The new 'I don't want to know' philosophy! Gerald Celente interviewed by Jeff Rense. Gets really good around 8:20. Runs 42 minutes altogether.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by anothershamus » Sun May 15, 2011 2:42 pm
by JackRiddler » Sun May 15, 2011 5:25 pm
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy04262011.html
April 26, 2011
An Empire of Failed States
Washington on the Rocks
By ALFRED W. McCOY and BRETT REILLY
In one of history's lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region's autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.
Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal "subordinate elites" and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.
Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer -- and thanks to WikiLeaks and the "Arab spring," this is now so much clearer -- is that both were Washington's chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.
Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo's torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates who had long served Washington's interests well in this key Arab state.
Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control -- and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and set their own agendas was also the moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.
If the "velvet revolutions" that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet empire, then the "jasmine revolutions" now spreading across the Middle East may well mark the beginning of the end for American global power.
Putting the Military in Charge
To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold War's early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe.
Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to 100 new nations, many -- as Washington saw it -- susceptible to "communist subversion." In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition to the region's growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.
After a review of the "threats" facing the U.S. in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that they should "stop talking so much about democracy" and instead "support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American." At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying, "They're OK if they're our s.o.b.'s."
It was a moment to remember, for the President of the United States had just articulated with crystalline clarity the system of global dominion that Washington would implement for the next 50 years -- setting aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik policy of backing any reliable leader willing to support the U.S., thereby building a worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would, in a pinch, put Washington's needs above local ones.
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor military autocrats in Latin America, aristocrats across the Middle East, and a mixture of democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, military coups in Thailand and Iraq suddenly put the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces to be reckoned with. It was then that the Eisenhower administration decided to bring foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further "training" to facilitate "the 'management' of the forces of change released by the development" of these emerging nations. Henceforth, Washington would pour military aid into the cultivation of the armed forces of allies and potential allies worldwide, while "training missions" would be used to create crucial ties between the U.S. military and the officer corps in country after country -- or where subordinate elites did not seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative leaders.
When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the Central Intelligence Agency went to work, promoting coups that would install reliable military successors --replacing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who tried to nationalize his country's oil, with General Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 1953; President Sukarno with General Suharto in Indonesia during the next decade; and of course President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, to name just three such moments.
In the first years of the twenty-first century, Washington's trust in the militaries of its client states would only grow. The U.S. was, for example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt's military annually, but investing only $250 million a year in the country's economic development. As a result, when demonstrations rocked the regime in Cairo last January, as the New York Times reported, "a 30-year investment paid off as American generals... and intelligence officers quietly called... friends they had trained with," successfully urging the army's support for a "peaceful transition" to, yes indeed, military rule.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, U.S. weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including access to educational institutions in the U.S. or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.
In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up this record thusly: "For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither."
How It Used to Work
America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?
From 1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal colonies through an extraordinary array of local allies -- from Fiji island chiefs and Malay sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, through subordinate elites Britain reigned over an even larger "informal empire" that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its peak in 1880, Britain's informal empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and China was larger, in population, than its formal colonial holdings in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, encompassing nearly half of humanity, rested on these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local elites.
Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however, Europe's five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of today's sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that "when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators," their power began to fade.
During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid decolonization, the world's two superpowers turned to the same methods regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states. The Soviet Union's KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third World. Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.
In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter indeed. Many of them were driven by conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be monitored closely. So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.
Given the rise of its system of global control in a post-World War II age of independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply with surrogates or puppets, but with allies who -- admittedly from weaker positions -- still sought to maximize what they saw as their nations' interests (as well as their own). Even at the height of American global power in the 1950s, when its dominance was relatively unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard bargaining with the likes of the Philippines' Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee, and South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem.
In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, General Park Chung Hee, then president, bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of U.S. development dollars, which helped spark the country's economic "miracle." In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it most wanted: 50,000 of those tough Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.
Post-Cold War World
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the "victor" and soon to be the "sole superpower" on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.
Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial. With its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.
As U.S. power and influence declined, Washington's attempts to control its subordinate elites began to fail, often spectacularly -- including its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia from Russia's orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections. Where a CIA coup or covert cash once sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush administration needed a massive invasion to topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam Hussein. Even then, it found its plans for subsequent regime change in Syria and Iran blocked when these states instead aided a devastating insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.
Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of dollars in foreign aid, Washington has found it nearly impossible to control the Afghan president it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who memorably summed up his fractious relationship with Washington to American envoys this way: "If you're looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If you're looking for a partner, yes."
Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing those thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that offer uncensored insights into Washington's weakening control over the system of surrogate power that it had built up for 50 years. In reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of Haaretz could see "the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic supremacy." No longer, he added, are "American ambassadors… received in world capitals as 'high commissioners'... [instead they are] tired bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts' talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state."
Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a State Department struggling to manage an unruly global system of increasingly insubordinate elites by any means possible -- via intrigue to collect needed information and intelligence, friendly acts meant to coax compliance, threats to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, for instance, the State Department instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including "email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans." Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also pressed its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an Islamic society, about the kingdom's crown princes, asking: "Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?"
With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for dominance by dismissing "the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans," or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's "voluptuous blonde" nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud's $52 million in stolen funds.
As its influence declines, however, Washington is finding many of its chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, particularly in the strategic Middle East. In mid-2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia reported that "President Ben Ali… and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people," relying "on the police for control," while "corruption in the inner circle is growing" and "the risks to the regime's long-term stability are increasing." Even so, the U.S. envoy could only recommend that Washington "dial back the public criticism" and instead rely only on "frequent high-level private candor" -- a policy that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the regime just 18 months later.
Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in Cairo feared that "Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts... are being suffocated." However, as the embassy admitted, "we would not like to contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened." When Mubarak visited Washington a few months later, the Embassy urged the White House "to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership." And so in June 2009, just 18 months before the Egyptian president's downfall, President Obama hailed this useful dictator as "a stalwart ally... a force for stability and good in the region."
As the crisis in Cairo's Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that Washington was pushing "the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression." After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he said, "a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science" because "people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education."
Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to something not so far short of defeat, the nation's capital is now writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.
For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the award-winning book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. He has also convened the "Empires in Transition" project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, and the findings from their latest conference, at Barcelona last June, will appear next year as Endless Empires: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, and America's Decline.
Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.
This article was originally published by TomDispatch.
Copyright 2011 Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly.
by JackRiddler » Sun May 15, 2011 5:26 pm
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3522
The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
Peter Dale Scott
The present NATO campaign against Gaddafi in Libya has given rise to great confusion, both among those waging this ineffective campaign, and among those observing it. Many whose opinions I normally respect see this as a necessary war against a villain – though some choose to see Gaddafi as the villain, and others point to Obama.
My own take on this war, on the other hand, is that it is both ill-conceived and dangerous -- a threat to the interests of Libyans, Americans, the Middle East and conceivably the entire world. Beneath the professed concern about the safety of Libyan civilians lies a deeper concern that is barely acknowledged: the West’s defense of the present global petrodollar economy, now in decline..
The confusion in Washington, matched by the absence of discussion of an overriding strategic motive for American involvement, is symptomatic of the fact that the American century is ending, and ending in a way that is both predictable in the long run, and simultaneously erratic and out of control in its details.
Confusion in Washington and in NATO
With respect to Libya’s upheaval itself, opinions in Washington range from that of John McCain, who has allegedly called on NATO to provide “every apparent means of assistance, minus ground troops,” in overthrowing Gaddafi,1 to Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who has expressed deep concern about even passing out arms to a group of fighters we do not know well.2
We have seen the same confusion throughout the Middle East. In Egypt a coalition of non-governmental elements helped prepare for the nonviolent revolution in that country, while former US Ambassador Frank Wisner, Jr., flew to Egypt to persuade Mubarak to cling to power. Meanwhile in countries that used to be of major interest to the US, like Jordan and Yemen, it is hard to discern any coherent American policy at all.
In NATO too there is confusion that occasionally threatens to break into open discord. Of the 28 NATO members, only 14 are involved at all in the Libyan campaign, and only six are involved in the air war. Of these only three countries –the U.S., Britain, and France, are offering tactical air support to the rebels on the ground. When many NATO countries froze the bank accounts of Gaddafi and his immediate supporters, the US, in an unpublicized and dubious move, froze the entire $30 billion of Libyan government funds to which it has access. (Of this, more later.) Germany, the most powerful NATO nation after America, abstained on the UN Security Council resolution; and its foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, has since said, “We will not see a military solution, but a political solution.”3
Such chaos would have been unthinkable in the high period of US dominance. Obama appears paralyzed by the gap between his declared objective – the removal of Gaddafi from power – and the means available to him, given the nation’s costly involvement in two wars, and his domestic priorities.
To understand America’s and NATO’s confusion over Libya, one must look at other phenomena:
• Standard & Poor’s warning of an imminent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating
• the unprecedented rise in the price of gold to over $1500 an ounce
• the gridlock in American politics over federal and state deficits and what to do about them
In the midst of the Libyan challenge to what remains of American hegemony, and in part as a direct consequence of America’s confused strategy in Libya, the price of oil has hit $112 a barrel. This price increase threatens to slow or even reverse America’s faltering economic recovery, and demonstrates one of the many ways in which the Libyan war is not serving American national interests.
Confusion about Libya has been evident in Washington from the outset, particularly since Secretary of State Clinton advocated a no-fly policy, President Obama said he wanted it as an option, and Secretary of Defense Gates warned against it.4 The result has been a series of interim measures, during which Obama has justified a limited U.S. response by pointing to America’s demanding commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet with a stalemate prevailing in Libya itself, a series of further gradual escalations are being contemplated, from the provision of arms, funds, and advisers to the rebels, to the introduction of mercenaries or even foreign troops. The American scenario begins to look more and more like Vietnam, where the war also began modestly with the introduction of covert operators followed by military advisers.
I have to confess that on March 17 I myself was of two minds about UN Security Council 1973, which ostensibly established a no-fly zone in Libya for the protection of civilians. But since then it has become apparent that the threat to rebels from Gaddafi’s troops and rhetoric was in fact far less than was perceived at the time. To quote Prof. Alan J. Kuperman,. . . President Barack Obama grossly exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify military action in Libya. The president claimed that intervention was necessary to prevent a “bloodbath’’ in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and last rebel stronghold. But Human Rights Watch has released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of protracted fighting, revealing that Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government. Misurata’s population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people — including combatants — have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 — less than 3 percent — are women…. Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The “no mercy’’ warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.’’ Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight “to the bitter end.’’5
The record of ongoing US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that we should expect a heavy human toll if the current stalemate in Libya either continues or escalates further.
The Role in this War of Oil and Financial Interests
In American War Machine, I wrote howBy a seemingly inevitable dialectic,… prosperity in some major states fostered expansion, and expansion in dominant states created increasing income disparity.6 In this process the dominant state itself was changed, as its public services were progressively impoverished, in order to strengthen security arrangements benefiting a few while oppressing many.7
Thus, for many years the foreign affairs of England in Asia came to be conducted in large part by the East India Company…. Similarly, the American company Aramco, representing a consortium of the oil majors Esso, Mobil, Socal, and Texaco, conducted its own foreign policy in Arabia, with private connections to the CIA and FBI.8…
In this way Britain and America inherited policies that, when adopted by the metropolitan states, became inimical to public order and safety.9
In the final stages of hegemonic power, one sees more and more naked intervention for narrow interests, abandoning earlier efforts towards creating stable international institutions. Consider the role of the conspiratorial Jameson Raid into the South African Boer Republic in late 1895, a raid, devised to further the economic interests of Cecil Rhodes, which helped to induce Britain’s Second Boer War.10 Or consider the Anglo-French conspiracy with Israel in 1956, in an absurd vain attempt to retain control of the Suez Canal.
Then consider the lobbying efforts of the oil majors as factors in the U.S. war in Vietnam (1961), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003).11 Although the role of oil companies in America’s Libyan involvement remains obscure, it is a virtual certainty that Cheney’s Energy Task Force Meetings discussed not just Iraq’s but Libya’s under-explored oil reserves, estimated to be around 41 billion barrels, or about a third of Iraq’s.12
Afterwards some in Washington expected a swift victory in Iraq would be followed by similar US attacks on Libya and Iran. General Wesley Clark told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now four years ago that soon after 9/11 a general in the Pentagon informed him that several countries would be attacked by the U.S. military. The list included Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.13 In May of 2003 John Gibson, chief executive of Halliburton's Energy Service Group, told International Oil Daily in an interview, “"We hope Iraq will be the first domino and that Libya and Iran will follow. We don't like being kept out of markets because it gives our competitors an unfair advantage,"14
It is also a matter of public record that the UN no-fly resolution 1973 of March 17 followed shortly on Gaddafi’s public threat of March 2 to throw western oil companies out of Libya, and his invitation on March 14 to Chinese, Russian, and Indian firms to produce Libyan oil in their place.15 Significantly China, Russia, and India (joined by their BRICS ally Brazil), all abstained on UN Resolution 1973.
The issue of oil is closely intertwined with that of the dollar, because the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency depends largely on OPEC’s decision to denominate the dollar as the currency for OPEC oil purchases. Today’s petrodollar economy dates back to two secret agreements with the Saudis in the 1970s for the recycling of petrodollars back into the US economy. The first of these deals assured a special and on-going Saudi stake in the health of the US dollar; the second secured continuing Saudi support for the pricing of all OPEC oil in dollars. These two deals assured that the US economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil price hikes. Since then the heaviest burden has been borne instead by the economies of less developed countries, who need to purchase dollars for their oil supplies.16
As Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted that "[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.."
According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Lybia - Punishment for Qaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar," Qaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. … The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Qaddafi continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.
And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned.... Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.17
Libya not only has oil. According to the IMF, its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS [Bank of International Settlements], the IMF and their rules.18
Gaddafi’s recent proposal to introduce a gold dinar for Africa revives the notion of an Islamic gold dinar floated in 2003 by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, as well as by some Islamist movements.19 The notion, which contravenes IMF rules and is designed to bypass them, has had trouble getting started. But today the countries stocking more and more gold rather than dollars include not just Libya and Iran, but also China, Russia, and India.20
The Stake of France in Terminating Gaddafi’s African Initiatives
The initiative for the air attacks appears to have come initially from France, with early support from Britain. If Qaddafi were to succeed in creating an African Union backed by Libya’s currency and gold reserves, France, still the predominant economic power in most of its former Central African colonies, would be the chief loser. Indeed, a report from Dennis Kucinich in America has corroborated the claim of Franco Bechis in Italy, transmitted by VoltaireNet in France, that “plans to spark the Benghazi rebellion were initiated by French intelligence services in November 2010.”21
If the idea to attack Libya originated with France, Obama moved swiftly to support French plans to frustrate Gaddafi’s African initiative with his unilateral declaration of a national emergency in order to freeze all of the Bank of Libya’s $30 billion of funds to which America had access. (This was misleadingly reported in the U.S. press as a freeze of the funds of “Colonel Qaddafi, his children and family, and senior members of the Libyan government.”22 But in fact the second section of Obama’s decree explicitly targeted “All property and interests… of the Government of Libya, its agencies, instrumentalities, and controlled entities, and the Central Bank of Libya.”23) While the U.S. has actively used financial weapons in recent years, the $30-billion seizure, “the largest amount ever to be frozen by a U.S. sanctions order,” had one precedent, the arguably illegal and certainly conspiratorial seizure of Iranian assets in 1979 on behalf of the threatened Chase Manhattan Bank.24
The consequences of the $30-billion freeze for Africa, as well as for Libya, have been spelled out by an African observer:The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belong to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation – the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaounde with a US$42 billion capital fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.25
This same observer spells out her reasons for believing that Gaddafi’s plans for Africa have been more benign than the West’s:It began in 1992, when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country.
An African satellite only cost a onetime payment of US$400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a US$500 million annual lease. Which banker wouldn’t finance such a project? But the problem remained – how can slaves, seeking to free themselves from their master’s exploitation ask the master’s help to achieve that freedom? Not surprisingly, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the USA, Europe only made vague promises for 14 years. Gaddafi put an end to these futile pleas to the western ‘benefactors’ with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan guide put US$300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added US$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further US$27 million – and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.26
I am not in a position to corroborate all of her claims. But, for these and other reasons, I am persuaded that western actions in Libya have been designed to frustrate Gaddafi’s plans for an authentically post-colonial Africa, not just his threatened actions against the rebels in Benghazi.
Conclusion
I conclude from all this confusion and misrepresentation that America is losing its ability to enforce and maintain peace, either by itself or with its nominal allies. I would submit that, if only to stabilize and reduce oil prices, it is in America’s best interest now to join with Ban Ki-Moon and the Pope in pressing for an immediate cease-fire in Libya. Negotiating a cease-fire will certainly present problems, but the probable alternative to ending this conflict is the nightmare of watching it inexorably escalate.America has been there before with tragic consequences. We do not want to see similar casualties incurred for the sake of anunjust petrodollar system whose days may be numbered anyway.
At stake is not just America’s relation to Libya, but to China. The whole of Africa is an area where the west and the BRIC countries will both be investing. A resource-hungry China alone is expected to invest on a scale of $50 billion a year by 2015, a figure (funded by America’s trade deficit with China) which the West cannot match.27 Whether east and west can coexist peacefully in Africa in the future will depend on the west’s learning to accept a gradual diminution of its influence there, without resorting to deceitful stratagems (reminiscent of the Anglo-French Suez stratagem of 1956) in order to maintain it.
Previous transitions of global dominance have been marked by wars, by revolutions, or by both together. The final emergence through two World Wars of American hegemony over British hegemony was a transition between two powers that were essentially allied, and culturally close. The whole world has an immense stake in ensuring that the difficult transition to a post-US hegemonic order will be achieved as peacefully as possible.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.
His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 18 No 2, May 2, 2011.
Notes
1 “McCain calls for stronger NATO campaign,” monstersandcritics.com, April 22, 2011, link.
2 Ed Hornick, “Arming Libyan Rebels: Should U.S. Do It?” CNN, March 31, 2011.
3 “Countries Agree to Try to Transfer Some of Qaddafi’s Assets to Libyan Rebels,” New York Times, April 13, 2011, link.
4 “President Obama Wants Options as Pentagon Issues Warnings About Libyan No-Fly Zone,” ABC News, March 3, 2011, link. Earlier, on February 25, Gates warned that the U.S. should avoid future land wars like those it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but should not forget the difficult lessons it has learned from those conflicts.
"In my opinion, any future Defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates said in a speech to cadets at West Point” (Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2011, link).
5 Alan J. Kuperman, “False Pretense for War in Libya?” Boston Globe, April 14, 2011.
6 America’s income disparity, as measured by its Gini coefficient, is now among the highest in the world, along with Brazil, Mexico, and China. See Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 38, 103; Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse (New York: Dutton, 2006), 159.
7 This is the subject of my book The Road to 9/11, 4–9.
8 Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 213.
9 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 32. One could cite also the experience of the French Third Republic and the Banque de l’Indochine or the Netherlands and the Dutch East India Company.
10 Elizabeth Longford, Jameson’s Raid: The Prelude to the Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982); The Jameson Raid: a centennial retrospective (Houghton, South Africa: Brenthurst Press, 1996).
11 Wikileak documents from October and November 2002 reveal that Washington was making deals with oil companies prior to the Iraq invasion, and that the British government lobbied on behalf of BP’s being included in the deals (Paul Bignell, “Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq,” Independent (London), April 19, 2011).
12 Reuters, March 23, 2011.
13 Saman Mohammadi, “The Humanitarian Empire May Strike Syria Next, Followed By Lebanon And Iran,” OpEdNews.com, March 31, 2011.
14 "Halliburton Eager for Work Across the Mideast," International Oil Daily, May 7, 2003.
15 “Gaddafi offers Libyan oil production to India, Russia, China,” Agence France-Presse, March 14, 2011, link.
16 Peter Dale Scott, “Bush’s Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question”; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 41-42: “From these developments emerged the twin phenomena, underlying 9/11, of triumphalist US unilateralism on the one hand, and global third-world indebtedness on the other. The secret deals increased US-Saudi interdependence at the expense of the international comity which had been the base for US prosperity since World War II.” Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37.
17 "Globalists Target 100% State Owned Central Bank of Libya." Link.
18 Ellen Brown, “Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking,” Reader Supported News, April 15, 2011.
19 Peter Dale Scott, “Bush’s Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question”; citing “Islamic Gold Dinar Will Minimize Dependency on US Dollar,” Malaysian Times, April 19, 2003.
20 “Gold key to financing Gaddafi struggle,” Financial Times, March 21, 2011, link.
21 Franco Bechis, “French plans to topple Gaddafi on track since last November,” VoltaireNet, March 25, 2011. Cf. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, “November 2010 War Games: ‘Southern Mistral’ Air Attack against Dictatorship in a Fictitious Country called ‘Southland,’" Global Research, April 15, 2011, link; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 19, 2011.
22 New York Times, February 27, 2011.
23 Executive Order of February 25, 2011, citing International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, seizes all Libyan Govt assets, February 25, 2011, link. The authority granted to the President by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose” (50 U.S.C. 1701).
24 “Billions Of Libyan Assets Frozen,” Tropic Post, March 8, 2011, link (“largest amount”); Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 80-89 (Iranian assets).
25 “Letter from an African Woman, Not Libyan, On Qaddafi Contribution to Continent-wide African Progress , Oggetto: ASSOCIAZIONE CASA AFRICA LA LIBIA DI GHEDDAFI HA OFFERTO A TUTTA L'AFRICA LA PRIMA RIVOLUZIONE DEI TEMPI MODERNI,” Vermont Commons, April 21, 2011, link. Cf. Manlio Dinucci, “Financial Heist of the Century: Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF),” Global Research, April 24, 2011, link.
26 Ibid. Cf. “The Inauguration of the African Satellite Control Center,” Libya Times, September 28, 2009, link; Jean-Paul Pougala, “The lies behind the West's war on Libya,” Pambazuka.org, April 14, 2011.
27 Leslie Hook, “China’s future in Africa, after Libya,” blogs.ft.com, March 4, 2011 ($50 billion). The U.S trade deficit with China in 2010 was $273 billion.
by JackRiddler » Sun May 15, 2011 5:28 pm
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... to-shrink/
What in the World? The military's secret plan...to shrink
An article written under the pseudonym Mr. Y. grabbed my attention this week. The article has a bold thesis, even more surprising given who the mysterious Mr. Y turns out to be.
It argues that the United States has embraced an entirely wrong set of priorities, particularly with regard to its federal budget. We have overreacted to Islamic extremism. We have pursued military solutions instead of political ones.
Y says we are underinvesting in the real sources of national power - our youth, our infrastructure and our economy. The United States sees the world through the lens of threats, while failing to understand that influence, competitiveness and innovation are the key to advancing American interests in the modern world. Y says that above all we must invest in our children. Only by educating them properly will we ensure our ability to compete in the future.
Y also argues that we need to move from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence.
Y goes on to say that we shouldn't even talk about national security as we have for the past 60 years; we should be talking about national prosperity and security.
Now, I think this is very smart stuff for the new world we're entering in, but it's important and influential in particular, given the source. This article arguing we need to rely less on our military comes, in fact, from the highest echelons of the Pentagon.
Mr. Y is actually two people, both top-ranking members of Admiral Mike Mullen's team, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are Captain Wayne Porter of the U.S. Navy and Colonel Mark Mykleby of the Marine Corps. It's likely that the essay had some official sanction, which means that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or perhaps even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had seen it and did not stop its publication.
So why did the authors call themselves Mr. Y? It's a play on a seminal essay from Foreign Affairs magazine more than five decades ago. The title was "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," and it was signed simply X. The author turned out to be the American diplomat George Kennan, and the article turned out to have perhaps the greatest influence on American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century.
It set out the policy of containment, that if we contain the Soviet Union, countering its influence, eventually the internal contradictions of the Soviet system would trigger its collapse, and it worked. But Porter and Mykleby say the basic approach, a massive military to deter the Soviets, a quasi-imperial policy to counter Soviet influence all over the world, is still in place and is outmoded and outdated. They call their policy proposal sustainment, and they hope it just might be the policy that will carry us forward for the next 50 years.
Mr. Y is hoping to be the next X - to set the new tone of Washington strategy. Will that happen?
Well, the term "sustainment" is silly, but the ideas behind it are not.
Washington needs to make sure that the United States does not fall into the imperial trap of every other superpower in history, spending greater and greater time and money and energy stabilizing disorderly parts of the world on the periphery, while at the core its own industrial and economic might is waning.
We have to recognize that fixing America's fiscal problems - paring back the budget busters like entitlements and also defense spending - making the economy competitive, dealing with immigration and outlining a serious plan for energy use are the best strategies to stay a superpower, not going around killing a few tribal leaders in the remote valleys and hills of Afghanistan.
Take a look a the report and then, if you feel so moved, write your congressperson about it here.
And let us know in the poll below whether you think the U.S. should substantially reduce its military expenditures to decrease the deficit and/or allocate money to other priorities.
by JackRiddler » Sun May 15, 2011 6:36 pm
by JackRiddler » Sun May 15, 2011 9:21 pm
Navy calling on gamers to help with security
By David Nakamura, Sunday, May 15, 7:05 PM
To combat Somali pirates, the U.S. Navy has relied on warships, snipers and SEAL teams. Now, it is turning to the heavy artillery: Internet gamers.
This month, the Office of Naval Research will roll out the military’s first-ever online war game open to the public, crowd-sourcing the challenges of maritime security to thousands of “players” sitting in front of their computers.
The project — named MMOWGLI (the acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet) — is a video game for policy wonks. It aims to replicate a traditional military strategy session on an exponentially larger scale, bringing together a diverse mix of government and outside experts that would be impossible even in the largest Pentagon conference room.
Through virtual simulation and social media tools made popular on Twitter and Facebook, players will work together to respond to a series of make-believe geopolitical scenarios set off when private ships are hijacked off Somalia’s coast.
“We live in an echo chamber,” Lawrence Schuette, the naval research office’s innovation chief, said of the military. “The challenge is you always want to have an audience that’s diverse in background, diverse in thinking. It’s those intersections where you see creativity occurring. The advantage of online crowd-sourcing is obvious: You have many more intersections and many more diverse backgrounds.”
Thanks in part to pre-launch publicity, more than 7,000 people have signed up for MMOWGLI, far beyond the 1,000 that developers had anticipated for the $450,000 pilot project. Programmers from the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, Calif., that is making the software, have postponed the launch date to be sure the game has enough capacity.
Schuette stressed that his office is more interested in building technology that can be used for research across military platforms than it is in generating groundbreaking anti-piracy policy. But piracy experts welcomed the exercise as a much-needed thought experiment.
“It is such a complex issue that has to do with local dynamics on the ground, governance, financial flows,” said Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There is no single way to approach piracy in that area.
“Naval experts do not know the tools that Treasury can bring to bear,’’ she said. “Likewise, a Somali expert might not have knowledge of what possible maritime strategies commercial shippers are able to employ.”
Innovate and Defend
MMOWGLI lacks the high-tech, shoot ’em up graphics of commercial video games. Video clips and storyboards will prompt players to envision scenarios. For example: “Three pirate ships are holding the world hostage. Chinese-U.S. relations are strained to the limit and both countries have naval ships in the area. Humanitarian aid for rig workers is blocked. The world is blaming the U.S. for plundering African resources.”
Players are then confronted with two boxes — Innovate and Defend — asking what new resources could “turn the tide” and what risks might result.
In the first round, players are limited to proposing Twitter-length, 140-character solutions, and the crowd votes on their favorite ideas, similar to “liking” something on Facebook, said Jason Tester, a game designer from the Institute for the Future. In ensuing rounds of the three-week game, teams will form around the most popular ideas and develop in-depth action plans.
It is all part of the Navy’s attempt to exploit the benefits of online “gamification,” the increasingly popular strategy of employing game-play mechanics in non-game situations to influence behaviors and direct people to a desired outcome.
Last year, the World Bank hosted a virtual game called EVOKE, centered around an online graphic novel whose characters prompted gamers to respond to imagined worldwide catastrophes, such as famine in Japan.
Aimed initially at college students in South Africa, the game went viral: 19,324 people from more than 150 countries registered to play, submitting 23,500 blog entries, 4,700 photos and 1,500 videos, said Robert Hawkins, a senior education specialist at the World Bank who helped develop the game.
“If you look at user-generated innovation, it’s already happening in the private sector,” Hawkins said. The theory is that “those closest to the ground and action have the best ideas as to what will work best.”
Practical vs. trendy
But as anyone who has spent time in an online chat room knows, moderating the debate against online bullies and sifting through thousands of comments to find quality ideas can be nearly impossible. During the EVOKE project, players coalesced around proposals that were unsustainable, such as floating greenhouses that would produce food 25 times too expensive to afford, said Rex Brynen, a professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal who blogs on strategic gaming.
“There was not enough quality control,” Brynen said of EVOKE. “Trendy development ideas that appeal to the 15- to 30-year-old age demographic catch on because they’re trendy, not because there is proof they would work.”
Hawkins dismissed the criticism, noting that the World Bank was using “nascent technology” to envision the world 10 years in the future.
“By no means were we proposing that the solutions outlined in a fictional story in 2020 are things the World Bank advocates,” he said. “What we wanted to do was inspire people and get them thinking about the possible.”
Schuette, of the naval research office, said his team is aware of the potential pitfalls of throwing out policy development to a nameless, faceless crowd. A dozen members of the Naval Postgraduate School, which is hosting the MMOWGLI Web site, will monitor the game around the clock, Schuette said.
Developers hope that MMOWGLI can help break down rigid military hierarchies by allowing players to remain anonymous.
“That’s old hat online, but it’s radically new to the military,” Tester said. “Everyone is looking forward to seeing if the winning team could be a four-star admiral, a Naval Academy cadet and someone from a nonprofit collaborating with each other.”
© The Washington Post Company
by anothershamus » Sun May 15, 2011 11:49 pm
by JackRiddler » Mon May 16, 2011 12:26 am
anothershamus wrote:That Navy gamer thing was used in the Stargate Universe series. It's pretty effective in the pilot if you want to watch it. I heard they use them lots in the drone program as well.
by JackRiddler » Mon May 16, 2011 7:09 pm
by vanlose kid » Wed May 18, 2011 7:53 pm
Guest Post: This Too Shall Pass. So Will This, This, This, This, And This Too
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/18/2011 12:32 -0400
From Simon Black of Sovereign Man
This too shall pass. So will this, this, this, this, and this too
Take a moment and conduct a mini thought experiment. Imagine that you're from the future many hundreds of years from now, researching what life was like in the early 21st century. You pull up an archive of newspaper headlines from the year 2011 and read the following:
"US Congress To Vote On Declaration Of World War 3 -- An Endless War With No Borders, No Clear Enemies"
"Blackwater hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together a secret force of foreign troops"
"10 killed in US drone attacks in northern Pakistan"
"US Officials Warn Terrorism Threat Remains Post-bin Laden"
"TSA Pat Down of Suspicious Baby Is No Big Deal"
"Treasury taps federal pensions as Uncle Sam hits debt ceiling"
"Fed chief Ben Bernanke says he's not worried about inflation"
"Global Food Prices Hit New All Time High After 8 Consecutive Months Of Gains"
"Over-50s suffer a lifestyle crash: Millions less comfortable than a year ago"
"UK And US Data Shows Stagflation Threat Deepening"
"Greek riot police, protesters clash over austerity "
"IMF: Greece needs more austerity measures"
"IMF Chief no stranger to sexual assault allegations"
"Portugal on brink of bankruptcy"
"Contagion fears high as Italy drawn into crisis"
"Italian PM Berlusconi Faces Prostitution Trial in Italy"
To an observer who is not part of our time, it must all look like a really bad joke, like it just couldn't possibly be true. In the same way, we look back upon history and wonder with skepticism and incredulity how our long-lost ancestors have possibly allowed the Inquisition, the Dark Ages, genocide and slavery to occur.
We fancy ourselves so advanced and enlightened... but my guess is that history will view us in the same way that we see those unfortunate brutes of medieval times: misguided, misled, and totally self-deluded.
We might not be burning each other at the stake anymore, or waging war for king and conquest, but the metaphoric comparisons run truly deep. Moreover, our story today is a similar one: there is a very small group of people in power whose decisions affect the lives of billions of people. Those of us not in the elite ruling class allow it to happen.
Their choices drive up food prices, increase war and destruction, bankrupt entire economies, reduce standards of living, degrade social stability, and force everyday people into conditions that look more and more like a police state.
Simultaneously, this elite group uses its position to shower itself with privileges and benefits at everyone else's expense: hard-core sex parties, handing out free money to their friends, not paying their taxes, hiring private armies to protect them from their own people, etc.
It's positively disgusting... and I have to imagine that historians of the future will scratch their heads and wonder how we allowed ourselves to be duped into such a system.
Our leaders tell us that these troubles will pass... to sit down, shut up, be patient, and put our faith and confidence in their abilities to right the ship once again. Sounds great... but there's just one problem. Nobody's buying it anymore.
We're in the beginning of a period where people are finally starting to wake up and smell the fraud... and even though the establishment is furiously rearranging the deck chairs and trying desperately to maintain the status quo, the great market singularity is beginning to take hold: that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.
Glance at those headlines one more time. This system is corrupt, perverse, and wholly unsustainable. It will reset. Reasonable, sentient human beings cannot live under such a yoke in the long run.
It's difficult to say how it will happen, when it will finish, or what it will look like at the end, but rest assured, it's already happening, and it's going to be a bumpy ride.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest- ... ll-and-too
by vanlose kid » Wed May 18, 2011 9:19 pm
Guest Post: The End Of History
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/18/2011 00:54 -0400
The next in a continuing series (most recently: Security in a Free Society).
Submitted by Free Radical
The End of History
There is properly no history, only biography. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was famously proclaimed that what we were likely witnessing was… not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
In reality, however, what we are witnessing is the ideological exhaustion of “Western liberal democracy” and therefore the last gasp of the fraud upon which it rests: the state, even its best form. No longer able to hide behind the Jeffersonian dream of constitutional freedom and order or the Lincolnian myth that the dream could be preserved at the expense of the principle upon which it was founded, the American state’s demise proves that “the final form of human government” has not yet arrived – not because a final form shouldn’t have arrived but because, for those who have had so much fun during historical times, the aftermath won’t be any fun. On the contrary, it will be “a very sad time”:The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
How sad, in other words, that if people were in fact freed from “the worldwide ideological struggle” (though of course they have not been), they would at long last be able to live their lives on their own terms. How sad that without “the struggle for recognition,” people would not have to endure another Pharoah, Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Clinton, Bush, or Obama, and would instead be left to while away the hours in the peaceful pursuit of their own happiness. How sad that without the “purely abstract goal” of one or another statist ideology, grandparents, parents, spouses, children, and grandchildren would not know the “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” that continues to send their loved ones home in flag-draped cartons. How sad that “environmental concerns” could actually be solved, rather than perpetrated by governments and perpetuated by their bloated “regulatory” agencies. And how sad that “economic calculation and the endless solving of technical problems” – i.e., the day-by-day work of an increasingly complex and thus more richly rewarding world – would not be complicated by the relentless onslaught of the state.
Yes, there is the hope that “centuries of boredom at the end of history might serve to get history started once again,” so that murder and mayhem can once again spice up the dreary “satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” What is a cell phone, after all, compared to a land mine? What is communication compared to mutilation? With “no struggle over ‘large’ issues and consequently no need for generals or statesmen,” how much attraction can life hold? What’s the use of living, in other words, if you can’t make a killing killing people?
And a twofold killing it is – over 15 billion people “since the beginning of authentic history,” at a cost of over a thousand trillion dollarsi – according to the research published in a 1914 New York Times piece that also makes the following observation:Brilliant deeds on the battlefield are done by the man who will take the greatest risks in support of an ideal; the man who will take the greatest risks is, ordinarily, the best of men. So these are least likely to escape. …
… And even though large numbers of the best of men are left, many are destroyed, and of those remaining many have been deteriorated physically by the effort, by the wounds, by the diseases, of wartime; while the economic course of every man participating in a war is interrupted by his service, and, in the majority of cases, such an interruption harms his industrial or professional or mercantile future, thus directly affecting the opportunities that he may offer to the rising generation, which, for a time, depends upon him.
And thus does the killing of the best in war also kill “a certain portion of the incalculable social and educational effort of the ages.”
But no matter. For as war is its very health, the state will have a war if it wants one, never mind how much the people, understandably, do not:Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. … But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country.
But why? The answer is as old as Plato’s Dorians:[I]t is immaterial for the citizens of any nation where the frontiers of their country are drawn. It is of no concern for anyone whether his country is big or small, and whether it conquers a province or not. The individual citizens do not derive any profit from the conquest of a territory.
It is different with the princes or ruling aristocracies. They can increase their power and their tax revenues by expanding the size of their realms. They can profit from conquest. They are bellicose, while the citizenry is peace loving.
The “princes and ruling aristocracies” will object, of course, that they are not bellicose at all and only want to increase their power in order to be of greater service to humanity. They are public servants, after all, seeking only to do good on their constituents’ behalf. What they do not understand, however – what they dare not even contemplate – is that because Men are cruel, but Man is kind, no men are more cruel than those who would do good with mankind’s money – with the proceeds, that is, of the legalized theft by which “Western liberal democracy” and every other manifestation of the state perpetuate themselves. For as easy as it is to make this theft legal, it is impossible to make it moral, the resulting assault on society being all the worse for the pretence upon which it is based: namely, that legalized theft is the price that must be paid for a civilized society.
And it is because of this vast charade – the biggest of all big lies – that its perpetrators fail to realize that they are but the latest incarnation of the iniquity that has prevailed from time immemorial, that however much the forces of history have been debated over the centuries – are they blind, cyclical, progressive, eschatological, dialectical, etc. – there are actually no forces of history; there is only the history of force. In fact, there is only history as force, the absence of which is not history but biography – the ability to graph, as it were, one’s own bio in cooperative association with one’s fellow human beings.
Its perpetrators do not understand, that is, that their role in history is history, for history is nothing more than the biographies of those who have used the political means to trump the economic means, the producers of which have had their biographies expropriated in the process. As such, history is merely a chronicle of conquest, subjugation, and confiscation, and therefore a glorification of perpetual war for perpetual war. And just as war and the state are one, so, then, are the state and history one.
Therefore, the end of the state will be the end of history.
––––––––––
i Inflation-adjusted as follows: 15 billion battlefield deaths x $3,677 per death in 1914 dollars (see footnote 138) x 20 to correct for the dollar’s lost purchasing power since then (see here) = $1,103,100,000,000,000.My next submission: “The Final Form of Human Government.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-end-history
by JackRiddler » Sat May 21, 2011 3:54 pm
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/fe ... 37174.html
WikiLeaks: A battle to 'carve up' the Arctic
Resource wars are possible as global warming melts polar ice - opening new areas to oil exploitation, cables indicate.
Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 21 May 2011 15:27
Energy experts estimate that the Arctic contains more than one fifth of the world's petroleum [GALLO/GETTY]
It is considered the final frontier for oil and gas exploitation, and secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks confirm that nations are battling to "carve up" the Arctic's vast resources.
"The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight."
Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice melting due to global warming will open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize.
Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre of world politics".
Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, have competing claims to the Arctic, a region about the size of Africa, comprising some six per cent of the Earth's surface.
'Resource wars'
"The WikiLeaks cables show us realpolitik in its rarest form," says Paul Wapner, director of the global environmental politics programme at American University in Washington. "Diplomats continue to think of this as a zero sum world. When they see exploitable resources, all things being equal, they are going to approach them through a competitive nation state system."
The cables come to light at a time when academics and activists fear resource scarcity, particularly over dwindling oil and drinking water supplies, could lead to new international conflicts.
Sir David King, the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, called the invasion of Iraq "the first of [this century's] resource wars", warning that "powerful nations will secure resources for their own people at the expense of others".
In 2007, Russia planted its flag 4,000 metres below the Arctic Ocean, in an attempt to claim that its continental shelf, the geological formation by which claims are measured, extends far into the frozen zone.
"Behind Russia's policy are two potential benefits accruing from global warming, the prospect for an [even seasonally] ice-free shipping route from Europe to Asia, and the estimated oil and gas wealth hidden beneath the Arctic sea floor," noted a 2009 cable articulating US beliefs.
Presently, the Russians are far ahead of the US and other Arctic countries to take advantage of what will happen offshore, says Bruce Forbes, a research professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland. "The cables confirm what we as scientists already know; [global warming means] the Arctic is not just this hinterland, as it is portrayed in the mainstream media."
In its 2010 Quadrennial Defence Review report, the Pentagon stated: "Climate change and energy are two issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment."
Global warning
If humans do not drastically reduce their fossil fuel consumption, and current trends continue, the world is heading for a significant temperature increase, melting polar ice caps and causing sea levels to rise between 0.9 and 1.6 meters this century, according to a study from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme released in early May.
The idea that global warming will melt polar icecaps and allow for new petroleum exploitation in the far north represents a terrible irony, says Andrea Harden-Donahue, a researcher with the Council of Canadians, a social justice organisation.
"Climate change is making these resources easier to exploit, while burning these resources will only contribute to more climate change," she says.
"In Canada, we have seen a number of well-known actors, including BP and Chevron, exploring for oil and gas in the Beaufort Sea. In the US, Shell is consistently trying to get access to resources off the coast of Alaska; BP hopes to develop off the coast of Russia and Cairn energy have already been awarded licenses in Greenland and they are likely to start [drilling] this year.
"If [these companies] are allowed to move forward, I don't think it is unreasonable that we would see a scramble for these resources."
A 2008 cable quotes Russian Navy head Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky as saying: "While in the Arctic there is peace and stability, however, one cannot exclude that in the future there will be a redistribution of power, up to armed intervention."
Partisan politics
But verbose rhetoric about conflict could be linked to politicians who want to support the military-industrial complex and boost their own stature, rather than actual fears of impending violence, cables suggest.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere is referred to in a 2009 cable, describing "how, during his March 2009 visit to Moscow, he thanked [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov for making it so much easier for him to justify the Joint Strike Fighter purchase to the Norwegian public, given Russia's regular military flights up and down Norway's coast".
The programme to develop the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is expected to cost the US and its allies more than $380 billion, meaning it is likely the most expensive military project in history - and politicians seem to feel the need to justify such a massive outlay of resources to sceptical electorates.
Environmentalists worry that oil exploitation in the Arctic will damage fragile ecosystems [GALLO/GETTY]
Canadian politicians, including recently re-elected Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, are also capitalising on fears of northern conflict to buttress narrow partisan agendas.
Harper has made several high profile visits to the far north, boasting that: "From Afghanistan to the Arctic, from the coast of Somalia to the shorfes of Nootka Sound [on Vancouver island] we will be able to see what the bad guys are up to," with new military satellites.
Commenting on Harper's rhetoric in a 2010 cable, US diplomats note that: "The persistent high public profile which this government has accorded 'Northern Issues' and the Arctic is, however, unprecedented and reflects the PM's views that 'the North has never been more important to our country' - although one could perhaps paraphrase to state 'the North has never been more important to our Party'."
While politicians pound their chests over resource claims, Prof Forbes says the risk of actual conflict is minimal, because there are international institutions and treaties governing competing claims.
The Arctic Council, composed of eight Arctic nations, is the main discussion forum for issues related to the far north and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the US has not signed, is supposed to govern resource claims in the region.
During a meeting of the Arctic Council held on May 12 in Greenland, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that US ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention was "way overdue".
Clinton's desire to change US policy to sign the convention may have more to do with resource battles than respect for international institutions.
"If you stay out [of the convention]" then-Danish foreign minister Moller is quoted as saying in 2009 cables, "then the rest of us will have more to carve up in the Arctic".
The US position of not ratifying the convention means it cannot put forward a formal claim to the seabed directly north of Alaska, says Oran Young, a professor of environmental science at the University of California.
"If I knew why the US hasn't signed, I'd be happy," Young says, speculating that lobbyists for the mining industry and some senators who display "knee jerk negativism to the UN in general" were driving the decision.
'Doomsday scenario'
In a 1987 speech, Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the former USSR, described the "threatening character" of NATO in the far north. Today, NATO's role in the Arctic is unclear.
"There is no reason for NATO to have a strong Arctic profile," says Timo Koivurova, a visiting professor specialising in northern issues at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "All the Arctic Ocean coastal states have behaved exactly as the Law of the Sea dictates."
But plenty of other people, from scholars to diplomats and military officials, do not entirely share Koivurova's optimistic view.
"The very best case scenario [for peace in the arctic] is that we move beyond fossil fuels," says American University's Paul Wapner. "The best case scenario is that we have cooperative institutions - with representatives of indigenous people - who use peaceful and cooperative means to ensure fair access to these resources.
"The doomsday would be competitive resource wars. As climate change gets worse, people will be pushed to get more resources to run their air conditioners and so forth. My prediction is that we are still going to be addicted to oil [when the main icecaps melt] and these resources are going to be extracted by the most powerful lot - which would include Russia, the US and China."
Follow Chris Arsenault On Twitter: @AJEchris
Source:
Al Jazeera
me on China threat thread wrote:
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/post ... 8&p=402173
The neocon fantasies of global full-spectrum dominance, attacks on Iran, serial Asian wars and a nuclear playoff with China are coming to an end. By the end of this year with a bit of luck you might see a declared opponent of US imperialism as Egyptian president and the last of the US soldiers forced to leave Iraq, in keeping with the schedule already set in the SOFA. You might even see Pakistan and Afghanistan inviting the US to leave, yesterday, and guess what? If covert operations can't change their minds, the US will comply. American regulars' boots are not going to touch Libyan soil (at least, not while the combat's going). An "eventual war with China" could only come about as a kabuki event to retire the debt (damn though that will be scary) or as a big civilization-ending mistake (total time of war, three and a half hours). The US is likely to complete its long arc toward techno-totalitarianism, with or without an explicitly Christian fascist regime (probably not the latter), but its imperialism will necessarily become more and more restrained. The limits of ecology are asserting themselves on the civilization as a whole, and the limits of finance and economics have already started the inevitable roll-back of US empire. In the latter case the question is how bloody it will be, and whether it will make any difference to the Pentagon and Homeland budgets (unlikely). If there is an "end game" for the empire it will not be China; it will far more likely be Mexico and Canada (and I'm not kidding).
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by JackRiddler » Sat May 21, 2011 6:36 pm
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/05/ ... e-u-s.html
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Guest Post: Congress Proposes Bill to Allow Worldwide War … Including INSIDE the U.S.
→ Washington’s Blog
Americans who have been paying attention are outraged that Bush lied us into Iraq by making up false claims about weapons of mass destruction and pretending that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11.
Many are disgusted that Obama got us into a war in Libya without Congressional authorization.
But as the ACLU noted yesterday, Congress is going even further … proposing handing permanent, world-wide war-making powers to the president – including the ability to make war within the United States:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-secur ... ldwide-war
A hugely important provision for Congress to authorize a new worldwide war has been tucked away inside the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill was marked up by members of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) last Wednesday that poured into Thursday morning (2:45 a.m. to be exact).
A couple of minutes past midnight, Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) offered an amendment to strike Sec. 1034 — the new authorization for worldwide war provision — from the NDAA. Visibly angry that such a large sweeping provision had not yet had any public hearing whatsoever, he vigorously characterized it as a very broad declaration of war.
Rep. Garamendi was very concerned by the limitless geographic boundaries of the provision. Essentially, it would enable the U.S. to use military force anywhere in the world (including within the U.S.) in search of terrorists.
***
While a new authorization for worldwide war has had its first public debate, it unfortunately only lasted a hair over 10 minutes and occurred after midnight.
Though it is a very troubling expansion of war authority, it has been lingering for more than three years as a “sleeper provision,” and it is finally getting the attention of some members of Congress. We hope that further debate in Congress in the weeks ahead will allow for a more in-depth examination of unchecked authority to wage worldwide war, and what the outcomes of such a provision will yield.
SNIP
by Harvey » Sun May 22, 2011 7:28 am
by Joe Hillshoist » Sun May 22, 2011 7:39 am
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