be extremely high, quite possibly higher than it is now. But instead of taking responsibility, politicians and Fed officials will declare that high unemployment is structural, beyond their control. And, as I said, over time these excuses may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the long-term unemployed lose their connections with the workforce and become unemployable.
I'd like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn't all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.
Every great empire runs the risk of imploding due to overextension and moral decadence. The American empire is currently troubled by both.
Instead of a Defense Department we actually maintain a trillion dollar per year "war department" with almost 1000 foreign bases and so-called "hot wars" in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Paul Craig Roberts is correct that we cannot continue to waste over a trillion dollars each year in war-making and hope to survive as a nation. It alone will bankrupt us.
Moreover, the fact that the oligarchs in their hedonistic greed, successfully transferred virtually all of our manufacturing base overseas has meant the almost total destruction of our middle class and in its place the establishment of a permanent underclass while the elites become unconscionably rich.
The economy is so threatened that experts disagree about what if anything can be done in way of trying to save the nation. It may already be too late. I agree with Roberts that the one major thing that could be done is to end our foreign empire and current wars. That alone could save over half a trillion dollars per year. The closing of most of our foreign military bases would save hundreds of billions more dollars each year. Additional money could be saved by bringing the hundreds of thousands of US troops home that are stationed abroad. Over 30 thousand are based in South Korea for no reasonable purpose.
Ergo: End the Empire and end the wars!
Roberts is also correct that multinational corporations must be forced to pay a heavy price for utilizing foreign labor at the expense of American jobs.
Ergo: Tax multinational corporations for their use of foreign laborers!
Paul Krugman presents an alternative solution below in short further fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing allowing the potential inflation rate to exceed 2%. I have no problem with additional short term stimulus. A depression era make-work jobs bill to boost infrastructure would be good in the near-term. I do not favor printing more money if that is what Krugman thinks is the way to increase the inflation rate. In any case, all will ultimately be lost if the "elephant in the room" which is our constant foreign wars and growing empire is not dealt with definitively post haste!
We simply must excise the war and empire portions of the federal budget which are not only unaffordable but which are also counterproductive and morally unjustified. The prescription is obvious albeit not easy.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
The ecstasy of empire: How Close Is America’s Demise?
By Paul Craig Roberts
August 17, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times Column, “Welcome to the Recovery.”
As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echos from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David Stockman, who excoriated the Republican Party for becoming big spending Democrats.
It is encouraging to see a bit of realization that, this time, Washington cannot spend the economy out of recession. The deficits are already too large for the dollar to survive as reserve currency, and deficit spending cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been moved offshore.
However, the solutions offered by those who are beginning to recognize that there is a problem are discouraging. Kotlikoff thinks the solution is massive Social Security and Medicare cuts or massive tax increases or hyperinflation to destroy the massive debts.
Perhaps economists lack imagination, or perhaps they don’t want to be cut off from Wall Street and corporate subsidies, but Social Security and Medicare are insufficient at their present levels, especially considering the erosion of private pensions by the dot com, derivative and real estate bubbles. Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15% of their earnings all their life, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.
Tax increases make even less sense. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of households cannot survive on one job. Both husband and wife work and often one of the partners has two jobs in order to make ends meet. Raising taxes makes it harder to make ends meet--thus more foreclosures, more food stamps, more homelessness. What kind of economist or humane person thinks this is a solution?
Ah, but we will tax the rich. The usual idiocy. The rich have enough money. They will simply stop earning.
Let’s get real. Here is what the government is likely to do. Once the Washington idiots realize that the dollar is at risk and that they can no longer finance their wars by borrowing abroad, the government will either levy a tax on private pensions on the grounds that the pensions have accumulated tax-deferred, or the government will require pension fund managers to purchase Treasury debt with our pensions. This will buy the government a bit more time while pension accounts are loaded up with worthless paper.
The last Bush budget deficit (2008) was in the $400-500 billion range, about the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and OPEC trade surpluses with the US. Traditionally, these trade surpluses have been recycled to the US and finance the federal budget deficit. In 2009 and 2010 the federal deficit jumped to $1,400 billion, a back-to-back trillion dollar increase. There are not sufficient trade surpluses to finance a deficit this large. From where comes the money?
The answer is from individuals fleeing the stock market into “safe” Treasury bonds and from the bankster bailout, not so much the TARP money as the Federal Reserve’s exchange of bank reserves for questionable financial paper such as subprime derivatives. The banks used their excess reserves to purchase Treasury debt.
These financing maneuvers are one-time tricks. Once people have fled stocks, that movement into Treasuries is over. The opposition to the bankster bailout likely precludes another. So where does the money come from the next time?
The Treasury was able to unload a lot of debt thanks to “the Greek crisis,” which the New York banksters and hedge funds multiplied into “the euro crisis.” The financial press served as a financing arm for the US Treasury by creating panic about European debt and the euro. Central banks and individuals who had taken refuge from the dollar in euros were panicked out of their euros, and they rushed into dollars by purchasing US Treasury debt.
This movement from euros to dollars weakened the alternative reserve currency to the dollar, halted the dollar’s decline, and financed the massive US budget deficit a while longer.
Possibly the game can be replayed with Spanish debt, Irish debt, and whatever unlucky country swept in by the thoughtless expansion of the European Union.
But when no countries remain that can be destabilized by Wall Street investment banksters and hedge funds, what then finances the US budget deficit?
The only remaining financier is the Federal Reserve. When Treasury bonds brought to auction do not sell, the Federal Reserve must purchase them. The Federal Reserve purchases the bonds by creating new demand deposits, or checking accounts, for the Treasury. As the Treasury spends the proceeds of the new debt sales, the US money supply expands by the amount of the Federal Reserve’s purchase of Treasury debt.
Do goods and services expand by the same amount? Imports will increase as US jobs have been offshored and given to foreigners, thus worsening the trade deficit. When the Federal Reserve purchases the Treasury’s new debt issues, the money supply will increase by more than the supply of domestically produced goods and services. Prices are likely to rise.
How high will they rise? The longer money is created in order that government can pay its bills, the more likely hyperinflation will be the result.
The economy has not recovered. By the end of this year it will be obvious that the collapsing economy means a larger than $1.4 trillion budget deficit to finance. Will it be $2 trillion? Higher?
Whatever the size, the rest of the world will see that the dollar is being printed in such quantities that it cannot serve as reserve currency. At that point wholesale dumping of dollars will result as foreign central banks try to unload a worthless currency.
The collapse of the dollar will drive up the prices of imports and offshored goods on which Americans are dependent. Wal-Mart shoppers will think they have mistakenly gone into Neiman Marcus.
Domestic prices will also explode as a growing money supply chases the supply of goods and services still made in America by Americans.
The dollar as reserve currency cannot survive the conflagration. When the dollar goes the US cannot finance its trade deficit. Therefore, imports will fall sharply, thus adding to domestic inflation and, as the US is energy import-dependent, there will be transportation disruptions that will disrupt work and grocery store deliveries.
Panic will be the order of the day.
Will farms be raided? Will those trapped in cities resort to riots and looting?
Is this the likely future that “our” government and “our patriotic” corporations have created for us?
To borrow from Lenin, “What can be done?”
Here is what can be done. The wars, which benefit no one but the military-security complex and Israel’s territorial expansion, can be immediately ended. This would reduce the US budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. More hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by cutting the rest of the military budget, which in its present size, exceeds the budgets of all the serious military powers on earth combined.
US military spending reflects the unaffordable and unattainable crazed neoconservative goal of US Empire and world hegemony. What fool in Washington thinks that China is going to finance US hegemony over China?
The only way that the US will again have an economy is by bringing back the offshored jobs. The loss of these jobs impoverished Americans while producing over-sized gains for Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate executives. These jobs can be brought home where they belong by taxing corporations according to where value is added to their product. If value is added to their goods and services in China, corporations would have a high tax rate. If value is added to their goods and services in the US, corporations would have a low tax rate.
This change in corporate taxation would offset the cheap foreign labor that has sucked jobs out of America, and it would rebuild the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society.
If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.
Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to Americans. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.
The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire.
The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.
Without a revolution, Americans are history.
____________
US unemployment: Don't let the elite pass the buck
Congress and the Federal Reserve should be pulling out all the stops to create jobs –not seeking to move the economy's goalposts
Paul Krugman
The Observer,
Sunday 15 August 2010
Growth is slowing and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That's bad. But what's worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn't care – that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is becoming the norm. And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is "structural", a permanent part of the economic landscape – and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they'll turn that excuse into dismal reality.
Not long ago, anyone predicting that one in six American workers would soon be unemployed or underemployed, and that the average unemployed worker would have been jobless for 35 weeks, would have been dismissed as outlandishly pessimistic – in part because if anything like that happened, policy makers would surely be pulling out all the stops on behalf of job creation.
But now it has happened and what do we see?
First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.
We're told that we can't afford to help the unemployed – that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the "bond vigilantes" will send US borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks' imagination – far from fleeing US debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fear-mongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything – everything, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.
The point is that a large part of Congress, large enough to block any action on jobs, cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1% of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can't find work.
Well, if Congress won't act, what about the Federal Reserve? The Fed, after all, is supposed to pursue two goals: full employment and price stability, usually defined in practice as an inflation rate of about 2%. Since unemployment is very high and inflation well below target, you might expect the Fed to be taking aggressive action to boost the economy. But it isn't.
It's true that the Fed has already pushed one pedal to the metal: short-term interest rates, its usual policy tool, are near zero. Still, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has assured us that he has other options, like holding more mortgage-backed securities. And a large body of research suggests that the Fed could boost the economy by committing to an inflation target higher than 2%. (Editor's NOTE: It's unclear whether he has in mind here printing more money [so-called quantitative easing] which would be inflationary) But the Fed hasn't done any of these things. Instead, some officials are defining success down.
For example, last week Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, argued that the Fed bears no responsibility for the economy's weakness, which he attributed to business uncertainty about future regulations – a view that's popular in conservative circles, but completely at odds with the evidence. In effect, he responded to the Fed's failure to achieve one of its two main goals by taking down the goalpost.
He then moved the other goalpost, defining the Fed's aim not as roughly 2% inflation, but rather "keeping inflation extremely low and stable".
In short, it's all good. And I predict – having seen this movie before, in Japan – that if and when prices start falling, when below-target inflation becomes deflation, some Fed officials will explain that that's OK, too.
What lies down this path? Here's what I consider all too likely. Two years from now unemployment will still be extremely high, quite possibly higher than it is now. But instead of taking responsibility, politicians and Fed officials will declare that high unemployment is structural, beyond their control. And, as I said, over time these excuses may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the long-term unemployed lose their connections with the workforce and become unemployable.
I'd like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn't all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Gulf Oil Update: Day 119
BP to proceed with relief well after tests
By Chris Baltimore
Fri Aug 13, 2010 5:23pm EDT
HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc will proceed with a relief well to kill its blown-out Gulf of Mexico well, the top U.S. spill official said on Friday.
"Everybody is in agreement that we need to proceed with the relief well," retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said. "The question is how to do it."
The decision to continue with the relief well came as Alabama announced it was suing BP for the "catastrophic harm" that the spill had caused the state.
Earlier this week Allen had raised the possibility that the relief well might not be necessary because the cement poured into the top of the blown Macondo well last week -- the so-called "static kill" -- might have permanently killed it.
But after running pressure tests, BP and U.S. officials agree that the relief well is needed to plug the well 13,000 feet beneath the seabed, Allen said. The relief well is only about 45 feet from reaching the Macondo well.
"The relief well will be finished," Allen said. "We will kill the well."
The Macondo well, a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico, blew out April 20 and began spewing oil in what has become the worst offshore oilspill in history.
The well was provisionally capped on July 15 after spewing an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, soiling marshlands, fisheries and tourist beaches along several hundreds of miles (kilometers) of the Gulf Coast.
The British energy giant has lost more than a third of its market value since the explosion and has set aside $32.2 billion to deal with clean-up costs.
BP faces hundreds of civil lawsuits from injured rig workers, fishermen, investors and property owners seeking to recoup losses. Alabama added to that pile by with its suit against BP and other companies for what Attorney General Troy King said was "catastrophic harm.
"We are suing them for the amount it will take to make Alabama whole," King said.
"WANTON FAILURE"
The suit, which did not set a damage figure, accuses the defendants of "negligent or wanton failure to adhere to recognized industry standards of care."
The spill has hurt fishing and tourism around the Gulf and has affected other sectors such as housing. People and businesses that have sustained losses can make claims against the BP compensation fund administered by Kenneth Feinberg, named by the White House as an independent overseer.
But King said Feinberg was undermining efforts by Gulf state attorneys general to make it possible for spill victims to claim damages from the fund while retaining the right to sue BP at a future date.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who has faced criticism for being slow to act in the face of the world's worst offshore oil spill, will vacation in Panama City, Florida, this weekend and make a public statement on the recovery effort on Saturday.
In Louisiana, the state hit hardest by the spill, U.S. and BP officials met with parish presidents and Gov. Bobby Jindal to discuss long-term recovery plans.
The U.S. government will enact an ocean monitoring system to detect underwater plumes of oil that could be harming undersea ecosystems, Allen said.
Meanwhile, top-level BP and U.S. officials including Energy Secretary Steven Chu and incoming BP chief executive Bob Dudley on Friday discussed how to proceed with the final well plug, Allen said.
Pressure tests completed late on Thursday showed that the well is effectively sealed, with "no communication with the reservoir," Allen said.
But engineers are worried that increased pressure from the "bottom kill" could damage the existing temporary cement plug and perhaps cause about 1,000 barrels of oil trapped in the well shaft to flow into the ocean, Allen said. Engineers are developing procedures to allay such concerns, he said.
After Allen gives the order to continue with the relief well, it will take about 96 hours to drill into the Macondo well shaft and perhaps days beyond that to complete the job, he said.
____________
Gulf seafood gets intense safety testing
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
The Associated Press
Monday, August 16, 2010; 4:33 AM
WASHINGTON -- Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is being put under the microscope like no other kind on the market, with fish, shrimp and other catches ground up to hunt for minute traces of oil - far more reassuring than that sniff test that made all the headlines.
And while the dispersant that was dumped into the massive oil spill has consumers nervous, health regulators contend there's no evidence it builds up in seafood - although they're working to create a test for it, just in case.
More Gulf waters are reopening to commercial hauls as tests show little hazard from oil, and Louisiana's fall shrimp season kicks off Monday. Yet it's too soon to know what safety testing will satisfy a public so skeptical of government reassurances that even local fishermen voice concern.
Basic biology is key: Some species clear oil contamination out of their bodies far more rapidly than others. Fish are the fastest, oysters and crabs the slowest, and shrimp somewhere in between.
"I probably would put oysters at the top of the concern list and I don't think there's a close second," said marine scientist George Crozier, who directs the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama.
The oil contaminants of most health concern - potential cancer-causing substances called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs - show up in other everyday foods, too, such as grilled meat. Low levels also are in seafood sold from other waters.
Where Gulf seafood harvesting has been reopened, "the levels that we see are pretty typical of what we see in other areas, Puget Sound or Alaska," said Walton Dickhoff, who oversees testing at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.
Here are some questions and answers about Gulf seafood safety:
Q: What are PAHs? MORE...
____________
Gulf Seafood Testing:
By Chris Baltimore
Fri Aug 13, 2010 5:23pm EDT
HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc will proceed with a relief well to kill its blown-out Gulf of Mexico well, the top U.S. spill official said on Friday.
"Everybody is in agreement that we need to proceed with the relief well," retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said. "The question is how to do it."
The decision to continue with the relief well came as Alabama announced it was suing BP for the "catastrophic harm" that the spill had caused the state.
Earlier this week Allen had raised the possibility that the relief well might not be necessary because the cement poured into the top of the blown Macondo well last week -- the so-called "static kill" -- might have permanently killed it.
But after running pressure tests, BP and U.S. officials agree that the relief well is needed to plug the well 13,000 feet beneath the seabed, Allen said. The relief well is only about 45 feet from reaching the Macondo well.
"The relief well will be finished," Allen said. "We will kill the well."
The Macondo well, a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico, blew out April 20 and began spewing oil in what has become the worst offshore oilspill in history.
The well was provisionally capped on July 15 after spewing an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, soiling marshlands, fisheries and tourist beaches along several hundreds of miles (kilometers) of the Gulf Coast.
The British energy giant has lost more than a third of its market value since the explosion and has set aside $32.2 billion to deal with clean-up costs.
BP faces hundreds of civil lawsuits from injured rig workers, fishermen, investors and property owners seeking to recoup losses. Alabama added to that pile by with its suit against BP and other companies for what Attorney General Troy King said was "catastrophic harm.
"We are suing them for the amount it will take to make Alabama whole," King said.
"WANTON FAILURE"
The suit, which did not set a damage figure, accuses the defendants of "negligent or wanton failure to adhere to recognized industry standards of care."
The spill has hurt fishing and tourism around the Gulf and has affected other sectors such as housing. People and businesses that have sustained losses can make claims against the BP compensation fund administered by Kenneth Feinberg, named by the White House as an independent overseer.
But King said Feinberg was undermining efforts by Gulf state attorneys general to make it possible for spill victims to claim damages from the fund while retaining the right to sue BP at a future date.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who has faced criticism for being slow to act in the face of the world's worst offshore oil spill, will vacation in Panama City, Florida, this weekend and make a public statement on the recovery effort on Saturday.
In Louisiana, the state hit hardest by the spill, U.S. and BP officials met with parish presidents and Gov. Bobby Jindal to discuss long-term recovery plans.
The U.S. government will enact an ocean monitoring system to detect underwater plumes of oil that could be harming undersea ecosystems, Allen said.
Meanwhile, top-level BP and U.S. officials including Energy Secretary Steven Chu and incoming BP chief executive Bob Dudley on Friday discussed how to proceed with the final well plug, Allen said.
Pressure tests completed late on Thursday showed that the well is effectively sealed, with "no communication with the reservoir," Allen said.
But engineers are worried that increased pressure from the "bottom kill" could damage the existing temporary cement plug and perhaps cause about 1,000 barrels of oil trapped in the well shaft to flow into the ocean, Allen said. Engineers are developing procedures to allay such concerns, he said.
After Allen gives the order to continue with the relief well, it will take about 96 hours to drill into the Macondo well shaft and perhaps days beyond that to complete the job, he said.
____________
Gulf seafood gets intense safety testing
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
The Associated Press
Monday, August 16, 2010; 4:33 AM
WASHINGTON -- Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is being put under the microscope like no other kind on the market, with fish, shrimp and other catches ground up to hunt for minute traces of oil - far more reassuring than that sniff test that made all the headlines.
And while the dispersant that was dumped into the massive oil spill has consumers nervous, health regulators contend there's no evidence it builds up in seafood - although they're working to create a test for it, just in case.
More Gulf waters are reopening to commercial hauls as tests show little hazard from oil, and Louisiana's fall shrimp season kicks off Monday. Yet it's too soon to know what safety testing will satisfy a public so skeptical of government reassurances that even local fishermen voice concern.
Basic biology is key: Some species clear oil contamination out of their bodies far more rapidly than others. Fish are the fastest, oysters and crabs the slowest, and shrimp somewhere in between.
"I probably would put oysters at the top of the concern list and I don't think there's a close second," said marine scientist George Crozier, who directs the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama.
The oil contaminants of most health concern - potential cancer-causing substances called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs - show up in other everyday foods, too, such as grilled meat. Low levels also are in seafood sold from other waters.
Where Gulf seafood harvesting has been reopened, "the levels that we see are pretty typical of what we see in other areas, Puget Sound or Alaska," said Walton Dickhoff, who oversees testing at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.
Here are some questions and answers about Gulf seafood safety:
Q: What are PAHs? MORE...
____________
Gulf Seafood Testing:
Another View on Possible War with Iran
Israeli Generals and Intel Officials Oppose Attack on Iran
Analysis by Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 13, 2010 (IPS) - Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg's article in "The Atlantic" magazine was evidently aimed at showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran in the coming months unless it takes a much more menacing line toward Iran's nuclear programme.
But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an "existential threat" is unnecessary and self-defeating. Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996.
The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not go ahead with any strike without being assured of U.S. direct involvement in the war with Iran.
Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is that Israeli officials will call their U.S. counterparts to inform them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
The Israelis would explain that they had "no choice", he writes, because "a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people."
He claims the "consensus" among present and past Israeli leaders is that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel "will launch a strike by next July", based on interviews with 40 such Israeli decision-makers.
Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.
Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu's thinking as saying, "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation."
In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to "fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella".
But Israel relies on conventional forces - not nuclear deterrence - against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.
Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel's ability to retain its most talented people.
But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked "worry that talk of an 'existential threat' is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people."
A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts "the usefulness of an attack".
Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating.
Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been "distorted".
Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe Iran's main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to threaten Israel but to "deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime change", according to Bergman.
The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to Israel - and Israeli intelligence officials' disagreement with it - goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labour Party government in Israel began a campaign to portray Iran's missile and nuclear programmes as an "existential threat" to Israel, as Trita Parsi revealed in his 2007 book "Treacherous Alliance".
An internal Israeli inter-ministerial committee formed in 1994 to make recommendations on dealing with Iran concluded that Israeli rhetoric had been "self-defeating", because it had actually made Iran more afraid of Israel, and more hostile toward it, Parsi writes.
Ironically, it was Netanyahu who decided to stop using such rhetoric after becoming prime minister the first time in mid-1996. Mossad director of intelligence Uzi Arad convinced him that Israel had a choice between making itself Iran's enemy or allowing Iran to focus on threats from other states.
Netanyahu even sought Kazakh and Russian mediation between Iran and Israel.
But he reversed that policy when he became convinced that Tehran was seeking a rapprochement with Washington, which Israeli leaders feared would result in reduced U.S. support for Israel, according to Parsi's account. As a result, Netanyahu reverted to the extreme rhetoric of his predecessors.
That episode suggests that Netanyahu is perfectly capable of grasping the intelligence community's more nuanced analysis of Iran, contrary to his public stance that the Iranian threat is the same as that from Hitler's Germany.
Netanyahu administration officials used Goldberg to convey the message to the Americans that they didn't believe Obama would launch an attack on Iran, and therefore Israel would have to do so.
But Israel clearly cannot afford to risk a war with Iran without the assurance that the United States being committed to participate in it. That is why the Israeli lobby in Washington and its allies argue that Obama should support an Israeli strike, which would mean that he would have to attack Iran with full force if it retaliates against such an Israeli strike.
The knowledge that Israel could not attack Iran without U.S. consent makes Israeli officials extremely sensitive about the possibility that Obama would explicitly reject an Israeli strike
Goldberg reports that "several Israeli officials" told him they were worried that U.S. intelligence might learn about Israeli plans to strike Iran "hours" before the scheduled launch.
The officials told Goldberg that if Obama were to say, "We know what you're doing. Stop immediately," Israel might have to back down.
Goldberg alludes only vaguely to the possibility that the threat of an attack on Iran is a strategy designed to manipulate both Iran and the United States. In a March 2009 article in The Atlantic online, however, he was more straightforward, conceding that the Netanyahu threat to strike Iran if the United States failed to stop the Iranian nuclear programme could be a "tremendous bluff".
Analysis by Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 13, 2010 (IPS) - Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg's article in "The Atlantic" magazine was evidently aimed at showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran in the coming months unless it takes a much more menacing line toward Iran's nuclear programme.
But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an "existential threat" is unnecessary and self-defeating. Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996.
The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not go ahead with any strike without being assured of U.S. direct involvement in the war with Iran.
Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is that Israeli officials will call their U.S. counterparts to inform them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
The Israelis would explain that they had "no choice", he writes, because "a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people."
He claims the "consensus" among present and past Israeli leaders is that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel "will launch a strike by next July", based on interviews with 40 such Israeli decision-makers.
Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.
Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu's thinking as saying, "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation."
In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to "fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella".
But Israel relies on conventional forces - not nuclear deterrence - against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.
Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel's ability to retain its most talented people.
But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked "worry that talk of an 'existential threat' is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people."
A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts "the usefulness of an attack".
Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating.
Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been "distorted".
Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe Iran's main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to threaten Israel but to "deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime change", according to Bergman.
The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to Israel - and Israeli intelligence officials' disagreement with it - goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labour Party government in Israel began a campaign to portray Iran's missile and nuclear programmes as an "existential threat" to Israel, as Trita Parsi revealed in his 2007 book "Treacherous Alliance".
An internal Israeli inter-ministerial committee formed in 1994 to make recommendations on dealing with Iran concluded that Israeli rhetoric had been "self-defeating", because it had actually made Iran more afraid of Israel, and more hostile toward it, Parsi writes.
Ironically, it was Netanyahu who decided to stop using such rhetoric after becoming prime minister the first time in mid-1996. Mossad director of intelligence Uzi Arad convinced him that Israel had a choice between making itself Iran's enemy or allowing Iran to focus on threats from other states.
Netanyahu even sought Kazakh and Russian mediation between Iran and Israel.
But he reversed that policy when he became convinced that Tehran was seeking a rapprochement with Washington, which Israeli leaders feared would result in reduced U.S. support for Israel, according to Parsi's account. As a result, Netanyahu reverted to the extreme rhetoric of his predecessors.
That episode suggests that Netanyahu is perfectly capable of grasping the intelligence community's more nuanced analysis of Iran, contrary to his public stance that the Iranian threat is the same as that from Hitler's Germany.
Netanyahu administration officials used Goldberg to convey the message to the Americans that they didn't believe Obama would launch an attack on Iran, and therefore Israel would have to do so.
But Israel clearly cannot afford to risk a war with Iran without the assurance that the United States being committed to participate in it. That is why the Israeli lobby in Washington and its allies argue that Obama should support an Israeli strike, which would mean that he would have to attack Iran with full force if it retaliates against such an Israeli strike.
The knowledge that Israel could not attack Iran without U.S. consent makes Israeli officials extremely sensitive about the possibility that Obama would explicitly reject an Israeli strike
Goldberg reports that "several Israeli officials" told him they were worried that U.S. intelligence might learn about Israeli plans to strike Iran "hours" before the scheduled launch.
The officials told Goldberg that if Obama were to say, "We know what you're doing. Stop immediately," Israel might have to back down.
Goldberg alludes only vaguely to the possibility that the threat of an attack on Iran is a strategy designed to manipulate both Iran and the United States. In a March 2009 article in The Atlantic online, however, he was more straightforward, conceding that the Netanyahu threat to strike Iran if the United States failed to stop the Iranian nuclear programme could be a "tremendous bluff".
Sunday, August 15, 2010
A Neocon Preps US for War with Iran
By Ray McGovern
August 13, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- I guess I was naïve in thinking that The Atlantic and its American-Israeli writer Jeffrey Goldberg might shy away from arguing for yet another war — this one with Iran — while the cauldrons are still boiling in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s worth remembering how Goldberg helped to make the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For instance, on Oct. 3, 2002, as America’s war fever was building, Goldberg wrote in Slate, the online magazine:
“The [Bush] administration is planning … to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”
Looking back on Goldberg’s commentaries at the time, it’s also a reminder of how many U.S. publications that are considered centrist or even liberal were bending over backward to get in line with that coming invasion.
Even earlier, on March 25, 2002, Goldberg filled the pages of The New Yorker with a mammoth 17,000-word story hyping Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorism and glossing over the ambiguities regarding the gassing of civilians in the Kurdish city of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war.
Goldberg’s magnum opus, entitled “The Great Terror,” earned him high marks from other neocons and essentially “made” Goldberg’s career. The story was also made to order, so to speak, for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Presenting Goldberg with an award for the article, the Overseas Press Club saw fit to note that former CIA director James Woolsey described the story as a “blockbuster.” Woolsey, the self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of JINSA (The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs),” has been a strong advocate for the use of force against any and all perceived enemies of Israel.
Woolsey also was the prime manufacturer and a key disseminator of bogus “intelligence” on the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection. In The New Yorker article, while exaggerating Iraq’s links to terrorism, Goldberg quotes Woolsey complaining about the CIA’s alleged aversion to learning about Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda.
It is a safe bet that Goldberg’s prose under the subhead “The Al-Qaeda Link” was inspired by Woolsey. But it gets worse; the detail in that section came mostly from a drug dealer in a Kurdish prison, whom a British journalist, following upon Goldberg’s reporting, quickly determined to be a “liar.”
A Friendly Reception
Yet, not surprisingly, Goldberg emerged from his work prepping the PR ground for the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a well-respected "journalist," so much so that he was afforded deferential treatment when he made a tour of the cable TV news programs this week promoting his new case for a new war, this time with Iran.
Goldberg had just produced a new magnum opus for another prestige journal, The Atlantic, entitled “The Point of No Return,” explaining Israel’s case for bombing Iran and the reasons why the United States should join in.
On Wednesday, Goldberg swatted away softball questions from MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell, who joined in a friendly chat about whether the U.S. or Israel or both should opt for what Mitchell described as a “military response” to the “Iranian nuclear threat,” and when.
Goldberg claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sees the challenge from Iran as being on a par with the Holocaust, believing that Iran is bent on the destruction of Israel with its 6 million people.
“Are you persuaded that Israel would take action against Iran unilaterally?” asked Mitchell. “Yes, I am; I am,” Goldberg responded.
Goldberg added that he believes that President Barack Obama is not prepared to live with a nuclear Iran but that it remains an open question whether he would take military action to prevent that eventuality. Goldberg said Obama “probably” would not.
And that being the case, Goldberg thought Netanyahu would be inclined to unleash Israeli forces unilaterally and absorb any damage this might do to bilateral relations with Washington.
At the end of the Mitchell interview, she lofted what appeared to be a canned question and, in response, Goldberg seemed downright eager to share what he called a “secret,” as he put it.
Mitchell asked when Obama planned to visit Israel. Goldberg, however, expressed a concern: “The Israelis are worried about Obama coming; they don’t want him to be boo-ed wherever he goes; that’s the last thing they need. Obama is not popular in Israel in the way Bush and Clinton were.”
The unmistakable message: An Obama tour of Israel could be an ugly affair.
Chatting with Wolf
Goldberg walked through a similar discussion on the merits of war when he appeared on CNN, a guest of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room.”
Goldberg: “The question is what can the Obama administration do to stop the Iranians from pursuing the nuclear program … it seems unlikely to me at this point that Iran is simply going to say, because President Obama asks, you know, we’re going to end our nuclear program.”
Blitzer: “You have concluded that an Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities is — in your word — a near certainty?”
Goldberg: “Well, it’s a near certainty, in the long term, but even in the next year I give it a 50 percent or better chance. Next year, meaning by next July.”
Not that it probably would have mattered, but someone probably should have told Andrea Mitchell and Wolf Blitzer that more skeptical observers have described Goldberg’s previous “journalism” in very unflattering terms.
One critic deemed Goldberg’s pre-Iraq War reporting for The New Yorker as “a journalism-school nightmare: bad sources, compromised sources, unacknowledged uncertainties … with alarmist rhetoric that is now either laughable or nauseating, depending on your mood.”
For instance, the fact that many civilians were gassed as Iraqi and Iranian forces clashed on March 16, 1988, in the area of Halabja, just barely inside Iraq’s border with Iran, is beyond dispute.
However, what is not clear is the blockbuster charge that it was the Iraqis, rather than the Iranians, who used the deadly chemical warfare agents. The U.S. government has pointed the finger in both directions, often depending on which side of the conflict Washington was tilting toward.
A joint CIA and Defense Intelligence assessment focused in on the “blood agents (cyanogen chloride) deemed responsible for most of the deaths in Halabja and determined that the Iraqis had no history of using those particular agents, but that the Iranians did.
That particular CIA-DIA report concluded that, despite the conventional wisdom, “the Iranians perpetrated this attack.”
Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, a senior CIA analyst on Iraq during its war with Iran, told Roger Trilling of the Village Voice that he is one among many who believe that Goldberg’s account of the killings at Halabja was wrong and that the issue was far from academic.
Pelletiere said: “We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world shouldn’t tolerate him. But why? Because that’s the last argument the U.S. has for going to war with Iraq.”
It may well have been the most emotionally riveting argument, I suppose.
Debunking the Junk
But what about Iraq’s alleged WMDs and supposed ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda? Goldberg made an attempt to include those canards as well, focusing mostly on chemical and biological warfare agents. (He left to the New York Times’ Judith Miller, who was later fired, and Michael Gordon, who is still chief military correspondent, to do the heavy lifting for the lies about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons.)
A final story about Jeffrey Goldberg’s pre-Iraq-invasion stories: Just a week before Congress bowed to Bush’s request for war authorization against Iraq, Goldberg was writing in Slate about the dangers of “aflatoxin,” which he had cited 15 times in his New Yorker article.
“Aflatoxin does only one thing well,” Goldberg wrote. “It causes liver cancer. In fact, it induces it particularly well in children.”
However, Goldberg’s obsession with “aflatoxin” didn’t stand up too well after the U.S.-led invasion found no evidence that Iraq still had bio-weapons stockpiles. Regarding aflatoxin, Charles Duelfer, the Bush administration’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that there was “no evidence to link those tests [of aflatoxin] with the development of biological weapons agents for military use.”
Ken Silverstein of Harper’s, among the more serious journalists who have had macabre fun critiquing Goldberg’s contribution to the Iraq War effort, wrote “Goldberg’s War,” one of the best critiques.
Silverstein wrote:
“Whatever Saddam’s regime intended to do with the aflatoxin … it did not involve wholescale tot-slaughter. But it seems to me that Goldberg was out to prove that Saddam was singularly evil — a man who would kill kids using cancer, no doubt cackling with glee as he watched them expire — because the American public might be less willing to support a war if he was merely an evil dictator, which are a dime a dozen.”
But who is Jeffrey Goldberg and how did he achieve such influence, helping to create the false conventional wisdom that sleep-walked the American people into war with Iraq and is now pointing toward a new war with Iran.
For a 44-year-old writer, Goldberg surely has been around. He left college to move to Israel where he served with the Israeli army as a prison guard at the Ketziot military prison camp during the First Intifada; he also wrote for The Jerusalem Post.
Upon his return to the U.S., he worked for the Jewish daily Forward and eventually got hired by The New Yorker. Now, he’s a star writer for The Atlantic.
Pitching for War
Goldberg’s mission this time? Pitching war with Iran.
This time, Goldberg and the Israelis want us to buy into a syllogism without a valid major premise. Their argument presupposes that Iran has made the decision to develop nuclear weapons and is hard at work on such a program, which is what they want Americans to believe whether there’s evidence or not.
The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) and the neocons who brought us the war on Iraq, and occasionally the President himself, speak as though Iran has restarted work on the nuclear weapons part of their nuclear energy program.
This internal government debate (and the external propaganda) is a replay of three years ago, when the FCM succeeded in convincing most Americans that Iran either had nuclear weapons or was on the verge of getting them.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney were out in front hyping the danger, whipping the American people into another war frenzy -- when an honest National Intelligence Estimate stopped them in their tracks.
Two things saved the day: integrity and fear.
Integrity on the part of analysts who, after the corruption before the Iraq War, were able to revert to the tell-it-like-it-is-without-fear-or-favor ethos that obtained during my 27 years as a CIA analyst; and fear on the part of the senior U.S. military that Cheney and Bush were about to order them to commit U.S. forces to war with Iran.
The integrity played out during work on a congressionally mandated National Intelligence Estimate that it took almost all of 2007 to complete. Most of those intelligence officials who had “fixed” the intelligence on Iraq had been given the heave-ho.
New leadership was installed under the direction of a non-corruptible Director of the National Intelligence Council, Tom Fingar, from the State Department.
Under Fingar, intelligence analysts rose to the occasion on the delicate issue of Iran’s nuclear development program by performing a bottom-up assessment. There would be no “fixing” of intelligence around the policy. Main question: Had Iran decided to go for the bomb?
The NIE’s first sentence conveyed the unanimous conclusion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”
Fearing Another War
Fear now came into play and, for once, played a salutary role. Fear is simply a by-product of a sane appraisal of what war with Iran would mean. The senior U.S. military had enough good sense to be afraid and saw the NIE as an opportunity to stop the juggernaut toward war.
And so, they and those in Congress who had commissioned the NIE insisted that its key judgments be declassified and made public, despite reluctance on the part of the Director of National Intelligence to do so.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and CENTCOM commander William “Fox” Fallon had been living in fear of a Cheney-inspired order to commit U.S. forces to war with Iran. Fallon actually had told retired Col. Patrick Lang, a few months before Fallon was cashiered, “We are not going to do Iran on my watch.”
Fear? Yes, fear — an altogether sensible reaction. No commander worth his salt looks with equanimity at the prospect of being on the receiving end of an order that could decimate his troops and lead to a wider war for which his forces would not be adequate.
On a more personal basis, no commander wants to be faced with a choice between having to resign on principle on the one hand and carrying out an order he knows to be fatefully misguided on the other.
Good sense prevailed, over Cheney’s strong objections and Bush sent Mullen to Israel in June 2008 with instructions to warn the Israelis in no uncertain terms not to provoke war with Iran with any expectation that the U.S. would pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
Fast forward to the present. Where is Iran now in its nuclear program?
When an important National Intelligence Estimate needs updating, the art form often chosen is what is called a “Memorandum to Holders” — in the case at hand, holders of the original NIE of November 2007.
Such a paper need not repeat the bottom-up research and analysis completed immediately prior to November 2007; it simply requires a close look at evidence acquired from the end of 2007 to the present to determine whether there is reason to change the key judgments of three years ago.
Pressure to Rewrite?
We hear nothing from our sources about any substantial change over the past three years. That is not what the Goldbergs and other neocons of this world want to hear, and this presumably is why the Memorandum to Holders has been held up for months and months. Not a good sign.
Authoritative statements for the record have been sparse but reassuring, inasmuch as they seem to confirm the 2007 NIE's key judgments. Congressional testimony in February by then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and in April by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs revealed no major developments.
Moreover, Blair consistently hewed to the 2007 judgment that Iran's eventual decision on whether or not to build a nuclear weapon can still be influenced by "the international community."
Scattered statements by other high officials, including President Obama, sometimes convey a sense that Iran is again working toward a nuclear weapon, and the FCM has been leaving hints left and right that this is the case.
Folks like Jeffrey Goldberg refer casually, but intentionally, to “Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
The neocons seem to be as strong now as under George W. Bush, with their Real-Men-Go-to-Tehran-type macho undiminished.
Can integrity trump macho this time? Without a strong man at the helm in the intelligence community, it will be very difficult. And the administration let drop months ago that this time the key judgments of the Memorandum to Holders will not be made public.
Meanwhile, Goldberg and his neocon colleague flaks are trying to create as much pressure as they can on Obama to produce a scarier Estimate … or to delay the one in progress sine die.
The outlook would seem even bleaker were it not for the availability of WikiLeaks and other non-FCM news outlets that would be ready and willing to publish documents about what is actually going on behind the scenes.
It would seem a safe bet that there are enough folks with access to the Memorandum to Holders drafts to recognize swiftly any attempt to corrupt honest judgments.
Some government officials will probably be able to recognize their own conscience, their integrity and their oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, as values that properly supersede other promises — like the promise not to release classified information that is a condition of employment.
Those who are tempted to exaggerate the threat from Iran will, at least, have to take into account how relatively easy it has become to evade the FCM’s gatekeepers and expose government dishonesty to the people.
Editor's NOTE:
As Professor James Petras has frequently reminded us, the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) is alive and well among the elite broadcast media. Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell are both members. Goldberg is an avid Zionist who is in the mold of those charter members who signed the PNAC document including Bill Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others.
At the risk of being accused of the genetic fallacy, I would point out that anyone who either admits to being a Zionist or has Zionist sympathies should have any statements they make vis a vis war with Iran immediately discounted.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
August 13, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- I guess I was naïve in thinking that The Atlantic and its American-Israeli writer Jeffrey Goldberg might shy away from arguing for yet another war — this one with Iran — while the cauldrons are still boiling in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s worth remembering how Goldberg helped to make the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For instance, on Oct. 3, 2002, as America’s war fever was building, Goldberg wrote in Slate, the online magazine:
“The [Bush] administration is planning … to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”
Looking back on Goldberg’s commentaries at the time, it’s also a reminder of how many U.S. publications that are considered centrist or even liberal were bending over backward to get in line with that coming invasion.
Even earlier, on March 25, 2002, Goldberg filled the pages of The New Yorker with a mammoth 17,000-word story hyping Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorism and glossing over the ambiguities regarding the gassing of civilians in the Kurdish city of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war.
Goldberg’s magnum opus, entitled “The Great Terror,” earned him high marks from other neocons and essentially “made” Goldberg’s career. The story was also made to order, so to speak, for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Presenting Goldberg with an award for the article, the Overseas Press Club saw fit to note that former CIA director James Woolsey described the story as a “blockbuster.” Woolsey, the self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of JINSA (The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs),” has been a strong advocate for the use of force against any and all perceived enemies of Israel.
Woolsey also was the prime manufacturer and a key disseminator of bogus “intelligence” on the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection. In The New Yorker article, while exaggerating Iraq’s links to terrorism, Goldberg quotes Woolsey complaining about the CIA’s alleged aversion to learning about Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda.
It is a safe bet that Goldberg’s prose under the subhead “The Al-Qaeda Link” was inspired by Woolsey. But it gets worse; the detail in that section came mostly from a drug dealer in a Kurdish prison, whom a British journalist, following upon Goldberg’s reporting, quickly determined to be a “liar.”
A Friendly Reception
Yet, not surprisingly, Goldberg emerged from his work prepping the PR ground for the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a well-respected "journalist," so much so that he was afforded deferential treatment when he made a tour of the cable TV news programs this week promoting his new case for a new war, this time with Iran.
Goldberg had just produced a new magnum opus for another prestige journal, The Atlantic, entitled “The Point of No Return,” explaining Israel’s case for bombing Iran and the reasons why the United States should join in.
On Wednesday, Goldberg swatted away softball questions from MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell, who joined in a friendly chat about whether the U.S. or Israel or both should opt for what Mitchell described as a “military response” to the “Iranian nuclear threat,” and when.
Goldberg claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sees the challenge from Iran as being on a par with the Holocaust, believing that Iran is bent on the destruction of Israel with its 6 million people.
“Are you persuaded that Israel would take action against Iran unilaterally?” asked Mitchell. “Yes, I am; I am,” Goldberg responded.
Goldberg added that he believes that President Barack Obama is not prepared to live with a nuclear Iran but that it remains an open question whether he would take military action to prevent that eventuality. Goldberg said Obama “probably” would not.
And that being the case, Goldberg thought Netanyahu would be inclined to unleash Israeli forces unilaterally and absorb any damage this might do to bilateral relations with Washington.
At the end of the Mitchell interview, she lofted what appeared to be a canned question and, in response, Goldberg seemed downright eager to share what he called a “secret,” as he put it.
Mitchell asked when Obama planned to visit Israel. Goldberg, however, expressed a concern: “The Israelis are worried about Obama coming; they don’t want him to be boo-ed wherever he goes; that’s the last thing they need. Obama is not popular in Israel in the way Bush and Clinton were.”
The unmistakable message: An Obama tour of Israel could be an ugly affair.
Chatting with Wolf
Goldberg walked through a similar discussion on the merits of war when he appeared on CNN, a guest of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room.”
Goldberg: “The question is what can the Obama administration do to stop the Iranians from pursuing the nuclear program … it seems unlikely to me at this point that Iran is simply going to say, because President Obama asks, you know, we’re going to end our nuclear program.”
Blitzer: “You have concluded that an Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities is — in your word — a near certainty?”
Goldberg: “Well, it’s a near certainty, in the long term, but even in the next year I give it a 50 percent or better chance. Next year, meaning by next July.”
Not that it probably would have mattered, but someone probably should have told Andrea Mitchell and Wolf Blitzer that more skeptical observers have described Goldberg’s previous “journalism” in very unflattering terms.
One critic deemed Goldberg’s pre-Iraq War reporting for The New Yorker as “a journalism-school nightmare: bad sources, compromised sources, unacknowledged uncertainties … with alarmist rhetoric that is now either laughable or nauseating, depending on your mood.”
For instance, the fact that many civilians were gassed as Iraqi and Iranian forces clashed on March 16, 1988, in the area of Halabja, just barely inside Iraq’s border with Iran, is beyond dispute.
However, what is not clear is the blockbuster charge that it was the Iraqis, rather than the Iranians, who used the deadly chemical warfare agents. The U.S. government has pointed the finger in both directions, often depending on which side of the conflict Washington was tilting toward.
A joint CIA and Defense Intelligence assessment focused in on the “blood agents (cyanogen chloride) deemed responsible for most of the deaths in Halabja and determined that the Iraqis had no history of using those particular agents, but that the Iranians did.
That particular CIA-DIA report concluded that, despite the conventional wisdom, “the Iranians perpetrated this attack.”
Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, a senior CIA analyst on Iraq during its war with Iran, told Roger Trilling of the Village Voice that he is one among many who believe that Goldberg’s account of the killings at Halabja was wrong and that the issue was far from academic.
Pelletiere said: “We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world shouldn’t tolerate him. But why? Because that’s the last argument the U.S. has for going to war with Iraq.”
It may well have been the most emotionally riveting argument, I suppose.
Debunking the Junk
But what about Iraq’s alleged WMDs and supposed ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda? Goldberg made an attempt to include those canards as well, focusing mostly on chemical and biological warfare agents. (He left to the New York Times’ Judith Miller, who was later fired, and Michael Gordon, who is still chief military correspondent, to do the heavy lifting for the lies about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons.)
A final story about Jeffrey Goldberg’s pre-Iraq-invasion stories: Just a week before Congress bowed to Bush’s request for war authorization against Iraq, Goldberg was writing in Slate about the dangers of “aflatoxin,” which he had cited 15 times in his New Yorker article.
“Aflatoxin does only one thing well,” Goldberg wrote. “It causes liver cancer. In fact, it induces it particularly well in children.”
However, Goldberg’s obsession with “aflatoxin” didn’t stand up too well after the U.S.-led invasion found no evidence that Iraq still had bio-weapons stockpiles. Regarding aflatoxin, Charles Duelfer, the Bush administration’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that there was “no evidence to link those tests [of aflatoxin] with the development of biological weapons agents for military use.”
Ken Silverstein of Harper’s, among the more serious journalists who have had macabre fun critiquing Goldberg’s contribution to the Iraq War effort, wrote “Goldberg’s War,” one of the best critiques.
Silverstein wrote:
“Whatever Saddam’s regime intended to do with the aflatoxin … it did not involve wholescale tot-slaughter. But it seems to me that Goldberg was out to prove that Saddam was singularly evil — a man who would kill kids using cancer, no doubt cackling with glee as he watched them expire — because the American public might be less willing to support a war if he was merely an evil dictator, which are a dime a dozen.”
But who is Jeffrey Goldberg and how did he achieve such influence, helping to create the false conventional wisdom that sleep-walked the American people into war with Iraq and is now pointing toward a new war with Iran.
For a 44-year-old writer, Goldberg surely has been around. He left college to move to Israel where he served with the Israeli army as a prison guard at the Ketziot military prison camp during the First Intifada; he also wrote for The Jerusalem Post.
Upon his return to the U.S., he worked for the Jewish daily Forward and eventually got hired by The New Yorker. Now, he’s a star writer for The Atlantic.
Pitching for War
Goldberg’s mission this time? Pitching war with Iran.
This time, Goldberg and the Israelis want us to buy into a syllogism without a valid major premise. Their argument presupposes that Iran has made the decision to develop nuclear weapons and is hard at work on such a program, which is what they want Americans to believe whether there’s evidence or not.
The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) and the neocons who brought us the war on Iraq, and occasionally the President himself, speak as though Iran has restarted work on the nuclear weapons part of their nuclear energy program.
This internal government debate (and the external propaganda) is a replay of three years ago, when the FCM succeeded in convincing most Americans that Iran either had nuclear weapons or was on the verge of getting them.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney were out in front hyping the danger, whipping the American people into another war frenzy -- when an honest National Intelligence Estimate stopped them in their tracks.
Two things saved the day: integrity and fear.
Integrity on the part of analysts who, after the corruption before the Iraq War, were able to revert to the tell-it-like-it-is-without-fear-or-favor ethos that obtained during my 27 years as a CIA analyst; and fear on the part of the senior U.S. military that Cheney and Bush were about to order them to commit U.S. forces to war with Iran.
The integrity played out during work on a congressionally mandated National Intelligence Estimate that it took almost all of 2007 to complete. Most of those intelligence officials who had “fixed” the intelligence on Iraq had been given the heave-ho.
New leadership was installed under the direction of a non-corruptible Director of the National Intelligence Council, Tom Fingar, from the State Department.
Under Fingar, intelligence analysts rose to the occasion on the delicate issue of Iran’s nuclear development program by performing a bottom-up assessment. There would be no “fixing” of intelligence around the policy. Main question: Had Iran decided to go for the bomb?
The NIE’s first sentence conveyed the unanimous conclusion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”
Fearing Another War
Fear now came into play and, for once, played a salutary role. Fear is simply a by-product of a sane appraisal of what war with Iran would mean. The senior U.S. military had enough good sense to be afraid and saw the NIE as an opportunity to stop the juggernaut toward war.
And so, they and those in Congress who had commissioned the NIE insisted that its key judgments be declassified and made public, despite reluctance on the part of the Director of National Intelligence to do so.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and CENTCOM commander William “Fox” Fallon had been living in fear of a Cheney-inspired order to commit U.S. forces to war with Iran. Fallon actually had told retired Col. Patrick Lang, a few months before Fallon was cashiered, “We are not going to do Iran on my watch.”
Fear? Yes, fear — an altogether sensible reaction. No commander worth his salt looks with equanimity at the prospect of being on the receiving end of an order that could decimate his troops and lead to a wider war for which his forces would not be adequate.
On a more personal basis, no commander wants to be faced with a choice between having to resign on principle on the one hand and carrying out an order he knows to be fatefully misguided on the other.
Good sense prevailed, over Cheney’s strong objections and Bush sent Mullen to Israel in June 2008 with instructions to warn the Israelis in no uncertain terms not to provoke war with Iran with any expectation that the U.S. would pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
Fast forward to the present. Where is Iran now in its nuclear program?
When an important National Intelligence Estimate needs updating, the art form often chosen is what is called a “Memorandum to Holders” — in the case at hand, holders of the original NIE of November 2007.
Such a paper need not repeat the bottom-up research and analysis completed immediately prior to November 2007; it simply requires a close look at evidence acquired from the end of 2007 to the present to determine whether there is reason to change the key judgments of three years ago.
Pressure to Rewrite?
We hear nothing from our sources about any substantial change over the past three years. That is not what the Goldbergs and other neocons of this world want to hear, and this presumably is why the Memorandum to Holders has been held up for months and months. Not a good sign.
Authoritative statements for the record have been sparse but reassuring, inasmuch as they seem to confirm the 2007 NIE's key judgments. Congressional testimony in February by then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and in April by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs revealed no major developments.
Moreover, Blair consistently hewed to the 2007 judgment that Iran's eventual decision on whether or not to build a nuclear weapon can still be influenced by "the international community."
Scattered statements by other high officials, including President Obama, sometimes convey a sense that Iran is again working toward a nuclear weapon, and the FCM has been leaving hints left and right that this is the case.
Folks like Jeffrey Goldberg refer casually, but intentionally, to “Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
The neocons seem to be as strong now as under George W. Bush, with their Real-Men-Go-to-Tehran-type macho undiminished.
Can integrity trump macho this time? Without a strong man at the helm in the intelligence community, it will be very difficult. And the administration let drop months ago that this time the key judgments of the Memorandum to Holders will not be made public.
Meanwhile, Goldberg and his neocon colleague flaks are trying to create as much pressure as they can on Obama to produce a scarier Estimate … or to delay the one in progress sine die.
The outlook would seem even bleaker were it not for the availability of WikiLeaks and other non-FCM news outlets that would be ready and willing to publish documents about what is actually going on behind the scenes.
It would seem a safe bet that there are enough folks with access to the Memorandum to Holders drafts to recognize swiftly any attempt to corrupt honest judgments.
Some government officials will probably be able to recognize their own conscience, their integrity and their oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, as values that properly supersede other promises — like the promise not to release classified information that is a condition of employment.
Those who are tempted to exaggerate the threat from Iran will, at least, have to take into account how relatively easy it has become to evade the FCM’s gatekeepers and expose government dishonesty to the people.
Editor's NOTE:
As Professor James Petras has frequently reminded us, the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) is alive and well among the elite broadcast media. Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell are both members. Goldberg is an avid Zionist who is in the mold of those charter members who signed the PNAC document including Bill Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others.
At the risk of being accused of the genetic fallacy, I would point out that anyone who either admits to being a Zionist or has Zionist sympathies should have any statements they make vis a vis war with Iran immediately discounted.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
“Police-State” Tactics Replace Traditional Moral Restraint
By: Dr. J. P. Hubert
Legal Stringency vs. Legal Laxity:
Not everything that is immoral is illegal in the West. There would be insufficient numbers of police and prosecuting attorney’s to process all of the crimes were that to be the case. As a result, some behaviors which are clearly immoral based on tradition moral precepts[1] are not made criminal e.g. adultery, homosexual activity, fornication etc (in Muslim countries which observe Sharia law however, many of these immoral behaviors are considered crimes and punished severely meaning their societies are legally stringent). The degree to which immoral behavior is not made criminal is a measure of the legal laxity of a society. For a detailed discussion of the relationship of the "Common Good" to Civil Law and human virtue see: Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I-II, 96, 1-6 HERE...
Not all Immoral Acts are Illegal and Vice-Versa:
On the other hand, most things that are illegal are immoral, e.g. murder, rape, theft etc. Clearly there are some minor crimes e.g. failure to pay a parking ticket in a timely fashion which are either morally neutral or of minimal significance compared to major criminal activity. For all intents and purposes then, there exist few crimes which are not immoral as well. If too many clearly moral acts were punishable by law, not only would enforcement be impossible but justice would be unattainable as the civil law would be capricious and confidence in it would be destroyed.
The Correct Balance of Civil Laws and Moral Code:
The ideal balance in society is for major immoral actions/behaviors to be punishable by law as well. However, as a society loses its traditional moral integrity, it becomes necessary to substitute increasingly more and more stringent laws to serve as a substitute for the moral restraint which was once practiced by the populace. Taken to the extreme, a “police-state” will be required in cases where there has been a significant repudiation of traditional morality in practice. Such societal moral depravity simply cannot be controlled by stringent police-state tactics. There is no effective substitute for individual and societal moral restraint since it is impossible to place a police officer in every home, on every street corner and so forth.
Inverse Relationship between Morality and Civil Law:
For ease of handling, one might think of morality and civil laws then as being inversely proportional to one another. Where there is a high degree of morality in a population, there is less need for prohibitive laws and large numbers of police to enforce them. Where there is moral depravity, more and more legal impediments must be erected to control human behavior and a larger number of police and prosecutors are required to enforce them. This of course assumes that it is possible to determine right and wrong in the first instance which many Post-Modernists/Utilitarian’s/Hedonist’s/Moral Relativist’s often deny. [Not only do they argue that there is no truth (an epistemological claim) but that there is no fixed morality (a moral philosophical claim)]. Most proponents of post-modernism adopt some sort of Moral Relativism or Utilitarianism in which determinations of right and wrong become reflections of what is socially acceptable at a given time. Needless to say, that is a prescription for moral anarchy but unfortunately describes quite well the current situation in the “developed” West.
The Need for a Fixed Moral Code:
In any case, despite the claims of self-professed nihilists and other non-traditional moralist’s everyone behaves in their interpersonal relations as if a fixed moral code exists. For example, we all appeal to fairness if we believe that we are being treated inequitably. To say that we must be accorded fair treatment is to imply that a standard exists by which to determine fairness. That standard might be thought of loosely as the Natural (moral) law, what for example C.S. Lewis termed the Tau in his Mere Christianity, (San Francisco: Harper, 1952).
[2] In order for there to be a standard by which all can be equally judged, there must be a universal reality to which all may appeal. That reality can be thought of as our human nature or anthropology which is fixed by virtue of our being members of the human race. In a certain sense it is specific to our DNA although not simply an epiphenomenon of it. That fixed human nature or “being” then which exists in every person is the standard or template the “is” from which all behavior or “ought’s” must be derived.
It is pointless to argue that human nature or “being” is fluid and not fixed. Quite apart from the ontological implications which have been debated ad nauseum in the biological realm, if we do not assume a fixed human anthropology, it is impossible to devise a workable moral code to which all human beings can be held. The result is to render meaningless such statements as: “All human beings are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or “all human beings should be treated equally” or “it is always and everywhere wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.” Under such a rubric (fluidity of human nature) it is impossible to derive any human rights at all since they become nothing more than claims which certain people advance from time to time against the ruling authority, which ultimately have no basis in fact or reality.
Their existence is as impermanent as the political power possessed at a given moment by the reference group or individual in question. That is to say even if a given human right is granted temporarily there is no basis upon which to believe that it will remain so. Moreover, when it is impossible to determine right from wrong because it is constantly changing we induce a societal form of cognitive dissonance. People assume a sort of “every man for himself” mentality. The result is selfishness, greed and often all encompassing hedonistic pursuits instead of selflessness, generosity and the seeking of the “common good.”
Human Rights must be based on a Fixed Human Nature:
What we have then is the truth that human rights must be tied to the fixed reality of human "being" or nature. If we assume instead that human anthropology is fluid, that human nature is not fixed or is indeterminate; we have moral anarchy due to the lack of a suitable universal referent. Tragically that is pretty much the case currently in the “developed” West and is also the main reason that much of the so-called third world a large percentage of which is Muslim finds us to be morally repugnant.
Quite apart from what we may see as the repressive nature of fundamentalist Islamic mores’, the actual moral code (as separated from the sanctions which enforce it) is much more compatible with traditional (Aristotelian/Thomistic) morality than that which is practiced in the West since it is based upon a more accurate assessment of human nature.[3] The Islamic moral code is simply closer to traditional (what was once termed Judeo-Christian) morality than is the Moral Relativism and Utilitarianism which has overtaken us.[4]
Where Christianity is different is that it proposes a complete or total spiritual conversion of the individual (through the power of the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the Cross) as the deterent against evil rather than the severe system of corporal punishment which is associated with Islamic Sharia law. In the former it is the positive transformation of the human person into an entirely "new creature in Christ" in the latter the negative reinforcement of physical injury or death. The Christian emphasis is on conversion and mercy while still maintaining a strict moral code, the Islamic emphasis is on an Old Testament form of severe retributive attempt at justice.
Historically over the past 50 years traditional (Aristotelian/Thomistic) morality has been progressively replaced in the United States and much of the West by a combination of Utilitarianism and Moral Relativism. This has been combined with a marked change in the judicial system from what was primarily Natural Law based jurisprudence to one of Legal Positivism or Pragmatism.[5] With the loss of traditional moral precepts there has been the expected increase in immoral behavior which to wit has been associated with a marked increase in law-breaking on the part of individuals and powerful group entities (such as major corporations, the Congress and the Executive branch of the US government).
Societal Moral Depravity Promotes Advent of Police State:
Some in the research community contend that Neo-fascist tactics are the result primarily of authoritarian personalities who periodically come to power and that fascist governments represent the occasional outlier or idiosyncratic development. Little recognized perhaps is the fact that when traditional morality is abandoned by a society, it becomes much easier for nefarious forces to introduce police-state tactics.
For example, in the wake of the 911 terrorist attacks, fascist neo-Nazi tactics were quite easily adopted e.g. USA Patriot Act, attempted suspension of Habeas Corpus, Torture of Prisoners, and Rendition etc. In part this was due to the fear which gripped the nation. The fact however that for decade’s traditional morality had been degraded adds to the ease with which heretofore unimaginable infringements were made on human rights. We had in a sense become accustomed to the need for prohibitive laws which took the place of traditional moral behavior in the aggregate. The corporate media was enlisted to convince[6] average Americans that we must even surrender certain of our basic human rights and liberty in order to ensure our national and individual security. Of course that would be unnecessary if as neighbors we trusted each other to do right and to be virtuous. The fact that we don’t should tell us something profound about our moral climate currently.
In the absence of a return to traditional morality as a nation, we will find it increasingly necessary to adopt more and more draconian laws by which to control human behavior. That is simply an inevitable outcome which results from the existence of the Natural (moral) law. If human beings will not voluntarily submit to the precepts of the Natural Law, then they will be forced to do so at the point of a gun or from behind prison walls.
The only other option is complete societal dissolution/anarchy where all positive civil law is suspended and where violence and a “might makes right” vigilantism is in force. The latter development is unlikely as long as our current oligarch’s maintain authoritarian control through progressively more stringent laws and prohibitions. The institution of Marshal-Law would be the logical next step or end-result of a further degradation in societal morality.
911 and a Constitutional Coup d'état Facilitated Police-State:
Professor Francis A Boyle a leading light in the area of constitutional and international law maintains that the US constitution has already been subjected to a Coup d'état in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the signing of the USA Patriot Act, attempted suspension of Habeas Corpus and the practice of Torture and Rendition.[7] If he is correct than we are further along the path outlined above than I would have hoped. Boyle of course sees the problem as our not being willing to abide by international law and the treaties we have signed which have made them a part of US domestic law. He is certainly correct as far as it goes. The more fundamental underlying reason in this writer’s estimation however is the increasing moral depravity of the ruling elites which has now percolated down to the level of the average American. The “ruling class” should be very nervous now that the so-called “common man” has adopted their immoral code and jettisoned traditional morality. Historically, this is when “the natives get restless” and the Oligarchical regime is most potentially threatened by the masses who are no longer governed by a desire for justice rather than vengeance or a love of the common good.
To put a finer point on this concept; people often assume that is, take-on the morality of the civil law in which they reside. When the oligarchical regime intentionally adulterates the traditional morality of a society by moving it in the direction of Hedonism/Utilitarianism/Moral Relativism through the legislative process and the courts, the new “moral code” is eventually embraced by the masses. If something is made legal which previously was not, it is assumed to be moral and vice-versa. For example, after abortion was legalized in 1974; many Americans insufficiently grounded in traditional moral precepts decided it must be moral. This was made easier due to the fact that the political class and special interest groups engaged in a form of rank sophistry[8] rather than a probative analysis and debate regarding the actual biological, philosophical and religious implications involved. That sadly is still the case today.
Another example is the issue of gay “marriage” which while illegal in a majority of states and previously thought to be immoral by a majority of Americans, is rapidly becoming acceptable and is in the process of being legalized throughout the United States. The national trajectory is now in the direction of the legalization of gay “marriage” and along with it the assumption that gay “marriage must be morally licit.[9] The point is that the ruling elite’s who have abandoned traditional morality are able through their control of the political process and the media to normalize virtually any aberrant or immoral behavior. As they do so, they must enact increasingly more stringent laws to control the choices (many of which are largely immoral from the perspective of traditional morality) which the populace wishes to make and act upon.
Conclusion:
As a nation we have abandoned traditional morality in favor of a hodge-podge of non-moral philosophical theories including Utilitarianism, Moral Relativism and Hedonism all of which ultimately translate to personal selfishness. We no longer care about the “common good.” This has made it necessary and easy to establish a more and more stringent “police-state” domestically in order to control our now unbridled passions. Such things as “hate-crime” legislation are a good example of the result where the law now attempts to ascertain the moral intention of a given perpetrator of a crime. Needless to say this is not only legally improper but is unlikely to be effective. The proper place to consider “intention” is at the level of the moral analysis which should take place prior to the performance of a given act.
Just as in the case of gay “marriage” bans, the problem is not a legal one it is a moral one in this case the repudiation of traditional morality at the level of nation-state. In the history of the world, there is no precedent at the nation state level for reversing the current situation in which the common morality has been so seriously adulterated. Moral depravity of a nation predisposes to its self destruction from within and the foolhardy overextension of empire from without. For more see THIS... and THIS... That reality (US moral depravity) means that the survival of the American experiment (barring a fundamental change in national morality and or Divine intervention) is in doubt.
NOTES:
[1] When I refer to “traditional morality” or traditional moral precepts I mean Aristotelian/Thomistic moral philosophical principles, what some have called the Judeo-Christian ethic in the past although technically, the latter is less precise than the former in terms of performing a proper moral analysis of a given moral question. Some have utilized the phrase “golden-rule” ethic to summarize what they mean by traditional morality which is also less concise than the Aristotelian/Thomistic Synthesis. Human actions which are immoral from the perspective of traditional morality are not arbitrarily so characterized. The determination is made on the basis of what it means to be human or have a human nature and how a given human being is best able to actualize the attainment of the ultimate goal which is the Sumum Bonum or supreme good.
[2] Lewis made a variant of the so-called Moral argument for the existence of God and demonstrated that it was this that in large part was responsible for his conversion from atheism first to pantheism and then to Christianity. Today we have the interesting development that a notorious atheist philosopher has converted to Theism based primarily on the Design argument reworked in light of contemporary Astrophysics data which demonstrate that the physical constants of the universe are incredibly “fine-tuned.”
[3] This is to be expected since the Muslim philosopher’s were aware of the work of Aristotle’s metaphysics, philosophy of nature and his Ethics. In fact it is they who preserved his teaching throughout the Dark Ages prior to the time of Albert Magnus (St. Albert the Great) and Thomas Aquinas who combined Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity. For an excellent treatment of the Philosophy of Nature see William A. Wallace O.P. THE MODELING OF NATURE: PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE IN SYNTHESIS.(The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C. 20064, 1996). Click HERE...for a short video by Professor Wallace.
[4] The irony here is that the Neoconservative/Neo-Nazi political right which has taken over the Republican Party and the Neo-liberal left the Democratic Party are both further away from traditional morality than Muslim morality based as it is in Aristotle’s metaphysics and ethical theory. In Islamic societies in which there is no Radical Jihadism and absent Sharia, the moral climate is much closer to traditional morality than is the current immoral one found in the United States. Moreover, the Neoconservatives and Neoliberals largely embrace the Neo-Nazi moral philosophy of the Radical Zionist’s who now control modern Israel e.g. all accept the immoral “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war.
[5] John P. Hubert, “The “Fruits” of Legal Positivism: Utilitarianism in Action”, Intellectual Conservative, 09 December 2005, HERE....
[6] The FCM have taken on the role of the ancient Greek Sophists in manipulating public opinion on behalf of the ruling oligarch’s.
[7] Francis A. Boyle. Tackling America’s Toughest Questions, (Atlanta Ga: Clarity Press, 2009), pp. 39-47.
[8] Rather than asking if abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being (which is always and everywhere wrong according to traditional morality), proponents framed the issue as one of a women’s “right” to control her reproductive process. Such a “right” however does not exist in traditional morality based as it is on a fixed human anthropology. The USSC has said that such a “right” exists in the Constitution of the US (a debatable issue in itself) even though no such moral “right” could be found unless the court abandoned Natural Law jurisprudence in exchange for Legal Pragmatism. See footnote # 5 for details.
[9] See my blog post “The Problem with Gay Marriage Bans” HERE.... For additional background on Traditional Marriage contrasted with Gay “Marriage see THIS....
Legal Stringency vs. Legal Laxity:
Not everything that is immoral is illegal in the West. There would be insufficient numbers of police and prosecuting attorney’s to process all of the crimes were that to be the case. As a result, some behaviors which are clearly immoral based on tradition moral precepts[1] are not made criminal e.g. adultery, homosexual activity, fornication etc (in Muslim countries which observe Sharia law however, many of these immoral behaviors are considered crimes and punished severely meaning their societies are legally stringent). The degree to which immoral behavior is not made criminal is a measure of the legal laxity of a society. For a detailed discussion of the relationship of the "Common Good" to Civil Law and human virtue see: Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I-II, 96, 1-6 HERE...
Not all Immoral Acts are Illegal and Vice-Versa:
On the other hand, most things that are illegal are immoral, e.g. murder, rape, theft etc. Clearly there are some minor crimes e.g. failure to pay a parking ticket in a timely fashion which are either morally neutral or of minimal significance compared to major criminal activity. For all intents and purposes then, there exist few crimes which are not immoral as well. If too many clearly moral acts were punishable by law, not only would enforcement be impossible but justice would be unattainable as the civil law would be capricious and confidence in it would be destroyed.
The Correct Balance of Civil Laws and Moral Code:
The ideal balance in society is for major immoral actions/behaviors to be punishable by law as well. However, as a society loses its traditional moral integrity, it becomes necessary to substitute increasingly more and more stringent laws to serve as a substitute for the moral restraint which was once practiced by the populace. Taken to the extreme, a “police-state” will be required in cases where there has been a significant repudiation of traditional morality in practice. Such societal moral depravity simply cannot be controlled by stringent police-state tactics. There is no effective substitute for individual and societal moral restraint since it is impossible to place a police officer in every home, on every street corner and so forth.
Inverse Relationship between Morality and Civil Law:
For ease of handling, one might think of morality and civil laws then as being inversely proportional to one another. Where there is a high degree of morality in a population, there is less need for prohibitive laws and large numbers of police to enforce them. Where there is moral depravity, more and more legal impediments must be erected to control human behavior and a larger number of police and prosecutors are required to enforce them. This of course assumes that it is possible to determine right and wrong in the first instance which many Post-Modernists/Utilitarian’s/Hedonist’s/Moral Relativist’s often deny. [Not only do they argue that there is no truth (an epistemological claim) but that there is no fixed morality (a moral philosophical claim)]. Most proponents of post-modernism adopt some sort of Moral Relativism or Utilitarianism in which determinations of right and wrong become reflections of what is socially acceptable at a given time. Needless to say, that is a prescription for moral anarchy but unfortunately describes quite well the current situation in the “developed” West.
The Need for a Fixed Moral Code:
In any case, despite the claims of self-professed nihilists and other non-traditional moralist’s everyone behaves in their interpersonal relations as if a fixed moral code exists. For example, we all appeal to fairness if we believe that we are being treated inequitably. To say that we must be accorded fair treatment is to imply that a standard exists by which to determine fairness. That standard might be thought of loosely as the Natural (moral) law, what for example C.S. Lewis termed the Tau in his Mere Christianity, (San Francisco: Harper, 1952).
[2] In order for there to be a standard by which all can be equally judged, there must be a universal reality to which all may appeal. That reality can be thought of as our human nature or anthropology which is fixed by virtue of our being members of the human race. In a certain sense it is specific to our DNA although not simply an epiphenomenon of it. That fixed human nature or “being” then which exists in every person is the standard or template the “is” from which all behavior or “ought’s” must be derived.
It is pointless to argue that human nature or “being” is fluid and not fixed. Quite apart from the ontological implications which have been debated ad nauseum in the biological realm, if we do not assume a fixed human anthropology, it is impossible to devise a workable moral code to which all human beings can be held. The result is to render meaningless such statements as: “All human beings are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or “all human beings should be treated equally” or “it is always and everywhere wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.” Under such a rubric (fluidity of human nature) it is impossible to derive any human rights at all since they become nothing more than claims which certain people advance from time to time against the ruling authority, which ultimately have no basis in fact or reality.
Their existence is as impermanent as the political power possessed at a given moment by the reference group or individual in question. That is to say even if a given human right is granted temporarily there is no basis upon which to believe that it will remain so. Moreover, when it is impossible to determine right from wrong because it is constantly changing we induce a societal form of cognitive dissonance. People assume a sort of “every man for himself” mentality. The result is selfishness, greed and often all encompassing hedonistic pursuits instead of selflessness, generosity and the seeking of the “common good.”
Human Rights must be based on a Fixed Human Nature:
What we have then is the truth that human rights must be tied to the fixed reality of human "being" or nature. If we assume instead that human anthropology is fluid, that human nature is not fixed or is indeterminate; we have moral anarchy due to the lack of a suitable universal referent. Tragically that is pretty much the case currently in the “developed” West and is also the main reason that much of the so-called third world a large percentage of which is Muslim finds us to be morally repugnant.
Quite apart from what we may see as the repressive nature of fundamentalist Islamic mores’, the actual moral code (as separated from the sanctions which enforce it) is much more compatible with traditional (Aristotelian/Thomistic) morality than that which is practiced in the West since it is based upon a more accurate assessment of human nature.[3] The Islamic moral code is simply closer to traditional (what was once termed Judeo-Christian) morality than is the Moral Relativism and Utilitarianism which has overtaken us.[4]
Where Christianity is different is that it proposes a complete or total spiritual conversion of the individual (through the power of the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the Cross) as the deterent against evil rather than the severe system of corporal punishment which is associated with Islamic Sharia law. In the former it is the positive transformation of the human person into an entirely "new creature in Christ" in the latter the negative reinforcement of physical injury or death. The Christian emphasis is on conversion and mercy while still maintaining a strict moral code, the Islamic emphasis is on an Old Testament form of severe retributive attempt at justice.
Historically over the past 50 years traditional (Aristotelian/Thomistic) morality has been progressively replaced in the United States and much of the West by a combination of Utilitarianism and Moral Relativism. This has been combined with a marked change in the judicial system from what was primarily Natural Law based jurisprudence to one of Legal Positivism or Pragmatism.[5] With the loss of traditional moral precepts there has been the expected increase in immoral behavior which to wit has been associated with a marked increase in law-breaking on the part of individuals and powerful group entities (such as major corporations, the Congress and the Executive branch of the US government).
Societal Moral Depravity Promotes Advent of Police State:
Some in the research community contend that Neo-fascist tactics are the result primarily of authoritarian personalities who periodically come to power and that fascist governments represent the occasional outlier or idiosyncratic development. Little recognized perhaps is the fact that when traditional morality is abandoned by a society, it becomes much easier for nefarious forces to introduce police-state tactics.
For example, in the wake of the 911 terrorist attacks, fascist neo-Nazi tactics were quite easily adopted e.g. USA Patriot Act, attempted suspension of Habeas Corpus, Torture of Prisoners, and Rendition etc. In part this was due to the fear which gripped the nation. The fact however that for decade’s traditional morality had been degraded adds to the ease with which heretofore unimaginable infringements were made on human rights. We had in a sense become accustomed to the need for prohibitive laws which took the place of traditional moral behavior in the aggregate. The corporate media was enlisted to convince[6] average Americans that we must even surrender certain of our basic human rights and liberty in order to ensure our national and individual security. Of course that would be unnecessary if as neighbors we trusted each other to do right and to be virtuous. The fact that we don’t should tell us something profound about our moral climate currently.
In the absence of a return to traditional morality as a nation, we will find it increasingly necessary to adopt more and more draconian laws by which to control human behavior. That is simply an inevitable outcome which results from the existence of the Natural (moral) law. If human beings will not voluntarily submit to the precepts of the Natural Law, then they will be forced to do so at the point of a gun or from behind prison walls.
The only other option is complete societal dissolution/anarchy where all positive civil law is suspended and where violence and a “might makes right” vigilantism is in force. The latter development is unlikely as long as our current oligarch’s maintain authoritarian control through progressively more stringent laws and prohibitions. The institution of Marshal-Law would be the logical next step or end-result of a further degradation in societal morality.
911 and a Constitutional Coup d'état Facilitated Police-State:
Professor Francis A Boyle a leading light in the area of constitutional and international law maintains that the US constitution has already been subjected to a Coup d'état in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the signing of the USA Patriot Act, attempted suspension of Habeas Corpus and the practice of Torture and Rendition.[7] If he is correct than we are further along the path outlined above than I would have hoped. Boyle of course sees the problem as our not being willing to abide by international law and the treaties we have signed which have made them a part of US domestic law. He is certainly correct as far as it goes. The more fundamental underlying reason in this writer’s estimation however is the increasing moral depravity of the ruling elites which has now percolated down to the level of the average American. The “ruling class” should be very nervous now that the so-called “common man” has adopted their immoral code and jettisoned traditional morality. Historically, this is when “the natives get restless” and the Oligarchical regime is most potentially threatened by the masses who are no longer governed by a desire for justice rather than vengeance or a love of the common good.
To put a finer point on this concept; people often assume that is, take-on the morality of the civil law in which they reside. When the oligarchical regime intentionally adulterates the traditional morality of a society by moving it in the direction of Hedonism/Utilitarianism/Moral Relativism through the legislative process and the courts, the new “moral code” is eventually embraced by the masses. If something is made legal which previously was not, it is assumed to be moral and vice-versa. For example, after abortion was legalized in 1974; many Americans insufficiently grounded in traditional moral precepts decided it must be moral. This was made easier due to the fact that the political class and special interest groups engaged in a form of rank sophistry[8] rather than a probative analysis and debate regarding the actual biological, philosophical and religious implications involved. That sadly is still the case today.
Another example is the issue of gay “marriage” which while illegal in a majority of states and previously thought to be immoral by a majority of Americans, is rapidly becoming acceptable and is in the process of being legalized throughout the United States. The national trajectory is now in the direction of the legalization of gay “marriage” and along with it the assumption that gay “marriage must be morally licit.[9] The point is that the ruling elite’s who have abandoned traditional morality are able through their control of the political process and the media to normalize virtually any aberrant or immoral behavior. As they do so, they must enact increasingly more stringent laws to control the choices (many of which are largely immoral from the perspective of traditional morality) which the populace wishes to make and act upon.
Conclusion:
As a nation we have abandoned traditional morality in favor of a hodge-podge of non-moral philosophical theories including Utilitarianism, Moral Relativism and Hedonism all of which ultimately translate to personal selfishness. We no longer care about the “common good.” This has made it necessary and easy to establish a more and more stringent “police-state” domestically in order to control our now unbridled passions. Such things as “hate-crime” legislation are a good example of the result where the law now attempts to ascertain the moral intention of a given perpetrator of a crime. Needless to say this is not only legally improper but is unlikely to be effective. The proper place to consider “intention” is at the level of the moral analysis which should take place prior to the performance of a given act.
Just as in the case of gay “marriage” bans, the problem is not a legal one it is a moral one in this case the repudiation of traditional morality at the level of nation-state. In the history of the world, there is no precedent at the nation state level for reversing the current situation in which the common morality has been so seriously adulterated. Moral depravity of a nation predisposes to its self destruction from within and the foolhardy overextension of empire from without. For more see THIS... and THIS... That reality (US moral depravity) means that the survival of the American experiment (barring a fundamental change in national morality and or Divine intervention) is in doubt.
NOTES:
[1] When I refer to “traditional morality” or traditional moral precepts I mean Aristotelian/Thomistic moral philosophical principles, what some have called the Judeo-Christian ethic in the past although technically, the latter is less precise than the former in terms of performing a proper moral analysis of a given moral question. Some have utilized the phrase “golden-rule” ethic to summarize what they mean by traditional morality which is also less concise than the Aristotelian/Thomistic Synthesis. Human actions which are immoral from the perspective of traditional morality are not arbitrarily so characterized. The determination is made on the basis of what it means to be human or have a human nature and how a given human being is best able to actualize the attainment of the ultimate goal which is the Sumum Bonum or supreme good.
[2] Lewis made a variant of the so-called Moral argument for the existence of God and demonstrated that it was this that in large part was responsible for his conversion from atheism first to pantheism and then to Christianity. Today we have the interesting development that a notorious atheist philosopher has converted to Theism based primarily on the Design argument reworked in light of contemporary Astrophysics data which demonstrate that the physical constants of the universe are incredibly “fine-tuned.”
[3] This is to be expected since the Muslim philosopher’s were aware of the work of Aristotle’s metaphysics, philosophy of nature and his Ethics. In fact it is they who preserved his teaching throughout the Dark Ages prior to the time of Albert Magnus (St. Albert the Great) and Thomas Aquinas who combined Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity. For an excellent treatment of the Philosophy of Nature see William A. Wallace O.P. THE MODELING OF NATURE: PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE IN SYNTHESIS.(The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C. 20064, 1996). Click HERE...for a short video by Professor Wallace.
[4] The irony here is that the Neoconservative/Neo-Nazi political right which has taken over the Republican Party and the Neo-liberal left the Democratic Party are both further away from traditional morality than Muslim morality based as it is in Aristotle’s metaphysics and ethical theory. In Islamic societies in which there is no Radical Jihadism and absent Sharia, the moral climate is much closer to traditional morality than is the current immoral one found in the United States. Moreover, the Neoconservatives and Neoliberals largely embrace the Neo-Nazi moral philosophy of the Radical Zionist’s who now control modern Israel e.g. all accept the immoral “Bush Doctrine” of preventive war.
[5] John P. Hubert, “The “Fruits” of Legal Positivism: Utilitarianism in Action”, Intellectual Conservative, 09 December 2005, HERE....
[6] The FCM have taken on the role of the ancient Greek Sophists in manipulating public opinion on behalf of the ruling oligarch’s.
[7] Francis A. Boyle. Tackling America’s Toughest Questions, (Atlanta Ga: Clarity Press, 2009), pp. 39-47.
[8] Rather than asking if abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being (which is always and everywhere wrong according to traditional morality), proponents framed the issue as one of a women’s “right” to control her reproductive process. Such a “right” however does not exist in traditional morality based as it is on a fixed human anthropology. The USSC has said that such a “right” exists in the Constitution of the US (a debatable issue in itself) even though no such moral “right” could be found unless the court abandoned Natural Law jurisprudence in exchange for Legal Pragmatism. See footnote # 5 for details.
[9] See my blog post “The Problem with Gay Marriage Bans” HERE.... For additional background on Traditional Marriage contrasted with Gay “Marriage see THIS....
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