http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/03/while-nation-fragments-socially.html
While the Nation Fragments Socially, the Financial Aristocracy Rules Unimpeded
If there is one central irony in American history, it is this: the citizenry that broke free of the chains of British Monarchy, the citizenry that reckoned everyone was equal before the law, the citizenry that vowed never to be ruled by an aristocracy that controlled the government and finance as a means of self-enrichment, is now so distracted by social fragmentation that the citizenry is blind to their servitude to a new and formidably informal financial aristocracy.
From this juncture, ironies abound: the so-called Socialist demands for Medicare for All, "free" college for all and Universal Basic Income (UBI) are encouraged (or perhaps orchestrated) by the financial aristocracy, which rakes in tens of billions of dollars in profits from its banking, healthcare, national defense and higher education cartels: throwing more trillions down the ratholes of Medicare and higher education will only further enrich and empower the financial elites.
As for Universal Basic Income (UBI), the financial aristocracy is cheering loudly for UBI, which would enable debt-serfs to keep servicing their debts. (Is anyone so naive to think that UBI won't have a clause which enables the deduction of debt payments from the monthly "free money"? Does anyone think the financial aristocracy is going to give $1,000 a month to debt-serfs and then let them default on their debt? Get real!)
The demands for social justice, i.e. that everyone be allowed to be treated the same before the law and enjoy the same rights as other citizens, is a core tenet of American culture. Long before the Constitution was even ratified, the calls to end slavery were becoming louder. Long before women won the the right to vote, the calls to treat women equally before the law were gaining ground.
In the long sweep of U.S. history, the rights of gays to marry and other contemporary social justice issues are of a piece with all previous drives to eliminate disparities between the way individuals are treated before the law. This is of course as it should be: this was a core value of the revolutionaries, as limited as it was in that era, and this drive is largely what makes America America.
Equally important was the cultural drive to never be ruled by a neofeudal aristocracy or let an aristocracy form in America. Yet this is precisely what has come to pass: we are ruled by an informal but oh-so neofeudal aristocracy.
As social justice controversies fragment the increasingly economically precarious populace, a financial aristocracy has arisen that rules the nation behind the screens of "meritocracy" and "equal rights." No one is more in favor of equal rights and the abolition of social privilege that the members of the financial aristocracy, who have no need for social privilege since they control the real source of power in America: proximity to credit and newly issued money.
(Look at the liberal leanings of the Silicon Valley, L.A., Boston and NYC elites. They all love whatever distracts everyone from scrutinizing their power, and love recruiting fresh talent to slave away for their private empires.)
With this wealth, the financial aristocracy buys political influence for piddling sums and scoops up most of the low-risk productive assets of the private sector.
The core structure of the financial aristocracy is the state-cartel, the cartels that are funded and enforced by the central state: higher education, healthcare, national defense, banking, mortgages, student loans, etc.
For the financial aristocracy, the federal government is their personal enrichment machine, collecting trillions in taxes and borrowing additional trillions which are funneled through the state-cartels.
The number of seats in the American aristocracy is extremely limited, and so the top 5% are willing to go to extreme lengths to get in the first class lifeboat as the Titanic takes on water. This manifests in all sorts of ways, including the elite college admissions scandal.
While social justice proponents focus on divisive distractions, the financial aristocracy is tightening its control of the nation's economy and political order.As everyday life, civil liberties and economic security all become increasingly precarious for the bottom 90%, the divisive focus on social privilege becomes a useful distraction for the financial aristocracy, which also controls the mainstream media.
America's aristocracy is chuckling with great amusement as society is torn to pieces by media-circus sideshows. America's aristocracy doesn't need any titles or overt class distinctions as the aristocracy of old had; this would only call attention to their dominance. The ideal arrangement is a society shredded by social-media-driven fabricated divisions and a profound apathy to the actual structures of power, wealth and control.
America's aristocracy is not formalized, and that's the secret of its success.The power and control are exercised behind the formal machinery of governance and finance, and this structure protects the aristocracy from scrutiny.
So by all means demand Medicare for All and UBI: the aristocracy is heavily promoting these expansions of its wealth and power. Just as the Roman elites favored distributing free bread to the disenfranchised masses and the staging of Netflix binge TV watching--oops, I mean circuses-- so too does America's aristocracy favor UBI, Medicare for All and a fragmented society in thrall to disunity.
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
SC185-13
https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-needs-stronger-defense-industry/5672104
America Needs a Stronger Defense Industry? Trillions Down the Hole of Military Spending
Post-WW II, America’s only enemies were and remain invented ones.
No real ones existed since Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were defeated – none anywhere, clearly none today!
Yet the US consistently pours countless trillions of dollars down a black hole of endless waste, fraud and abuse – global militarism and belligerence supported by the vast majority of Republicans and undemocratic Dems, at the expense of world peace, equity and justice.
Trump regime director of trade and industrial policy Peter Navarro is a militant right-wing.
He’s part of the cabal in Washington, wanting US-controlled puppet rule replacing independent governments in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere.
He favors whatever it takes for the US to achieve dominance. The NYT gave him feature op-ed space to promote greater military spending at a time it should be slashed.
He lied claiming “(i)nvesting in the (defense) sector means more jobs at home and improved security abroad. He lied saying “(i)n terms of economic security, the Trump defense budget is helping to create good manufacturing jobs at good wages.”
He lied claiming increased “arms sales (abroad) not only help create good jobs at good wages in America…they also enhance America’s capacity to bolster and stabilize our regional alliances, even as they may reduce the need to deploy more American soldiers overseas.”
He lied saying “our defense industrial base (is) the unshakable foundation of both economic and national security.”
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about military-industrial complex dangers went unheeded, saying:
“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
He called it a “potential enemy of the national interest…a distorted use of the nation’s resources…fail(ing) to comprehend its grave implication…(affecting our) livelihood (and) the very structure of our society,” adding:
“Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed.”
In an article titled “The War Business,” the late Chalmers Johnson said the following:
“(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough.”
“To call these companies ‘private,’ though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism,” adding:
“When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it,” sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.
George Washington warned about “overgrown military establishments,” calling them “inauspicious to liberty.”
Perpetual wars now rage for illusory peace, what ruling authorities in Washington abhor – along with democratic governance they tolerate nowhere, especially at home.
US elections are farcical when held. With attribution to redoubtable activist Emma Goldman, if they changed anything, they’d be outlawed.
Economist, activist writer opponent of the military, industrial, security complex, Seymour Melman wrote extensively on the topic, dispelling state-sponsored/media promoted myths.
Discussing what he called “the Grip of a Permanent War Economy,” he explained the following:
“(A)t the start of the twenty-first century, every major aspect of American life (has been) shaped by our Permanent War Economy.” Its horrific toll includes:
a de-industrialized nation, the result of decades of shifting production abroad, leaving unions, US workers and communities “decimated;”
government financing, promoting and pursuing “every kind of war industry and foreign investing by US firms” – war priorities taking precedence over essential homeland needs;
America’s “permanent war economy…has endured since the end of World War II…Since then, the US has been at war – somewhere – every year, in Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the Balkans, – all this to the accompaniment of shorter military forays in Africa, Chile, Grenada, Panama,” and endless aggression in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Central Africa, and increasingly against perceived homeland threats;
“How to make war” takes precedence over everything, leaving no “public space (for) improv(ing) the quality of our lives;”
“Shortages of housing have caused a swelling of the homeless population in every major city (because) state and city governments across the country have become trained to bend to the needs of the military…;”
The nation’s deplorable state is characterized by growing millions of poor, disadvantaged, low income, uneducated, and “disconnected (people) from society’s mainstream, restless and unhappy, frustrated, angry, and sad;”
“State Capitalism” characterizes America’s agenda – partnering with business, running a permanent war economy for greater power and wealth, ill-served by pure evil leadership, at war on humanity at home and abroad.
US rage for global dominance comes at the expense of a nation in decline, lost industrialization, crumbling infrastructure, millions of lost jobs offshored to low-wage countries, growing millions at home uncared for, unwanted, ignored, and forgotten to assure steady funding for bankers, warmaking, and other corporate predation – at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.
Melman explained that investing in domestic needs, developing the nation and its people, achieves a far greater bang for the buck than resources spent for militarism and warmaking.
They’re parasitic, unjustifiable, illegal, immoral, and eventually self-destructive – why the US has been in decline for decades while China, Russia, and other nations are growing and developing productively.
Unlike America’s permanent war agenda, wanting its will forcefully imposed on other nations, they wage peace and mutual cooperation with other nations.
Along with equity and justice for all everywhere, what’s more important than that!
America Needs a Stronger Defense Industry? Trillions Down the Hole of Military Spending
Post-WW II, America’s only enemies were and remain invented ones.
No real ones existed since Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were defeated – none anywhere, clearly none today!
Yet the US consistently pours countless trillions of dollars down a black hole of endless waste, fraud and abuse – global militarism and belligerence supported by the vast majority of Republicans and undemocratic Dems, at the expense of world peace, equity and justice.
Trump regime director of trade and industrial policy Peter Navarro is a militant right-wing.
He’s part of the cabal in Washington, wanting US-controlled puppet rule replacing independent governments in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere.
He favors whatever it takes for the US to achieve dominance. The NYT gave him feature op-ed space to promote greater military spending at a time it should be slashed.
He lied claiming “(i)nvesting in the (defense) sector means more jobs at home and improved security abroad. He lied saying “(i)n terms of economic security, the Trump defense budget is helping to create good manufacturing jobs at good wages.”
He lied claiming increased “arms sales (abroad) not only help create good jobs at good wages in America…they also enhance America’s capacity to bolster and stabilize our regional alliances, even as they may reduce the need to deploy more American soldiers overseas.”
He lied saying “our defense industrial base (is) the unshakable foundation of both economic and national security.”
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about military-industrial complex dangers went unheeded, saying:
“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
He called it a “potential enemy of the national interest…a distorted use of the nation’s resources…fail(ing) to comprehend its grave implication…(affecting our) livelihood (and) the very structure of our society,” adding:
“Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed.”
In an article titled “The War Business,” the late Chalmers Johnson said the following:
“(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough.”
“To call these companies ‘private,’ though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism,” adding:
“When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it,” sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.
George Washington warned about “overgrown military establishments,” calling them “inauspicious to liberty.”
Perpetual wars now rage for illusory peace, what ruling authorities in Washington abhor – along with democratic governance they tolerate nowhere, especially at home.
US elections are farcical when held. With attribution to redoubtable activist Emma Goldman, if they changed anything, they’d be outlawed.
Economist, activist writer opponent of the military, industrial, security complex, Seymour Melman wrote extensively on the topic, dispelling state-sponsored/media promoted myths.
Discussing what he called “the Grip of a Permanent War Economy,” he explained the following:
“(A)t the start of the twenty-first century, every major aspect of American life (has been) shaped by our Permanent War Economy.” Its horrific toll includes:
a de-industrialized nation, the result of decades of shifting production abroad, leaving unions, US workers and communities “decimated;”
government financing, promoting and pursuing “every kind of war industry and foreign investing by US firms” – war priorities taking precedence over essential homeland needs;
America’s “permanent war economy…has endured since the end of World War II…Since then, the US has been at war – somewhere – every year, in Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the Balkans, – all this to the accompaniment of shorter military forays in Africa, Chile, Grenada, Panama,” and endless aggression in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Central Africa, and increasingly against perceived homeland threats;
“How to make war” takes precedence over everything, leaving no “public space (for) improv(ing) the quality of our lives;”
“Shortages of housing have caused a swelling of the homeless population in every major city (because) state and city governments across the country have become trained to bend to the needs of the military…;”
The nation’s deplorable state is characterized by growing millions of poor, disadvantaged, low income, uneducated, and “disconnected (people) from society’s mainstream, restless and unhappy, frustrated, angry, and sad;”
“State Capitalism” characterizes America’s agenda – partnering with business, running a permanent war economy for greater power and wealth, ill-served by pure evil leadership, at war on humanity at home and abroad.
US rage for global dominance comes at the expense of a nation in decline, lost industrialization, crumbling infrastructure, millions of lost jobs offshored to low-wage countries, growing millions at home uncared for, unwanted, ignored, and forgotten to assure steady funding for bankers, warmaking, and other corporate predation – at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.
Melman explained that investing in domestic needs, developing the nation and its people, achieves a far greater bang for the buck than resources spent for militarism and warmaking.
They’re parasitic, unjustifiable, illegal, immoral, and eventually self-destructive – why the US has been in decline for decades while China, Russia, and other nations are growing and developing productively.
Unlike America’s permanent war agenda, wanting its will forcefully imposed on other nations, they wage peace and mutual cooperation with other nations.
Along with equity and justice for all everywhere, what’s more important than that!
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
SC185-12
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51289.htm
War Against Venezuela Is War Against Us All
The American war on Venezuela continues to escalate with the sabotage of it’s electricity grid, the most serious action of all so far, which was not only an act of terrorism against the entire civilian population but also an attempt to shut down exports of Venezuelan oil.
This is part of the American hybrid war strategy. Hybrid warfare is warfare that uses all domains of life and society to hurt and damage the targeted nation. It was best defined by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiansui, two senior colonels of the Peoples Liberation Army in their famous book titled, Unrestricted Warfare, published in 1999 which proposed strategies and tactics that could be used by developing countries to compensate for their military inferiority vis a vis the United States during a high tech war.
Published prior to the American cruise missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, the book drew a lot of attention in the west for its proposition that a multitude of means, military and non-military could be used to strike at the United States in a conflict; hacking into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media, urban warfare, sabotage, crippling infrastructure, subversion, all the methods of what the Americans term hybrid warfare.
The Chinese colonels stated that the first rule of this type of warfare is that there are no rules, nothing is forbidden. But they made a fundamental error when they also stated that “strong countries would not use the same approach against weak countries because strong countries make the rule while rising one break them” and, though admitting that the US breaks the rules of international law and makes up its own law when it suits their interests stated that it “has to observe its own rules or the world won’t trust it.”
Well, the colonels seem to have ignored the long history of the United States using exactly these types of methods against all its enemies weak or strong, of using unrestricted warfare, without limitations, in effect, total war on nations and peoples they target. They did not seem to understand that the Americans don’t give a damn what anyone else in the world thinks or whether anyone trusts them, which makes them all the more dangerous because peaceful settlement of disputes with them on an equitable basis is next to impossible. They are currently using these methods against Russia, Iran, China, Syria, DPRK, and of course Venezuela.
All these tactics are, of course, elements of a war of aggression, which is the fundamental war crime, and now a crime at the ICC for which they could, in theory, be prosecuted. Yet, the ICC prosecutor sits at her desk, as is her custom, drinking tea while collecting a large salary and instead of stating that the US and its allies are committing crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Venezuelan people entertains a Canadian request on behalf of the Lima Group to investigate the Venezuelan government for “crimes against humanity.” We have to suppose for not giving all its oil to the Americans.
Though Venezuela is a Party to the Treaty of Rome and so falls within their jurisdiction, for the Prosecutor to begin an investigation she has to be supplied with credible and reliable information deserving of investigation that crimes have been committed and crimes which the Venezuelan government is systematically ignoring or is part of. They have supplied no such information in their requests. All they have sent to the Prosecutor are unsubstantiated claims, bald statements echoing their political rhetoric. So there are no legal grounds on which the Prosecutor can act.
However, there is overwhelming evidence and outright confessions, bragging in fact by the US, Canadian and some EU leaders that they are committing crimes against humanity against the people of Venezuela with their economic warfare, that they call “sanctions’ which are illegal under international law, and for supporting an internal coup attempt, for their conspiracy to commit aggression and lately the sabotage of civilian infrastructure, the electricity grid.
Canada, with the US, and European nations, such as Germany Spain France and Britain, have imposed illegal sanctions, economic warfare on the people of Venezuela in order to force them to turn against their government by making them suffer. The sanctions are illegal because they violate the UN Charter. Only the Security Council has the authority to impose sanctions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. They are also crimes against humanity because they amount to siege warfare, that is, causing the deliberate suffering of civilians in an attempt to overthrow a government. Venezuela to protect itself, is building support among the nations such as Russia China, India, Cuba, Turkey, Iran and many other nations that have just formed a group to restore the UN Charter as the heart of international law and in recent days we have seen both Russia and China promising assistance and telling the Americans to back off.
Venezuela can also play the ICC game. It can request the ICC to lay charges against the countries attacking it and can file a claim against the USA and its gang for damages in the International Court of Justice and request an order from that court to the US gang stop their aggression against Venezuela. Venezuela can also use war without rules on its attackers and President Maduro hinted as much in a recent speech warning the Americans that they will not be immune from the consequences of their actions.
In some way it appears as if the United States, its influence weakening in other areas of the world, is attempting to re-establish its one time dominance in North and South America. Canada has been long brought to heel and is just a whimpering poodle in the lap of the American state to the dismay of most Canadians who have no real say in anything. Mexico was once in their pocket but already there are signs of trying to undermine and slap down the new Mexican President Obrador whose social democracy is too left for the far right that controls the US machinery of power.
John Bolton even stated that the “Monroe Doctrine” was the foundation of their policy to explain the US approach against Venezuela. The statement was a clear insult to all the countries of Latin America, the Lima Group included but it has no basis in international law.
The Monroe Doctrine is not accepted as part of international law and never has been. It is a very simple statement that the Americans issued in 1823 just after most of Latin America freed itself from Spanish and Portuguese rule, proclaiming that the western hemisphere was an American region of interest and that any European intrusions into the area would be considered a hostile act. To resurrect it today as Bolton tries to do is an insult to all Latin American countries, and even Canada, since it means that the Americans view those nations as so many provinces of their empire. However there is a contradiction because the Americans now rely on assistance from the very European countries that the Monroe Doctrine was aimed against; Spain, Britain, France, Germany in order to advance their war against Venezuela. So its resurrection at this time shows American weakness, by relying on help from the same nations that the Monroe Doctrine claims to exclude from the region.
Indeed, they heavily relied on these European interlopers to help them get their American puppet back into the country after he had left to try to stage a propaganda stunt at the Colombia-Venezuela border, a stunt that backfired and made them look like fools. On his return to Venezuela on March 4, Guaidò was met at the airport, likely preventing his deserved arrest, by some European ambassadors from Spain, France, and Germany, in particular. The US ambassador was not there.
In any case that action by the foreign ambassadors was a violation of the Vienna Convention and a hostile act. Article 5 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations sets out the permitted normal activities of consuls in a receiving state. But subsection (m) states:
“(m) performing any other functions entrusted to a consular post by the sending State which are not prohibited by the laws and regulations of the receiving State or to which no objection is taken by the receiving State or which are referred to in the international agreements in force between the sending State and the receiving State.”
This means that supporting the conspirators in an attempted coup against the receiving state, Venezuela is clearly prohibited and is regarded under customary international law as a hostile act and Venezuela has the right to immediately expel the consular officials involved or the entire consulate. The German ambassador who seemed to be most vocal has now been expelled.
Part of the hybrid warfare is the use of propaganda of course and an important element of the US propaganda is the resort to a claim that there exists a legal doctrine of “responsibility to protect” in international law. This doctrine does not exist in international law. It is purely an invention of the United States and its allies to justify their wars of aggression and violations of the UN Charter. Since they cannot obtain the support of the Security Council for their wars, because they are in violation of the obligation to keep the peace, and violations of the rights of every nation to its sovereignty and independence, the right not to be attacked in any way by other nations, they invented this phrase to justify the unjustifiable, It is nothing less than a pretext for wars of aggression and people should put it out of their minds as an argument for these wars. It is a bogus doctrine, a doctrine invented by fascists.
Worse they base the resort to this false doctrine on false facts because the UN Human Rights Council sent a Special Rapporteur to investigate the conditions in Venezuela and the cause of them. The man assigned dutifully went there, investigated and dutifully filed his report which because it did not accord with what they had hoped he would report was suppressed and we only know about it through an interview he gave to the press. Mr. Alfred de Zeyas reported to the UN that it was the illegal economic sanctions imposed by the US, Canada and their other allies that are the principal cause of the hardships being created in Venezuela and that they are illegal and should be ended and that the countries imposing them should be charged for committing crimes against humanity, I could quote him at length but I think the reader deserves to read this interview in full as much as de Zeyas deserves to he heard. We can only hope that the ICC Prosecutor will read his report and act on it. But I won’t hold my breath waiting.
The people of the world must protest this war, protest against these criminals who control the machinery of state in their nations for the crimes we see them commit against peoples in foreign lands so openly are the very crimes they are committing against us at home. We are all targets. No one is immune. The war on the people of Venezuela, and now, for good measure, Cuba and other socialist countries, against any form of socialism everywhere, is a war against us all.
War Against Venezuela Is War Against Us All
The American war on Venezuela continues to escalate with the sabotage of it’s electricity grid, the most serious action of all so far, which was not only an act of terrorism against the entire civilian population but also an attempt to shut down exports of Venezuelan oil.
This is part of the American hybrid war strategy. Hybrid warfare is warfare that uses all domains of life and society to hurt and damage the targeted nation. It was best defined by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiansui, two senior colonels of the Peoples Liberation Army in their famous book titled, Unrestricted Warfare, published in 1999 which proposed strategies and tactics that could be used by developing countries to compensate for their military inferiority vis a vis the United States during a high tech war.
Published prior to the American cruise missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, the book drew a lot of attention in the west for its proposition that a multitude of means, military and non-military could be used to strike at the United States in a conflict; hacking into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media, urban warfare, sabotage, crippling infrastructure, subversion, all the methods of what the Americans term hybrid warfare.
The Chinese colonels stated that the first rule of this type of warfare is that there are no rules, nothing is forbidden. But they made a fundamental error when they also stated that “strong countries would not use the same approach against weak countries because strong countries make the rule while rising one break them” and, though admitting that the US breaks the rules of international law and makes up its own law when it suits their interests stated that it “has to observe its own rules or the world won’t trust it.”
Well, the colonels seem to have ignored the long history of the United States using exactly these types of methods against all its enemies weak or strong, of using unrestricted warfare, without limitations, in effect, total war on nations and peoples they target. They did not seem to understand that the Americans don’t give a damn what anyone else in the world thinks or whether anyone trusts them, which makes them all the more dangerous because peaceful settlement of disputes with them on an equitable basis is next to impossible. They are currently using these methods against Russia, Iran, China, Syria, DPRK, and of course Venezuela.
All these tactics are, of course, elements of a war of aggression, which is the fundamental war crime, and now a crime at the ICC for which they could, in theory, be prosecuted. Yet, the ICC prosecutor sits at her desk, as is her custom, drinking tea while collecting a large salary and instead of stating that the US and its allies are committing crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Venezuelan people entertains a Canadian request on behalf of the Lima Group to investigate the Venezuelan government for “crimes against humanity.” We have to suppose for not giving all its oil to the Americans.
Though Venezuela is a Party to the Treaty of Rome and so falls within their jurisdiction, for the Prosecutor to begin an investigation she has to be supplied with credible and reliable information deserving of investigation that crimes have been committed and crimes which the Venezuelan government is systematically ignoring or is part of. They have supplied no such information in their requests. All they have sent to the Prosecutor are unsubstantiated claims, bald statements echoing their political rhetoric. So there are no legal grounds on which the Prosecutor can act.
However, there is overwhelming evidence and outright confessions, bragging in fact by the US, Canadian and some EU leaders that they are committing crimes against humanity against the people of Venezuela with their economic warfare, that they call “sanctions’ which are illegal under international law, and for supporting an internal coup attempt, for their conspiracy to commit aggression and lately the sabotage of civilian infrastructure, the electricity grid.
Canada, with the US, and European nations, such as Germany Spain France and Britain, have imposed illegal sanctions, economic warfare on the people of Venezuela in order to force them to turn against their government by making them suffer. The sanctions are illegal because they violate the UN Charter. Only the Security Council has the authority to impose sanctions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. They are also crimes against humanity because they amount to siege warfare, that is, causing the deliberate suffering of civilians in an attempt to overthrow a government. Venezuela to protect itself, is building support among the nations such as Russia China, India, Cuba, Turkey, Iran and many other nations that have just formed a group to restore the UN Charter as the heart of international law and in recent days we have seen both Russia and China promising assistance and telling the Americans to back off.
Venezuela can also play the ICC game. It can request the ICC to lay charges against the countries attacking it and can file a claim against the USA and its gang for damages in the International Court of Justice and request an order from that court to the US gang stop their aggression against Venezuela. Venezuela can also use war without rules on its attackers and President Maduro hinted as much in a recent speech warning the Americans that they will not be immune from the consequences of their actions.
In some way it appears as if the United States, its influence weakening in other areas of the world, is attempting to re-establish its one time dominance in North and South America. Canada has been long brought to heel and is just a whimpering poodle in the lap of the American state to the dismay of most Canadians who have no real say in anything. Mexico was once in their pocket but already there are signs of trying to undermine and slap down the new Mexican President Obrador whose social democracy is too left for the far right that controls the US machinery of power.
John Bolton even stated that the “Monroe Doctrine” was the foundation of their policy to explain the US approach against Venezuela. The statement was a clear insult to all the countries of Latin America, the Lima Group included but it has no basis in international law.
The Monroe Doctrine is not accepted as part of international law and never has been. It is a very simple statement that the Americans issued in 1823 just after most of Latin America freed itself from Spanish and Portuguese rule, proclaiming that the western hemisphere was an American region of interest and that any European intrusions into the area would be considered a hostile act. To resurrect it today as Bolton tries to do is an insult to all Latin American countries, and even Canada, since it means that the Americans view those nations as so many provinces of their empire. However there is a contradiction because the Americans now rely on assistance from the very European countries that the Monroe Doctrine was aimed against; Spain, Britain, France, Germany in order to advance their war against Venezuela. So its resurrection at this time shows American weakness, by relying on help from the same nations that the Monroe Doctrine claims to exclude from the region.
Indeed, they heavily relied on these European interlopers to help them get their American puppet back into the country after he had left to try to stage a propaganda stunt at the Colombia-Venezuela border, a stunt that backfired and made them look like fools. On his return to Venezuela on March 4, Guaidò was met at the airport, likely preventing his deserved arrest, by some European ambassadors from Spain, France, and Germany, in particular. The US ambassador was not there.
In any case that action by the foreign ambassadors was a violation of the Vienna Convention and a hostile act. Article 5 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations sets out the permitted normal activities of consuls in a receiving state. But subsection (m) states:
“(m) performing any other functions entrusted to a consular post by the sending State which are not prohibited by the laws and regulations of the receiving State or to which no objection is taken by the receiving State or which are referred to in the international agreements in force between the sending State and the receiving State.”
This means that supporting the conspirators in an attempted coup against the receiving state, Venezuela is clearly prohibited and is regarded under customary international law as a hostile act and Venezuela has the right to immediately expel the consular officials involved or the entire consulate. The German ambassador who seemed to be most vocal has now been expelled.
Part of the hybrid warfare is the use of propaganda of course and an important element of the US propaganda is the resort to a claim that there exists a legal doctrine of “responsibility to protect” in international law. This doctrine does not exist in international law. It is purely an invention of the United States and its allies to justify their wars of aggression and violations of the UN Charter. Since they cannot obtain the support of the Security Council for their wars, because they are in violation of the obligation to keep the peace, and violations of the rights of every nation to its sovereignty and independence, the right not to be attacked in any way by other nations, they invented this phrase to justify the unjustifiable, It is nothing less than a pretext for wars of aggression and people should put it out of their minds as an argument for these wars. It is a bogus doctrine, a doctrine invented by fascists.
Worse they base the resort to this false doctrine on false facts because the UN Human Rights Council sent a Special Rapporteur to investigate the conditions in Venezuela and the cause of them. The man assigned dutifully went there, investigated and dutifully filed his report which because it did not accord with what they had hoped he would report was suppressed and we only know about it through an interview he gave to the press. Mr. Alfred de Zeyas reported to the UN that it was the illegal economic sanctions imposed by the US, Canada and their other allies that are the principal cause of the hardships being created in Venezuela and that they are illegal and should be ended and that the countries imposing them should be charged for committing crimes against humanity, I could quote him at length but I think the reader deserves to read this interview in full as much as de Zeyas deserves to he heard. We can only hope that the ICC Prosecutor will read his report and act on it. But I won’t hold my breath waiting.
The people of the world must protest this war, protest against these criminals who control the machinery of state in their nations for the crimes we see them commit against peoples in foreign lands so openly are the very crimes they are committing against us at home. We are all targets. No one is immune. The war on the people of Venezuela, and now, for good measure, Cuba and other socialist countries, against any form of socialism everywhere, is a war against us all.
Monday, March 18, 2019
SC185-11
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/chelsea-manning-and-the-silencing-of-the-press/
Chelsea Manning and the New Inquisition
The U.S. government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing the same material. There is no federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on March 8 was sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about this issue.
If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been severed.
Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009, provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000 documents copied from military and government archives, including the “Collateral Murder” video footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians that included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and found guilty in 2013.
The campaign to criminalize whistleblowing has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to those who have the skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden did, needed to hack into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents. This is why hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced. The failure of news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The target is the press itself.
“If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose,” I wrote after I and Cornel West attended Manning’s sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 ‘violent deaths’ in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”
Manning has always insisted her leak of the classified documents and videos was prompted solely by her own conscience. She has refused to implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, although President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence after she served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary confinement and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in prison. She knows from painful experience the myriad ways the system can break you psychologically and physically. And yet she has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in court on behalf of the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps the last thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is deteriorating in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.
Manning—who was known as Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone gender reassignment surgery and needs frequent medical monitoring. Judge Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a request by her lawyers for house arrest. Manning was granted immunity by prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, and because she had immunity she was unable to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination or to have her attorney present. The judge found her in contempt of court and sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton, who has long been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has vowed to hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning said any questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the grand jury.
“All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010—answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in 2013,” she said on March 7, the day before she was jailed.
“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury,” she said later in a statement issued from jail. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.”
“The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events,” she went on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”
Manning reiterated that she “will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”
The New York Times, Britain’s The Guardian, Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all published the WikiLeaks files provided by Manning. How could they not? WikiLeaks had shamed them into doing their jobs. But once they took the incendiary material from Manning and Assange, these organizations callously abandoned them. No doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized against the two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press and cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian capitalism. President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, referring to them as the “enemy of the people.” Any legal tools given to the administration to shut down these news outlets, or at least hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the president.
The prosecutions of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems. The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism exposed as a con, have had enough of us examining and questioning their abuses, pillage and crimes.
“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange told me during one of our meetings at the embassy in London. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”
“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”
The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—wrote a book titled “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.”
“All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that can only produce a very controlling atmosphere.”
“How can a normal person be free within that system?” he asks. “[He or she] simply cannot, it’s impossible.”
It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and perhaps impossible to use.
“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.
Chelsea Manning and the New Inquisition
The U.S. government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing the same material. There is no federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on March 8 was sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about this issue.
If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been severed.
Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009, provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000 documents copied from military and government archives, including the “Collateral Murder” video footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians that included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and found guilty in 2013.
The campaign to criminalize whistleblowing has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to those who have the skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden did, needed to hack into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents. This is why hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced. The failure of news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The target is the press itself.
“If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose,” I wrote after I and Cornel West attended Manning’s sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 ‘violent deaths’ in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”
Manning has always insisted her leak of the classified documents and videos was prompted solely by her own conscience. She has refused to implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, although President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence after she served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary confinement and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in prison. She knows from painful experience the myriad ways the system can break you psychologically and physically. And yet she has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in court on behalf of the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps the last thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is deteriorating in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.
Manning—who was known as Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone gender reassignment surgery and needs frequent medical monitoring. Judge Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a request by her lawyers for house arrest. Manning was granted immunity by prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, and because she had immunity she was unable to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination or to have her attorney present. The judge found her in contempt of court and sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton, who has long been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has vowed to hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning said any questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the grand jury.
“All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010—answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in 2013,” she said on March 7, the day before she was jailed.
“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury,” she said later in a statement issued from jail. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.”
“The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events,” she went on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”
Manning reiterated that she “will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”
The New York Times, Britain’s The Guardian, Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all published the WikiLeaks files provided by Manning. How could they not? WikiLeaks had shamed them into doing their jobs. But once they took the incendiary material from Manning and Assange, these organizations callously abandoned them. No doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized against the two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press and cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian capitalism. President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, referring to them as the “enemy of the people.” Any legal tools given to the administration to shut down these news outlets, or at least hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the president.
The prosecutions of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems. The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism exposed as a con, have had enough of us examining and questioning their abuses, pillage and crimes.
“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange told me during one of our meetings at the embassy in London. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”
“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”
The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—wrote a book titled “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.”
“All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that can only produce a very controlling atmosphere.”
“How can a normal person be free within that system?” he asks. “[He or she] simply cannot, it’s impossible.”
It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and perhaps impossible to use.
“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
SC185-10
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
The Coming Crisis the Fed Can't Fix: Credit Exhaustion
Having fixed the liquidity crisis of 2008-09 and kept a perversely unequal "recovery" staggering forward for a decade, central banks now believe there is no crisis they can't defeat: Liquidity crisis? Flood the global financial system with liquidity. Interest rates above zero? Create trillions out of thin air and use the "free money" to buy bonds. Mortgage and housing markets shaky? Create another trillion and use it buy up mortgages.
And so on. Every economic-financial crisis can be fixed by creating trillions of out thin air, except the one we're entering--the exhaustion of credit. Central banks, like generals, always prepare to fight the last war and believe their preparation insures their victory.
China's central bank created over $1 trillion in January alone to flood China's faltering credit system with new credit-currency. Pouring new trillions into the financial system has always restarted the credit system, triggering renewed borrowing and lending that then powered yet another cycle of heedless consumption and mal-investment--oops, I meant development.
The elixir of new central bank money isn't working as intended, and this failure is now eroding trust in the central bank's fixes. Central banks can issue new credit to the private sector and it can can buy bonds, empty flats and mortgages, but no central bank can force over-indebted borrowers to borrow more or force wary lenders to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers.
Let's be honest: the entire global "recovery" since 2009 has been fueled by soaring debt. The output of more debt is declining, that is, every additional dollar of debt is no longer generating much in the way of positive returns. As with any stimulant, increasing the stimulant leads to diminishing returns.
Then there's the issue of debt saturation and debt exhaustion: those who are creditworthy no longer want to borrow more and those who are not creditworthy cannot borrow more, unless lenders want to eat the losses of default a few months after they issue the new loan.
The evidence is plain enough: defaults of student loans and auto loans are already at monumental levels, and the recession hasn't even started. Zero-percent financing for vehicles is a thing of the past, and those borrowers with average credit ratings are paying 6% or more for a new vehicle loan.
Coupled with the ever-higher prices of vehicles, this is leading to auto loans of $600 and $700 a month and lenders extending the duration of the loans from 5 to 7 years. Just how badly do households need a new vehicle at these rates and prices?
As for housing--unless the buyer just sold a house in a bubblicious market and has hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, housing is out of reach of the bottom 95% in many markets. This raises the other dynamic of credit exhaustion: the whole exercise of buying a home or dumping more money in stocks is ultimately based on greater fools arising who will pay substantially more that the buyer paid today.
Greater fools generally depend on credit to finance their purchase, and so the erosion of creditworthy borrowers means the pool of greater fools willing and able to pay $1.2 million for the old bungalow someone paid $1 million for today is drying up fast.
Only a fool buys an asset that is poised to lose value as the pool of future buyers dries up. No wonder insiders are selling stocks like no tomorrow, and housing markets have become decidedly sluggish: the pool of qualified borrowers who are willing to bet on another decade of central-bank goosed "growth at any cost" is shrinking rapidly.
The next crisis won't be one of liquidity that central banks can fix by emitting additional trillions; it's a crisis that's impervious to central bank manipulation. The credibility of central banks is already evaporating like spilled water in July-baked Death Valley.
Central banks cannot magically make uncreditworthy borrowers creditworthy or magically force those who have forsworn adding more debt to borrow more at high rates of interest, and as a result they are powerless to stop the tide of credit from ebbing.
Thus will end the central banks' bombastic hubris and the public's faith in central banks' godlike powers, the "global growth" story, the China story, and all the other fairy tales that have passed as policies for the past decade rather than what they really were: politically expedient cover for the greatest expansion of inequality in modern history.
The Coming Crisis the Fed Can't Fix: Credit Exhaustion
Having fixed the liquidity crisis of 2008-09 and kept a perversely unequal "recovery" staggering forward for a decade, central banks now believe there is no crisis they can't defeat: Liquidity crisis? Flood the global financial system with liquidity. Interest rates above zero? Create trillions out of thin air and use the "free money" to buy bonds. Mortgage and housing markets shaky? Create another trillion and use it buy up mortgages.
And so on. Every economic-financial crisis can be fixed by creating trillions of out thin air, except the one we're entering--the exhaustion of credit. Central banks, like generals, always prepare to fight the last war and believe their preparation insures their victory.
China's central bank created over $1 trillion in January alone to flood China's faltering credit system with new credit-currency. Pouring new trillions into the financial system has always restarted the credit system, triggering renewed borrowing and lending that then powered yet another cycle of heedless consumption and mal-investment--oops, I meant development.
The elixir of new central bank money isn't working as intended, and this failure is now eroding trust in the central bank's fixes. Central banks can issue new credit to the private sector and it can can buy bonds, empty flats and mortgages, but no central bank can force over-indebted borrowers to borrow more or force wary lenders to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers.
Let's be honest: the entire global "recovery" since 2009 has been fueled by soaring debt. The output of more debt is declining, that is, every additional dollar of debt is no longer generating much in the way of positive returns. As with any stimulant, increasing the stimulant leads to diminishing returns.
Then there's the issue of debt saturation and debt exhaustion: those who are creditworthy no longer want to borrow more and those who are not creditworthy cannot borrow more, unless lenders want to eat the losses of default a few months after they issue the new loan.
The evidence is plain enough: defaults of student loans and auto loans are already at monumental levels, and the recession hasn't even started. Zero-percent financing for vehicles is a thing of the past, and those borrowers with average credit ratings are paying 6% or more for a new vehicle loan.
Coupled with the ever-higher prices of vehicles, this is leading to auto loans of $600 and $700 a month and lenders extending the duration of the loans from 5 to 7 years. Just how badly do households need a new vehicle at these rates and prices?
As for housing--unless the buyer just sold a house in a bubblicious market and has hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, housing is out of reach of the bottom 95% in many markets. This raises the other dynamic of credit exhaustion: the whole exercise of buying a home or dumping more money in stocks is ultimately based on greater fools arising who will pay substantially more that the buyer paid today.
Greater fools generally depend on credit to finance their purchase, and so the erosion of creditworthy borrowers means the pool of greater fools willing and able to pay $1.2 million for the old bungalow someone paid $1 million for today is drying up fast.
Only a fool buys an asset that is poised to lose value as the pool of future buyers dries up. No wonder insiders are selling stocks like no tomorrow, and housing markets have become decidedly sluggish: the pool of qualified borrowers who are willing to bet on another decade of central-bank goosed "growth at any cost" is shrinking rapidly.
The next crisis won't be one of liquidity that central banks can fix by emitting additional trillions; it's a crisis that's impervious to central bank manipulation. The credibility of central banks is already evaporating like spilled water in July-baked Death Valley.
Central banks cannot magically make uncreditworthy borrowers creditworthy or magically force those who have forsworn adding more debt to borrow more at high rates of interest, and as a result they are powerless to stop the tide of credit from ebbing.
Thus will end the central banks' bombastic hubris and the public's faith in central banks' godlike powers, the "global growth" story, the China story, and all the other fairy tales that have passed as policies for the past decade rather than what they really were: politically expedient cover for the greatest expansion of inequality in modern history.
Thursday, March 14, 2019
SC185-9
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/03/11/federal-reserve-chairman-appears-on-60-minutes-why-now/
Federal Reserve Chairman Appears on 60 Minutes – Why Now?
One of the most famous, and prescient, financial cartoons in American history is the above depiction of the Federal Reserve Bank as a giant octopus that would come to parasitically suck the life out of all U.S. institutions as well as free markets.
The image is taken from Alfred Owen Crozier’s U.S. Money Vs Corporation Currency, “Aldrich Plan,” Wall Street Confessions! Great Bank Combine, published in 1912, just a year before the creation of the Federal Reserve.
Last night, the current high priest of money printing, asset bubbles and inequality, Jerome Powell, appeared on 60 Minutes. Interviewer Scott Pelley mentioned the fact that such discussions are rare and noted the last time a Fed head appeared for such a chat was Ben Bernanke back in 2010.
As such, what I find most interesting about this event wasn’t Powell’s boilerplate, bureaucratic propaganda about how the economy’s doing fine and how much central bankers love average Americans, but why he and the institution he heads felt a need to do this now.
There’s no doubt something has the Fed spooked otherwise Powell never would have done this. One factor is they know the economic ground’s starting to shift beneath them, and they need to push a particular narrative ahead of time so central bankers can once again do as they please when “the time to act” arrives.
This is why Powell pushed the blame on the current economic slowdown on China and Europe. The Fed is no different than your average politician. It takes full credit when things go well, but endlessly deflects and blames outside forces when things fall apart.
Rule number 1 of the Federal Reserve: It’s never the Fed’s fault.
Rule number 2 of the Federal Reserve: It’s never the Fed’s fault.
Rule number 3 of the Federal Reserve…
You get the point. If central bankers accept blame, or admit they got anything over the past decade terribly wrong, then they can’t justify doing more of the same and worse in the future. And that’s exactly what they plan to do, by the way.
Which brings me to the purpose of this piece. The reason I’ve started writing about such topics again after a multi-year hiatus is because the chickens are finally coming home to roost. The recent global slowdown and concurrent central banker panic is proof we’ve arrived at a very important inflection point. The central bankers hope they can prolong this already historic and obscene financial asset bubble a little longer via manipulation and propaganda, but they also understand it may be the end of the road for this cycle.
As such, every person in the world needs to understand what the Fed and other central banks did during the last crisis, and what they plan on doing the next time around (more of the same and worse). If you judge an economy based on stock market performance and aggregate GDP, you might think the Fed did a great job over the past decade, but if you judge it based how we’ve turned an entire generation of young people into debt slaves, arrived at levels of inequality unseen since just before the Great Depression and catalyzed an explosion of populist politics throughout the western world, you might be ready to grab a pitchfork.
What central banks have achieved over the past decade is a surreptitious transfer of risk and cost away from elites and onto the general public. They sent benchmark interest rates down to zero, but only the corporate and financial class really benefits from such distortions. They’re the ones who bought up all the foreclosed upon real estate (hello Blackstone) only to rent it right back to those who were evicted. They’re the ones who can issue debt on the cheap to buyback shares in order to dump their personal holdings to their own corporations. At the same time, credit card interest rates for the average person are at record highs of 17.64%. So who really benefits from the Fed’s record low rates?
What I also think has the Fed spooked is the fact the public is slowly but surely catching on to its scam. The increased popularity of MMT in the public conversation is proof of this. People are starting to wonder why the central bank can print money and buy assets to save the portfolios of baby boomers, yet the public can’t simply print money for stuff like healthcare, education and roads. The Fed intentionally obfuscates what it does (money printing) with terms like “quantitative easing,” but people are starting to get the joke. The Fed doesn’t want people thinking about such things.
Another sign that non-financial types are starting to pay more attention to such topics was made clear when I saw Michael Hudson interviewed on the Jimmy Dore show. If you haven’t seen it, take a watch.
The monetary system is slowly being exposed for the scam that it is. It’s merely an opaque and unaccountable mechanism to bail-out and entrench the wealthiest and most powerful segments of society at the expense of the general public. This is one reason the Fed is currently panicking and so desperate to craft and promulgate an alternative narrative.
The Fed will try to do what it did ten years ago (and then some) the next time the economy craters. They already transferred trillions from future generations and society at large to financial industry elites once in the past decade. Will we let them do it again?
....
Quantitative easing is legalized counterfeiting
And here are a couple of video links with additional information about the Fed
....
How Wall Street Gave Us Trump w/Michael Hudson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSvcB55R8jM
....
The Fed Stooges
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114876/video-fed-stooges
Federal Reserve Chairman Appears on 60 Minutes – Why Now?
One of the most famous, and prescient, financial cartoons in American history is the above depiction of the Federal Reserve Bank as a giant octopus that would come to parasitically suck the life out of all U.S. institutions as well as free markets.
The image is taken from Alfred Owen Crozier’s U.S. Money Vs Corporation Currency, “Aldrich Plan,” Wall Street Confessions! Great Bank Combine, published in 1912, just a year before the creation of the Federal Reserve.
Last night, the current high priest of money printing, asset bubbles and inequality, Jerome Powell, appeared on 60 Minutes. Interviewer Scott Pelley mentioned the fact that such discussions are rare and noted the last time a Fed head appeared for such a chat was Ben Bernanke back in 2010.
As such, what I find most interesting about this event wasn’t Powell’s boilerplate, bureaucratic propaganda about how the economy’s doing fine and how much central bankers love average Americans, but why he and the institution he heads felt a need to do this now.
There’s no doubt something has the Fed spooked otherwise Powell never would have done this. One factor is they know the economic ground’s starting to shift beneath them, and they need to push a particular narrative ahead of time so central bankers can once again do as they please when “the time to act” arrives.
This is why Powell pushed the blame on the current economic slowdown on China and Europe. The Fed is no different than your average politician. It takes full credit when things go well, but endlessly deflects and blames outside forces when things fall apart.
Rule number 1 of the Federal Reserve: It’s never the Fed’s fault.
Rule number 2 of the Federal Reserve: It’s never the Fed’s fault.
Rule number 3 of the Federal Reserve…
You get the point. If central bankers accept blame, or admit they got anything over the past decade terribly wrong, then they can’t justify doing more of the same and worse in the future. And that’s exactly what they plan to do, by the way.
Which brings me to the purpose of this piece. The reason I’ve started writing about such topics again after a multi-year hiatus is because the chickens are finally coming home to roost. The recent global slowdown and concurrent central banker panic is proof we’ve arrived at a very important inflection point. The central bankers hope they can prolong this already historic and obscene financial asset bubble a little longer via manipulation and propaganda, but they also understand it may be the end of the road for this cycle.
As such, every person in the world needs to understand what the Fed and other central banks did during the last crisis, and what they plan on doing the next time around (more of the same and worse). If you judge an economy based on stock market performance and aggregate GDP, you might think the Fed did a great job over the past decade, but if you judge it based how we’ve turned an entire generation of young people into debt slaves, arrived at levels of inequality unseen since just before the Great Depression and catalyzed an explosion of populist politics throughout the western world, you might be ready to grab a pitchfork.
What central banks have achieved over the past decade is a surreptitious transfer of risk and cost away from elites and onto the general public. They sent benchmark interest rates down to zero, but only the corporate and financial class really benefits from such distortions. They’re the ones who bought up all the foreclosed upon real estate (hello Blackstone) only to rent it right back to those who were evicted. They’re the ones who can issue debt on the cheap to buyback shares in order to dump their personal holdings to their own corporations. At the same time, credit card interest rates for the average person are at record highs of 17.64%. So who really benefits from the Fed’s record low rates?
What I also think has the Fed spooked is the fact the public is slowly but surely catching on to its scam. The increased popularity of MMT in the public conversation is proof of this. People are starting to wonder why the central bank can print money and buy assets to save the portfolios of baby boomers, yet the public can’t simply print money for stuff like healthcare, education and roads. The Fed intentionally obfuscates what it does (money printing) with terms like “quantitative easing,” but people are starting to get the joke. The Fed doesn’t want people thinking about such things.
Another sign that non-financial types are starting to pay more attention to such topics was made clear when I saw Michael Hudson interviewed on the Jimmy Dore show. If you haven’t seen it, take a watch.
The monetary system is slowly being exposed for the scam that it is. It’s merely an opaque and unaccountable mechanism to bail-out and entrench the wealthiest and most powerful segments of society at the expense of the general public. This is one reason the Fed is currently panicking and so desperate to craft and promulgate an alternative narrative.
The Fed will try to do what it did ten years ago (and then some) the next time the economy craters. They already transferred trillions from future generations and society at large to financial industry elites once in the past decade. Will we let them do it again?
....
Quantitative easing is legalized counterfeiting
And here are a couple of video links with additional information about the Fed
....
How Wall Street Gave Us Trump w/Michael Hudson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSvcB55R8jM
....
The Fed Stooges
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114876/video-fed-stooges
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
SC185-8
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51270.htm
Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America
“Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away…”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet
March 13, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - War spending is bankrupting America.
Our nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments.
America has so much to offer—creativity, ingenuity, vast natural resources, a rich heritage, a beautifully diverse populace, a freedom foundation unrivaled anywhere in the world, and opportunities galore—and yet our birthright is being sold out from under us so that power-hungry politicians, greedy military contractors, and bloodthirsty war hawks can make a hefty profit at our expense.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for national security and urgent military needs.
It’s all a ruse.
You know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the government’s fiscal year? Government agencies—including the Department of Defense—go on a “use it or lose it” spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the next fiscal year.
We’re not talking chump change, either.
We’re talking $97 billion worth of wasteful spending.
According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).
So much for draining the swamp.
Anyone who suggests that the military needs more money is either criminally clueless or equally corrupt, because the military isn’t suffering from lack of funding—it’s suffering from lack of proper oversight.
Where President Trump fits into that scenario, you decide.
Trump may turn out to be, as policy analyst Stan Collender warned, “the biggest deficit- and debt-increasing president of all time.”
Rest assured, however, that if Trump gets his way—to the tune of a $4.7 trillion budget that digs the nation deeper in debt to foreign creditors, adds $750 billion for the military budget, and doubles the debt growth that Trump once promised to erase—the war profiteers (and foreign banks who “own” our debt) will be raking in a fortune while America goes belly up.
This is basic math, and the numbers just don’t add up.
As it now stands, the U.S. government is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad.
Certainly, nothing about the way the government budgets its funds puts America’s needs first.
The nation’s educational system is pathetic (young people are learning nothing about their freedoms or their government). The infrastructure is antiquated and growing more outdated by the day. The health system is overpriced and inaccessible to those who need it most. The supposedly robust economy is belied by the daily reports of businesses shuttering storefronts and declaring bankruptcy. And our so-called representative government is a sham.
If this is a formula for making America great again, it’s not working.
The White House wants taxpayers to accept that the only way to reduce the nation’s ballooning deficit is by cutting “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare, yet the glaring economic truth is that at the end of the day, it’s the military industrial complex—and not the sick, the elderly or the poor—that is pushing America towards bankruptcy.
We have become a debtor nation, and the government is sinking us deeper into debt with every passing day that it allows the military industrial complex to call the shots.
Simply put, the government cannot afford to maintain its over-extended military empire.
“Money is the new 800-pound gorilla,” remarked a senior administration official involved in Afghanistan. “It shifts the debate from ‘Is the strategy working?’ to ‘Can we afford this?’ And when you view it that way, the scope of the mission that we have now is far, far less defensible.” Or as one commentator noted, “Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it.”
To be clear, the U.S government’s defense spending is about one thing and one thing only: establishing and maintaining a global military empire.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.
In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.
Then there’s the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the world and policing the globe with 1.3 million U.S. troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.
As The Nation reports:
For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year.
For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.
Those who call the shots in the government—those who push the military industrial complex’s agenda—those who make a killing by embroiling the U.S. in foreign wars—have not heeded Johnson’s warning.
The U.S. government is not making American citizens any safer. The repercussions of America’s military empire have been deadly, not only for those innocent men, women and children killed by drone strikes abroad but also those here in the United States....
....All of this carnage is being carried out with the full support of the American people, or at least with the proxy that is our taxpayer dollars.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, under a military empire, war and its profiteering will always take precedence over the people’s basic human needs.
Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower warned us not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?”
We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.
It’s not sustainable, of course.
Eventually, inevitably, military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.
It happened in Rome. It’s happening again.
The America empire is already breaking down.
We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front, and the government is ready.
For years now, the government has worked with the military to prepare for widespread civil unrest brought about by “economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
For years now, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.
We’re approaching critical mass.
As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to wage its costly, meaningless, endless wars abroad, the American homeland will continue to suffer: our roads will crumble, our bridges will fail, our schools will fall into disrepair, our drinking water will become undrinkable, our communities will destabilize, our economy will tank, crime will rise, and our freedoms will suffer.
So who will save us?
As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’d better start saving ourselves: one by one, neighbor to neighbor, through grassroots endeavors, by pushing back against the police state where it most counts—in our communities first and foremost, and by holding fast to what binds us together and not allowing politics and other manufactured nonrealities to tear us apart.
Start today. Start now. Do your part.
Literally and figuratively, the buck starts and stops with “we the people.”
Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America
“Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away…”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet
March 13, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - War spending is bankrupting America.
Our nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments.
America has so much to offer—creativity, ingenuity, vast natural resources, a rich heritage, a beautifully diverse populace, a freedom foundation unrivaled anywhere in the world, and opportunities galore—and yet our birthright is being sold out from under us so that power-hungry politicians, greedy military contractors, and bloodthirsty war hawks can make a hefty profit at our expense.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for national security and urgent military needs.
It’s all a ruse.
You know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the government’s fiscal year? Government agencies—including the Department of Defense—go on a “use it or lose it” spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the next fiscal year.
We’re not talking chump change, either.
We’re talking $97 billion worth of wasteful spending.
According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).
So much for draining the swamp.
Anyone who suggests that the military needs more money is either criminally clueless or equally corrupt, because the military isn’t suffering from lack of funding—it’s suffering from lack of proper oversight.
Where President Trump fits into that scenario, you decide.
Trump may turn out to be, as policy analyst Stan Collender warned, “the biggest deficit- and debt-increasing president of all time.”
Rest assured, however, that if Trump gets his way—to the tune of a $4.7 trillion budget that digs the nation deeper in debt to foreign creditors, adds $750 billion for the military budget, and doubles the debt growth that Trump once promised to erase—the war profiteers (and foreign banks who “own” our debt) will be raking in a fortune while America goes belly up.
This is basic math, and the numbers just don’t add up.
As it now stands, the U.S. government is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad.
Certainly, nothing about the way the government budgets its funds puts America’s needs first.
The nation’s educational system is pathetic (young people are learning nothing about their freedoms or their government). The infrastructure is antiquated and growing more outdated by the day. The health system is overpriced and inaccessible to those who need it most. The supposedly robust economy is belied by the daily reports of businesses shuttering storefronts and declaring bankruptcy. And our so-called representative government is a sham.
If this is a formula for making America great again, it’s not working.
The White House wants taxpayers to accept that the only way to reduce the nation’s ballooning deficit is by cutting “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare, yet the glaring economic truth is that at the end of the day, it’s the military industrial complex—and not the sick, the elderly or the poor—that is pushing America towards bankruptcy.
We have become a debtor nation, and the government is sinking us deeper into debt with every passing day that it allows the military industrial complex to call the shots.
Simply put, the government cannot afford to maintain its over-extended military empire.
“Money is the new 800-pound gorilla,” remarked a senior administration official involved in Afghanistan. “It shifts the debate from ‘Is the strategy working?’ to ‘Can we afford this?’ And when you view it that way, the scope of the mission that we have now is far, far less defensible.” Or as one commentator noted, “Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it.”
To be clear, the U.S government’s defense spending is about one thing and one thing only: establishing and maintaining a global military empire.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.
In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.
Then there’s the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the world and policing the globe with 1.3 million U.S. troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.
As The Nation reports:
For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year.
For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.
Those who call the shots in the government—those who push the military industrial complex’s agenda—those who make a killing by embroiling the U.S. in foreign wars—have not heeded Johnson’s warning.
The U.S. government is not making American citizens any safer. The repercussions of America’s military empire have been deadly, not only for those innocent men, women and children killed by drone strikes abroad but also those here in the United States....
....All of this carnage is being carried out with the full support of the American people, or at least with the proxy that is our taxpayer dollars.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, under a military empire, war and its profiteering will always take precedence over the people’s basic human needs.
Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower warned us not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?”
We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.
It’s not sustainable, of course.
Eventually, inevitably, military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.
It happened in Rome. It’s happening again.
The America empire is already breaking down.
We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front, and the government is ready.
For years now, the government has worked with the military to prepare for widespread civil unrest brought about by “economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
For years now, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.
We’re approaching critical mass.
As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to wage its costly, meaningless, endless wars abroad, the American homeland will continue to suffer: our roads will crumble, our bridges will fail, our schools will fall into disrepair, our drinking water will become undrinkable, our communities will destabilize, our economy will tank, crime will rise, and our freedoms will suffer.
So who will save us?
As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’d better start saving ourselves: one by one, neighbor to neighbor, through grassroots endeavors, by pushing back against the police state where it most counts—in our communities first and foremost, and by holding fast to what binds us together and not allowing politics and other manufactured nonrealities to tear us apart.
Start today. Start now. Do your part.
Literally and figuratively, the buck starts and stops with “we the people.”
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