Iran has held sway over Iraq ever since Bush II sent in American troops. Iran's leaders are skilled at adapting and adjusting their diplomacy to the changing fortunes of the different political groups operating within Iraq. Washington has never been able to gain enough influence in Iraq to outflank the Iranians, partly because American strategic thinking is too militarized, and American military thinking is too commercialized.
Washington criticizes the IRGC for engaging in commerce, which is laughable considering how the American military now has a growing component of mercenaries whose activities are commercializing the military in ways that go far beyond the awarding of defense contracts.
Paladino, Bush II, Emanuel, Obama -- they're much alike but have different styles.
Obama prefers to have FBI agents raid the houses of innocent Americans who oppose the war in Afghanistan. The excuse that they were conducting a rogue operation doesn't wash. In fact they were utilizing federal funds dedicated to spying on, harassing and criminalizing the citizenry.
As to Emanuel, at least Pelosi had the courage to say 'f... you' to his face when he tried to bully her into giving up on expanding health coverage to poorer Americans.
American military intervention in Pakistan, either direct or through remote-controlled bombing, has parallels that reflect faith in counter-productive top-down thinking:
1) the Fed thwarts market forces by holding interest rates at zero, making it easy for American companies to borrow American private savings in order to invest and create jobs overseas, as Walmart just said it will do in South Africa;
2) instead of recognizing that the growing regulatory thicket governing commerce hampers capital investments that create jobs in the USA, Washington keeps setting up new bureaucracies that will issue yet more regulations;
3) instead of letting large financial institutions and large industrial corporations go through the orderly process of bankruptcy when they fail, Washington props them up by seizing private savings that would have gone into job-creating capital investment;
4) instead of letting states that have been overspending deal with the consequences, Washington is now planning on seizing private savings in order to rescue those states;
5) instead of letting the marketplace explore alternatives to oil and coal, Washington under Bush II favored ethanol, which as a result distorted normal planting strategies, damaged topsoil and polluted the environment;
6) the Tea Party, which says it wants to cut federal spending by shrinking the size of government, also wants to keep increasing the the far-flung activities of the military, and supports candidates who want to strengthen federal control of personal behavior.
Washington is carrying out a strategy that can't fail: namely, create more insurgents through remote-controlled bombing, and then make more bombing runs in order to attack the newly created insurgents, thus justifying the continued expansion of the military's effort to eliminate insurgents.
Netanyahu knew that by having the USA exclude Hamas, he'd made certain the talks would go nowhere. Abbas knew he had little chance of wielding influence unless the USA excluded Hamas. Both Netanyahu and Abbas have already achieved the most they could expect to achieve. Kadima knew all this and was willing to play along.
If she and her ilk take over Washington, the nation will break up. There's no law guaranteeing that the nation will outlast the shared values that built it and led to its growth.
Makdisi's commentary's outstanding. American diplomacy is constrained by economic forces that the American military knows how to exploit.
Unfettered by national conscription, the commercialized military is bent on waging wars that feed its own growing needs. Federal budgetary excesses will only serve to accelerate the military's progress toward becoming an independent entity that generates its own income by controlling arms sales, contractors and mercenaries. The military will undertake wars in order to support its own logistical needs. The counter-productive war on drugs will bring in growing profits. Although Obama may want to free his administration from the military's grip, he has no choice but to protect his political flank from those who see military strength as signifying national well being. Petraeus had the nerve to complain about Israeli influence because the military's becoming more independent as politicians are becoming more helpless. For instance, Tea Party types never breathe a word about cutting military spending: they know a sacred cow when they see one.
In calculating GDP, a meaningless composite as it is, economists fail to account for the wasted productivity that war represents. To this day American economists think WWII ended the Great Depression: they overlook how it destroyed the fruits of American industrial output. Measured by the narrow view of profits, the military may survive the nation it's bound to destroy, just as the final centuries of the Roman Empire saw the military acting as a parasite sucking the life out of the economy.
Outstanding analysis. Washington tops the worldwide rankings for being skilled at shooting itself in the foot. Bush installed the Shiites by toppling Saddam, then the Shiites transformed Iraq into Iran's client state. Later, Petraeus strengthened the Shiites' hold on Baghdad by cleansing the city of Sunnis. Meanwhile the very neocons who urged Bush to invade Iraq have been shrieking about attacking Iran and are now urging Obama to bring the Sunnis back into power in Iraq.
Sanctions are counter-productive because they represent top-down thinking. Oil will always find a way out, which shows that wars aimed at controlling oil resources are futile, as Hitler found out in WWII when he invaded Russia in order to get at its oil fields.
For Castro, the lesson is that American sanctions had nothing to do with Cuba's failed economy. His own top-down thinking in blindly aping the Soviet Kremlin's doomed economic policies has been just as damaging to Cuba as Washington's increasingly top-down thinking has been to the USA. Now that Cuba's opening up, Americans will be the last to benefit.
Washington's bleating about Chinese currency manipulation is yet another self-inflicted wound, considering how Washington's manipulated the dollar for generations. The upshot of Washington's intervening in the markets is that Americans will be left behind as Asian nations thrive.
Today's Iraqi authorities learned from the invaders that jailing and mistreating innocent civilians is the way to go. Saddam behaved no worse than the invaders who dethroned him. Operating on a larger scale than Saddam had, the invaders drove millions of Iraqis from their houses and pushed many of those to leave their country, besides bringing a further million to an early grave by depriving them of water, electricity, health care, education, employment and other things that prevailed under Saddam. Above all, the invaders dealt a blow to women's rights. The fact that untold billions of dollars went missing in the Green Zone is just icing on the cake.
The beauty of it all is that by crossing the border in 2003, the invaders immediately handed Iraq to Iran, although they don't know it yet. Now Iraq looks more like Iran than it did under Saddam, while Iraq's leaders seek the guidance of Iran's leaders.
In turn, Iran's the new bogeyman that the invaders are presenting to the world. The invaders are fantasists who dream up ways of wasting their own nation's lives, material resources and production, whose scientists make a living by devising new ways of killing by remote control, and whose politicians toady to big bankers who steal the public's savings by enforcing a monetary system that's a fraud.
Certain EU countries keep raising the bar against Turkey, but the EU economic crisis has yet to run its course and some day Turkey will be glad it's still outside the EU, which is destined to become a source of busboys and housemaids for prospering Asian countries.
Loss leaders have the same economic effect on tv as in supermarkets. People who watch Fox News are buying the news from Murdoch whether they think so or not. Those who think they're getting tv news for nothing are selling themselves short. Even public broadcasting isn't actually free. One is welcome to distinguish between loss leaders by industry, but Murdoch knows how to use loss leaders in order to make money. As the economy shrinks, as the ranks of frightened whites grow, as politicians who disbelieve peer-reviewed, evidence-based science win more elections, advertisers will spend more on Murdoch's increasingly popular oddities, knowing that those who view such shows will then add to the numbers watching Fox News, which advertisers already support to the hilt. The next step is that other tv networks will add more oddities to their schedules in order to match Murdoch. Everybody wins but truth.
If Fox News didn't exist, Americans would still have the same outlook. Instead of manipulating public opinion, Fox is following and representing the views of frightened whites, who see themselves as losing ground. Murdoch's willing to broadcast certain shows that don't attract enough advertising because such shows build the audiences for shows that attract plenty of advertising. It's what a supermarket does in offering certain items at prices that are set below cost.
Gul Jammas Hussein makes sense. The authors of false flag attacks don't acknowledge their deeds, which they carry out more often than the public thinks. Hussein writes better in English than 99% of Americans do: his idiom's superb.
You keep your anger in control enough to describe with clarity how Karzai's regime is a ponzi scheme masquerading as a progressive government. Here in the USA, mainstream media emphasized the enormity of Bernie Madoff's scheme because Washington and big bankers needed to avert the public's eyes from the enormity of their own crimes in stealing the taxpayer blind in order that Wall Streeters might keep bagging huge bonuses.
What Americans don't realize is that since the late 1950s when the federal balance sheet started going down the path to world-beating indebtedness, Washington, aided by big bankers, has been running a ponzi scheme fated to end in sovereign default either outright or through terminal weakening of the dollar. The upshot will be that most Americans will be standing in breadlines as the big bankers impose a new monetary system on the nation. But by then the middle class will have disappeared. The big bankers will have enriched themselves by using the taxpayer's savings in order to collect on their winning derivatives bets, such as the ones against AIG that Washington helped them collect. These bets now total roughly a quadrillion dollars. Although the weakening dollar means the winning bets when collected won't be worth what they are on paper today, it's worth it to the bankers to collect even a small fraction of the total. Their motto is 'half a loaf is better than none'.
All that Karzai has been doing is to imitate Washington and American big bankers.
Both major parties are well versed in scapegoating and it's not just muslims who suffer. The object is to oppress young minority males and, where possible, to take away their voting rights. To bring young muslim males into the mix is a natural development. An example is how mainstream media continually highlight with alarm the spread of islam among minority prisoners.
But it's the war on drugs, enjoying unstinted bipartisan support, that has had unbounded success in scapegoating young minority males. For instance, the DEA has started training operatives to understand ebonics, a step that presumes drug activity among blacks even though it's whites who per capita buy, sell and consume the most drugs, specially the costlier drugs. But it's blacks and latinos who far and away spend the most time in prison, showing that official discrimination has evolved like bacteria in order to soothe the growing anxieties of frightened whites.
Politicians are hardly leading the way here: they're only carrying out the wishes of frightened white voters. As muslims become more prominent, they'll face an increasing degree of targeted policing.
You're right to question the drone attacks and the cotton tariff. The only way it makes sense is if Washington, in acting as a neo-colonial power, wants to topple the Pakistani government.
Whether it's the USA, China or Europe, countries that resort to protectionism are harming the interests of their own citizens and are undermining their own economies.
Republican opinionmakers are pandering to frightened Whites. Believe it or not, they're also bringing in some aspiring Blacks. Hispanics are less likely to fall under their spell. Asians are harder to read as a group: being far better educated, they think for themselves. Jews divide into two camps: those who align themselves with Christian Zionists and those who think for themselves.
The 'us and them' mentality is spreading as the USA slides deeper into the economic ditch.
Iraqis can only see things from where they are, just as Americans can only see things from where they are. Slipping by nearly unnoticed is the commercialization of the American military and the American diplomatic corps. Although the official line is that combat troops are gone, it's American volunteers who've been leaving. Offsetting the shrinking ranks of volunteers who are still in Iraq are the growing numbers of mercenaries. Anybody who doubts that both the USA's military and its diplomatic corps are commercialized needs to look into the $9 billion that went missing during the war, as well as consider the size of the American embassy. Washington didn't let these results come about on a whim. It's the American taxpayer who's funding this increasing emphasis on grandiosity and profiteering. Small wonder that jobs are disappearing from the private sector here in the USA.
In Afghanistan, Karzai is cleverer than his Iraqi counterparts. Despite American efforts to portray him as being crazed and corrupt, he has the sense to push back against American commercialization of the war. Washington treats as corrupt any foreign leader who blocks American war profiteering.
Bolton and his ilk are traitors. They want Israel to do things that will drag Washington into attacking Iran in order to defend Israel. It would be all right if Bolton were a lone wolf, but his hysteria finds congenial ground in Congress.
This is one instance, though, where the growing clout of Israel's Russian immigrants may restrain those who want an attack against Iran. As time goes by, American influence with Israel is waning while Russian influence waxes. Besides, Americans can't offer Israelis access to the amount of natural resources that Russians can.
Russian leaders think first about what's good for Russia. American leaders instead think first about what's good for Israel, which is a sign of continued American decay.
It's true that "the American way of doing economics encourages such blinders" -- moreover, the international monetary system existing today misallocates financial resources, leading to the misuse and wasting of physical resources. Instead of letting individual people participating in the marketplace determine which fiduciary media to use as money and which interest rates to apply in their dealings, governments worldwide enforce legal tender laws and interfere with interest rates. Two extremes are the USSR, where top-down planning resulted in overproduction of tractors and shortages of basic necessities, and Zimbabwe, where the printing of growing amounts of legal tender enabled insiders, who got the new money first, to keep pace with accelerating price inflation by investing in the local stock market while the general population became penniless and starved.
The same thing is happening here today. That insiders get the new money first is clear from how Bush rescued Wall Streeters. But what the public doesn't see is how the Federal Reserve enriches bondholders by carrying out open market operations, thus allowing bond traders to front-run the Fed. There's been a nearly 30 year bull market in bonds that has fostered a sequence of bubbles in different market sectors, the most recent being in housing, which attracted financial and physical resources that far exceeded the needs of the populace.
Governments worldwide intervene in the marketplace by passing laws and introducing regulations in order to correct the continually mushrooming economic imbalances that the monetary system generates, but the effort is fruitless and the mess keeps growing. The monetary system is bound to collapse, but that will be good for the environment if governments then set the marketplace free by eliminating subsidies to oil companies and by foregoing all other favoritism.
This trick of demonizing Arabs whenever there's a chance, and of requiring American taxpayers to fund Apartheid overseas, is fostering the mentality that leads Americans to act out their prejudices, as they have in Arizona.
Whenever NATO forces kill a large number of Afghani civilians, even though American troops on the ground may cover it up, Afghani officials publicize it to the world. The White House and the Pentagon know they need to keep Americans interested in the war, and that means publicizing the deaths of bad guys so that Americans at home can slake their thirst for blood. Americans don't care whether any so-called bad guys happen to be civilians, which is why a popular cartoonist has portrayed the bombing of an Afghani wedding party in a lighthearted vein.
American officials know that by stonewalling they can lengthen the life of each such controversy. Within the USA, the mainstream news media play along by reporting the much higher number of civilian deaths that Afghani officials themselves disclose and proclaim in pointedly disagreeing with American officials. Thus the White House and the Pentagon get each atrocity across to Americans watching the news in their dens.
The public emphasis that the White House and the Pentagon place on avoiding civilian deaths is itself another way of reminding Americans that blood is being spilled.
It's the controversy that counts. Now the White House and the Pentagon are making statement after statement about Wikileaks, feeding the general controversy about civilian deaths. Had Washington ignored Wikileaks, only a handful of Americans would have noticed, considering the mass of unorganized material. Americans don't care about past cover-ups that weren't really cover-ups, they just want blood. The proof is that Congress keeps voting for war. Some Democrats posture about having wanted to vote against war, but it's all theater. There are powerful vested interests who buy the votes needed.
Americans pay taxes that fund the enforcing of Apartheid. Many of the Americans who don't want their government to regulate unharmful activity, do want their government to require all Americans to back harmful activity overseas.
Bush deserves credit for completing the American quest for failure. The instant he sent American girls and boys into Iraq, he handed Iraq to Iran, which Iraq had invaded in 1980 at American urging. Washington still doesn't realize that the USA lost Iraq to Iran in a war that took 23 years, ending with Bush's invasion. The following seven year stretch has seen ups and downs, but Iran's standing has remained supreme. For instance, in helping Shiites cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis, Petraeus may as well have been on Iran's payroll. What governments don't say means far more than what they say. Iran's silence is deafening: it's delighted with things as they are in Iraq. Besides, the Iranian leadership is busy stamping out music right now, thus providing the world with comedy that would be unbelievable were it in a novel.
Those massive aid donations were stolen from private savings held by citizens of Nato nations and Japan. No government has savings of its own to give away. Karzai's government's only following the lesson of theft that donor nations are teaching.
Thank you for posting this outstanding analysis. When more than 75% of the House vote together with 87 Senators to applaud the flotilla attack, which happened to kill an American citizen, it's clear that Washington's in thrall to its ally.
By forcing taxpayers to fund apartheid overseas, Washington emboldens white Americans to practice discrimination at home, as they do in Arizona and want to do elsewhere. The outlook that engenders belief in tribalism, blood and soil has found congenial ground among white Americans who prefer awaiting their rapture to strengthening education in the sciences.
It isn't the gridlock of partisan politics that keeps Americans from taking a saner path. It's the areas where the two major political parties agree that are undermining the nation's prospects. They agree to let the security of an allied nation come first. They agree to let defense spending outstrip financial resources. They agree to stretch out the war against Afghanistan in order to control the trade in heroin. They agree to fight a war on drugs that's a smokescreen for running guns to Mexico and for attacking the peasantry of Latin America. They agree to bolster the existing monetary regime based on economic theory that Keynes himself knew was a fraud favoring insiders and that Milton Friedman dressed up so that American politicians and banking interests could sell it better to the public. On such matters, the Tea Party acts as a subset of the establishment, and thus allows white Americans to luxuriate in the thought that they're being radical while in fact they're greasing the skids that will lead to national collapse.
The only part of the world that has yet bleaker prospects than the USA is Europe, whose grandchildren are destined to be servants to wealthy Asians.
Your commentaries are refreshing. Most white Americans are so brainwashed they don't want to think. The Tea Party's the latest scam: its promoters talk about shrinking government but they back the creeping militarization of government and they want to keep the handouts they enjoy today. They just don't want other folks to benefit.
Tom Engelhardt looks at the facts as scientists do. But the Pentagon knows it can only wage war as long as it can enthrall the American public by killing lots of bad guys, specially by using all the deadly technology that American taxpayers have funded. Americans don't care about civilian casualties in Afghanistan: they want to see blood. McChrystal was failing because he wasn't shedding enough blood. The same propagandists who equate Palestinians with terrorists and who make Americans think apartheid is glorious are painting all Afghanis as sympathizing with the Taliban. It goes hand in hand with breaking news about Karzai's negotiating with the Taliban. The object is to justify the killing of innocent civilians. Petraeus was careful in Baghdad to contrate American firepower on the Sunnis and thus to achieve ethnic cleansing, another way of giving the American public an identified set of dead or defeated bad guys. In Afghanistan he sees no easy way of differentiating one group of Afghanis from another, so if he's to slake the bloodthirstiness of the American public, he'll need to increase the body count no matter who dies.
NATO can plan all it wants: economic decline will force it to leave before 2014. Western markets will keep falling and won't hit bottom till after 2014. It's no coincidence that George W Bush launched the war in Afghanistan soon after American stock markets topped. It was his way of having the government pour money into the economy, which he accelerated by then launching the war in Iraq. Bush's last move was to create yet more money out of thin air in order to rescue AIG and bail out Wall Street. Obama's following in Bush's footsteps by flooding the marketplace with newly printed money, but the effect is to crowd out private savings, which are the only source of the capital that's needed to start businesses. Western economists get the story backwards: they say consumer spending drives the economy. But consumers can't spend unless they have jobs, and they can't find jobs unless new companies create them. But new companies can't create them unless they have access to capital. Not credit, but capital. Capital only comes from private savings: government has no savings. As Bush did and Obama has done, politicians rescue large businesses that are failing and that will never create jobs. It's start-up businesses that create jobs. Government has a role in fostering education, but can only weaken the economy by tampering with capital markets.
Politicians aren't going to let go of their talent for making the populace think there's a free lunch. The question is whether the bankers who take advantage of federal money-printing will restrain their greed soon enough to head off collapse by abandoning the existing monetary fraud. When government prints money, it's the bankers who get it first. When that money later trickles down to the populace, it's lost much of its value, but the bankers have done well.
Nasr's firing is disheartening. Concerning the Middle East and Israel, Americans have little access to the facts of the matter. The only source is the information that this blog and its counterparts provide.
Americans accept the tyranny they're living under because propagandists point their attention toward trivialities.
Biden says, "We'll be with you economically" -- easy to say, but the USA is the biggest debtor in history. China and Japan can't afford to finance American overspending any more, specially as in buying American debt and letting their own currencies float upward, they've been taking capital losses while the USA has been booking gains. Either the USA defaults on its debt again -- it defaulted wholesale on 15 August 1971, although by stealth -- or it carries out de facto default by weakening the dollar even faster. The upshot is that the USA will no longer be able to replace all those fancy armaments it's been wasting in unending warfare. Much less will it be able to fund non-military aid.
Warmongers are pawns who fail to see that our monetary system is falling apart, just as Europe's is. Other nations like China and Japan have been financing American debt but they have the same monetary system we have, so the collapse will be worldwide. Warfare destroys wealth, here and wherever fighting takes place. One can only guess what the warmongers will gain by driving our nation into the ditch: it may have something to do with how the leading international banking interests are bound to keep weakening the dollar, as measured in goods, till they've collected on all the winning bets on derivatives that they've made . One got a glimpse of that process in the taxpayer-funded rescue of AIG, which made a colossal amount of losing bets on derivatives: the knock-on effect was for Washington to rescue the international bankers who were on the winning side, not just the glorified Goldman Sachs, a fronting bank that seems glad to serve as a lightning rod for criticism that only goes skin deep and that also misses the point by not shining light on the monetary system itself, the system that Goldman and its international counterparts know how to exploit at taxpayer expense. One need only look at Europe, where German taxpayers are rescuing the international bankers that lent to Greece. Whether it's German taxpayers or American taxpayers who are gouged, governments are shifting massive amounts of private savings into the pockets of the international banking interests. This process depends on the central banking system that exists worldwide. Once the banking interests have collected on all their bets, they'll let the existing monetary system collapse, impoverishing billions of people, and they'll introduce a new system.
Obama worsened the mess by calculating American politics first, and then imposing American fantasies on Afghanistan. He promised victory and withdrawal. But his outlook suffers from the delusion that the USA won in Iraq, where in actuality Bush handed Iraq to Iran the instant American troops invaded. Afghanistan was never the USA's to win.
Turkey's in better shape than the USA is. Besides being fiscally sounder, Turkey has a more sophisticated foreign policy, having lined up Russia before challenging Israel. Turkey sees that Russian-born Israelis are gaining power in Israel and are closer to Moscow than to Washington. Our elected representatives know little about foreign policy and care less: they fail to grasp that the USA, being the greatest debtor ever, can ill afford to let Likud hold American foreign policy hostage. Also, in saying 'British Petroleum' instead of BP, Obama is fostering the same self-destructive outlook here that Likud fosters in Israel -- he ignores that Americans own 39% of BP stock, including pension funds covering millions of Americans.
He may have needed to protect his wife and child, who are still living in Iran, by reading a script written by the Iranians -- his American handlers would have helped him do this if he'd told them things worth knowing. But had he known highly sensitive information, the Iranians wouldn't have let him travel at all -- thus his information cannot hold much value irrespective of what his American handlers may think. This is the same CIA whose drones have been adept at bombing Iraqi and Afghani wedding parties, based on so-called valuable information. This is the same government that dismisses the efforts of Turkey and Brazil to bring Iran to the table.
today's commentary's outstanding -- every time i have an itch to contribute to the tip jar, paypal makes me hesitate -- is there some other way to do it? -- a check would be ideal -- thank you
Iran has held sway over Iraq ever since Bush II sent in American troops. Iran's leaders are skilled at adapting and adjusting their diplomacy to the changing fortunes of the different political groups operating within Iraq. Washington has never been able to gain enough influence in Iraq to outflank the Iranians, partly because American strategic thinking is too militarized, and American military thinking is too commercialized.
Washington criticizes the IRGC for engaging in commerce, which is laughable considering how the American military now has a growing component of mercenaries whose activities are commercializing the military in ways that go far beyond the awarding of defense contracts.
Paladino, Bush II, Emanuel, Obama -- they're much alike but have different styles.
Obama prefers to have FBI agents raid the houses of innocent Americans who oppose the war in Afghanistan. The excuse that they were conducting a rogue operation doesn't wash. In fact they were utilizing federal funds dedicated to spying on, harassing and criminalizing the citizenry.
As to Emanuel, at least Pelosi had the courage to say 'f... you' to his face when he tried to bully her into giving up on expanding health coverage to poorer Americans.
American military intervention in Pakistan, either direct or through remote-controlled bombing, has parallels that reflect faith in counter-productive top-down thinking:
1) the Fed thwarts market forces by holding interest rates at zero, making it easy for American companies to borrow American private savings in order to invest and create jobs overseas, as Walmart just said it will do in South Africa;
2) instead of recognizing that the growing regulatory thicket governing commerce hampers capital investments that create jobs in the USA, Washington keeps setting up new bureaucracies that will issue yet more regulations;
3) instead of letting large financial institutions and large industrial corporations go through the orderly process of bankruptcy when they fail, Washington props them up by seizing private savings that would have gone into job-creating capital investment;
4) instead of letting states that have been overspending deal with the consequences, Washington is now planning on seizing private savings in order to rescue those states;
5) instead of letting the marketplace explore alternatives to oil and coal, Washington under Bush II favored ethanol, which as a result distorted normal planting strategies, damaged topsoil and polluted the environment;
6) the Tea Party, which says it wants to cut federal spending by shrinking the size of government, also wants to keep increasing the the far-flung activities of the military, and supports candidates who want to strengthen federal control of personal behavior.
Washington is carrying out a strategy that can't fail: namely, create more insurgents through remote-controlled bombing, and then make more bombing runs in order to attack the newly created insurgents, thus justifying the continued expansion of the military's effort to eliminate insurgents.
Netanyahu knew that by having the USA exclude Hamas, he'd made certain the talks would go nowhere. Abbas knew he had little chance of wielding influence unless the USA excluded Hamas. Both Netanyahu and Abbas have already achieved the most they could expect to achieve. Kadima knew all this and was willing to play along.
Obama is more naive than Bush II.
Obama's following Likud's line by excluding Hamas.
If she and her ilk take over Washington, the nation will break up. There's no law guaranteeing that the nation will outlast the shared values that built it and led to its growth.
My taxes help to subsidize public broadcasting, which goes out of its way to ignore or to trivialize such injustices.
Makdisi's commentary's outstanding. American diplomacy is constrained by economic forces that the American military knows how to exploit.
Unfettered by national conscription, the commercialized military is bent on waging wars that feed its own growing needs. Federal budgetary excesses will only serve to accelerate the military's progress toward becoming an independent entity that generates its own income by controlling arms sales, contractors and mercenaries. The military will undertake wars in order to support its own logistical needs. The counter-productive war on drugs will bring in growing profits. Although Obama may want to free his administration from the military's grip, he has no choice but to protect his political flank from those who see military strength as signifying national well being. Petraeus had the nerve to complain about Israeli influence because the military's becoming more independent as politicians are becoming more helpless. For instance, Tea Party types never breathe a word about cutting military spending: they know a sacred cow when they see one.
In calculating GDP, a meaningless composite as it is, economists fail to account for the wasted productivity that war represents. To this day American economists think WWII ended the Great Depression: they overlook how it destroyed the fruits of American industrial output. Measured by the narrow view of profits, the military may survive the nation it's bound to destroy, just as the final centuries of the Roman Empire saw the military acting as a parasite sucking the life out of the economy.
Outstanding analysis. Washington tops the worldwide rankings for being skilled at shooting itself in the foot. Bush installed the Shiites by toppling Saddam, then the Shiites transformed Iraq into Iran's client state. Later, Petraeus strengthened the Shiites' hold on Baghdad by cleansing the city of Sunnis. Meanwhile the very neocons who urged Bush to invade Iraq have been shrieking about attacking Iran and are now urging Obama to bring the Sunnis back into power in Iraq.
Sanctions are counter-productive because they represent top-down thinking. Oil will always find a way out, which shows that wars aimed at controlling oil resources are futile, as Hitler found out in WWII when he invaded Russia in order to get at its oil fields.
For Castro, the lesson is that American sanctions had nothing to do with Cuba's failed economy. His own top-down thinking in blindly aping the Soviet Kremlin's doomed economic policies has been just as damaging to Cuba as Washington's increasingly top-down thinking has been to the USA. Now that Cuba's opening up, Americans will be the last to benefit.
Washington's bleating about Chinese currency manipulation is yet another self-inflicted wound, considering how Washington's manipulated the dollar for generations. The upshot of Washington's intervening in the markets is that Americans will be left behind as Asian nations thrive.
Evidence of Abuse
Today's Iraqi authorities learned from the invaders that jailing and mistreating innocent civilians is the way to go. Saddam behaved no worse than the invaders who dethroned him. Operating on a larger scale than Saddam had, the invaders drove millions of Iraqis from their houses and pushed many of those to leave their country, besides bringing a further million to an early grave by depriving them of water, electricity, health care, education, employment and other things that prevailed under Saddam. Above all, the invaders dealt a blow to women's rights. The fact that untold billions of dollars went missing in the Green Zone is just icing on the cake.
The beauty of it all is that by crossing the border in 2003, the invaders immediately handed Iraq to Iran, although they don't know it yet. Now Iraq looks more like Iran than it did under Saddam, while Iraq's leaders seek the guidance of Iran's leaders.
In turn, Iran's the new bogeyman that the invaders are presenting to the world. The invaders are fantasists who dream up ways of wasting their own nation's lives, material resources and production, whose scientists make a living by devising new ways of killing by remote control, and whose politicians toady to big bankers who steal the public's savings by enforcing a monetary system that's a fraud.
Certain EU countries keep raising the bar against Turkey, but the EU economic crisis has yet to run its course and some day Turkey will be glad it's still outside the EU, which is destined to become a source of busboys and housemaids for prospering Asian countries.
Loss leaders have the same economic effect on tv as in supermarkets. People who watch Fox News are buying the news from Murdoch whether they think so or not. Those who think they're getting tv news for nothing are selling themselves short. Even public broadcasting isn't actually free. One is welcome to distinguish between loss leaders by industry, but Murdoch knows how to use loss leaders in order to make money. As the economy shrinks, as the ranks of frightened whites grow, as politicians who disbelieve peer-reviewed, evidence-based science win more elections, advertisers will spend more on Murdoch's increasingly popular oddities, knowing that those who view such shows will then add to the numbers watching Fox News, which advertisers already support to the hilt. The next step is that other tv networks will add more oddities to their schedules in order to match Murdoch. Everybody wins but truth.
If Fox News didn't exist, Americans would still have the same outlook. Instead of manipulating public opinion, Fox is following and representing the views of frightened whites, who see themselves as losing ground. Murdoch's willing to broadcast certain shows that don't attract enough advertising because such shows build the audiences for shows that attract plenty of advertising. It's what a supermarket does in offering certain items at prices that are set below cost.
Gul Jammas Hussein makes sense. The authors of false flag attacks don't acknowledge their deeds, which they carry out more often than the public thinks. Hussein writes better in English than 99% of Americans do: his idiom's superb.
You keep your anger in control enough to describe with clarity how Karzai's regime is a ponzi scheme masquerading as a progressive government. Here in the USA, mainstream media emphasized the enormity of Bernie Madoff's scheme because Washington and big bankers needed to avert the public's eyes from the enormity of their own crimes in stealing the taxpayer blind in order that Wall Streeters might keep bagging huge bonuses.
What Americans don't realize is that since the late 1950s when the federal balance sheet started going down the path to world-beating indebtedness, Washington, aided by big bankers, has been running a ponzi scheme fated to end in sovereign default either outright or through terminal weakening of the dollar. The upshot will be that most Americans will be standing in breadlines as the big bankers impose a new monetary system on the nation. But by then the middle class will have disappeared. The big bankers will have enriched themselves by using the taxpayer's savings in order to collect on their winning derivatives bets, such as the ones against AIG that Washington helped them collect. These bets now total roughly a quadrillion dollars. Although the weakening dollar means the winning bets when collected won't be worth what they are on paper today, it's worth it to the bankers to collect even a small fraction of the total. Their motto is 'half a loaf is better than none'.
All that Karzai has been doing is to imitate Washington and American big bankers.
Both major parties are well versed in scapegoating and it's not just muslims who suffer. The object is to oppress young minority males and, where possible, to take away their voting rights. To bring young muslim males into the mix is a natural development. An example is how mainstream media continually highlight with alarm the spread of islam among minority prisoners.
But it's the war on drugs, enjoying unstinted bipartisan support, that has had unbounded success in scapegoating young minority males. For instance, the DEA has started training operatives to understand ebonics, a step that presumes drug activity among blacks even though it's whites who per capita buy, sell and consume the most drugs, specially the costlier drugs. But it's blacks and latinos who far and away spend the most time in prison, showing that official discrimination has evolved like bacteria in order to soothe the growing anxieties of frightened whites.
Politicians are hardly leading the way here: they're only carrying out the wishes of frightened white voters. As muslims become more prominent, they'll face an increasing degree of targeted policing.
US Drone Strikes Kill 20;
As Floods Advance on Sindh
You're right to question the drone attacks and the cotton tariff. The only way it makes sense is if Washington, in acting as a neo-colonial power, wants to topple the Pakistani government.
Whether it's the USA, China or Europe, countries that resort to protectionism are harming the interests of their own citizens and are undermining their own economies.
Republican opinionmakers are pandering to frightened Whites. Believe it or not, they're also bringing in some aspiring Blacks. Hispanics are less likely to fall under their spell. Asians are harder to read as a group: being far better educated, they think for themselves. Jews divide into two camps: those who align themselves with Christian Zionists and those who think for themselves.
The 'us and them' mentality is spreading as the USA slides deeper into the economic ditch.
Iraqis can only see things from where they are, just as Americans can only see things from where they are. Slipping by nearly unnoticed is the commercialization of the American military and the American diplomatic corps. Although the official line is that combat troops are gone, it's American volunteers who've been leaving. Offsetting the shrinking ranks of volunteers who are still in Iraq are the growing numbers of mercenaries. Anybody who doubts that both the USA's military and its diplomatic corps are commercialized needs to look into the $9 billion that went missing during the war, as well as consider the size of the American embassy. Washington didn't let these results come about on a whim. It's the American taxpayer who's funding this increasing emphasis on grandiosity and profiteering. Small wonder that jobs are disappearing from the private sector here in the USA.
In Afghanistan, Karzai is cleverer than his Iraqi counterparts. Despite American efforts to portray him as being crazed and corrupt, he has the sense to push back against American commercialization of the war. Washington treats as corrupt any foreign leader who blocks American war profiteering.
Bolton and his ilk are traitors. They want Israel to do things that will drag Washington into attacking Iran in order to defend Israel. It would be all right if Bolton were a lone wolf, but his hysteria finds congenial ground in Congress.
This is one instance, though, where the growing clout of Israel's Russian immigrants may restrain those who want an attack against Iran. As time goes by, American influence with Israel is waning while Russian influence waxes. Besides, Americans can't offer Israelis access to the amount of natural resources that Russians can.
Russian leaders think first about what's good for Russia. American leaders instead think first about what's good for Israel, which is a sign of continued American decay.
It's true that "the American way of doing economics encourages such blinders" -- moreover, the international monetary system existing today misallocates financial resources, leading to the misuse and wasting of physical resources. Instead of letting individual people participating in the marketplace determine which fiduciary media to use as money and which interest rates to apply in their dealings, governments worldwide enforce legal tender laws and interfere with interest rates. Two extremes are the USSR, where top-down planning resulted in overproduction of tractors and shortages of basic necessities, and Zimbabwe, where the printing of growing amounts of legal tender enabled insiders, who got the new money first, to keep pace with accelerating price inflation by investing in the local stock market while the general population became penniless and starved.
The same thing is happening here today. That insiders get the new money first is clear from how Bush rescued Wall Streeters. But what the public doesn't see is how the Federal Reserve enriches bondholders by carrying out open market operations, thus allowing bond traders to front-run the Fed. There's been a nearly 30 year bull market in bonds that has fostered a sequence of bubbles in different market sectors, the most recent being in housing, which attracted financial and physical resources that far exceeded the needs of the populace.
Governments worldwide intervene in the marketplace by passing laws and introducing regulations in order to correct the continually mushrooming economic imbalances that the monetary system generates, but the effort is fruitless and the mess keeps growing. The monetary system is bound to collapse, but that will be good for the environment if governments then set the marketplace free by eliminating subsidies to oil companies and by foregoing all other favoritism.
This trick of demonizing Arabs whenever there's a chance, and of requiring American taxpayers to fund Apartheid overseas, is fostering the mentality that leads Americans to act out their prejudices, as they have in Arizona.
To say that the lasting standoff with Iran "...has continuously opened up a wide range of... economic benefits" is absurd.
It's the right of elected leaders to fail.
Whenever NATO forces kill a large number of Afghani civilians, even though American troops on the ground may cover it up, Afghani officials publicize it to the world. The White House and the Pentagon know they need to keep Americans interested in the war, and that means publicizing the deaths of bad guys so that Americans at home can slake their thirst for blood. Americans don't care whether any so-called bad guys happen to be civilians, which is why a popular cartoonist has portrayed the bombing of an Afghani wedding party in a lighthearted vein.
American officials know that by stonewalling they can lengthen the life of each such controversy. Within the USA, the mainstream news media play along by reporting the much higher number of civilian deaths that Afghani officials themselves disclose and proclaim in pointedly disagreeing with American officials. Thus the White House and the Pentagon get each atrocity across to Americans watching the news in their dens.
The public emphasis that the White House and the Pentagon place on avoiding civilian deaths is itself another way of reminding Americans that blood is being spilled.
It's the controversy that counts. Now the White House and the Pentagon are making statement after statement about Wikileaks, feeding the general controversy about civilian deaths. Had Washington ignored Wikileaks, only a handful of Americans would have noticed, considering the mass of unorganized material. Americans don't care about past cover-ups that weren't really cover-ups, they just want blood. The proof is that Congress keeps voting for war. Some Democrats posture about having wanted to vote against war, but it's all theater. There are powerful vested interests who buy the votes needed.
Americans pay taxes that fund the enforcing of Apartheid. Many of the Americans who don't want their government to regulate unharmful activity, do want their government to require all Americans to back harmful activity overseas.
Bush deserves credit for completing the American quest for failure. The instant he sent American girls and boys into Iraq, he handed Iraq to Iran, which Iraq had invaded in 1980 at American urging. Washington still doesn't realize that the USA lost Iraq to Iran in a war that took 23 years, ending with Bush's invasion. The following seven year stretch has seen ups and downs, but Iran's standing has remained supreme. For instance, in helping Shiites cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis, Petraeus may as well have been on Iran's payroll. What governments don't say means far more than what they say. Iran's silence is deafening: it's delighted with things as they are in Iraq. Besides, the Iranian leadership is busy stamping out music right now, thus providing the world with comedy that would be unbelievable were it in a novel.
Those massive aid donations were stolen from private savings held by citizens of Nato nations and Japan. No government has savings of its own to give away. Karzai's government's only following the lesson of theft that donor nations are teaching.
Outstanding commentary. Thank you.
Thank you for posting this outstanding analysis. When more than 75% of the House vote together with 87 Senators to applaud the flotilla attack, which happened to kill an American citizen, it's clear that Washington's in thrall to its ally.
By forcing taxpayers to fund apartheid overseas, Washington emboldens white Americans to practice discrimination at home, as they do in Arizona and want to do elsewhere. The outlook that engenders belief in tribalism, blood and soil has found congenial ground among white Americans who prefer awaiting their rapture to strengthening education in the sciences.
It isn't the gridlock of partisan politics that keeps Americans from taking a saner path. It's the areas where the two major political parties agree that are undermining the nation's prospects. They agree to let the security of an allied nation come first. They agree to let defense spending outstrip financial resources. They agree to stretch out the war against Afghanistan in order to control the trade in heroin. They agree to fight a war on drugs that's a smokescreen for running guns to Mexico and for attacking the peasantry of Latin America. They agree to bolster the existing monetary regime based on economic theory that Keynes himself knew was a fraud favoring insiders and that Milton Friedman dressed up so that American politicians and banking interests could sell it better to the public. On such matters, the Tea Party acts as a subset of the establishment, and thus allows white Americans to luxuriate in the thought that they're being radical while in fact they're greasing the skids that will lead to national collapse.
The only part of the world that has yet bleaker prospects than the USA is Europe, whose grandchildren are destined to be servants to wealthy Asians.
Your commentaries are refreshing. Most white Americans are so brainwashed they don't want to think. The Tea Party's the latest scam: its promoters talk about shrinking government but they back the creeping militarization of government and they want to keep the handouts they enjoy today. They just don't want other folks to benefit.
It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or
...to concentrate...
Tom Engelhardt looks at the facts as scientists do. But the Pentagon knows it can only wage war as long as it can enthrall the American public by killing lots of bad guys, specially by using all the deadly technology that American taxpayers have funded. Americans don't care about civilian casualties in Afghanistan: they want to see blood. McChrystal was failing because he wasn't shedding enough blood. The same propagandists who equate Palestinians with terrorists and who make Americans think apartheid is glorious are painting all Afghanis as sympathizing with the Taliban. It goes hand in hand with breaking news about Karzai's negotiating with the Taliban. The object is to justify the killing of innocent civilians. Petraeus was careful in Baghdad to contrate American firepower on the Sunnis and thus to achieve ethnic cleansing, another way of giving the American public an identified set of dead or defeated bad guys. In Afghanistan he sees no easy way of differentiating one group of Afghanis from another, so if he's to slake the bloodthirstiness of the American public, he'll need to increase the body count no matter who dies.
5 NATO Troops Killed
NATO can plan all it wants: economic decline will force it to leave before 2014. Western markets will keep falling and won't hit bottom till after 2014. It's no coincidence that George W Bush launched the war in Afghanistan soon after American stock markets topped. It was his way of having the government pour money into the economy, which he accelerated by then launching the war in Iraq. Bush's last move was to create yet more money out of thin air in order to rescue AIG and bail out Wall Street. Obama's following in Bush's footsteps by flooding the marketplace with newly printed money, but the effect is to crowd out private savings, which are the only source of the capital that's needed to start businesses. Western economists get the story backwards: they say consumer spending drives the economy. But consumers can't spend unless they have jobs, and they can't find jobs unless new companies create them. But new companies can't create them unless they have access to capital. Not credit, but capital. Capital only comes from private savings: government has no savings. As Bush did and Obama has done, politicians rescue large businesses that are failing and that will never create jobs. It's start-up businesses that create jobs. Government has a role in fostering education, but can only weaken the economy by tampering with capital markets.
Politicians aren't going to let go of their talent for making the populace think there's a free lunch. The question is whether the bankers who take advantage of federal money-printing will restrain their greed soon enough to head off collapse by abandoning the existing monetary fraud. When government prints money, it's the bankers who get it first. When that money later trickles down to the populace, it's lost much of its value, but the bankers have done well.
You're right. Amiri told Washington what Israel wanted to hear. One suspects that Iran's leaders are provoking Israel.
To avoid confusion, I'm adopting a new name.
Nasr's firing is disheartening. Concerning the Middle East and Israel, Americans have little access to the facts of the matter. The only source is the information that this blog and its counterparts provide.
Americans accept the tyranny they're living under because propagandists point their attention toward trivialities.
Outstanding analysis -- thank you.
Biden says, "We'll be with you economically" -- easy to say, but the USA is the biggest debtor in history. China and Japan can't afford to finance American overspending any more, specially as in buying American debt and letting their own currencies float upward, they've been taking capital losses while the USA has been booking gains. Either the USA defaults on its debt again -- it defaulted wholesale on 15 August 1971, although by stealth -- or it carries out de facto default by weakening the dollar even faster. The upshot is that the USA will no longer be able to replace all those fancy armaments it's been wasting in unending warfare. Much less will it be able to fund non-military aid.
Warmongers are pawns who fail to see that our monetary system is falling apart, just as Europe's is. Other nations like China and Japan have been financing American debt but they have the same monetary system we have, so the collapse will be worldwide. Warfare destroys wealth, here and wherever fighting takes place. One can only guess what the warmongers will gain by driving our nation into the ditch: it may have something to do with how the leading international banking interests are bound to keep weakening the dollar, as measured in goods, till they've collected on all the winning bets on derivatives that they've made . One got a glimpse of that process in the taxpayer-funded rescue of AIG, which made a colossal amount of losing bets on derivatives: the knock-on effect was for Washington to rescue the international bankers who were on the winning side, not just the glorified Goldman Sachs, a fronting bank that seems glad to serve as a lightning rod for criticism that only goes skin deep and that also misses the point by not shining light on the monetary system itself, the system that Goldman and its international counterparts know how to exploit at taxpayer expense. One need only look at Europe, where German taxpayers are rescuing the international bankers that lent to Greece. Whether it's German taxpayers or American taxpayers who are gouged, governments are shifting massive amounts of private savings into the pockets of the international banking interests. This process depends on the central banking system that exists worldwide. Once the banking interests have collected on all their bets, they'll let the existing monetary system collapse, impoverishing billions of people, and they'll introduce a new system.
Enlightening -- thank you.
Although it's a serious matter, the following is mirth-provoking: '...tends to treat allies as patsies' -- it works as far as the USA goes.
as Karzai is Said to Dicker with Insurgents;
and Panetta Scoffs
Taliban Rejoice in McChrystal Firing
Enlightening -- thank you
Obama worsened the mess by calculating American politics first, and then imposing American fantasies on Afghanistan. He promised victory and withdrawal. But his outlook suffers from the delusion that the USA won in Iraq, where in actuality Bush handed Iraq to Iran the instant American troops invaded. Afghanistan was never the USA's to win.
Considers breaking off Ties;
Israel Lobbies in Congress denounce Ankara
Turkey's in better shape than the USA is. Besides being fiscally sounder, Turkey has a more sophisticated foreign policy, having lined up Russia before challenging Israel. Turkey sees that Russian-born Israelis are gaining power in Israel and are closer to Moscow than to Washington. Our elected representatives know little about foreign policy and care less: they fail to grasp that the USA, being the greatest debtor ever, can ill afford to let Likud hold American foreign policy hostage. Also, in saying 'British Petroleum' instead of BP, Obama is fostering the same self-destructive outlook here that Likud fosters in Israel -- he ignores that Americans own 39% of BP stock, including pension funds covering millions of Americans.
He may have needed to protect his wife and child, who are still living in Iran, by reading a script written by the Iranians -- his American handlers would have helped him do this if he'd told them things worth knowing. But had he known highly sensitive information, the Iranians wouldn't have let him travel at all -- thus his information cannot hold much value irrespective of what his American handlers may think. This is the same CIA whose drones have been adept at bombing Iraqi and Afghani wedding parties, based on so-called valuable information. This is the same government that dismisses the efforts of Turkey and Brazil to bring Iran to the table.
today's commentary's outstanding -- every time i have an itch to contribute to the tip jar, paypal makes me hesitate -- is there some other way to do it? -- a check would be ideal -- thank you