Si vous voulez savoir ce qui s'est passe le jour du 11 septembre dans l'organisation des services judiciaires, connaitre qui controle qui dans ce pays, alors regardez ce documentaire a tout prix, il est bien fait, et vous raconte ce que les medias ne vous disent pas. Ca fait meme peur en fait sachant que l'on savez tres bien qu'on allait etre attaque. L'oeil de la justice americaine est aveugle.
"The Truth shall set you free" Enjoy
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Nevada Had Top Foreclosure Rate in 2007
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The number of U.S. homes that slipped into some stage of foreclosure in 2007 was 79 percent higher than in the previous year, a real estate tracking company said Tuesday. Many homeowners started to fall behind on mortgage payments in the last three months, setting the stage for more foreclosures this year.
About 1.3 million homes received foreclosure-related warnings last year, up from 717,522 in 2006, Irvine-based RealtyTrac Inc. said. Foreclosure filings rose 75 percent from the previous year to 2.2 million.
More than 1 percent of all U.S. households were in some phase of the foreclosure process last year, up from about half a percent in 2006, RealtyTrac said.
Nevada, Florida, Michigan and California posted the highest foreclosure rates, the company said.
The filings included notices warning owners that they were in default, or that their home was slated for auction or for repossession by a bank. Some properties may have received more than one notice if the owners had multiple mortgages.
A late-year surge in the number of properties reporting foreclosure filings suggests that many are in the initial stages of the foreclosure process and could end up lost to foreclosure this year unless lenders or the government steps in, RealtyTrac said.
"It does appear that we're seeing a new batch of properties enter the process," said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's vice president of marketing.
RealtyTrac is forecasting that the pace of foreclosure filings will remain steady, rather than accelerate during the first half of 2008.
"Assuming nothing else bad happens economically ... we will have exhausted the bulk of the worst-performing loans by the end of June," Sharga said, referring to adjustable-rate mortgage loans made to borrowers with poor credit.
Many of these subprime loans defaulted last year, triggering a credit crisis and saddling major financial institutions with losses.
More than 1.8 million subprime mortgages are scheduled to reset to higher interest rates this year and next.
Last year's explosion in foreclosure activity came amid a worsening housing downturn, as falling home values ate into homeowners' equity, making it harder for many to refinance into more affordable loans or to find buyers. Those options had helped keep troubled homeowners from sliding into foreclosure.
"We went from a sort of buying frenzy to a foreclosure frenzy in the last two years," Sharga said.
Recent efforts by government and mortgage lenders to help homeowners at risk of falling seriously behind on mortgage payments have had a marginal impact on the U.S. foreclosure rate so far, Sharga added.
In December alone, foreclosure filings soared 97 percent from the same month a year earlier to 215,749. It was the fifth consecutive month in which foreclosure filings topped more than 200,000, RealtyTrac said.
In the fourth quarter, filings rose 86 percent from the prior-year quarter but only 1 percent from the third quarter.
Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation last year, with 3.4 percent of its households receiving foreclosure filings. That was more than three times the national average, RealtyTrac said.
The state had 66,316 filings on 34,417 properties in 2007, up more than 200 percent from 2006's total.
Florida had more than 2 percent of its properties in some stage of foreclosure last year. The state reported 279,325 filings on 165,291 homes, more than twice the previous year's total.
In Michigan, where job losses are pressuring many homeowners, 1.9 percent of all households received a foreclosure filing last year. In all, 136,205 filings were issued on 87,210 properties, up 68 percent versus filings in 2006.
California led the nation in total foreclosure filings and the number of homes in some stage of foreclosure last year.
A total of 481,392 filings were issued on 249,513 properties, more than triple the number of filings in 2006, RealtyTrac said.
In all, 1.9 percent of households in California received foreclosure filings.
Many of the homes receiving foreclosure filings in the state were in the inland markets, where new construction and more affordable prices helped fuel a spike in sales toward the end of the housing boom.
Other states in the 2007 foreclusure top 10 were Colorado, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, Illinois and Indiana.
On the Net:
- RealtyTrac Inc.: http://www.realtytrac.com
Mortorcycle crash
A truck was traveling down the highway at around 1 o'clock in the morning near Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Motorcyclist was traveling at ~120mph and ran into the back of the moving semi-truck.
Truck driver said he felt the impact, and it took almost a 1/4 mile for him to pull over.
This is what he found...
He survived… wear your helmet! And don't speed!
Motorcyclist was traveling at ~120mph and ran into the back of the moving semi-truck.
Truck driver said he felt the impact, and it took almost a 1/4 mile for him to pull over.
This is what he found...
He survived… wear your helmet! And don't speed!
Burning the house down
Aux USA, quand le prix des maisons chute, on prefere les bruler pour toucher l'assurance.
Broke homeowners linked to arsons
Authorities in economically stressed cities see an increase in torched houses. Is the nation's mortgage mess transforming more Americans into criminals?
By Marilyn Lewis
Arson is nothing new in Detroit. It's a time-honored weapon of the angry, vengeful, distressed and dispossessed in a city that gets hurt harder and sooner than others, making it a perfect place to spot early evidence of stress from the real-estate meltdown.
The Detroit Fire Department can't draw a definitive link between its rising arson rate (151 arrest warrants in 2007), rising foreclosures (up more than 65% last year) and falling housing prices (the region's median house price dropped 17.3% in the past four years, to $145,173).
But Capt. Steve Varnas of the department's arson section says he sees a connection: In 2005, the city issued only 80 arrest warrants for arson -- about half the number last year. "Things were going great," Varnas says. "There were fewer desperate people in 2004 and 2005."
Across the U.S., homeowners are searching for ways to escape from mortgages they can't pay -- or don't want to. A few are turning to arson, but it's too soon to turn anecdotes into meaningful statistics. Consumer pressure and state laws require speedy settlements, which means insurance companies are quick to pay up and slower to complete complex arson investigations. Definitive answers will come later.
But the signs of trouble are there if you're looking for them:
- The FBI reportsthat arson grew 4% in suburbs and 2.2% in cities from 2005 to 2006. The 2007 numbers aren't out yet.
- In California, a state hit particularly hard by foreclosures, insurance companies must tell the state within 60 days if they suspect a fire is "questionable." Last year, more than 120 reports were filed, and in 14 foreclosure was named a possible factor. The previous year, just 70 reports were filed, with seven citing foreclosure, says the state insurance commissioner's office. (Not all reports become arson cases.)
- Arrest warrants for arson in Detroit rose 89% between 2005 and 2007. "We are up to our eyeballs in arsons," says Varnas, of the Detroit Fire Department. "We're not only dealing with hardened criminals. We're dealing with desperate people."
A trend -- or arson as usual?
In Stockton, Calif., where foreclosures are rampant, Deputy District Attorney J.C. Weydert is wondering whether he's looking at an arson trend or just a coincidence.Weydert, a prosecutor with San Joaquin County's Economic Crimes/Insurance Fraud Unit, usually handles a residential arson case every two or three years. "Now I've got two in the pipeline," he says
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Jérôme Kerviel - joke of the day
Seen on a french blog: "Societe Generale challenges the dog of Jerome Kerviel". For the people who are not familiar with the name of Jerome Kerviel, he is the french trader who made lost the modest sum of 4.9 billions Euros to the bank La Societe Generale.
A propos de Jerome Kerviel et du systeme financier
C'est un poste que j'avais griffone sur un autre blog, alors voila je l'ai mis ici pour en faire profiter tout le monde.
Ca m'etonnerait que le trader Jerome Kerviel soit le seul dans cette affaire. Dans le monde de la finance j'ai vu des gens partir en prison alors qu'ils n'avaient rien fait. Ils designent souvent un responsable pour essuyer les platres et etouffer l'affaire. Il y a quelques annees de cela j'avais vu une histoire d'escroquerie a la bourse americaine ou ils blanchissaient de l'argent en creant des fausses factures. Le commanditaire n'a jamais ete attrape, au contraire il a paye quelqu'un pour aller en prison pendant 7 ans pour quelques millions de dollars, et a essuye un divorce avec 2 enfants lorsqu'il etait en prison.
La finance est un mode tres particulier et tres brutal. Les gens sont motives par l'argent en premier lieu, et beaucoup de personnes prennent le risque d'arrondir leur fin de mois. Il y a tres peu de gens qui demissioneront de leur fonction pour incompatibilite morale avec le systeme financier et feront ce que leur boss leur demande.
D'ailleurs l'enjeu politique du XXIieme siecle a pris une nouvelle dimension par rapport au XXieme siecle. Au XXieme siecle les finances etaient la pour vous aider a realiser un projet professionnel par exemple. Aujourd'hui le systeme financier ne revendique plus de norme morale et a pris une nouvelle dimension parce-qu'il est la pour vous asphyxier financierement que ce soit en France ou aux USA. Le systeme financier a ete devoile en plein jour, mais il n'y a aucun politicien aux USA ou en France pour regulariser ces disfonctionnements. En fait, contrairement au monde anglo-saxon qui voyait une crise a cause d'une banque francaise, l'affaire est plus compliquee que cela. Ce sont les Americains qui ont vendu leur "subprime mortgage" avec des notes AAA alors qu'ils etaient cotes CCC, et ce sont les banques qui ont ete obligees de manipuler des operations financieres pour ne pas se retrouver au bout du gouffre financier. L'histoire de Jerome Kerviel cache quelque-chose de plus grand qu'un petit probleme localise en France, et il y a un lien dans les interconnexions globales de la finance dissimulant une crise mondiale generalisee.
Pour en revenir au poste de FB, la mentalite des Americains a completement change. D'un cote on a des banques qui ne veulent pas que leur client se debarasse de leur maison, et de l'autre cote on a les clients qui pensaient avoir un retour financier dans leur investissement alors qu'il n'en est rien. C'est une situation extremement grave aux USA car a chaque fois que quelqu'un veut se debarasser de sa maison, ca coute dans les 100.000 dollars a la banque. Alors au lieu de perdre plus de 10 trillion de dollars, les banques americaines donnent des defferements(?) (deferrals) sur 4 mois pour la somme modique de 900 dollars. Cette operation permet de credibiliser les banques et les investisseurs, et elle permettrait aux particulier de sauver entre 5.000 et 20.000 dollars sur 4 mois. Seulement voila, beaucoup d'Americains ont ete frappes par la crise et ceux qui n'ont pas encore ete frappes boudent ces decisions economiques. Il y a une prise de conscience morale de la part des Americains qui ont vu une entourloupe dans le systeme financier et ils n'ont plus d'autres choix que de se retourner contre le systeme de la finance. Pour reparer ce probleme, les banques devraient passer leur taux variables a un taux fixe mais ils ne veulent pas le faire car ils sont plus preoccupes encore a engrager des sommes malhonnetes que de couper leur vin avec de l'eau.
Alors le boudage des subprimes mortgages continueront pour longtemps. On a deja atteind la crise financiere des annees 80 dans les subprimes mortgages et la chute n'est pas finie. En plus le gouvernment americain a essaye de regulariser tout cela mais il n'y a aucun effet meme en diminuant les taux d'interet. Certaines grandes villes americaines n'ont pas ete touchees, comme New York par exemple, car les investissements etrangers se sont precipites dans cette ville par la chute du dollar. En attendant on voit de plus en plus se former des villages en forme de tente dans certains Etats americains.
Ca m'etonnerait que le trader Jerome Kerviel soit le seul dans cette affaire. Dans le monde de la finance j'ai vu des gens partir en prison alors qu'ils n'avaient rien fait. Ils designent souvent un responsable pour essuyer les platres et etouffer l'affaire. Il y a quelques annees de cela j'avais vu une histoire d'escroquerie a la bourse americaine ou ils blanchissaient de l'argent en creant des fausses factures. Le commanditaire n'a jamais ete attrape, au contraire il a paye quelqu'un pour aller en prison pendant 7 ans pour quelques millions de dollars, et a essuye un divorce avec 2 enfants lorsqu'il etait en prison.
La finance est un mode tres particulier et tres brutal. Les gens sont motives par l'argent en premier lieu, et beaucoup de personnes prennent le risque d'arrondir leur fin de mois. Il y a tres peu de gens qui demissioneront de leur fonction pour incompatibilite morale avec le systeme financier et feront ce que leur boss leur demande.
D'ailleurs l'enjeu politique du XXIieme siecle a pris une nouvelle dimension par rapport au XXieme siecle. Au XXieme siecle les finances etaient la pour vous aider a realiser un projet professionnel par exemple. Aujourd'hui le systeme financier ne revendique plus de norme morale et a pris une nouvelle dimension parce-qu'il est la pour vous asphyxier financierement que ce soit en France ou aux USA. Le systeme financier a ete devoile en plein jour, mais il n'y a aucun politicien aux USA ou en France pour regulariser ces disfonctionnements. En fait, contrairement au monde anglo-saxon qui voyait une crise a cause d'une banque francaise, l'affaire est plus compliquee que cela. Ce sont les Americains qui ont vendu leur "subprime mortgage" avec des notes AAA alors qu'ils etaient cotes CCC, et ce sont les banques qui ont ete obligees de manipuler des operations financieres pour ne pas se retrouver au bout du gouffre financier. L'histoire de Jerome Kerviel cache quelque-chose de plus grand qu'un petit probleme localise en France, et il y a un lien dans les interconnexions globales de la finance dissimulant une crise mondiale generalisee.
Pour en revenir au poste de FB, la mentalite des Americains a completement change. D'un cote on a des banques qui ne veulent pas que leur client se debarasse de leur maison, et de l'autre cote on a les clients qui pensaient avoir un retour financier dans leur investissement alors qu'il n'en est rien. C'est une situation extremement grave aux USA car a chaque fois que quelqu'un veut se debarasser de sa maison, ca coute dans les 100.000 dollars a la banque. Alors au lieu de perdre plus de 10 trillion de dollars, les banques americaines donnent des defferements(?) (deferrals) sur 4 mois pour la somme modique de 900 dollars. Cette operation permet de credibiliser les banques et les investisseurs, et elle permettrait aux particulier de sauver entre 5.000 et 20.000 dollars sur 4 mois. Seulement voila, beaucoup d'Americains ont ete frappes par la crise et ceux qui n'ont pas encore ete frappes boudent ces decisions economiques. Il y a une prise de conscience morale de la part des Americains qui ont vu une entourloupe dans le systeme financier et ils n'ont plus d'autres choix que de se retourner contre le systeme de la finance. Pour reparer ce probleme, les banques devraient passer leur taux variables a un taux fixe mais ils ne veulent pas le faire car ils sont plus preoccupes encore a engrager des sommes malhonnetes que de couper leur vin avec de l'eau.
Alors le boudage des subprimes mortgages continueront pour longtemps. On a deja atteind la crise financiere des annees 80 dans les subprimes mortgages et la chute n'est pas finie. En plus le gouvernment americain a essaye de regulariser tout cela mais il n'y a aucun effet meme en diminuant les taux d'interet. Certaines grandes villes americaines n'ont pas ete touchees, comme New York par exemple, car les investissements etrangers se sont precipites dans cette ville par la chute du dollar. En attendant on voit de plus en plus se former des villages en forme de tente dans certains Etats americains.
Bush's economic package
Perhaps it was the smartest thing that he did during his Presidency in terms of recentering our Democracy, but this economic stimulus won't do that much when people are losing their houses. Government control and regulations should have been there to control the inflated rush on the housing market.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — President George W. Bush has warned against pulling the plug on his Iraq strategy and assured the US public -- now more worried about the US economy than the war -- that help was on the way.
With barely 12 months before his term ends, and less before the race to the November elections all but sidelines him, Bush also vowed to "confront" Iran where necessary and do "everything we can" to reach a Middle East peace deal.
The president used his final annual State of the Union address to defend his deeply unpopular handling of what US voters say are their top two concerns: the nearly five-year-old Iraq war and economic turmoil.
"In the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth, but in the short run, we can all see that that growth is slowing," he said, urging lawmakers to speed approval of a 150-billion-dollar (102-billion-euro) stimulus package he agreed last week with Congressional leaders.
US mortgage crisis creates ghost town
Tiens la meme chose s'est passe a Las Vegas il y a quelques mois de cela, et le sentiment d'une catastrophe economique se fait de plus en plus sentir ici aux USA - "I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare." The BANKS, the GOV, and the BROKERS and the LENDERS and the INVESTORS are all responsible in this national tragedy.
The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.
The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.
This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.
Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.
A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.
Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.
The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.
At 9422 Chagrin Street, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: "Please Used."
After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments.
It is a complicated story. She refinanced in 2003, but did not realize the document she signed included provisions to radically increase the interest rate.
She stopped making payments in 2006 and shows her unpaid bills totaling 24,000 dollars.
Her bank is in the midst of eviction procedures.
"When folks buy a home they expect to die in it, I guess," she said as she stood outside in the cold. "I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare."
Her words are echoed by the angry barks of the guard dogs pacing behind a chain link fence two houses away that was installed by the new owner: a bank.
The massive parking lot of the Eagle Fresh supermarket is empty.
Behind her till, Myra Bibldwit lifts her head when a bell signals the entrance of a customer.
"Not many folks come anymore. We're used to it," said the 24-year-old cashier, one of the few in the neighborhood who managed to hold onto her job.
In the five hours since she started working today she has served just 10 customers. "Maybe you will buy something," she says with a smile.
Then comes customer number 12.
Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street -- about 10 minutes away by car -- was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.
"Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes," she told AFP.
"I'm very upset. I missed my friend Helen. She disappeared overnight. She did not even say goodbye."
There are plenty of cases like Helen. They are called the neighbors who disappear in the night.
For county treasurer Jim Rokakis, the greed of the banks is to blame for this man-made disaster.
"All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer's incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless," he said in an interview.
"Shaker Heights was the perfect storm: poor folks, unemployed and a desire to get a piece of the American Dream."
Monday, January 28, 2008
A China base in Iran?
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In the aftermath of President George W Bush's recent tour of the Persian Gulf, coinciding with a similar trip by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, culminating in a deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a small French base, Iran's security calculus has changed. It has almost reached the point of Tehran considering the option of reciprocating the perceived excess Western intrusion into its vicinity by allowing a military base for China at one of Iran's Persian Gulf ports or on one of its islands.
Without doubt, this would be a significant geopolitical move on both Iran's and China's part, bound to unsettle the US superpower that enjoys unrivalled hegemony in the oil region and which has
unsettled China with its recent civilian nuclear agreement with India, widely interpreted as a long-term "containing China" initiative.
In the tight interplay of geopolitics and geo-economics, with China heavily dependent on energy imports from Iran and other Persian Gulf states, the trend is definitely toward China's naval complement of its flurry of energy deals in order to secure its precious oil and (liquefied) gas cargo ships exiting through the narrow corridors of the Strait of Hormuz.
Presently, China's strategy is confined to the port city of Gwadar along the southwestern coast of Pakistan in Balochistan province, strategically located near the Hormuz Strait. Yet, due to the close US-Pakistan relations, it is highly improbable the US would permit Islamabad to enter into strategic relations with Beijing so that China, still lacking a formidable navy, could utilize it for power projection in the region.
Not so with Iran, which is constantly threatened by the US, and now France, and which already enjoys observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), headed by China and Russia. Iran's bid to join the SCO has been stalled partly as a result of the standoff over its nuclear program, but will likely succeed in the not too distant future should the present patterns of Iran-Russia and Iran-China cooperation continue.
Regarding the latter, China has already surpassed Germany as Iran's number one trade partner. Sinopec, China's largest oil refiner, has just finalized a multi-billion dollar deal to develop the giant Yadavaran oil field, and this is in addition to the "deal of the century" contract for natural gas from Iran's immense North Pars field. Chinese contractors are also busy constructing oil terminals for Iran in the Caspian Sea, extending the Tehran metro, building airports, among other projects. And this while China arms sales to Iran have included such hot items as ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars.
The growing Iran-China cooperation on the energy and trade fronts is bound sooner or later to spill over into more meaningful military cooperation and, in turn, this depends to some extent on the ebbs and flows of Iran-US and China-US "games of strategy", particularly if China feels additional pressure from the US on the geopolitical front.
For sure, Iran's willingness to show a greater willingness than hitherto to embrace China's naval vessels making port calls to Iran is now in the cards, this as a prelude to more extensive agreements up to and including provisions for a small Chinese naval outpost on one of Iran's Persian Gulf islands.
Again, such a scenario, sure to raise the serious ire of Washington, depends on a number of intervening variables. These include future US moves in the Persian Gulf, for example, whether or not the US military will end up utilizing some of the man-made artificial islands set up by the UAE. If so, thus enhancing the US's power projection capability with regard to Iran, Tehran may be more inclined to try to offset the US's leaning so heavy on it by playing the "China card".
To reiterate, France's bold new move in the Persian Gulf is equally unsettling to Tehran, which finds the new pro-US turn of French foreign policy detrimental to its national interests. The net result is the cognitive bifurcation of "West" versus "us" [1] that nicely dovetails with the new "eastern orientation" of Iran under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This is part and parcel of an energetic new "globalist" approach that includes new strategic openings with certain Latin and Central American nations.
In other words, it is sheer error to misinterpret Iran's "new foreign policy" as one-dimensionally regional or continental in nature, despite its narrow focus on Iran's immediate regions.
"Iran cannot remain indifferent to the aggressive geopolitical maneuvers against it by Western nations [who are] targeting Iran in no unmistakable language," says a prominent political science professor at Tehran University.
The professor loudly wondered how France would react if all of a sudden Iran started setting up bases near its coastline or, for that matter, how Washington would respond to an Iranian base in Iran-friendly Nicaragua? "They definitely need a wake-up call that national security is not a one-way process."
While Iran's political pundits are not yet willing to concede that Iran is now at the stage to allow a Chinese base along its vast Persian Gulf coastline, nonetheless quite a few agree that with the changing geopolitical milieu representing potentially serious national security threats to Iran, all options must remain open.
Note
1. After all, Sarkozy has stepped down from his predecessor's talk of "multiploarism" and, instead, per an article in this week's New York Times, "has tempered that notion with talk about France's place within its 'Western family', an expression welcomed in Washington".
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
In the aftermath of President George W Bush's recent tour of the Persian Gulf, coinciding with a similar trip by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, culminating in a deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a small French base, Iran's security calculus has changed. It has almost reached the point of Tehran considering the option of reciprocating the perceived excess Western intrusion into its vicinity by allowing a military base for China at one of Iran's Persian Gulf ports or on one of its islands.
Without doubt, this would be a significant geopolitical move on both Iran's and China's part, bound to unsettle the US superpower that enjoys unrivalled hegemony in the oil region and which has
unsettled China with its recent civilian nuclear agreement with India, widely interpreted as a long-term "containing China" initiative.
In the tight interplay of geopolitics and geo-economics, with China heavily dependent on energy imports from Iran and other Persian Gulf states, the trend is definitely toward China's naval complement of its flurry of energy deals in order to secure its precious oil and (liquefied) gas cargo ships exiting through the narrow corridors of the Strait of Hormuz.
Presently, China's strategy is confined to the port city of Gwadar along the southwestern coast of Pakistan in Balochistan province, strategically located near the Hormuz Strait. Yet, due to the close US-Pakistan relations, it is highly improbable the US would permit Islamabad to enter into strategic relations with Beijing so that China, still lacking a formidable navy, could utilize it for power projection in the region.
Not so with Iran, which is constantly threatened by the US, and now France, and which already enjoys observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), headed by China and Russia. Iran's bid to join the SCO has been stalled partly as a result of the standoff over its nuclear program, but will likely succeed in the not too distant future should the present patterns of Iran-Russia and Iran-China cooperation continue.
Regarding the latter, China has already surpassed Germany as Iran's number one trade partner. Sinopec, China's largest oil refiner, has just finalized a multi-billion dollar deal to develop the giant Yadavaran oil field, and this is in addition to the "deal of the century" contract for natural gas from Iran's immense North Pars field. Chinese contractors are also busy constructing oil terminals for Iran in the Caspian Sea, extending the Tehran metro, building airports, among other projects. And this while China arms sales to Iran have included such hot items as ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars.
The growing Iran-China cooperation on the energy and trade fronts is bound sooner or later to spill over into more meaningful military cooperation and, in turn, this depends to some extent on the ebbs and flows of Iran-US and China-US "games of strategy", particularly if China feels additional pressure from the US on the geopolitical front.
For sure, Iran's willingness to show a greater willingness than hitherto to embrace China's naval vessels making port calls to Iran is now in the cards, this as a prelude to more extensive agreements up to and including provisions for a small Chinese naval outpost on one of Iran's Persian Gulf islands.
Again, such a scenario, sure to raise the serious ire of Washington, depends on a number of intervening variables. These include future US moves in the Persian Gulf, for example, whether or not the US military will end up utilizing some of the man-made artificial islands set up by the UAE. If so, thus enhancing the US's power projection capability with regard to Iran, Tehran may be more inclined to try to offset the US's leaning so heavy on it by playing the "China card".
To reiterate, France's bold new move in the Persian Gulf is equally unsettling to Tehran, which finds the new pro-US turn of French foreign policy detrimental to its national interests. The net result is the cognitive bifurcation of "West" versus "us" [1] that nicely dovetails with the new "eastern orientation" of Iran under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This is part and parcel of an energetic new "globalist" approach that includes new strategic openings with certain Latin and Central American nations.
In other words, it is sheer error to misinterpret Iran's "new foreign policy" as one-dimensionally regional or continental in nature, despite its narrow focus on Iran's immediate regions.
"Iran cannot remain indifferent to the aggressive geopolitical maneuvers against it by Western nations [who are] targeting Iran in no unmistakable language," says a prominent political science professor at Tehran University.
The professor loudly wondered how France would react if all of a sudden Iran started setting up bases near its coastline or, for that matter, how Washington would respond to an Iranian base in Iran-friendly Nicaragua? "They definitely need a wake-up call that national security is not a one-way process."
While Iran's political pundits are not yet willing to concede that Iran is now at the stage to allow a Chinese base along its vast Persian Gulf coastline, nonetheless quite a few agree that with the changing geopolitical milieu representing potentially serious national security threats to Iran, all options must remain open.
Note
1. After all, Sarkozy has stepped down from his predecessor's talk of "multiploarism" and, instead, per an article in this week's New York Times, "has tempered that notion with talk about France's place within its 'Western family', an expression welcomed in Washington".
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
3 US workers face investigation over Obama e-mail
Allegedly spread discredited rumor
WASHINGTON - Three federal employees are being investigated for unlawful political activities after they allegedly sent an e-mail falsely accusing Barack Obama of being a "radical Muslim," the Globe has learned.
The US Office of Special Counsel - the independent federal agency responsible for enforcing a law banning civil service workers from engaging in political activism while performing their official duties - has launched investigations of two employees at one agency and one employee at another agency. All three are believed to have forwarded the erroneous chain e-mail about Obama from their government e-mail accounts.
Doing so would be a violation of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law designed to help protect career government employees and the government workforce from the influence of partisan politics. The act bans civil servants from taking "any active part" in political campaigns while on the job.
If a special oversight board finds the three employees in violation of the act, punishment could range from suspension from work without pay to termination from their jobs and disqualification from any future government employment.
A spokesman for the special counsel office, which has about 100 employees and a $17 million annual budget, said news of the investigations could deter other government employees from spreading partisan information over the Internet - including many who do not know it is illegal.
"We think that this e-mail could be the tip of the iceberg and that we may have many more similar e-mails circulating in federal agencies," said James Mitchell, the office's communications director. "People need to stop doing this."
Quick access to the Internet from work "makes it easier for people to make the mistake," he said. "Now people can step into trouble very easily just by forwarding a message that someone else sent to them."
Mitchell would not identify the individuals under investigation for privacy reasons, nor would he say which agencies they work for because the investigation has not been completed.
The US Army has already told its soldiers not to use government computers to spread the Obama smear. Personnel at the US Army Medical Command in Fort Sam Houston, were warned last week after an Army employee used an official e-mail address to send the message to soldiers and civilian employees worldwide.
Federal laws bar military personnel from actively engaging in politics while in uniform.
The e-mail questioning Obama's faith and patriotism, though widely discredited, is still alive on the Internet, where it has been forwarded to thousands of voters and has appeared on right-wing blogs. It recently appeared on a local Republican Party office's website in Washington state.
The anonymous author has not been identified and the origin of the e-mail is unknown. A version of the e-mail asserts this is "something that should be considered in your choice" for president.
Several federal and state employees were found to be in violation of the Hatch Act last year, including some who sent politically-motived e-mails. One federal employee who disseminated an e-mail to 27 of her colleagues about a political candidate with links to his campaign website was suspended without pay.
Mitchell has said the office - which received a $1.1 million funding increase - is bracing for a sharp rise in unlawful political activity by government employees.
"With the political season on, this is a time when people become more vulnerable because there is just more activity in the political realm," he said.
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
U.S. will not attack Iran
25/01/2008 18:24 DAVOS, January 25 (RIA Novosti) - The U.S. will not attack Iran, but will prevent the country from getting nuclear weapons, the country's homeland security secretary told RIA Novosti on Friday.
Michael Chertoff, who also talked about Russia - U.S. relations, terrorism, non-proliferation and the Iranian nuclear issue was asked whether the U.S. would launch an offensive attack against Iran over nuclear weapons concerns.
He said: "No... we need to continue to press the international community with respect to sanctions and other instruments to encourage the Iranians to comply, become transparent in their actions and not progress along the path that ultimately leads in a very dangerous direction."
Chertoff stressed the importance of non-proliferation stating that it was a top priority for U.S. collaboration with Russia, saying the two countries had "to make sure that weapons of mass destruction" did not find their way into "the hands of new states or terrorists."
Describing relations between Russia and the U.S. he said the two countries had "a very cooperative and constructive relationship."
He went on to say the two countries did not "always agree" but discussed their disagreements adding, "We also have a lot of common interests."
Touching upon terrorism he said though there had been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since September 11, 2001, the "issue is still present" adding Russia and the U.S. had "good" cooperation in the field discussing ways to share information and "hard lessons."
Late last year, the IAEA issued a generally positive report on Tehran's cooperativeness with UN inspectors, and a U.S. intelligence community report stated that the country had dropped nuclear weapons research several years ago. Chertoff described the U.S. report as "widely misunderstood" adding, "anyone, who is suggesting that they [Iranians] have abandoned the nuclear research efforts is wildly optimistic."
A new resolution on further sanctions against Iran was agreed on by the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany January 22. It is expected to expand travel bans and asset freezes.
More stringent sanctions have been blocked by China and Russia, with extensive business interests in Iran, whereas the U.S. has pushed for tough measures to be taken against the Islamic Republic.
Commenting on the new resolution, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday: "Our position is crystal clear. As we have stated before, from our point of view, Iran's nuclear problem is over, but they have made the same mistake again...an ineffective resolution."
Tehran plans to hold tenders for the construction of 19 new nuclear reactors.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
The “Brutal World”
How did Western Civilization get a monopoly on “moral conscience” when it has no morality?
By Paul Craig Roberts
“The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” Five Western military leaders.
23/01/08 "ICH" -- -- I read the statement three times trying to figure out the typo. Then it hit me, the West has now out-Owellled Orwell: The West must nuke other countries in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction! In Westernspeak, the West nuking other countries does not qualify as the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The astounding statement comes from a paper prepared for a Nato summit in April by five top military leaders--an American, a German, a Dutchman, a Frenchman, and a Brit. It can be found here: [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/nato/story/0,,2244782,00.html ]
The paper, prepared by men regarded as distinguished leaders and not as escapees from insane asylums, argues that “the West’s values and way of life are under threat, but the West is struggling to summon the will to defend them.” The leaders find that the UN is in the way of the West’s will, as is the European Union which is obstructing NATO and “NATO’s credibility is at stake in Afghanistan.”
And that’s a serious matter. If NATO loses its credibility in Afghanistan, Western civilization will collapse just like the Soviet Union. The West just doesn’t realize how weak it is. To strengthen itself, it needs to drop more and larger bombs.
The German military leader blames the Merkel government for contributing to the West’s inability to defend its values by standing in the way of a revival of German militarism. How can Germany be “a reliable partner” for America, he asks, if the German government insists on “special rules” limiting the combat use of its forces in Afghanistan?
Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund and a former US State Department official, welcomed the paper as “a wake-up call.” Asmus means a call to wake-up to the threats from the brutal world, not to the lunacy of Western leaders.
Who, what is threatening the West’s values and way of life? Political fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, and the imminent spread of nuclear weapons, answer the five asylum escapees.
By political fanaticism, do they mean the neoconservatives who believe that the future of humanity depends on the US establishing its hegemony over the world? By religious fundamentalism, do they mean “rapture evangelicals” agitating for armageddon or Christian and Israeli Zionists demanding a nuclear attack on Iran? By spread of nuclear weapons, do they mean Israel’s undeclared and illegal possession of several hundred nuclear weapons?
No. The paranoid military leaders see all the fanaticism, religious and otherwise, and all the threats to humanity as residing outside Western civilization (Israel is inside). The “increasingly brutal world,” of which the leaders warn, is “over there.” Only Muslims are fanatics. All us white guys are rational and sane.
There is nothing brutal about the US/Nato bombing of Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, or the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, or the genocide Israel hopes to commit against Palestinians in Gaza.
All of this, as well as America’s bombing of Somalia, America’s torture dungeons, show trials of “detainees,” and overthrow of elected governments and installation of puppet rulers, is the West’s necessary response to keep the brutal world at bay.
Brutal things happen in the “brutal world” and are entirely the fault of those in the brutal world. None of this would happen if the inhabitants of the brutal world would just do as they are told. How can the civilized world with its monopoly on morality allow people in the brutal world to behave independently? I mean, really! God forbid, they might attack some innocent country.
The “brutal world” consists of those immoral fanatics who object to being marginalized by the West and who reply to mass bombings from the air and to the death and destruction inflicted on them through myriad ways by strapping on a suicide bomb.
Unable to impose its will on countries it has invaded with conventional arms, the West’s military leaders are now prepared to force compliance with the moral world’s will by threatening to nuke those who resist. You see, since the West has the monopoly on morality, truth, and justice, those in the outside world are obviously evil, wicked and brutal. Therefore, as President Bush tells us, it is a simple choice between good and evil, and there’s no better candidate than evil for being nuked. The sooner we can get rid of the brutal world, the sooner we will have “freedom and democracy” everywhere that’s left.
Meanwhile, the United States, the great moral light unto the world, has just prevented the United Nations from censuring Israel, the world’s other great moral light, for cutting off food supplies, medical supplies, and electric power to Gaza. You see, Gaza is in the outside world and is a home of the bad guys. Moreover, the wicked Palestinians there tricked the US when the US allowed them to hold a free election. Instead of electing the US candidate, the wicked voters elected a government that would represent them. The US and Israel overturned the Palestinian election in the West Bank, but those in Gaza clung to the government that they had elected. Now they are going to suffer and die until they elect the government that the US and Israel wants. I mean, how can we expect people in the brutal world to know what’s best for them?
The fact that the UN tried to stop Israel’s just punishment of the Gazans shows how right the five leaders’ report is about the UN being a threat to Western values and way of life. The UN is really against us. This puts the UN in the outside world and makes it a candidate for being nuked if not an outright terrorist organization. As our president said, “you are with us or against us.”
The US and Israel need a puppet government in Palestine so that a ghettoized remnant of Palestine can be turned into a “two state solution.” The two states will be Israel incorporating the stolen West Bank and a Palestinian ghetto without an economy, water, or contiguous borders.
This is necessary in order to protect Israel from the brutal outside world.
Inhabitants of the brutal world are confused about the “self-determination” advocated by Western leaders. It doesn’t mean that those outside Western civilization and Israel should decide for themselves. “Self” means American. The term, so familiar to us, means “American-determination.” The US determines and others obey.
It is the brutal world that causes all the trouble by not obeying.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
The worst market crisis in 60 years
By George Soros
The current financial crisis was precipitated by a bubble in the US housing market. In some ways it resembles other crises that have occurred since the end of the second world war at intervals ranging from four to 10 years.
However, there is a profound difference: the current crisis marks the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency. The periodic crises were part of a larger boom-bust process. The current crisis is the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years.
Boom-bust processes usually revolve around credit and always involve a bias or misconception. This is usually a failure to recognise a reflexive, circular connection between the willingness to lend and the value of the collateral. Ease of credit generates demand that pushes up the value of property, which in turn increases the amount of credit available. A bubble starts when people buy houses in the expectation that they can refinance their mortgages at a profit. The recent US housing boom is a case in point. The 60-year super-boom is a more complicated case.
Every time the credit expansion ran into trouble the financial authorities intervened, injecting liquidity and finding other ways to stimulate the economy. That created a system of asymmetric incentives also known as moral hazard, which encouraged ever greater credit expansion. The system was so successful that people came to believe in what former US president Ronald Reagan called the magic of the marketplace and I call market fundamentalism. Fundamentalists believe that markets tend towards equilibrium and the common interest is best served by allowing participants to pursue their self-interest. It is an obvious misconception, because it was the intervention of the authorities that prevented financial markets from breaking down, not the markets themselves. Nevertheless, market fundamentalism emerged as the dominant ideology in the 1980s, when financial markets started to become globalised and the US started to run a current account deficit.
Globalisation allowed the US to suck up the savings of the rest of the world and consume more than it produced. The US current account deficit reached 6.2 per cent of gross national product in 2006. The financial markets encouraged consumers to borrow by introducing ever more sophisticated instruments and more generous terms. The authorities aided and abetted the process by intervening whenever the global financial system was at risk. Since 1980, regulations have been progressively relaxed until they have practically disappeared.
The super-boom got out of hand when the new products became so complicated that the authorities could no longer calculate the risks and started relying on the risk management methods of the banks themselves. Similarly, the rating agencies relied on the information provided by the originators of synthetic products. It was a shocking abdication of responsibility.
Everything that could go wrong did. What started with subprime mortgages spread to all collateralised debt obligations, endangered municipal and mortgage insurance and reinsurance companies and threatened to unravel the multi-trillion-dollar credit default swap market. Investment banks' commitments to leveraged buyouts became liabilities. Market-neutral hedge funds turned out not to be market-neutral and had to be unwound. The asset-backed commercial paper market came to a standstill and the special investment vehicles set up by banks to get mortgages off their balance sheets could no longer get outside financing. The final blow came when interbank lending, which is at the heart of the financial system, was disrupted because banks had to husband their resources and could not trust their counterparties. The central banks had to inject an unprecedented amount of money and extend credit on an unprecedented range of securities to a broader range of institutions than ever before. That made the crisis more severe than any since the second world war.
Credit expansion must now be followed by a period of contraction, because some of the new credit instruments and practices are unsound and unsustainable. The ability of the financial authorities to stimulate the economy is constrained by the unwillingness of the rest of the world to accumulate additional dollar reserves. Until recently, investors were hoping that the US Federal Reserve would do whatever it takes to avoid a recession, because that is what it did on previous occasions. Now they will have to realise that the Fed may no longer be in a position to do so. With oil, food and other commodities firm, and the renminbi appreciating somewhat faster, the Fed also has to worry about inflation. If federal funds were lowered beyond a certain point, the dollar would come under renewed pressure and long-term bonds would actually go up in yield. Where that point is, is impossible to determine. When it is reached, the ability of the Fed to stimulate the economy comes to an end.
Although a recession in the developed world is now more or less inevitable, China, India and some of the oil-producing countries are in a very strong countertrend. So, the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world.
The danger is that the resulting political tensions, including US protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession or worse.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
The economic recession
By Steven Rix (aka politiquesusa)
Some financial analysts predict we have a chance of 50/50 to be in an economic recession (seen on Fox News).
If you think 2007 was a bad year for the economy, then wait the end of 2008 to see how painful the financial squeeze in your wallets will be. We are in an economic recession for sure, but we are in an economic recession at the wrong time.
There are many tools to measure any economic performance, the unemployment rate is an economic indicator, the CPI (Consumer Price Index) is another tool to measure the dynamism in economics and social disparities. The inflation rate is also another interesting tool but for some economic and disguised capitalist reasons (the US inflation tool does not take into account the forty first values) this tool is often forgotten in the US mentalities because keynesian economists prefer to deal with it in terms of economic activity and wealth accumulation. Mainly for the american case people think first in rational terms with their wallets, wealth, and purchasing power. Of course we can dissert at length about accuracy of these economic tools, especially with the CPI, because they do not translate the reality for many products based on raw products, but the consumer is really going to feel the pain during the course of the year 2008.
The CPI - The cost of food:
For instance, the price of wheat has been rising to 92% the last 12 months, and the the price of corn has been rising to +44% the last 15 months. That's a whole lot of inflation when everything's going to be translated to the consumer's wallet within the end of the year. So far, inflation was not really visible last year, but if you think in terms of numbers you should be able to see that basic food products won't be cheap anymore. For example walmart that used to roll back its prices had to raise its prices by 10% at least from December to January, up to 25% for some products (bread). It's only for 1 month, and it's only for the beginning of the year.
Ethanol is produced with corn and as a gasoline substitution there is a downfall in this so-called "green aspect": we need more fields to produce more corn to reduce our dependence on oil and oil prices. Sounds good? But oh oh wait we forgot something here: we are focusing on feeding our cars with ethanol but are we that sure we are going able to feed Americans too? Agricultural performance is good but like the US army troops it's not stretchable. Are we going to be able to feed Americans? What about foreign aid (wheat, corn) to the poorest countries in the world? Didn't the UN report overestimate that the industrialized countries could easily feed all these people on the planet? What are we going to do when we have to make choices between feeding our cars or giving aid to the poorest countries, especially when we need desperately to re-establish an international image?
Get your garden ready if you can, go to wallyworld to buy your tools (made in the USA) and start planting veggies all over the place, because there is no word yet from the presidential nomenklatur (candidates) about this issue. Nobody foresaw the risks, and social problems may be bigger than we think.
The rising oil price and new energies (biofuels):
The oil barrel price has been hitting $100 a few months ago. The days when people had to pay for cheap oil are over, finito. Consequently we are trying to find new sources of energy. Solar energy is a good alternative. It's an infinite source, it's not situated on our planet so we won't destroy it, and for once it breaks the economic cycles between producers and consumers. All we have to do is buying some solar panels and batteries and we can run basically anything we want in our house. The sunnier, the more energy we will supply. With these new technologies we are even able to run solar panels in countries whose sunshines are limited during the day. The problem though is we can't apply these new technologies in all the domains (cars, airplanes, boats...etc) so we are still and will be dependent for a very long time on oil energy. The main idea consists to reduce our energetic dependence, because the oil prices won't go down, unless they decide to open new oilfields in Iraq (I was told there are 17 oilfields that have never been exploited over there), but it bad enough with a war in Iraq, that we should not even hope for that if we want the Iraqi people to be free.
By 2030 if everything goes well and if we are still here in this world, we should be able to see new technologies with power plants whose energy would be unlimited: no need anymore to refuel a nuclear plant, it seems an attractive idea, and if it would be a good alternative to reverse the globalization process: once oil prices will reach unaffordable prices, we'll have to go back to the local economy to produce goods instead of importing them.
The mortgage crisis:
2008 will be another bad year for the mortgage crisis. Disruptive economic policies from Greenspan inflated the house market, and people thought it was going to last forever. While people were able to have positive equities on their house, the housing market crashed, and now people are finding themselves with negative equities. As a result people are giving up on their house payment for this main reason, but also these people lost their jobs or they contracted an ARM and the lenders shot up their payment. In some minor cases, their house payment went from $851 a month to $1,300, which is nothing compared to other people whose house payment doubled up, but enough to make you yell and forget about the american dream. This stuff is happening all over the States, although some states are more devastated by this economic tsunami. If you wanted to move to California, Arizona, Nevada or Florida, then forget about that and chose another state. Coincidentally there is a huge number of people who lost their house because they lost their job, but they lost their jobs because they were working illegally or under fake papers in the country. The percentage rate of those people inside the mortgage crisis is high enough to give you a vertigo or a head spin. How in the hell have these people been able to contract a loan without proper documentation and guidelines? And who is responsible in this story? Brokers? Lenders? The government? All of them. Too often, too many times, these people contributed to the dynamism of our economy, but the anti-immigration RAID from ICE worsened the mortgage crisis. We've been shooting our own toes again, and we'll have to make a choice between illegal immigration and mortgage crisis. Actually the percentage of illegal people who contracted a loan in some american banks is higher than 50%.
Conclusion:
These are some ideas only, at first glance, but the economic recession is here, and I do not expect it to be solved from one day to the next. Worse, there is no bandaid yet because this crisis is different from the previous ones: with soaring oil prices we have to make choices between revitalizing our economy and finding other alternative energies while we have to make sure at the same time we don't reach a brand new crisis, a food crisis this time. 2008 will emphasize the crisis so be prepared for the worse. Finally after 8 years of Bush, the country is in bad shape, and we'll need somebody with talent, whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, but the choices, once again, are limited. We need more people like Kucinich or Ron Paul that emphasize on american economics policies instead of diverting us with their foreign policies in the Middle-East. If most Americans think that going to war is the only resource to take care of our country, then please don't count on me.
Some financial analysts predict we have a chance of 50/50 to be in an economic recession (seen on Fox News).
If you think 2007 was a bad year for the economy, then wait the end of 2008 to see how painful the financial squeeze in your wallets will be. We are in an economic recession for sure, but we are in an economic recession at the wrong time.
There are many tools to measure any economic performance, the unemployment rate is an economic indicator, the CPI (Consumer Price Index) is another tool to measure the dynamism in economics and social disparities. The inflation rate is also another interesting tool but for some economic and disguised capitalist reasons (the US inflation tool does not take into account the forty first values) this tool is often forgotten in the US mentalities because keynesian economists prefer to deal with it in terms of economic activity and wealth accumulation. Mainly for the american case people think first in rational terms with their wallets, wealth, and purchasing power. Of course we can dissert at length about accuracy of these economic tools, especially with the CPI, because they do not translate the reality for many products based on raw products, but the consumer is really going to feel the pain during the course of the year 2008.
The CPI - The cost of food:
For instance, the price of wheat has been rising to 92% the last 12 months, and the the price of corn has been rising to +44% the last 15 months. That's a whole lot of inflation when everything's going to be translated to the consumer's wallet within the end of the year. So far, inflation was not really visible last year, but if you think in terms of numbers you should be able to see that basic food products won't be cheap anymore. For example walmart that used to roll back its prices had to raise its prices by 10% at least from December to January, up to 25% for some products (bread). It's only for 1 month, and it's only for the beginning of the year.
Ethanol is produced with corn and as a gasoline substitution there is a downfall in this so-called "green aspect": we need more fields to produce more corn to reduce our dependence on oil and oil prices. Sounds good? But oh oh wait we forgot something here: we are focusing on feeding our cars with ethanol but are we that sure we are going able to feed Americans too? Agricultural performance is good but like the US army troops it's not stretchable. Are we going to be able to feed Americans? What about foreign aid (wheat, corn) to the poorest countries in the world? Didn't the UN report overestimate that the industrialized countries could easily feed all these people on the planet? What are we going to do when we have to make choices between feeding our cars or giving aid to the poorest countries, especially when we need desperately to re-establish an international image?
Get your garden ready if you can, go to wallyworld to buy your tools (made in the USA) and start planting veggies all over the place, because there is no word yet from the presidential nomenklatur (candidates) about this issue. Nobody foresaw the risks, and social problems may be bigger than we think.
The rising oil price and new energies (biofuels):
The oil barrel price has been hitting $100 a few months ago. The days when people had to pay for cheap oil are over, finito. Consequently we are trying to find new sources of energy. Solar energy is a good alternative. It's an infinite source, it's not situated on our planet so we won't destroy it, and for once it breaks the economic cycles between producers and consumers. All we have to do is buying some solar panels and batteries and we can run basically anything we want in our house. The sunnier, the more energy we will supply. With these new technologies we are even able to run solar panels in countries whose sunshines are limited during the day. The problem though is we can't apply these new technologies in all the domains (cars, airplanes, boats...etc) so we are still and will be dependent for a very long time on oil energy. The main idea consists to reduce our energetic dependence, because the oil prices won't go down, unless they decide to open new oilfields in Iraq (I was told there are 17 oilfields that have never been exploited over there), but it bad enough with a war in Iraq, that we should not even hope for that if we want the Iraqi people to be free.
By 2030 if everything goes well and if we are still here in this world, we should be able to see new technologies with power plants whose energy would be unlimited: no need anymore to refuel a nuclear plant, it seems an attractive idea, and if it would be a good alternative to reverse the globalization process: once oil prices will reach unaffordable prices, we'll have to go back to the local economy to produce goods instead of importing them.
The mortgage crisis:
2008 will be another bad year for the mortgage crisis. Disruptive economic policies from Greenspan inflated the house market, and people thought it was going to last forever. While people were able to have positive equities on their house, the housing market crashed, and now people are finding themselves with negative equities. As a result people are giving up on their house payment for this main reason, but also these people lost their jobs or they contracted an ARM and the lenders shot up their payment. In some minor cases, their house payment went from $851 a month to $1,300, which is nothing compared to other people whose house payment doubled up, but enough to make you yell and forget about the american dream. This stuff is happening all over the States, although some states are more devastated by this economic tsunami. If you wanted to move to California, Arizona, Nevada or Florida, then forget about that and chose another state. Coincidentally there is a huge number of people who lost their house because they lost their job, but they lost their jobs because they were working illegally or under fake papers in the country. The percentage rate of those people inside the mortgage crisis is high enough to give you a vertigo or a head spin. How in the hell have these people been able to contract a loan without proper documentation and guidelines? And who is responsible in this story? Brokers? Lenders? The government? All of them. Too often, too many times, these people contributed to the dynamism of our economy, but the anti-immigration RAID from ICE worsened the mortgage crisis. We've been shooting our own toes again, and we'll have to make a choice between illegal immigration and mortgage crisis. Actually the percentage of illegal people who contracted a loan in some american banks is higher than 50%.
Conclusion:
These are some ideas only, at first glance, but the economic recession is here, and I do not expect it to be solved from one day to the next. Worse, there is no bandaid yet because this crisis is different from the previous ones: with soaring oil prices we have to make choices between revitalizing our economy and finding other alternative energies while we have to make sure at the same time we don't reach a brand new crisis, a food crisis this time. 2008 will emphasize the crisis so be prepared for the worse. Finally after 8 years of Bush, the country is in bad shape, and we'll need somebody with talent, whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, but the choices, once again, are limited. We need more people like Kucinich or Ron Paul that emphasize on american economics policies instead of diverting us with their foreign policies in the Middle-East. If most Americans think that going to war is the only resource to take care of our country, then please don't count on me.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The human being, a natural born killer?
By Steven Rix
Here are some personal thoughts during an interesting conversation in this blog:
I never understood "violence" and in fact I've never experienced violent behaviors until I came to the USA. My 1st encounter with a US citizen was an experience that I will never forget because she was a pathological nutcase. That said I still continue to persuade myself there are good people out there, but there is something wrong actually with the system. For example the number of jailed people is far from the percentage of the racial disparity represented in the USA. Ipso facto there is an idea or a even a truth that all the people are not treated equally which is in perfect contradiction with my ideals and my education. Also I found out that many Americans from protestant descent put the blame on the catholic Irish, and they end up convincing themselves it is a genetic problem while they are blinded by religious concepts. Therefore there is an idea that our God is not the same, and then justice is not just. I believe that 6.5% of Americans will end up some day in jail. That's a lot compared to other international statistics, so there is something wrong with that and we cannot deny it.
First of all, I think that "violence" is inherent to people. You don't need to belong to a gang to be violent. When you are in a gang you are expected to be violent because these are the rules with their hierarchy. But even in a normal society, violence does exist. The guy in the US who will lose his house because he did not make his mortgage payment might put the blame of his wife and will punch her in the nose, or he will turn into drugs, if he cannot go back to the normal way of his life. Therefore there is an idea that capitalism in decline is the source of violence although the society expects them to straight themselves up; otherwise they will be sent to jail. In fact I would even advance safely that there is a correlation between economic achievements and violence, but the problem cannot be treated foremost if we cannot deal with the deviations of a society. It is a rather complicated issue because I am not a psychologist first, but the logical issue is self-evident: in a society when people are expected to achieve themselves through economic competences and performances (to make a living) I firmly believe that "corporations" and "financial entities" are excluded from the blame game. In fact we only deal with individualistic issues rather than treating the problem as a whole in the society. In the long run, the bright side of individualism may end up in jail because the government and its laws by association have a different approach on violence, and they'll tend to forget the whole picture that violence and crimes are intertwened with capitalism in ignoring not only the source of the conflict but also the expectations of their society. Maybe this is why people turn their back to socialism. For my part, I think that violence can be defused if you put people on a welfare system, but then again it may not be part of the solution because violence is unpredictable, and it is a complicated phenomena that cannot be solved in a few minutes: even people on welfare can be violent although I would expect a decrease in violence.
I've seen people going out of jail in the US and every time they go out they feel bitter and angry at the world, and they keep coming back to jail (recividism). The rehabilitation programs are extremely poor in the US, it depends on which state you live in. Usually you find more people in jail with less skills (another problem that should be taken into account with the deviations of our society) and learning something during jail time may be the key to rehabilitate them correctly so that they can find a job.
People kill other people in many ways, they don't need a gun to kill somebody, but chances to kill somebody with a gun are more successful than killing somebody with a machete. We can blame the guns for the instantaneous death of someone, but the result in itself does not come from the gun but from the violent behavior of the crime perpetrator. In fact the judicial system ignores the root causes and it prefers to treat them once it is too late. Removing guns in the US is not the solution, because there are so many guns here that we do need a gun to feel protected (self-defense in accordance with our constitutional rights). If you remove guns, we may see a decrease in murders, but it won't take care of violent behaviors. The human being is a natural born killer, and he can even kill with its fists.
I think you're being overly pessimistic about human beings, Politiques. Humans are not natural born killers. We are sentient thinking and feeling beings, which means we have as much potential to inflict harm as we have to do good deeds. Capitalism may well be a twisted social system that screws people up, but even so the vast majority would baulk at committing physically violent acts. I forget the research now (ha! there go my pretensions to being a serious, rigorous academic), but one study presented evidence that suggested the majority of US combatants in WWII wilfully missed or shot to injure rather than shoot to kill enemy soldiers.
On capitalism and psychological disorders, A Bit Like Lenin has posted on this issue recently. It's also worth noting that much of the anti-psychiatry movement that grew up in the sixties was in opposition to individualising mental pathologies, and abstracting patients outside of their social context. Speaking from a position of relative ignorance, I suspect some of the hostility directed toward psychoanalysis can be attributed to its emphasis on the role of the social in the formation of our psyches.
I truthfully think I am not being pessimistic, and my conclusion is not based on personal observations either. I'd rather think i was not clear enough in my writing which is one of my worse habits when you cannot express in your mother tongue, but then again English is such a wonderful language.
First of all, the human being is a "natural born killer" for a simple reason: killing is not a social skill, you don't have to learn it to be able to kill somebody, it belongs to your instincts, or your "rational" choice/decisions to do that. I chose to put the word rational into parenthesis because it is not always rational with pathological cases. In essence killing belongs to nature, it may be a natural act, right? We don't have to forget the anthropologists whose conclusions are based on rational observations in a society. There are many ancient societies whose killing actions were characterized by a natural phenomena (IE ritual sacrifices or cannibalism to cite only a few ones that come to my mind). Now in our western society, that reached a sufficient critical level of thinking, since the biblical holy writings, we learned that killing is not right ("Thou shall not kill") and punishement always prevails to whoever kills anyone, although most of them never get caught. The penitentiary system is the cage to isolate somebody from the society that does not share this behavior because the society failed to prevent these actions and because the human being is not necessarly good. This is why for this particular case that "violence" is inherent. It belongs to anyone but people sometimes in their life make the wrong decisions. But then again it is not something that you can categorize as a whole since a society with laws can attribute different circumstances to an event. Sometimes people have to kill to survive (self-defense) which means for this case that killing is the ultimate refuge to defend your life against somebody else. So killing represents something bad although sometimes it turns out to be for the best. But then again it's wrong and I always attributed this behavior to "violence", therefore "violence" is inherent in ourselves, and you cannot remove it from the society except by putting people in jail, in other words any society preaching the good always failed at some point.
Maybe I'm being a moral psychologist or a moral philosopher. Nietzsche at one point in his life said he was the 1st philosopher to be a great psychologist, which is absurd. One can trace the connections between philosophers and psychologists to the greeks. Lots of philosophers were obsessed with human psychology with people like Lock or Schopenhauer but the subjects were pushed apart from another in the XXth century, but in my eyes Nietzsche deserve some profound thoughts since he gave us a psycho-analysis of morals and religions, way before people like Freud, in a naturalistic way. This is what I am trying to emulate sometimes in biological terms rather than religious terms. "If you want to talk about morality, don't talk about its devine concepts but talk about human motivations that underline it". We need to explain morality, instead of justifying it.
This is why I never judged anyone because I never know the external factors.
I also cannot deny that an individual is a simple product of a society. For example I was reading on the BBC website that during the next 20 years the number of people with a nevrosis in the UK was going to grow and it would reach around 50% of the population. At this point we have to ask ourselves if there is something wrong in our society and searching the causes (any society) or if this statistical fact is determined by the precision of our research tools.
For my part, and I may be wrong, I think that any society has its own social disease. Shopoholism for example is a disease of our society with credit-cards: the human being feels depressed then he has to spend money that it does not have, then it goes on a rampage charging the credit-cards, and he feels even more depressed, then he has to spend more so that he can release the depression.
There is also an enigma with capitalism and it is harder to decipher because you have to replace the original contexts of justice, but I came to the following conclusion right now: justice in the US is not just, the poor does not escape from this reality while the wealthiest (corporate criminals et al) will always get out most of the time. In other words, the "pursuit of happiness" through accumulation of wealth may push people to act the wrong way. One of the most crucial examples I found was this pharmaceutical company in the US that was developing a painkiller medication to make people more addicted physically so that they can enlarge their profit margins.
I think it is a big issue that would deserve not a fine but some jail terms because we are talking about a huge amount of the US population being addicted to this medication (I believe it's called oxxysummfin). But justice is blind, because it tolerates perfectly in a capitalist system that in order to make it yourself you have to crush other people. This is what I call the deviations of a society; it is a very interesting subject, but I don't know anybody who worked on this subject, so I just can contribute with my modest thoughts. The socialists have one point, but I'm pretty sure we'll find other social diseases in a socialist society. Once again there is no perfect society when we compare them statistically, and people often reason first in terms of money without looking at other bright things.
Here are some personal thoughts during an interesting conversation in this blog:
I never understood "violence" and in fact I've never experienced violent behaviors until I came to the USA. My 1st encounter with a US citizen was an experience that I will never forget because she was a pathological nutcase. That said I still continue to persuade myself there are good people out there, but there is something wrong actually with the system. For example the number of jailed people is far from the percentage of the racial disparity represented in the USA. Ipso facto there is an idea or a even a truth that all the people are not treated equally which is in perfect contradiction with my ideals and my education. Also I found out that many Americans from protestant descent put the blame on the catholic Irish, and they end up convincing themselves it is a genetic problem while they are blinded by religious concepts. Therefore there is an idea that our God is not the same, and then justice is not just. I believe that 6.5% of Americans will end up some day in jail. That's a lot compared to other international statistics, so there is something wrong with that and we cannot deny it.
First of all, I think that "violence" is inherent to people. You don't need to belong to a gang to be violent. When you are in a gang you are expected to be violent because these are the rules with their hierarchy. But even in a normal society, violence does exist. The guy in the US who will lose his house because he did not make his mortgage payment might put the blame of his wife and will punch her in the nose, or he will turn into drugs, if he cannot go back to the normal way of his life. Therefore there is an idea that capitalism in decline is the source of violence although the society expects them to straight themselves up; otherwise they will be sent to jail. In fact I would even advance safely that there is a correlation between economic achievements and violence, but the problem cannot be treated foremost if we cannot deal with the deviations of a society. It is a rather complicated issue because I am not a psychologist first, but the logical issue is self-evident: in a society when people are expected to achieve themselves through economic competences and performances (to make a living) I firmly believe that "corporations" and "financial entities" are excluded from the blame game. In fact we only deal with individualistic issues rather than treating the problem as a whole in the society. In the long run, the bright side of individualism may end up in jail because the government and its laws by association have a different approach on violence, and they'll tend to forget the whole picture that violence and crimes are intertwened with capitalism in ignoring not only the source of the conflict but also the expectations of their society. Maybe this is why people turn their back to socialism. For my part, I think that violence can be defused if you put people on a welfare system, but then again it may not be part of the solution because violence is unpredictable, and it is a complicated phenomena that cannot be solved in a few minutes: even people on welfare can be violent although I would expect a decrease in violence.
I've seen people going out of jail in the US and every time they go out they feel bitter and angry at the world, and they keep coming back to jail (recividism). The rehabilitation programs are extremely poor in the US, it depends on which state you live in. Usually you find more people in jail with less skills (another problem that should be taken into account with the deviations of our society) and learning something during jail time may be the key to rehabilitate them correctly so that they can find a job.
People kill other people in many ways, they don't need a gun to kill somebody, but chances to kill somebody with a gun are more successful than killing somebody with a machete. We can blame the guns for the instantaneous death of someone, but the result in itself does not come from the gun but from the violent behavior of the crime perpetrator. In fact the judicial system ignores the root causes and it prefers to treat them once it is too late. Removing guns in the US is not the solution, because there are so many guns here that we do need a gun to feel protected (self-defense in accordance with our constitutional rights). If you remove guns, we may see a decrease in murders, but it won't take care of violent behaviors. The human being is a natural born killer, and he can even kill with its fists.
I think you're being overly pessimistic about human beings, Politiques. Humans are not natural born killers. We are sentient thinking and feeling beings, which means we have as much potential to inflict harm as we have to do good deeds. Capitalism may well be a twisted social system that screws people up, but even so the vast majority would baulk at committing physically violent acts. I forget the research now (ha! there go my pretensions to being a serious, rigorous academic), but one study presented evidence that suggested the majority of US combatants in WWII wilfully missed or shot to injure rather than shoot to kill enemy soldiers.
On capitalism and psychological disorders, A Bit Like Lenin has posted on this issue recently. It's also worth noting that much of the anti-psychiatry movement that grew up in the sixties was in opposition to individualising mental pathologies, and abstracting patients outside of their social context. Speaking from a position of relative ignorance, I suspect some of the hostility directed toward psychoanalysis can be attributed to its emphasis on the role of the social in the formation of our psyches.
I truthfully think I am not being pessimistic, and my conclusion is not based on personal observations either. I'd rather think i was not clear enough in my writing which is one of my worse habits when you cannot express in your mother tongue, but then again English is such a wonderful language.
First of all, the human being is a "natural born killer" for a simple reason: killing is not a social skill, you don't have to learn it to be able to kill somebody, it belongs to your instincts, or your "rational" choice/decisions to do that. I chose to put the word rational into parenthesis because it is not always rational with pathological cases. In essence killing belongs to nature, it may be a natural act, right? We don't have to forget the anthropologists whose conclusions are based on rational observations in a society. There are many ancient societies whose killing actions were characterized by a natural phenomena (IE ritual sacrifices or cannibalism to cite only a few ones that come to my mind). Now in our western society, that reached a sufficient critical level of thinking, since the biblical holy writings, we learned that killing is not right ("Thou shall not kill") and punishement always prevails to whoever kills anyone, although most of them never get caught. The penitentiary system is the cage to isolate somebody from the society that does not share this behavior because the society failed to prevent these actions and because the human being is not necessarly good. This is why for this particular case that "violence" is inherent. It belongs to anyone but people sometimes in their life make the wrong decisions. But then again it is not something that you can categorize as a whole since a society with laws can attribute different circumstances to an event. Sometimes people have to kill to survive (self-defense) which means for this case that killing is the ultimate refuge to defend your life against somebody else. So killing represents something bad although sometimes it turns out to be for the best. But then again it's wrong and I always attributed this behavior to "violence", therefore "violence" is inherent in ourselves, and you cannot remove it from the society except by putting people in jail, in other words any society preaching the good always failed at some point.
Maybe I'm being a moral psychologist or a moral philosopher. Nietzsche at one point in his life said he was the 1st philosopher to be a great psychologist, which is absurd. One can trace the connections between philosophers and psychologists to the greeks. Lots of philosophers were obsessed with human psychology with people like Lock or Schopenhauer but the subjects were pushed apart from another in the XXth century, but in my eyes Nietzsche deserve some profound thoughts since he gave us a psycho-analysis of morals and religions, way before people like Freud, in a naturalistic way. This is what I am trying to emulate sometimes in biological terms rather than religious terms. "If you want to talk about morality, don't talk about its devine concepts but talk about human motivations that underline it". We need to explain morality, instead of justifying it.
This is why I never judged anyone because I never know the external factors.
I also cannot deny that an individual is a simple product of a society. For example I was reading on the BBC website that during the next 20 years the number of people with a nevrosis in the UK was going to grow and it would reach around 50% of the population. At this point we have to ask ourselves if there is something wrong in our society and searching the causes (any society) or if this statistical fact is determined by the precision of our research tools.
For my part, and I may be wrong, I think that any society has its own social disease. Shopoholism for example is a disease of our society with credit-cards: the human being feels depressed then he has to spend money that it does not have, then it goes on a rampage charging the credit-cards, and he feels even more depressed, then he has to spend more so that he can release the depression.
There is also an enigma with capitalism and it is harder to decipher because you have to replace the original contexts of justice, but I came to the following conclusion right now: justice in the US is not just, the poor does not escape from this reality while the wealthiest (corporate criminals et al) will always get out most of the time. In other words, the "pursuit of happiness" through accumulation of wealth may push people to act the wrong way. One of the most crucial examples I found was this pharmaceutical company in the US that was developing a painkiller medication to make people more addicted physically so that they can enlarge their profit margins.
I think it is a big issue that would deserve not a fine but some jail terms because we are talking about a huge amount of the US population being addicted to this medication (I believe it's called oxxysummfin). But justice is blind, because it tolerates perfectly in a capitalist system that in order to make it yourself you have to crush other people. This is what I call the deviations of a society; it is a very interesting subject, but I don't know anybody who worked on this subject, so I just can contribute with my modest thoughts. The socialists have one point, but I'm pretty sure we'll find other social diseases in a socialist society. Once again there is no perfect society when we compare them statistically, and people often reason first in terms of money without looking at other bright things.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
France to get military base in UAE
Nicolas Sarkozy has signed a deal with the United Arab Emirates for France to establish its first permanent military base in the Gulf.
The agreement reached on Tuesday will make France one of the first Western countries other than the United States to have a permanent base in the region.
The planned facility will be able to house up to 500 personnel.
During his visit to Abu Dhabi, the latest stop on his tour of the Gulf, Sarkozy was also expected to conclude a deal with his Emirati counterpart, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, on nuclear co-operation that could be worth up to $6 billion.
France already has long-standing military co-operation accords with countries in the Gulf, including the Emirates and Qatar.
'Nuclear right'
The accord for co-operation in civilian nuclear activities, a first step toward building a nuclear reactor, would be the third such deal France has signed with Arab nations recently, after Libya and Algeria.
Sarkozy also offered Saudi Arabia nuclear assistance during his visit to the kingdom on Monday.
Frabnce generates a large majority of its power from nuclear reactors and is keen to export its technology and expertise in developing civilian energy.
In an interview with Al Jazeera while in Qatar, Sarkozy affirmed Arab nations right to nuclear energy.
However, he said the right did not extend to Iran as he believed the Islamic Republic should prove definitively it had no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons before it should be allowed to develop civilian nuclear energy.
"It would be giving credit to the current Iranian regime if civilian nuclear energy is only used by western democracies," he said.
"France tells Iran 'give up your race for a nuclear weapon - it's a risk and you don't really need it'. And, if you [Iran] stop the race for a nuclear weapon, you would have access to civilian nuclear power."
Sarkozy's comments came as officials revealed Areva, the French nuclear reactor manufacturer, has signed a $700 million electricity distribution and transmission deal with Qatar.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Twenty-five U.S. Military Officers Challenge Official Account of 9/11
Cliquez sur le lien pour en savoir plus.
Official Account of 9/11: “Impossible”, “A Bunch of Hogwash”, “Total B.S.”, “Ludicrous”, “A Well-Organized Cover-up”, “A White-Washed Farce”
Official Account of 9/11: “Impossible”, “A Bunch of Hogwash”, “Total B.S.”, “Ludicrous”, “A Well-Organized Cover-up”, “A White-Washed Farce”
Sunday, January 13, 2008
US Seen in Middle East Policy Retreat
by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO - Recent months have witnessed several notable political reorientations in the Middle East, involving Iran, the Gulf states, Egypt and Lebanon. Several experts say the changes reflect a shift in Washington's regional strategy following recent US policy setbacks.
"US policies in the region are either in retreat or undergoing reexamination," Ayman Abelaziz Salaama, international law professor at Cairo University told IPS. "Washington's project for a new Middle East – launched in 2001 with the aim of redrawing the region to suit US interests – has failed."
The most notable manifestation of this retreat is considered to be Washington's apparent change of tack on Iran.
A widely-publicized US intelligence report in early December devastated claims by both the Bush administration and Tel Aviv that Tehran was developing nuclear weapons. Since then, US statements suggest that – while Washington will continue to press for economic sanctions against Tehran – the notion of a US-led attack on the Islamic republic has been shelved.
What's more, the US State Department has shown a new willingness to engage Tehran diplomatically in an effort to garner Iranian cooperation in Iraq.
"The US has obviously changed course on Iran," Essam al-Arian, a leading member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement and head of the group's political department, told IPS. "The intelligence report has ensured that a US-led war on Iran is off the table."
The apparent US stand-down has been accompanied by several signs of diplomatic rapprochement between Washington's Arab allies and Tehran.
In early December, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was invited to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit – a first for an Iranian head of state – held in Qatar. "It seems a new chapter has been opened in relations between the Persian and the Gulf States," Ahmedinejad reportedly told the conference.
Days later, at a regional security summit held in Bahrain, representatives from a number of Arab countries bluntly declared their opposition to a would-be military strike against Iran. "We want the military factor to be eliminated," GCC Secretary-General Abdul-Rahman al-Attiya said at the conference, which was also attended by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
According to Salaama, the Gulf States – like most of Washington's Arab allies in the region – are all too relieved to be rid of the specter of a US-Iran showdown.
"The last thing the GCC states want is to have Iran – just across the gulf – as an enemy," he said. "Also, with significant Shi'ite populations, they are more susceptible to Iranian influence than other countries in the region."
In a Jan. 6 interview, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa defended the right of Arab capitals to set their own policies vis-à-vis Tehran. "As long as it has no nuclear program…why should we isolate Iran?" he was quoted as saying in a reference to the recent US intelligence assessment.
Egypt, too, which has not had diplomatic relations with Iran since 1979, appears to be flirting with the idea of rapprochement.
Late last month, Ali Larijani, head of Iran's National Security Council, visited Cairo where he met with a number of prominent government officials. The visit, which came in the wake of other high-profile exchanges, has prompted considerable speculation that diplomatic normalization between Cairo and Tehran is on the horizon.
Along with the apparent shift on Iran comes political reorientations by US allies in Lebanon.
Lebanon remains the scene of a drawn-out power struggle between the western-backed government in Beirut and the opposition led by Shi'ite resistance group Hezbollah. The conflict has lately culminated in a full-blown presidential crisis, with both sides intent on deciding the choice of the country's next president.
In a notable shift last month, the anti-Syrian government majority announced its willingness to accept army commander Michel Suleiman as a potential presidential candidate. Previously, government figures had voiced opposition to Suleiman's candidacy in light of the army chief's amicable relationship with Hezbollah.
Notably, the about-face came despite earlier statements by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in which she urged the government not to compromise on the issue of the presidency.
"The US didn't want Suleiman as president because of his good working relationship with Hezbollah," Abdel-Halim Kandil, political analyst and former editor-in-chief of opposition weekly al-Karama, told IPS. "But Washington was unable to impose this demand on its allies in the government."
According to Salaama, the shift must be seen within the context of Israel's inability – despite unqualified US support – to disarm Hezbollah during its 2006 summer with Lebanon.
"Israel, and by extension the US, failed to disarm Hezbollah by force," he said. "This changed the regional balance of power and had a profound impact on US policy in the Middle East."
In light of these developments, he added, the notion of disarming the Shi'ite resistance group – an ally of Iran and Syria – now seems farther away than ever.
"There may be UN Security Council resolutions calling for disarmament of Hezbollah, but they are far from being implemented," said Salaama.
Another factor in the seeming US policy retreat, say observers, is the US military's poor showing after almost five years in Iraq.
"The US went from launching a quick war for regime change to maintaining a long-term occupation of Iraq," said Salaama. "Now, despite new counterinsurgency strategies, the American military remains bogged down with mounting military and economic losses."
According to Kandil, the US failure to win decisively in Iraq has forced Arab capitals to reassess the vaunted US military might. "Given the situation in Iraq, the Arab regimes now realize that US power isn't absolute – and can even be resisted," he said.
Military strategy aside, local observers also point to Washington's shattered credibility as an arbitrator in the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly after the US-sponsored Annapolis summit in November.
Ostensibly held to restart the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process, the event was attended by representatives from Israel, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and 16 Arab nations. But while the conference was heavy on Tel Aviv's security concerns, longstanding Arab demands – chief among them the establishment of a Palestinian state – were conspicuously absent.
"The Arabs went to Annapolis despite serious reservations, based on Washington's promises that Israel would show flexibility," said Kandil. "But the US totally failed to deliver, embarrassing the Arab regimes in front of their respective publics."
Arian echoed this theme, saying, "Even Arab governments allied with the US were deeply embarrassed by the lack of results."
Many Arab commentators also point to the US failure to advance the twin causes of democracy and human rights in the region – both of which had been major components of Washington's post-9/11 vision for a "New Middle East."
"The US can't call for democracy and human rights while simultaneously committing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Salaama. "America was once seen as a champion of freedom – now it's perceived as a human rights violator."
According to Kandil, these accumulated US failures – both military and moral – have led the region's capitals to reexamine their priorities.
"Until now, the Arab regimes have blindly followed the US, thinking they needed it to keep them in power," he said. "But recent development are prompting them to reassesses this assumption.
"The era of US hegemony is ending," Kandil added. "And a new era of cooperation between regional actors – looking for new means to achieve their ends – has begun."
Friday, January 11, 2008
Notes on the political and economic crisis of the world capitalist system and the perspective and tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
Interesting data such as:
The top 1.0 percent of households owns 42.2 percent of non-home wealth.
or
Americans work 350 hours longer per year than the average European
A must read:
By David North
The top 1.0 percent of households owns 42.2 percent of non-home wealth.
or
Americans work 350 hours longer per year than the average European
A must read:
By David North
11 January 2008
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author
The following report was given by David North, national secretary of the SEP, at a national aggregate meeting held January 5-6 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1. 2008 will be characterized by a significant intensification of the economic and political crisis of the world capitalist system. The turbulence in world financial markets is the expression of not merely a conjunctural downturn, but rather a profound systemic disorder which is already destabilizing international politics. As always, the weakest links in the chain of imperialist geo-politics are the first to break. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the eruptions of civil wars in the Congo and Kenya, and the renewed tension in the Balkans over Kosovo are indicative of the increasingly explosive state of world politics.
2. Sixteen years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an event which supposedly signaled the definitive and irreversible triumph of global capitalism, the world economy is in shambles. The bursting of the housing market bubble in the United States, which had been fueled by uncontrolled speculative investments in sub-prime mortgages, has resulted in global losses of hundreds of billions of dollars for international banks and other financial institutions. The murky alphabet soup of financial instruments—i.e., SIVs (structured investment vehicles), CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), etc.—had been devised to “securitize” sub-prime mortgages, conceal their dubious character, and spread risk among a large number of institutions. The result is an international financial crisis which, in the words of one analyst, has called into question the viability and legitimacy of the Anglo-American system of capitalism. The Financial Times writes that “faith in 21st century financial innovation has since evaporated. The events of last year showed with brutal clarity that risk dispersal does not always prevent financial shocks, but may fuel contagion instead...” (January 2, 2008)
3. That the present economic situation is extremely serious is no longer a matter for debate among informed bourgeois analysts. The most astute and honest among them acknowledge that there is still insufficient data about the extent of financial losses and their impact upon broader sectors of the American and world economy to make firm predictions about the consequences of the still unfolding crisis. The “credit crunch” which developed in the summer of 2007 remains a major threat to the functioning of the world capitalist economy. With the realization that billions of dollars in assets must be written off as unrecoverable losses, the mutual confidence of financial institutions in each other’s solvency has been gravely undermined. Moreover, it is widely assumed that the same sort of lending practices that created the housing bubble were applied in other sectors of the US economy. There is growing fear that a US recession may expose the recklessness in corporate lending. But in this tense situation, initial hopes that the impact of the collapse in housing prices on the broader American economy will be contained are rapidly dissipating. “America has entered 2008,” writes the Financial Times, “in greater danger of recession than at any stage since the collapse of the internet bubble in 2000-01, as the world’s largest economy struggles to maintain growth in the face of the credit squeeze, a housing slide and high oil prices.” (January 2, 2008)
4. Another major economic study concludes: “So far as the credit crunch goes, there seems to be widespread agreement that, taking everything together, the present crisis is already more serious than any other that has occurred before in modern times. Major banks and their financial institutions are still, almost daily, revealing huge losses as a result of imprudent lending. House prices are falling. And there is a general sense that some further deterioration is in prospect, particularly as many more sub-prime borrowers [and some others who obtained (misnamed) ‘interest only’ loans or loans with enticing ‘teaser’ rates of interest] are going to come under increased pressure as the initial rates they have paid get raised over the coming year.” [Strategic Analysis, November 2007, Levy Institute of Bard College, p. 9]
5. A crisis of the US economy has direct and immediate global implications. The International Monetary Fund warns that “risks to domestic demand in western Europe and Japan have now shifted to the downside” as a result of the “contagion” emanating from the United States. (World Economic Outlook, October 2007, p. 11) Also, the IMF anticipates that “continuing turbulence in global financial markets could disrupt financial flows to emerging markets and trigger problems in domestic markets... [G]rowth [in Asia and Latin America] would be vulnerable to spillover effects from slower aggregate demand growth in the advanced economies...” [ibid., p. 19]
6. Within the United States, the crisis in the housing industry is, first and foremost, a social disaster for millions of working- and middle-class families. It is expected that at least one million families will lose their homes due to foreclosures during the next two years. Millions more who are not immediately threatened with foreclosure are being seriously affected by the crisis. In many parts of the country housing prices are expected to fall by 25 percent or more. Declines of this magnitude must have a devastating impact on the personal finances of working class families. It is well known that home equity loans have played a crucial role in supplementing the wages or salaries of working- and middle-class families. These loans have been used to finance education for children, pay medical bills and meet other pressing needs. This source of additional income will no longer be available for millions of people.
7. Thus, the collapse of housing prices deprives the broad mass of working Americans of one of the principal means by which they have sought to counteract the financial burdens created by three-and-a-half decades of wage stagnation. The income of a male worker in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a worker the same age in 1978. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has noted, the “coping mechanisms” that have been employed to deal with wage deflation have been the massive movement of women into the work force (from 38 percent in 1970 to 70 percent today), and the addition of two weeks to the annual work load. Americans work 350 hours longer per year than the average European. By the turn of the 21st century, when workers reached the physical limit of their ability to make money by working, they began to depend more and more on borrowing, using their homes as collateral. As this means of bridging the ever-wider chasm between income and needs disappears, millions are faced with the specter of falling into the financial abyss. Already, during the first half of 2007, personal bankruptcies in the United States increased by 48 percent. The extent to which workers are stretched financially to the limit is exposed by the fact that 27 million workers will have to borrow money this winter simply to pay their heating bills. But the use of credit cards is becoming just as problematic as home equity loans. As all the traditional and individualistic means for coping with prevailing economic realities recede, the working class is forced to turn to the only means by which it can defend itself—that of collective and conscious social and political struggle against the capitalist system.
8. The revolutionary character and consequences of the struggle of the working class are determined above all by the objective nature of the crisis of the global capitalist system. As stated previously, the expanding crisis is of a systemic character. For the third time in a decade, the world economy has been shaken by the collapse of a bubble that had been created by massive financial speculation. The East Asian financial crisis, which erupted in the summer of 1997, engulfed the economies of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines and Singapore, and came close to triggering an international financial meltdown. This was prevented by massive counter-measures by the International Monetary Fund, which funded country-wide bailouts to the tune of billions of dollars to prevent a series of cataclysmic national defaults. The vulnerability of the US equity markets to the Asian crisis was reflected in the upheavals on Wall Street. On just one day, October 27, 1997, the Dow Jones average fell 554 points (7.2 percent) in response to turmoil on Asian currency markets. Subsequent efforts to stabilize Wall Street, particularly with low interest rates, further inflated the investment bubble that had begun to develop in the mid-1990s. By 2000, the unsustainable character of the “dot.com” craze, characterized by “irrational exuberance,” had become all too clear. The bubble burst, and the subsequent crash led to the first recession in a decade. Again, the response of the Federal Reserve was to lower interest rates to their lowest levels in decades and flood the economy with liquidity. The means employed to contain the bursting of the dot.com bubble set the stage for the frenzied speculation in the US housing market. The highly speculative character of the housing market was widely recognized, but financial policy makers believed that its continued growth, however dubious in nature, was required in order to prevent a relapse into recession. As noted by the Levy Economics Institute, “The rise in personal expenditure, on which continuous growth of the US economy largely depended after 2001, was directly and indirectly caused by the hysterical boom in the housing market.” [Strategic Analysis, November 2007, p. 7]
9. The persistent tendency toward the creation of speculative bubbles arises out of deep-rooted contradictions in the development of the world capitalist system, especially bound up with the historical decline in the global position of American capitalism. The long-term decline in the profitability of US-based industry has propelled the drive by American financial institutions for alternative sources of high returns on investment. The mode of existence of the American ruling elite has been characterized for the last 30 years by the ever-wider separation of the process of wealth accumulation from the processes of industrial production. The latter is of interest to the ruling elite only where the availability of cheap labor provides the possibility of realizing a rate of profit large enough to satisfy its demand for ultra-high levels of personal enrichment.
10. The parasitic character of the American ruling elite is inextricably bound up with the extreme intensification of militarism. In the final analysis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—while exploiting the events of 9/11 as a pretext—grew out of the drive by the American ruling class to maintain the hegemonic global position of the United States. The doctrine of preventive war, unveiled by the Bush administration in 2002, remains in place. The geo-political and economic challenges posed by existent or emerging rivals are to be counteracted through the exercise of military power. The setbacks suffered in Iraq, far from diminishing the aggressive impulses of US imperialism, have created new imperatives for the deployment of US power. The threats against Iran have escalated in response to the fragility of the American position in Iraq.
11. As for the war in Iraq, the slight abatement of violence in Iraq does not mean that Bush’s “surge” has been successful, let alone that the war is drawing to a close. To a certain extent, the temporary decline in violence reflects the degree to which “ethnic cleansing” of neighborhoods—the product of the US invasion—has been carried out. There is also the effect of the massive loss of life that has already been suffered in Iraq. But the outcome of the US invasion has been a tremendous intensification of the social and political contradictions within the country and region. The escalating conflict between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds threatens to break out at any time into full-scale war. At any rate, there exists—apart from the development of a powerful anti-war movement of the American and international working class—no prospect for the withdrawal of US troops in the foreseeable future. As writer Nir Rosen observed in a recent article in the journal Current History, “The US surge is merely a way to kick the problem of Iraq down to the next administration, but the truth is that American soldiers will never leave Iraq. The large bases in Anbar province, such as Al Assad and Taqadum, are built to last—‘an enduring presence,’ as one Marine officer told me. Located in the remote desert, virtually impregnable and only occasionally targeted by mortars, these bases will remain for decades.” [December 2007, p. 413]
12. During the five years since the invasion of Iraq, the strategic position of the United States has deteriorated. Particularly in Central Asia, whose domination is considered by Washington to be essential to the project of global hegemony, the United States is confronted with a more challenging environment. The revival of Russian influence in the region and the continuing economic expansion of China and India are seen as a potential constraint on the imperial ambitions of the United States.
13. For the strategists of American imperialism, the issue of China looms ever larger. The unabated growth of China’s economic strength—which must assume an ever more overt military form—is widely seen as incompatible with the global interests of the United States. The recent formation of the new American military center for Africa—AFRICOM—is a direct response to steadily expanding Chinese influence on that continent. But the conflict between China and the United States for influence in East Asia is fraught with even greater and more immediate tension. As foreign policy expert Christopher Layne has written: “If the United States tries to maintain its current dominance in East Asia, Sino-American conflict is virtually certain, because US grand strategy has incorporated the logic of anticipatory violence as an instrument for maintaining American primacy. For a declining hegemon, ‘strangling the baby in the crib’ by attacking a rising challenger preventively—that is, while the hegemon still holds the upper hand militarily—has always been a tempting strategic option.” [Current History, January 2008, pp. 16-17]
14. The drive toward war arises inexorably out of the global geo-political interests and ambitions of the American bourgeoisie. It is also a product of the increasingly malignant state of social relations within the United States. The staggering growth in the levels of economic inequality over the past three decades signifies the build-up of extreme social tensions beneath the surface of official political life and outside the channels of media-sanctioned public discourse. Imperialist militarism is among the most important political instruments employed by the ruling elites to prevent social tensions from assuming the form of domestic class conflict.
15. Recent studies by Edward N. Wolff of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College document the extreme levels of social inequality in the United States. The statistics relating to the allocation of wealth and income reveal the extraordinary degree of social stratification. The top 1.0 percent of the population holds 34.3 percent of the net worth of households in the USA. The next 4.0 percent holds 24.6 percent, and the next 5.0 percent holds 12.3 percent. All in all, the richest 10 percent of the population holds just about 71 percent of the national household wealth. The next 10 percent holds just 13.4 percent of the wealth. The bottom 80 percent of American households accounts for just 15.3 percent of wealth. Those who fall in the third quintile own just 3.8 percent of the wealth. The bottom 40 percent of households possesses just 0.2 percent of wealth!
16. When non-home wealth is considered, the stratification is even greater. The top 1.0 percent of households owns 42.2 percent of non-home wealth. The top 10 percent owns just under 80 percent of non-home wealth. The bottom 80 percent owns 7.5 percent of non-home wealth. The poorest 40 percent report a -1.1 percent of non-home wealth.
17. Measuring income, the top 1.0 percent receives 20 percent of the total. The top 10 percent receives 45 percent of total income. The bottom 80 percent receives 41.4 percent. The poorest 40 percent accounts for just 10.1 percent of income.
18. Another extremely interesting set of statistics relates to the financial condition of households falling within the middle three quintiles (80-60, 60-40, 40-20). Their homes account for 66.1 percent of their personal wealth. Liquid assets account for only 8.5 percent of their wealth. Investment instruments (stocks, securities, trusts, etc.) account for only 4.2 percent. These figures make all too clear the extent to which the financial position of the middle three quintiles depends upon home valuation and the general condition of the housing market.
19. This fact makes all the more significant the sharp rise in the indebtedness of these sections of the working class and middle class. In 1983, the debt to equity ratio of these sections was 37.4 percent. By 2004, it had risen to 61.6 percent. In 1983, the debt to income ratio was 66.9 percent. In 2004, it had risen to 141.2 percent! In 1983, the mortgage debt on the homes of these three quintiles was 28.8 percent of house value. By 2004, the debt level had risen to 47.6 percent.
20. One last set of statistics: In 2004, according to Wolff, “the richest 1 percent of households held about half of all outstanding stock, financial securities, trust equity, and business equity. The top 10 percent of families as a group accounted for about 80 to 85 percent of stock shares, bonds, trusts, business equity, and non-home real estate. Moreover, despite the fact that 49 percent of households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts or various pension accounts, the richest 10 percent of households accounted for 79 percent of the total value of these stocks, only slightly less than its 85 percent of directly owned stocks and mutual funds.” [“Rising Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze,” June 2007, p. 25]
21. What are the political implications of these statistics? The extreme stratification of American society over the last three decades is rapidly approaching the point of open and violent class conflict. The sclerotic American political system, administered by two political parties that serve as instruments for the implementation of the interests of the ruling plutocracy, is organically incapable of responding in any sort of credible, let alone progressive, manner to the demands of the people for significant social change. In the final analysis, the demand for social change, even of a reformist character, runs up against the unyielding determination of the ruling elite to defend its wealth and social privileges.
22. The stolen election of 2000—as the SEP and the World Socialist Web Site warned at the time—represented a historical milestone in the degeneration of American democracy. The willingness of the Democratic Party to accept the theft of the election demonstrated that no substantial section of the American capitalist class retained a compelling interest in the defense of the traditional institutions of bourgeois democracy. All that has occurred since the election has substantiated that judgment. The wholesale violations of democratic and constitutional principles carried out under the cover of the post-9/11 “war on terror”—in which both the Democrats and Republicans are complicit—represent ever more brazen preparations for dictatorial forms of class rule. These are not aberrations, but arise out of a deepening social polarization that is ultimately incompatible with the maintenance of the traditional forms of American democracy. It should be taken as a warning that the procedure of “enhanced interrogation”—i.e., torture—is an English translation of a procedure that Hitler’s Gestapo called “verschärfte Verhemung.”
23. Regardless of who is ultimately nominated by the bourgeois parties and elected president, the logic of social and political developments is leading inexorably toward an intensification of class conflict. Moreover, the protracted deterioration in the social position and living standards of the working class, its ever-decreasing share of the wealth of society, and the unrelenting intensification of its exploitation by those who own and control the means of production have laid the foundations for a profound change in the political orientation and allegiances of the working class. Those who fail to see or who even deny that the profound changes in economic life over the past 30 years have left deep marks in the social consciousness of the American working class expose not only their demoralized skepticism, but also their ignorance of history. Indeed, the absence of open social and class conflict during the past quarter century stands in sharp contradiction to the general pattern of American history. But this prolonged period of social quiescence, rooted in a complex and exceptional interaction of national and, above all, international economic and political processes, is now drawing to a close. The central task of the Socialist Equality Party in 2008 is to prepare in all aspects of its work—theoretical, political and organizational—to meet the challenges posed by the eruption of class conflict.
24. A critical element of this preparation is the review of the lessons of past periods of revolutionary upheaval. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968, a year that was characterized by explosive struggles internationally and in the United States. The events of that year set into motion a protracted period of international revolutionary struggle and intense class conflict within the United States. Significantly, the political eruptions of 1968 were first anticipated and then developed against the backdrop of increased strains in the world economy. The devaluation of the British pound in November 1967, followed by the March 1968 instability in the European gold market, presaged the 1971 breakdown of the Bretton Woods system upon which the post-World War II reconstruction of international capitalism and the dominant role of the United States was based.
25. Let us briefly review the main events of that year: In late January, the government of North Vietnam launched its historic “Tet Offensive,” which utterly discredited the claims of the Johnson administration and the Pentagon that the United States was winning the war. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned and a ferocious internal struggle erupted within the administration over its Vietnam policy. Also in January, the arch-Stalinist Antonin Novotny was replaced as premier of Czechoslovakia by Alexander Dubcek, setting in motion what was to become known as the “Prague Spring.” In February, Lyndon Johnson narrowly defeated Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, an outcome that was interpreted as a major political defeat for the incumbent president. In March, Sen. Robert Kennedy announced that he would challenge Johnson for the nomination. Two weeks later, Johnson announced both his willingness to enter into peace talks with North Vietnam and his decision not to seek renomination. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis and riots erupted in cities throughout the United States. In May, the violent suppression of student protests at Paris’ Sorbonne University led to a general strike of the French working class that paralyzed the DeGaulle government and brought the country to the very brink of social revolution. On June 5, Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. In August, the Democratic convention in Chicago was besieged by anti-war protests, which Mayor Richard Daley sought to suppress with police violence. During the same week, Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia and restored hard-line Stalinist control. In November, Richard Nixon was elected president.
26. The events of 1968 marked only the beginning of a massive upsurge of global class struggle, which persisted for nearly a decade. On every continent mass struggle was the rule, not the exception. The most significant feature of that period was the parallel development of revolutionary movements in both the less developed and advanced capitalist countries. Pre-revolutionary or revolutionary conditions arose in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Italy, France, Britain, Portugal, Greece, and Spain. Within the United States, the dominant force in social struggles during that period was not the students, but the working class. With the exception of 1973 and 1976, the number of workers involved in major strikes never fell below one million between the years 1967 and 1979. In 1970 and 1971, the number of workers involved in strikes was 2.4 million and 2.5 million respectively. In Britain, the strike of coal miners in 1973-74 forced the resignation of the Conservative government of Edward Heath.
27. What then accounted for the survival of the capitalist system during this period of tumultuous social struggles? On the political front, the principal reason for the survival of capitalism is to be found in the counter-revolutionary policies of the Stalinist and social democratic governments, parties and trade union bureaucracies, which did everything in their power to sabotage the revolutionary struggles of the working class. Moreover, the Pabloite parties and organizations, which had in the 1950s and early 1960s broken with the Fourth International, played a destructive role in covering up for the political treachery of the Stalinists and social democrats and channeling mass struggles into politically impotent protests. In this project, the Pabloites worked arm-in-arm with the organizations of the so-called New Left, whose defining characteristics were disdain for the working class, indifference toward the lessons of history, hostility toward Marxist theory, and bitter hatred of Trotskyism.
28. The political treachery of these forces was abetted by substantial objective factors, of which the most significant was the still-dominant world position of American capitalism. The dollar functioned as the linchpin of the world capitalist economy, convertible into gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. But politically and economically, the world of 2008 is vastly different than that which existed 40 years ago. The world’s principal creditor has become its most indebted nation. The US dollar, whose value on international markets is only a fraction of what it was during the era of Bretton Woods, has lost virtually all credibility as a world reserve currency. Its displacement by the euro or a “basket” of international currencies, a development which is all but inevitable, will only confirm what is already apparent—that the era of the global dominance of American capitalism has come to an end. Moreover, the extraordinary technological changes that underlie the processes known as “globalization” are profoundly revolutionary in their implications. The last three decades have witnessed an immense world-wide expansion in the forces of the international working class. Its social power and potential ability to reorganize the world economy along socialist lines—that is, for the consciously directed purpose of ending poverty and exploitation and serving the needs of humanity—is greater than in any previous period of history.
29. The Socialist Equality Party, in political solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International, anticipates with confidence the resurgence of working class struggles. We are convinced that the objective crisis of the capitalist system will provide the impulse for the upsurge of the American and international working class. But the coming upsurge will not automatically solve the problems of developing socialist consciousness.
30. As the initial struggles of the working class in recent months demonstrate, there remains an enormous gulf between the objectively revolutionary implications of the crisis and the present level of political consciousness. Objective conditions will propel the working class into struggle and create the conditions for an immense leap in consciousness. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the degree of struggle that must be conducted by the party to raise the political consciousness of the working class and overcome the reactionary influence of the bureaucracies, which, while weakened, remain a dangerous and critical prop of capitalist rule. Nor can we ignore the role played by myriad “radical” petty-bourgeois tendencies, which persistently seek to disorient the working class and maintain its subordination to “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie. The influence of all these different political agencies of the ruling class can be overcome only by fighting for the assimilation of the strategic experiences of past revolutionary struggles and for an understanding of the implications of the developing crisis of world capitalism.
31. During 2008, the Socialist Equality Party will undertake a politically-ambitious campaign to expand its influence within the working class and among youth. This campaign will include:
(a) The participation of the SEP in the 2008 elections with its own candidates in as many states as possible. The purpose of this campaign will be to develop the political consciousness of the working class and its understanding of the program of international socialism, to hasten its political break with the parties of the capitalist class, to fight against poverty, exploitation and all forms of social inequality, to build opposition to American militarism and imperialism, and to recruit new forces into the Socialist Equality Party.
(b) The development, in conjunction with our political co-thinkers in the International Committee, of the World Socialist Web Site. This will include a major redesign of the web site to improve readability and make the most effective use possible of modern web technologies. The WSWS will also introduce editorial changes that will strengthen its political, cultural and theoretical content. The goal of all these changes is to expand the readership and political influence of the web site as an instrument of socialist thought and action.
(c) The International Students for Social Equality (ISSE), the student youth movement affiliated with the SEP, will expand its work on campuses throughout the United States. Combined with the efforts of our political co-thinkers in the International Committee, we will strive to develop the ISSE as a genuinely international movement fighting for the political unity and solidarity of youth and workers throughout the world.
32. We appeal to all SEP members to fight on the basis of the perspective outlined in this report for the expansion of the work of the party in 2008. At the same time, the entire SEP membership calls upon the readers and supporters of the World Socialist Web Site to recognize the urgency of the political and economic crisis of American and world capitalism and join with us in the fight for socialism.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
How Many Kids Will The US Kill In 2008?
By Dr Gideon Polya
08/01/08 "ICH" -- -- I seem to have been demonstrating against American racism, imperialism, wars and mass murder all my adult life from the Vietnam era of the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Back in the 1960s decent people chanted “Hay, hay LBJ, how many kids will you kill today?” (LBJ being US President Lyndon Baines Johnson who presided over the Indochina War - 13 million excess deaths in total - from the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) in 1963 to the accession of President Richard Nixon in 1969.
These days we have been chanting “Bush, Blair, CIA, how many kids did you kill today?” or the more general “Hay, hay USA, how many kids did you kill today?” This article by a senior biological scientist attempts to answer this question QUANTITATIVELY using the best available data from UNICEF (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ) and the UN Population Division (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ).
We can get an UPPER LIMIT estimate from determining the number of children who die avoidably on Spaceship Earth with George Bush in charge of the flight deck. I have published a huge book recently called “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”. (G.M. Polya, Melbourne; copies in some major libraries; see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Careful research over several years and involving every country in the world ultimately obtained the estimate that 16 million people die avoidably each year (2003 data) of whom 9.6 million are under-5 year old infants.
We can accordingly estimate that Bush US is COMPLICIT in about 9.6 million avoidable infant deaths on Spaceship Earth each year (26,000 daily). However complicity is not the same as actual, actionable RESPONSIBILITY.
However while Bush America cannot be held responsible for every country in the world, under International Law it is certainly responsible for all countries actually violently occupied by the US (Occupied Iraq, Occupied Afghanistan, Occupied Diego Garcia) or by its war criminal surrogates Ethiopia and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel (Occupied Haiti, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Somalia).
This culpability is clearly set out in Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ), QUOTE:
Article 55
To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.
The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods.
The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.
Article 56
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.
If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21.
In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory. END QUOTE.
Using data from UNICEF it can be estimated that 608,000 under-5 year old infants die ANNUALLY in the US- or US surrogate-occupied Occupied Territories listed above, 90% avoidably - i.e. 550,000 - and due to Occupier war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention.
A quick inspection of the WHO (World Health Organization) website (see: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ) reveals that total annual medical expenditure in US dollars permitted by the war criminal Occupiers is only $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $82 (Occupied Haiti), $135 (Occupied Iraq), ? (Occupied Somalia) and ? (Occupied Palestinian Territory) as compared to the following hugely greater values for the racist, war-criminal, mass pedocidal US Alliance Occupier Countries: $3,123 (Australia), $3,173 (Canada), $3,040 (France), $3,171 (Germany), $2,560 (the UK) and $6.096 (the US).
Accordingly Bush, Dr Rice (aka Dr Death), Bush America and indeed ALL Bush-supporting Americans are responsible for the 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths EACH YEAR in the above Occupied countries. For detailed data and analysis see "US Occupation & Terror & Occupation. War crimes & huge infant deaths": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11968/42/ , from which one obtains the following summary data:
Year 2005 under-5 infant deaths” / “year 2005 population” is 370,000 / 29.9 million (Occupied Afghanistan); 122,000 / 28.8 million (Occupied Iraq); 82,000 / 8.2 million (Occupied Somalia); 31,000 / 8.5 million (Occupied Haiti); and 3,000 / 3.7 million (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 1,500 / 20.2 million (Occupi-er Australia) and 800 / 6.4 million (Occupi-er Israel).
Year 2005 annual under-5 infant death rate” (i.e. as a percentage: deaths for every 100 under-5 year old infants in 2005 in a particular country) was 6.7% (Occupied Afghanistan); 2.8% (Occupied Iraq); 5.5% (Occupied Somalia); 2.7% (Occupied Haiti); and 0.47% (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 0.12% (Occupi-er Australia) and 0.12% (Occupi-er Israel).
Total excess deaths for impoverished developing countries is about 1.4 times the total under-5 infant deaths (see "Layperson's Guide to Counting Iraq deaths": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ (for detailed analysis see my book "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950" (copies in major libraries): http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Accordingly annual excess deaths in the above Occupied Countries = 608,000 x 1.4 = 850,000.
THE ANSWERS to the questions posed above are that Bush America will be responsible for (a) 850,000 excess deaths in US- or US surrogate-occupied Territories in 2008 (of whom well over 50% will be kids) and (b) 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths in these Occupied Territories in 2008 or 550,000/365 = 1,500 avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths DAILY.
Terrorism whether state terrorism or non-state terrorism is evil and repugnant.
Muslim-origin non-state terrorists have murdered 7,000 Western civilians in the last 40 (FORTY) years (including Israelis and assuming no US or Israeli complicity in 9/11 - ignoring the fact that in November 2007 former President and intelligence-intimate Francesco Cossiga of Italy announced unequivocally that 9/11 was due to the US CIA and Israeli Mossad) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/ ).
However the 21st century Bush Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been associated (SO FAR) with post-invasion excess deaths of 1.5-2 million and 3-6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths of 0.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively; and refugees totalling 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19121/42/ and http://www.countercurrents.org/polya071007.htm ).
From these UN agency- and medical literature-derived figures Bush US is clearly the world's #1 terrorist state and the current world's #1 for mass murder and mass pedocide (mass murder of children).
What sort of human beings can be complicit in such mass murder? What sort of Americans are complicit in this mass murder? What sort of American WOMEN are complicit in this horrendous mass murder of BORN INFANTS? Well, George W. Bush's Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice (aka Wicked Witch of the West, Dr Death), Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Hilary Clinton for starters.
Of course ugly, racist Americans such as the Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) Bush-ites might argue that Muslim, Arab, Asian, South Asian, African, or non-European infants "don't count" (that, of course, having been continuous, sustained American policy since the time of the racist, genocidal, God-fearing first European settlers of America 500 years ago) but what about the 20,000 AMERICAN INFANTS who die avoidably EACH YEAR because of Bush policies (see "How Bush killed 100,000 American infants": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/7102/26/ ).
Bush America is undoubtedly well ahead of the rest as the world's #1 climate criminal state, and the #1 for terrorism, and mass pedocide. US state terrorism (USST), US climate criminality, and US nuclear terrorism are the #1 threats facing the world today.
Those who KNOWINGLY deny, ignore, excuse, minimize, obfuscate, support, advocate or are otherwise complicit in the mass murder of CHILDREN have crossed the line separating decent humanity from proto-Nazi barbarism, from the unthinkable but real, barbaric actuality of Bush America.
Small wonder therefore that outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist, author, activist, Holocaust hero and Holocaust survivor George Soros has demanded the "de-Nazification" of Bush America (see: "George Soros: Bush America needs de-Nazification": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12714/26/ ).
What can decent people do to counter this horrendous Bush American barbarism in 2008? Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent folk must (a) inform others and (b) act ethically by applying Sanctions and Boycotts in relation to all their avoidable dealings with individuals, corporations and countries complicit in this continuing mass pedocide, this continuing, remorseless Bush-ite mass murder of innocent children.
Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He has just published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ).
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
France best, U.S. worst in preventable deaths
updated 8:44 a.m. CT, Tues., Jan. 8, 2008
WASHINGTON - France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.
Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.
They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a country’s health care system.
Nolte said the large number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance — about 47 million people in a country of about 300 million, according to U.S. government estimates — probably was a key factor in the poor showing of the United States compared to other industrialized nations in the study.
“I wouldn’t say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don’t, I think that’s the main problem, isn’t it?” Nolte said in a telephone interview.
In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.
Such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women, the researchers said.
France did best — with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002 and 2003. Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per 100,000 people. The United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people, the researchers said.
After the top three, Spain was fourth best, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.
Previous rankings
The researchers compared these rankings with rankings for the same 19 countries covering the period of 1997 and 1998. France and Japan also were first and second in those rankings, while the United States was 15th, meaning it fell four places in the latest rankings.
All the countries made progress in reducing preventable deaths from these earlier rankings, the researchers said. These types of deaths dropped by an average of 16 percent for the nations in the study, but the U.S. decline was only 4 percent.
The research was backed by the Commonwealth Fund, a private New York-based health policy foundation.
“It is startling to see the U.S. falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance,” Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen said.
“The fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals and efforts to improve health systems make a difference,” Schoen added in a statement.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Iraqi soldier “Caesar” killed three American soldiers because they kicked and beat a pregnant woman
Reported on many Iraqi news sites, an Iraqi soldier killed two American soldiers and a captain for kicking a pregnant Iraqi woman
The incident happened two days ago when an Iraqi soldier “Caesar Saadi” joined the American occupation forces in a raid in Mosul, he opened fire after he saw the American soldiers started to beat and kick an Iraqi pregnant woman.
Lebanese newspaper Al-akhbar reported today the story added:
In the streets of Mosul, graffiti appeared on the walls yesterday saying:
Well done Caesar
Also, people in the city are distributing leaflets saying the same text.
Caesar is now in custody accused with killing three Americans.
Thinking for yourself is now a crime
By Paul Craig Roberts
01/04/08 "ICH " -- -- What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush’s “surge” in Iraq? The decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress.
The American people’s attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government, which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference.
The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly.
The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and apparently faces no meaningful opposition.
Harman’s bill is called the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.” [ http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1955 ] When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens.
We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract.
Who will be on the “extremist beliefs” list? The answer is: civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration’s wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration’s use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration’s spying on Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group--such as environmentalists opposing politically connected developers--is also a candidate for the list.
The “Extremist Beliefs Commission” is the mechanism for identifying Americans who pose “a threat to domestic security” and a threat of “homegrown terrorism” that “cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts.”
This bill is a boon for nasty people. That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door--just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence. Moreover, “our” elected representatives will never admit that they voted for a bill and created an “Extremist Belief Commission” for which there is neither need nor constitutional basis.
That boss who harasses you for coming late to work--he’s a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can’t fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce. Every kind of quarrel and jealousy can now be settled with a phone call to Homeland Security.
Soon Halliburton will be building more detention centers.
Americans are so far removed from the roots of their liberty that they just don’t get it. Most Americans don’t know what habeas corpus is or why it is important to them. But they know what they want, and Jane Harman has given them a new way to settle scores and to advance their own interests.
Even educated liberals believe that the US Constitution is a “living document” that can be changed to mean whatever it needs to mean in order to accommodate some new important cause, such as abortion and legal privileges for minorities and the handicapped. Today it is the “war on terror” that the Constitution must accommodate. Tomorrow it can be the war on whomever or whatever.
Think about it. More than six years ago the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. The US government blamed it on al Qaeda. Scant evidence has been presented. The 9/11 Commission Report has been subjected to devastating criticism by a large number of qualified people--including the commission’s chairman and co-chairman. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02kean.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Since 9/11 there have been no terrorist attacks in the US. The FBI has tried to orchestrate a few, but the “terrorist plots” never got beyond talk organized and led by FBI agents. There are no visible extremist groups other than the neoconservatives that control the government in Washington. But somehow the House of Representatives overwhelmingly sees a need to create a commission to take testimony and search out extremist views (outside of Washington, of course).
This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice (sic) Department declare that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these “patriotic” views are extremist.
The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates.
Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks to 2007’s greatest failure--the Democratic Congress--there is to be an “Extremist Beliefs Commission” to secure inmates for Bush’s detention centers.
President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause the “untamed fire of freedom” to “reach the darkest corners of our world.” Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is being extinguished.
The light of liberty has gone out in the United States.
Happy new year 2008 to yall
Let's hope this world will become peaceful once again.
And in arabic:
Sana saida watamaniyati an yashmala asilm kola l3alame.
Wa atamana lmawt lisahayina.
And in arabic:
Sana saida watamaniyati an yashmala asilm kola l3alame.
Wa atamana lmawt lisahayina.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Selfish capitalism is bad for our mental health
The growth in relative materialism over the past 20 years is taking a heavy toll on the wellbeing of English-speaking nations
Oliver James
Thursday January 3, 2008
The Guardian
By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s. As I report in my book, The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza, World Health Organisation and nationally representative studies in the United States, Britain and Australia, reveal that it almost doubled between the early 80s and the turn of the century. These increases are very unlikely to be due to greater preparedness to acknowledge distress - the psychobabbling therapy culture was already established.
Add to this the astonishing fact that citizens of Selfish Capitalist, English-speaking nations (which tend to be one and the same) are twice as likely to suffer mental illness as those from mainland western Europe, which is largely Unselfish Capitalist in its political economy. An average 23% of Americans, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians suffered in the last 12 months, but only 11.5% of Germans, Italians, French, Belgians, Spaniards and Dutch. The message could not be clearer. Selfish Capitalism, much more than genes, is extremely bad for your mental health. But why is it so toxic?
Readers of this newspaper will need little reminding that Selfish Capitalism has massively increased the wealth of the wealthy, robbing the average earner to give to the rich. There was no "trickle-down effect" after all.
The real wage of the average English-speaking person has remained the same - or, in the case of the US, decreased - since the 1970s. By more than halving the taxes of the richest and transferring the burden to the general population, Margaret Thatcher reinstated the rich's capital wealth after three postwar decades in which they had steadily become poorer.
Although I risk you glazing over at these statistics, it's worth remembering that the top 1% of British earners have doubled their share of the national income since 1982, from 6.5% to 13%, FTSE 100 chief executives now earning 133 times more than the average wage (against 20 times in 1980); and under Brown's chancellorship the richest 0.3% nobbled over half of all liquid assets (cash, instantly accessible income), increasing their share by 79% during the last five years.
In itself, this economic inequality does not cause mental illness. WHO studies show that some very inequitable developing nations, like Nigeria and China, also have the lowest prevalence of mental illness. Furthermore, inequity may be much greater in the English-speaking world today, but it is far less than it was at the end of the 19th century. While we have no way of knowing for sure, it is very possible that mental illness was nowhere near as widespread in, for instance, the US or Britain of that time.
What does the damage is the combination of inequality with the widespread relative materialism of Affluenza - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances and fame when you already have enough income to meet your fundamental psychological needs. Survival materialism is healthy. If you need money for medicine or to buy a house, becoming very concerned about getting them does not make you mentally ill.
But Selfish Capitalism stokes up relative materialism: unrealistic aspirations and the expectation that they can be fulfilled. It does so to stimulate consumerism in order to increase profits and promote short-term economic growth. Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people make greedy consumers and can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.
With overstimulated aspirations and expectations, the entrepreneurial fantasy society fosters the delusion that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s. A Briton turning 20 in 1978 was more likely than one doing so in 1990 to achieve upward mobility through education. Nonetheless, in the Big Brother/ It Could Be You society, great swaths of the population believe they can become rich and famous, and that it is highly desirable. This is most damaging of all - the ideology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough. If you don't succeed, there is only one person to blame - never mind that it couldn't be clearer that it's the system's fault, not yours.
Depressed or anxious, you work ever harder. Or maybe you collapse and join the sickness benefit queue, leaving it to people shipped in to do the low-paid jobs that society has taught you are too demeaning - let alone the unpaid ones, like looking after children or elderly parents, which are beneath contempt in the Nouveau Labour liturgy.
There is much tearing of hair across the media and advocacy of nose-pegging on these pages of the "grin and bear it" variety. In fact, there is an alternative. We desperately need - and before long, I predict we will get - a passionate, charismatic, probably female leader who advocates the Unselfish Capitalism of our neighbours. The pitch is simple. Not only would reduced consumerism and greater equality make us more ecologically sustainable, it would halve the prevalence of mental illness within a generation.
· Oliver James is discussing Selfish Capitalism with Will Self, Madeleine Bunting and Stewart Wallis in three London seminars this month
www.selfishcapitalist.com
Oliver James
Thursday January 3, 2008
The Guardian
By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s. As I report in my book, The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza, World Health Organisation and nationally representative studies in the United States, Britain and Australia, reveal that it almost doubled between the early 80s and the turn of the century. These increases are very unlikely to be due to greater preparedness to acknowledge distress - the psychobabbling therapy culture was already established.
Add to this the astonishing fact that citizens of Selfish Capitalist, English-speaking nations (which tend to be one and the same) are twice as likely to suffer mental illness as those from mainland western Europe, which is largely Unselfish Capitalist in its political economy. An average 23% of Americans, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians suffered in the last 12 months, but only 11.5% of Germans, Italians, French, Belgians, Spaniards and Dutch. The message could not be clearer. Selfish Capitalism, much more than genes, is extremely bad for your mental health. But why is it so toxic?
Readers of this newspaper will need little reminding that Selfish Capitalism has massively increased the wealth of the wealthy, robbing the average earner to give to the rich. There was no "trickle-down effect" after all.
The real wage of the average English-speaking person has remained the same - or, in the case of the US, decreased - since the 1970s. By more than halving the taxes of the richest and transferring the burden to the general population, Margaret Thatcher reinstated the rich's capital wealth after three postwar decades in which they had steadily become poorer.
Although I risk you glazing over at these statistics, it's worth remembering that the top 1% of British earners have doubled their share of the national income since 1982, from 6.5% to 13%, FTSE 100 chief executives now earning 133 times more than the average wage (against 20 times in 1980); and under Brown's chancellorship the richest 0.3% nobbled over half of all liquid assets (cash, instantly accessible income), increasing their share by 79% during the last five years.
In itself, this economic inequality does not cause mental illness. WHO studies show that some very inequitable developing nations, like Nigeria and China, also have the lowest prevalence of mental illness. Furthermore, inequity may be much greater in the English-speaking world today, but it is far less than it was at the end of the 19th century. While we have no way of knowing for sure, it is very possible that mental illness was nowhere near as widespread in, for instance, the US or Britain of that time.
What does the damage is the combination of inequality with the widespread relative materialism of Affluenza - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances and fame when you already have enough income to meet your fundamental psychological needs. Survival materialism is healthy. If you need money for medicine or to buy a house, becoming very concerned about getting them does not make you mentally ill.
But Selfish Capitalism stokes up relative materialism: unrealistic aspirations and the expectation that they can be fulfilled. It does so to stimulate consumerism in order to increase profits and promote short-term economic growth. Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people make greedy consumers and can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.
With overstimulated aspirations and expectations, the entrepreneurial fantasy society fosters the delusion that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s. A Briton turning 20 in 1978 was more likely than one doing so in 1990 to achieve upward mobility through education. Nonetheless, in the Big Brother/ It Could Be You society, great swaths of the population believe they can become rich and famous, and that it is highly desirable. This is most damaging of all - the ideology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough. If you don't succeed, there is only one person to blame - never mind that it couldn't be clearer that it's the system's fault, not yours.
Depressed or anxious, you work ever harder. Or maybe you collapse and join the sickness benefit queue, leaving it to people shipped in to do the low-paid jobs that society has taught you are too demeaning - let alone the unpaid ones, like looking after children or elderly parents, which are beneath contempt in the Nouveau Labour liturgy.
There is much tearing of hair across the media and advocacy of nose-pegging on these pages of the "grin and bear it" variety. In fact, there is an alternative. We desperately need - and before long, I predict we will get - a passionate, charismatic, probably female leader who advocates the Unselfish Capitalism of our neighbours. The pitch is simple. Not only would reduced consumerism and greater equality make us more ecologically sustainable, it would halve the prevalence of mental illness within a generation.
· Oliver James is discussing Selfish Capitalism with Will Self, Madeleine Bunting and Stewart Wallis in three London seminars this month
www.selfishcapitalist.com
How to Erode and Destroy Democracy: a Dozen Tested Strategies
By Rob Kall
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 02 January 2008
Tips to fascists, dictators, corporatists, militarists, imperialists, neocons, right-wingers, theocrats, theofascists and terrorists.
1. Kill the strongest opposition candidate and then pretend that elections should go on as normal, without allowing the opposition party to reorganize. Examples:
Benazir Bhutto: strategy - hamstring security abilities to the extent that the candidate actually writes a letter accusing the government leadership of intentional sabotage of security.
Paul Wellstone: rush through a replacement candidate and politicize the funeral. Get the mainstream media "partners" to portray the funeral as despicably political to eliminate sympathy for the new candidate. (Expect something like this with the candidate who replaces Bhutto.
2. Steal elections using e-voting with nonpublic software code, no paper ballot records, purges from lists of eligible voters, phone-bank jamming and fraudulent registration drives, where you throw away the registrations of opposition party registrants. Multiple examples in US - Florida and Ohio, particularly. Essential: this only works with weak, cowardly candidates who fail to aggressively work to prevent these actions and then fail to challenge questionable outcomes. This has been relatively easy, since even when candidates do get tough in response to rigged elections, there are plenty of weak, compromised legislators who will enable the election theft. Clint Curtis's campaign is a good example. The Dems in Congress allowed the theft.
3. Erode constitutional rights. Violate laws and treaties. Make excuses that there are imminent threats to national security, or that the treaties will hurt the nation's economy. Take the most horrific of these and get the media to boost hysteria and fear, then get the most fascist members of the legislature to push through laws retroactively making violations of the law legal. The majority of sold-out legislators will work with your lobbyists, avoid your media mockery and pass the legislation or approve appointees who allow or refuse to not condemn the assaults upon the Constitution and international law. Example - Mukasey approval, FISA approval, continuation of Iraq war (started on lies).
4. Gradually destroy the economy. Engage in "Shock Doctrine" disaster capitalism, so the nation's citizens are more worried about survival than maintaining democracy. Naomi Klein has documented how fascist neocon Milton Friedman economists have used this tried and true approach to destruction of democracy in dozen of nations - usually with the help of the USA's CIA. See Naomi Klein's book, "Shock Doctrine," for detailed examples.
5. Corporatize the nation. Maximize laws that give corporations human rights as persons. Allow corporations to pollute the election process, so their money is the primary factor in deterring the ability of candidates to reach voters, as is the law and policy in the US. Have legislators you own create bogus, chimera laws that look like and call themselves election reform, that are really so full of loopholes that they actually improve the power of corporations while taking away the power of citizens. See US policy for excellent examples.
6. Deregulate the media so a handful of corporate owners control most of the message. Then filter the news so viewers/readers/listeners are turned off to paying attention. Do this by using the same footage over and over again, and numb the viewers' minds with focus on coverage of morally impaired and stupid celebrities, tabloid news such as weird surgeries, kidnappings, horrific mass murders, strange diseases, detachment of Siamese twins.... And when you do cover real news, mock the most serious defenders of democracy. Attempt to embarrass them, to get viewers and readers to think of them as fools and kooks. Especially, use this mockery approach to sabotage and attack any candidates not "with the program" who are surging in polls.
7. Infiltrate alternative media. Hijack comment threads with negative, cynical remarks, or distract commenters from staying on focus. Provoke incivility among regular readers of pro-democracy media.
8. Widen class differences. Keep as many people as possible hungry, without health care, worried about where they will get the money to pay for housing, clothing, education, food and medicine.
9. Take advantage of natural disasters to weaken democratic factors. Allow floods, hurricanes and fires to "cleanse" unwanted voters in selected regions. Replace them with high-end real estate and corporate assets. Use the disasters as opportunities to spend taxpayer money to reward political allies.
10. Pretend that everything you do is the patriotic support of Democracy, even if it is directly opposed to democracy. Attack the pro-democracy party and organizations as being communist, socialist, fringe, kook, even dangerous to democracy. Depend upon anti-democracy mainstream media allies to help pound this message so the fools produced by the dumbed-down, "most children left behind" educational system buy these messages. Use talk radio to nail this down. See US education laws and policies for examples. This is already working quite effectively in the US as low international scores indicate.
11. Allow candidates to run repeatedly, without term limits. Eventually, candidates who do not toe the anti-democracy line in all parties will burn out or run out of funding. That will leave, even in the supposed liberal parties, reliable legislators who will keep the anti-democracy program going. Eventually, they will get themselves into key leadership positions, either at the top of the party or just below the top. Consider Chuck Schumer, Stenny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel as excellent examples.
12. Build fear into the culture. Say you are fighting terrorism, but engage in international policies that foment and encourage terrorism, helping terrorists to massively expand recruitment and even training of operatives. See Iraq for Islamic terrorists. See the US for anti-abortion Christian terrorists.
My regular readers will know that I write this as a way to speak truth to current events, not as actual advocacy or support for these "strategies." I fear that some will read this as a genuine "how to." Some will be pleased with the advanced progress the world has seen along these strategies. If you are one of these - probably an adviser to power - please consider that your children and grandchildren will inherit the legacy you create for them. If wealth or power are your goals, what good will they do in a world darkened by tyranny or corporate domination?
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, president of Futurehealth Inc., inventor and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent speaker on politics; impeachment; the art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey; positive psychology; Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects.
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 02 January 2008
Tips to fascists, dictators, corporatists, militarists, imperialists, neocons, right-wingers, theocrats, theofascists and terrorists.
1. Kill the strongest opposition candidate and then pretend that elections should go on as normal, without allowing the opposition party to reorganize. Examples:
Benazir Bhutto: strategy - hamstring security abilities to the extent that the candidate actually writes a letter accusing the government leadership of intentional sabotage of security.
Paul Wellstone: rush through a replacement candidate and politicize the funeral. Get the mainstream media "partners" to portray the funeral as despicably political to eliminate sympathy for the new candidate. (Expect something like this with the candidate who replaces Bhutto.
2. Steal elections using e-voting with nonpublic software code, no paper ballot records, purges from lists of eligible voters, phone-bank jamming and fraudulent registration drives, where you throw away the registrations of opposition party registrants. Multiple examples in US - Florida and Ohio, particularly. Essential: this only works with weak, cowardly candidates who fail to aggressively work to prevent these actions and then fail to challenge questionable outcomes. This has been relatively easy, since even when candidates do get tough in response to rigged elections, there are plenty of weak, compromised legislators who will enable the election theft. Clint Curtis's campaign is a good example. The Dems in Congress allowed the theft.
3. Erode constitutional rights. Violate laws and treaties. Make excuses that there are imminent threats to national security, or that the treaties will hurt the nation's economy. Take the most horrific of these and get the media to boost hysteria and fear, then get the most fascist members of the legislature to push through laws retroactively making violations of the law legal. The majority of sold-out legislators will work with your lobbyists, avoid your media mockery and pass the legislation or approve appointees who allow or refuse to not condemn the assaults upon the Constitution and international law. Example - Mukasey approval, FISA approval, continuation of Iraq war (started on lies).
4. Gradually destroy the economy. Engage in "Shock Doctrine" disaster capitalism, so the nation's citizens are more worried about survival than maintaining democracy. Naomi Klein has documented how fascist neocon Milton Friedman economists have used this tried and true approach to destruction of democracy in dozen of nations - usually with the help of the USA's CIA. See Naomi Klein's book, "Shock Doctrine," for detailed examples.
5. Corporatize the nation. Maximize laws that give corporations human rights as persons. Allow corporations to pollute the election process, so their money is the primary factor in deterring the ability of candidates to reach voters, as is the law and policy in the US. Have legislators you own create bogus, chimera laws that look like and call themselves election reform, that are really so full of loopholes that they actually improve the power of corporations while taking away the power of citizens. See US policy for excellent examples.
6. Deregulate the media so a handful of corporate owners control most of the message. Then filter the news so viewers/readers/listeners are turned off to paying attention. Do this by using the same footage over and over again, and numb the viewers' minds with focus on coverage of morally impaired and stupid celebrities, tabloid news such as weird surgeries, kidnappings, horrific mass murders, strange diseases, detachment of Siamese twins.... And when you do cover real news, mock the most serious defenders of democracy. Attempt to embarrass them, to get viewers and readers to think of them as fools and kooks. Especially, use this mockery approach to sabotage and attack any candidates not "with the program" who are surging in polls.
7. Infiltrate alternative media. Hijack comment threads with negative, cynical remarks, or distract commenters from staying on focus. Provoke incivility among regular readers of pro-democracy media.
8. Widen class differences. Keep as many people as possible hungry, without health care, worried about where they will get the money to pay for housing, clothing, education, food and medicine.
9. Take advantage of natural disasters to weaken democratic factors. Allow floods, hurricanes and fires to "cleanse" unwanted voters in selected regions. Replace them with high-end real estate and corporate assets. Use the disasters as opportunities to spend taxpayer money to reward political allies.
10. Pretend that everything you do is the patriotic support of Democracy, even if it is directly opposed to democracy. Attack the pro-democracy party and organizations as being communist, socialist, fringe, kook, even dangerous to democracy. Depend upon anti-democracy mainstream media allies to help pound this message so the fools produced by the dumbed-down, "most children left behind" educational system buy these messages. Use talk radio to nail this down. See US education laws and policies for examples. This is already working quite effectively in the US as low international scores indicate.
11. Allow candidates to run repeatedly, without term limits. Eventually, candidates who do not toe the anti-democracy line in all parties will burn out or run out of funding. That will leave, even in the supposed liberal parties, reliable legislators who will keep the anti-democracy program going. Eventually, they will get themselves into key leadership positions, either at the top of the party or just below the top. Consider Chuck Schumer, Stenny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel as excellent examples.
12. Build fear into the culture. Say you are fighting terrorism, but engage in international policies that foment and encourage terrorism, helping terrorists to massively expand recruitment and even training of operatives. See Iraq for Islamic terrorists. See the US for anti-abortion Christian terrorists.
My regular readers will know that I write this as a way to speak truth to current events, not as actual advocacy or support for these "strategies." I fear that some will read this as a genuine "how to." Some will be pleased with the advanced progress the world has seen along these strategies. If you are one of these - probably an adviser to power - please consider that your children and grandchildren will inherit the legacy you create for them. If wealth or power are your goals, what good will they do in a world darkened by tyranny or corporate domination?
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, president of Futurehealth Inc., inventor and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent speaker on politics; impeachment; the art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey; positive psychology; Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects.
From hyperpower to new world disorder
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America isn’t alone on top. What’s replacing the unipolar world of the 1990s? A gang of five superpowers: China, Russia, India, the Eurozone and the U.S.
By David Olive
Feature Writer
01/01/08 "Toronto Star " -- -- "We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of our way."
Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations present.
It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world's lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.
The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the greenback.
That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S. economic "stagflation" that inflated the German and Swiss currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo parking spots fetched $90,000.
This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur. Russia wouldn't abide Washington's sanctions on Iran. India insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree, decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16 years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had slipped, and America's destiny is now shaped by a new world disorder of five superpowers.
All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively, the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived, cannot match.
The resentment of what the French labelled "the U.S. hyper-power" in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic command economies. And by the early years of this decade, Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a decisive Vladimir Putin.
The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here's Tony Blair, who revered Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S. more than most of his predecessors. "A single-power world is inherently unstable," Blair said back in 2005. "That's the rationale for Europe to unite.
"We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a superpower and a partner with the U.S."
The euro has been the world's strongest currency since 2005. But not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People's Bank of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar – the world's undisputed reserve currency since the end of World War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48 (U.S.)
It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan, China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America's deficient military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big stick behind diplomatic threats.
America now is the world's largest borrower, and China the biggest creditor nation.
As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it's difficult to have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when that country is also your biggest banker.
World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman's cast of feckless leaders in The March of Folly.
But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as America's staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for five years.
As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to control. After his first encounter with the Russian president, Bush famously said he had looked into Putin's heart and found a man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this year, Bush's soulmate excoriated the U.S. for "an almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts."
America's foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan, where Washington's full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and imprisoning his country's supreme court justices. In one go, with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al Qaeda operatives.
"No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse international situation than George W. Bush," says Richard Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009 who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be negotiated over the next two years.
America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at the time of creating a "New World Order" of universal peace and mutual prosperity.
Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping up its military allies, America could have secured its new found global supremacy by simply setting a good example.
Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral, botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S. hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers' next target.
In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the "E generation," as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous unilateralism of George W. Bush.
Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change; genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively ceded its claim to the "benign hegemony" that still shapes America's regard of its impact on the world.
And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton's view. In the 1990s, then-president Clinton declared that "America is the indispensable nation." In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in retirement from the White House, said, "The American people now know something they've never known before. In their bones they know that there's almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation, climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a co-operative way."
Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America's lone-superpower status, has warned that "Seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent – so what is their grand strategy for averting it?
"They must have one," the London-based global military analyst wrote. "Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire economies."
Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to be done. China is the world's second-largest CO2 emitter, trailing only the U.S. India has the world's largest population of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000 troops. Russia's regard for investors, whose property it expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country's entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.
The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem to realize. They all talk of restoring America's respect in the world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America as "the shining city on the hill" that Ronald Reagan invoked.
With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels between today's America and the decline of the Roman Empire. Among the similarities Walker cited were "declining values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."
Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower would still be jeopardized by its "unsustainable" disregard for tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets in. "It's time to learn from history," Walker said, "and take steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand the test of time."
By David Olive
Feature Writer
01/01/08 "Toronto Star " -- -- "We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of our way."
Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations present.
It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world's lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.
The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the greenback.
That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S. economic "stagflation" that inflated the German and Swiss currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo parking spots fetched $90,000.
This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur. Russia wouldn't abide Washington's sanctions on Iran. India insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree, decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16 years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had slipped, and America's destiny is now shaped by a new world disorder of five superpowers.
All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively, the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived, cannot match.
The resentment of what the French labelled "the U.S. hyper-power" in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic command economies. And by the early years of this decade, Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a decisive Vladimir Putin.
The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here's Tony Blair, who revered Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S. more than most of his predecessors. "A single-power world is inherently unstable," Blair said back in 2005. "That's the rationale for Europe to unite.
"We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a superpower and a partner with the U.S."
The euro has been the world's strongest currency since 2005. But not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People's Bank of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar – the world's undisputed reserve currency since the end of World War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48 (U.S.)
It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan, China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America's deficient military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big stick behind diplomatic threats.
America now is the world's largest borrower, and China the biggest creditor nation.
As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it's difficult to have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when that country is also your biggest banker.
World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman's cast of feckless leaders in The March of Folly.
But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as America's staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for five years.
As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to control. After his first encounter with the Russian president, Bush famously said he had looked into Putin's heart and found a man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this year, Bush's soulmate excoriated the U.S. for "an almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts."
America's foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan, where Washington's full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and imprisoning his country's supreme court justices. In one go, with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al Qaeda operatives.
"No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse international situation than George W. Bush," says Richard Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009 who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be negotiated over the next two years.
America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at the time of creating a "New World Order" of universal peace and mutual prosperity.
Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping up its military allies, America could have secured its new found global supremacy by simply setting a good example.
Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral, botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S. hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers' next target.
In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the "E generation," as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous unilateralism of George W. Bush.
Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change; genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively ceded its claim to the "benign hegemony" that still shapes America's regard of its impact on the world.
And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton's view. In the 1990s, then-president Clinton declared that "America is the indispensable nation." In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in retirement from the White House, said, "The American people now know something they've never known before. In their bones they know that there's almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation, climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a co-operative way."
Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America's lone-superpower status, has warned that "Seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent – so what is their grand strategy for averting it?
"They must have one," the London-based global military analyst wrote. "Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire economies."
Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to be done. China is the world's second-largest CO2 emitter, trailing only the U.S. India has the world's largest population of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000 troops. Russia's regard for investors, whose property it expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country's entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.
The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem to realize. They all talk of restoring America's respect in the world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America as "the shining city on the hill" that Ronald Reagan invoked.
With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels between today's America and the decline of the Roman Empire. Among the similarities Walker cited were "declining values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."
Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower would still be jeopardized by its "unsustainable" disregard for tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets in. "It's time to learn from history," Walker said, "and take steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand the test of time."
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