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Wednesday January 23 2008
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economy
Read this. Until the elephant in the room, the military, is recognized and dealt with, we are fucked.
Going Bankrupt
Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic
By Chalmers Johnson
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The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room," the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.
As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay -- or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.
There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.
Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures -- so-called "military Keynesianism," which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.
Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call "opportunity costs," things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs -- an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.
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Farewell to Old Economic Nostrums
Neither Supply-Side Theory Nor Keynesian Remedies Can Save Us Now
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Under pressure from budget and trade deficits, the US dollar has been losing value against other traded currencies. Having to borrow another $150 billion abroad will further erode the dollar's value.
Meanwhile, Congress passed a $700 billion "defense" bill so that the Bush administration can continue its wars in the Middle East.
Our leaders in Washington are out to lunch. They have no idea of the real challenges our country faces and America's dependence on foreign creditors.
The rebate will help Americans reduce their credit card debt. However, adding $150 billion to an existing federal budget deficit that will be worsened by recession could further alarm America's foreign creditors, traders in currency markets, and OPEC oil producers. If the rebate loses its punch to consumer debt reduction, imports, and pressure on the dollar, what will the government do next?
As long as offshoring continues, the US cannot close its trade deficit. Offshoring increases imports and reduces the supply of potential exports. With Washington's Middle East wars, with private companies ceasing to provide health coverage and pensions, with political spending promises in an election year, and with recession, the outlook for the federal budget deficit is dismal as well.
The US is moving into a situation in which the government could find it impossible to close the twin deficits without massive tariffs to curtail imports and offshoring and without pursuing peace instead of war. The outlook for the United States will continue to worsen as long as hegemonic superpower and free trade delusions prevail in Washington.
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ruins
It will rise from the ashes
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This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven't burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and "sadness" some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city's school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people:
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More pictures:
Detroit Public Schools Book Depository/ Roosevelt Warehouse
thanks to Conscientious
insanity
Essential Insanity
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Walk with me a while and imagine you are mad. Crazy. Insane. It's an interesting sort of insanity--you see the world as something other than it is. You are dead convinced that people are out to get you, but these people have almost no means to harm you and fear your retaliation greatly, because you're a powerful person and they are weak.
You believe that you are hale and hearty; but in fact you're ghastly, obese and ill. You think you're rich, but in fact you're poor. You think you have the best doctor around, but in fact your doctor is worse than almost every other doctor and charges 50% more than them. You think you're tough, and you certainly haven't let the fact that two ninety pound weaklings seem to be able to stand up to you get in the way of that.
You think that you have the most advanced technological toys, that what you have is the best, and once you did, but these days everyone else seems to have more advanced stuff.
The illness goes deeper though, a deep decay in your brain. The parts of your brain that make most of the decisions for your body think everything is wonderful. They seem only able to take in sensations from the taste buds these days, and for the last thirty years you've been on a rich diet. So they think everything's great. Your once lean body, packed with muscles, has been replaced by a flaccid one, paunchy and fat, but somehow the key parts of your brain don't know that. They don't feel your sore back, they don't hear the broken down breathing and they don't see the gut hanging over your belt.
The you I'm referring to, as I'm sure many have figured out by now, is the US. For years I've been writing for the US and observing it carefully, and I've found it one of the most interesting problems I've encountered in my life. Because America and Americans are very unpredictable. Now, of course, the first thing I thought was "it's me," and in a sense, that's true.
Yet, here's the thing, I have a very good record of predicting what will happen in Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. And when I get it wrong, I can look back and easily figure out why. Yet I've never visited any of those countries and really, know very little about them. On the other hand I grew up imbibing American media, know American history well, have visited America a number of times and spent 8 years in jobs that required me to deal with multiple Americans daily.
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What Gives the US the Right to Claim a Moral Monopoly Over the World?
The Empire That Must Be Obeyed
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"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
Five Western military leaders.
I read the statement three times trying to figure out the typo. Then it hit me, the West has now out-Owellled Orwell: The West must nuke other countries in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction! In Westernspeak, the West nuking other countries does not qualify as the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The astounding statement comes from a paper prepared for a Nato summit in April by five top military leaders--an American, a German, a Dutchman, a Frenchman, and a Brit. It can be found here.
The paper, prepared by men regarded as distinguished leaders and not as escapees from insane asylums, argues that "the West's values and way of life are under threat, but the West is struggling to summon the will to defend them." The leaders find that the UN is in the way of the West's will, as is the European Union which is obstructing NATO and "NATO's credibility is at stake in Afghanistan."
And that's a serious matter. If NATO loses its credibility in Afghanistan, Western civilization will collapse just like the Soviet Union. The West just doesn't realize how weak it is. To strengthen itself, it needs to drop more and larger bombs.
[...]
Who, what is threatening the West's values and way of life? Political fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, and the imminent spread of nuclear weapons, answer the five asylum escapees.
By political fanaticism, do they mean the neoconservatives who believe that the future of humanity depends on the US establishing its hegemony over the world? By religious fundamentalism, do they mean "rapture evangelicals" agitating for armageddon or Christian and Israeli Zionists demanding a nuclear attack on Iran? By spread of nuclear weapons, do they mean Israel's undeclared and illegal possession of several hundred nuclear weapons?
No. The paranoid military leaders see all the fanaticism, religious and otherwise, and all the threats to humanity as residing outside Western civilization (Israel is inside). The "increasingly brutal world," of which the leaders warn, is "over there." Only Muslims are fanatics. All us white guys are rational and sane.
There is nothing brutal about the US/Nato bombing of Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, or the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, or the genocide Israel hopes to commit against Palestinians in Gaza.
There is nothing brutal about the US/Nato bombing of Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, or the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, or the genocide Israel hopes to commit against Palestinians in Gaza.
Brutal things happen in the "brutal world" and are entirely the fault of those in the brutal world. None of this would happen if the inhabitants of the brutal world would just do as they are told. How can the civilized world with its monopoly on morality allow people in the brutal world to behave independently? I mean, really! God forbid, they might attack some innocent country.
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update
In addition to general busyness we got hit with a medical double whammy Friday. Both Zoe and her mom, Gerry, ended up in Emergency Rooms. Friday morning we got a call that Gerry (she has Alzheimer's and is at Western State Hospital) had a seizure. The sent her to a nearby (to Western State) ER. It was a frustrating day trying to find out just what happened. Zoe was getting increasingly frustrated and then, around 3 in the afternoon, we found out she had been admitted for more testing. That is what we were afraid of. Not that she needed tests but that she would be admitted. We had been to that ER before with Gerry and they are not set up to deal with Alzheimer's patients on their terms. Our worst fears were realized when Zoe found out that they were restraining Gerry and giving her Haldol to calm her down. Gerry was freaking out. She was terrified and angry. The instructions on how to deal with Gerry either never got to the ER or they weren't using them. The nurse complained that she wouldn't take her pain pill. Gerry doesn't take pills. She has difficulty swallowing them. Always has and it is worse now. The pills have to be crushed and taken with pudding or ice cream. Then she complained that Gerry wouldn't tell them what was wrong with her. Duh! She has Alzheimer's. She can't communicate. Zoe was getting so upset she finally had to pass off the phone to me. We gave them instructions on how to deal with Gerry and they told us they were starting to undo the restraints. Zoe Took a nap and woke up at 10:30 with her stomach in pain. Here Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which had been quite for the past year, was back. Here stomach had been bothering her but the stress of the day put it over and we spent the night in the Emergency Room at Whidbey General. Gerry was sent back to Western State Hospital the next day with no explanation of the seizure, which may have only been a fainting. Zoe is doing better but her world has been shaken. Zoe has more here and here.
martin luther king, jr. january 15, 1929 – april 4, 1968
King: War Cannot Achieve Even a Negative Good
by Juan Cole
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Martin Luther King will be honored today throughout America as a champion of racial justice and racial harmony. That is a pivotal legacy for the United States of America, which for 87 long years was built on the lawful enslavement of one race by another, and for another century practiced the lawful Apartheid of Jim Crow.
But he was not the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize only because of his work on civil rights and integration. He was also a profound thinker in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi on peace. Not peace in the abstract, but peace as a practical political tool. Not only peace as a social movement but peace as a method in international relations.
King critiqued the typical use of "peace" by politicians as a distant ideal toward which they are working, even while they bomb and massacre and slaughter. In his Christmas Sermon, December 24, 1967, King made this point:
' And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.
What is the problem?
They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.
We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.' | |
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