California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Pope Suggests NATO Partially to Blame for Russian Invasion

by John Lawrence

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Pope Francis said that “NATO barking at Russia” caused the Kremlin “to react badly and unleash the conflict” with Ukraine. The Pope has requested a meeting with Russian President Putin but so far to no avail. What is clear is that the West did not take Russia's objections to NATO expansion seriously and acted unilaterally to march NATO up to Russia's door. Besides that the US abrogated or just dismissed arms control treaties with Russia without further consultation. President George W Bush and Putin both came to power in the year 2000. Bush announced America’s intent to withdraw from the 1974 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had been central to the U.S.-USSR strategic relationship. Abrogating the treaty did not go down well in Moscow, especially given the the huge military technological lead the Kremlin believed Washington had after the 1991 Gulf War. Then in 2019 during the Trump administration the US abruptly abrogated the INF treaty which was the centerpiece of the post Cold War negotiations between Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. There was no attempt by the US or NATO to renegotiate these treaties which was a slap in the face to Russia.

The Hill reported:

When America intervened in Afghanistan in late 2001, Putin was irritated because the Bush team rejected Russian advice based on its decade-long failure in that country. In 2003, Putin strongly counseled Bush against invading Iraq, as the Russian leader feared the region would be thrown into turmoil. And the continuing expansion of NATO was neuralgic for Russia. A series of U.S. administrations downplayed or ignored how serious this issue was for Russia.

At the Munich Security Conference, Putin unleashed an angry broadside against the U.S. as a “uni-power” and against NATO expansion. Participants were shocked by the intensity of Putin’s attacks but otherwise largely dismissed them. That was a mistake. It was clear that Putin believed he was being disrespected and marginalized by the U.S. and NATO, adding to his growing resentment about the patronizing treatment he believed Russia was receiving.

NATO expanded during the 1990s largely due to the imprecations of President Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even though President Gorbachev had been promised that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward" as part of a deal to reunify Germany after the Cold War.

Politifact reported:

After explaining why the U.S. wanted the reunited Germany to stay within the framework of NATO, Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO 1 inch to the east."

"I put the following question to (Gorbachev)," Baker recounted in a letter to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "‘Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift 1 inch eastward from its present position?’"

Those comments, along with similar remarks from Baker’s European allies, like Genscher and Kohl, were part of what researchers at George Washington University’s National Security Archive called a "cascade of assurances" offered to the Soviets.

But Baker and other officials involved in the events have denied that the conversation ever turned on expanding NATO to other countries. 

So basically Gorbachev was sold a bill of goods that, if he consented to the reunification of Germany and with Germany as a NATO member, that NATO would not expand eastwards. However, "given assurances" is not the same as "legal and binding". Therefore, in July 1997, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (where Albright was born) were formally invited to join NATO.

The Conversation reported

"In hindsight, Albright’s curt dismissal of Russia’s security concerns might seem to have been ill-judged. This is especially true in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which some analysts blame in part upon the speed and perceived recklessness of NATO expansion during the 1990s."

One of Albright’s most consequential acts – both as Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton – was to support NATO expansion.

NATO had been a cornerstone of the Cold War security order in Europe, binding the United States to the defense of Western Europe. Albright’s approach was to cast NATO not just as a military alliance but as a pillar of international stability and an engine of democratic progress. She saw the alliance as a conduit through which the United States could impart peace, order and good governance upon a fragile European continent.

At the time, critics cautioned that NATO enlargement would antagonize a post-Soviet Russia and could end up worsening the European security order.

Albright’s answer was uncompromising.

“We do not need Russia to agree to enlargement,” she assured senators in 1997, stressing the word “need.”

The strategic and moral case for enlargement was overwhelming, explained Albright. If the newly democratized states of Central and Eastern Europe craved the protection of the United States, she concluded, then no other nation should be allowed to stand in the way.

In short there might have been no NATO expansion or at least Russia's security concerns might have bee addressed if it were not for Madeleine Albright and later for Bush era neocons who pressed for NATO admittance for Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia much to Russia's chagrin. All along the road of NATO expansion Russia's security concerns were ignored or belittled or disrespected. Russia was dismissed as a weak and powerless nation with no skin in the game, powerless to do anything or have any say as NATO was quick to identify Russia as a potential enemy which justified the arms buildup by the US. Notably the European nations did not commit anywhere as much of their financial resources to an arms buildup, a fact lamented by President Donald Trump who suggested that the European nations were letting the US carry the load.

During the Cold War, US forces had been deployed around the world for the explicit purpose of deterring Soviet aggression. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the primary justification for America’s enormous troop presence abroad and globe-spanning web of military alliances. However, defense spending was given a new justification by Madeleina Albright in order to increase the US militarized global role in the post-Cold War era. She supplied a new rationale for spending on the military industrial complex and the development of ever more destructive weapons systems. NATO expansion and the abrogation of important nuclear arms treaties with Russia were a thumb in the eye of the Russian bear.

Off the Top of My Head

When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together

by John Lawrence, April 28, 2020

These are the fateful words of Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize Laureate and the first and only President of the Soviet Union. Recently, he recalled how the threat of nuclear war was reduced by the treaties in the 1980s made possible by his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan. Writing in Time magazine, he said, "The leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union declared that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought." Despite the fact that the Cold War was declared to be over, the neocons running foreign policy today have been doing their best to create another one. The pandemic has made it clear that there are more important challenges than U.S.-Russian rivalry, and that the world has more to gain by cooperating even with supposed enemies or rivals than it does by perpetuating idiotic animosities. We have common enemies that affect us all with the coronavirus pandemic being just one of them.

Gorbachev mentioned "poverty and inequality, the degradation of the environment, the depletion of the earth and the oceans." Global warming is an existential threat that must be addressed now or there won't be a habitable earth left to fight over. "We have so far failed to develop and implement strategies and goals common to all mankind." Not only that the U.S. under Trump has retreated from any kind of cooperation with the other nations of the earth even our supposed allies. Instead U.S. foreign policy has been based on ordering other nations around as if we were the supreme bully. Trump's latest blunder is to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic.

"Progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the U.N. in 2000, has been extremely uneven." The U.S. under Trump does not really support the U.N. in any way because it wants to be the ruler of nations not part of an organization that attempts to have a forum for the cooperation of nations. The United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000 commits world leaders to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. The Eight Millennium Development Goals are:

• to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
• to achieve universal primary education;
• to promote gender equality and empower women;
• to reduce child mortality;
• to improve maternal health;
• to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
• to ensure environmental sustainability; and
• to develop a global partnership for development.

I had never even heard of the Eight Millennium Development Goals although I think I'm pretty well informed. All of the media time spent on Trump's self-serving bragging could have been better spent informing us about this WHO program. But instead the media spends its time either chastising Trump's stupidity or praising his glory depending on which channel you watch. He has changed from campaign rallies to hour long daily commercials for himself.

"What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security. Even after the end of the Cold War, it has been envisioned mostly in military terms." Yes, military hubris crowds out any prospect of peace let alone a prospect of eliminating extreme poverty. Bill Gates is singlehandedly doing his best to eliminate poverty and disease in the world. He basically is a one man United Nations surrogate. He presciently tried to warn us of the pandemic in a Ted talk. Now he is spending millions of his own money on developing a coronavirus vaccine. There are some good people in the world - even billionaires. That I am sure of. It's just that not a lot of them occupy positions of power in the U.S. government.

Gorbachev continued: "The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people's health. To achieve it, we have to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if nations continue to waste money by fueling the arms race. I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking."

Gorbachev is calling on national leaders to cut military budgets by 10% to 15%. It is not enough. The mindset, even among Democrats, is that we need a huge military to defend ourselves from perceived threats and perceived enemies. They don't have the mindset that they could make the world a better place by defusing tensions among nations that they perceive as threats. It might start by apologizing to Iran for overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossaddegh and installing the brutal Shah. That would go a long way to establishing a peaceful relationship with Iran. It could start there. Instead the U.S. only fuels tensions by applying sanctions and carrying on like the rest of the world should bow down to the almighty dollar.

Off the Top of My Head

El Salvador Has a Problem: Gangs Started in the US Are Running the Country

by John Lawrence, March 12, 2019

Two gangs run El Salvbador: MS-13 and the 18th Street gang. Both gangs were spawned in the US, in Los Angeles to be precise and took root in El Salvador when gang members were deported having been caught as criminals. National Geographics reported: "El Salvador’s government says that criminal gangs command an estimated 60,000 active members, and their battle for supremacy has fractured this tiny country of 6.4 million people along an expanding web of invisible fault lines that run red. In 2017 the homicide rate was 61 per 100,000 people, making El Salvador the second deadliest of any country not at war, after Venezuela."

El Salvador is locked in the latest phase of a social conflict that exploded during the 1980-1992 civil war, in which leftist guerrillas rose up against a wealthy elite and the military state that had long dispossessed the rural underclass of land. With the stated aim of stopping communism in its backyard, the U.S. supported El Salvador’s right-wing dictatorships with billions of dollars of economic and military aid that prolonged the bloodshed. By the time the war ended, in a stalemate, 75,000 people were dead and more than a million were displaced, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to the U.S. From Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., Salvadoran refugees found employment and community, and they sent money home.

The same old story. The US wants to stop communism which in this case would have helped poor peasants so it "prolonged the bloodshed" which led directly to the creation of the gangs here in the US that then took root back in El Salvador. The US' hands are dirty in this whole situation and should take responsibility for the immigration crisis instead of building a wall to keep immigrants out.

The children who came with them, displaced youths craving identity in a foreign land, created MS-13 on the streets of Los Angeles and swelled the ranks of a rival, 18th Street—a Hispanic gang that formed around 18th Street in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles and absorbed wayward refugees from Central America. As gang wars, and the war on gangs, intensified, laws were enacted that made it easier to deport immigrants with criminal records. In the late 1990s the U.S. began exporting thousands of convicts back to Central America each year. In the vacuum of weak governance and poverty in their home country, gang members reproduced their social structures and tactics and multiplied exponentially.

The US created the crisis by meddling in El Salvador's civil war as it has done many times before in Central and South America. "At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration."

The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen.

The US has made a mess out of Central and South America and is now ironically reaping the whirlwind: They all want to come here to escape the violence and poverty. Here are some more examples.

1) Brazil experienced several decades of right-wing authoritarian governments, especially after the US-backed 1964 Brazilian coup d'état against center-left social democrat João Goulart undertaken, according to then President John F. Kennedy, to "prevent Brazil from becoming another Cuba". Brazil's return to democracy saw several consecutive right-wing neoliberal governments following the Washington Consensus ending in endemic inequality and extreme poverty, one of the worst in the Continent.

2) After the democratic election of President Salvador Allende in 1970, an economic war ordered by President Richard Nixon. Then the CIA backed the 1973 Chilean coup d'état due to Allende’s democratic socialist leanings and installed the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

3) After several peasant and workers uprisings in the country against oligarchic and anti-democratic governments, often under the control of powerful American corporate interests like the United Fruit Company, efforts by democratically elected governments were often thwarted by US intervention. Civil war spread with US-endorsed far-right governments in El Salvador facing far-left guerrillas.

4) Peasants and workers (mostly of indigenous descent) revolts during the first half of the Guatemalan 20th century due to harsh conditions and abuse from landlords and the government-supported American United Fruit Company were brutally repressed. This led to the democratic election of left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was overthrown during the US-backed 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état leading to right-wing US-endorsed authoritarian governments and nearly 40 years of civil war in the Central American country.

There are many more examples of US intervention in Central and South America always on the side of right wing dictatorships and corporations like United Fruit and against the interests of the common people. The US is ever eager to destroy regimes which claim to have the interests of the people at heart and to install regimes favorable to the US model of unbridled capitalism at any cost, the cost usually being born by people suffering from extreme inequality and poverty. The US has tried again and again to make little " USes" out of every country in what it considers its sphere of influence which includes in particular Central and South America but in general the whole world.

Today some 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. have temporary protected status (TPS), a designation that allows undocumented migrants deemed at risk because of armed conflict or environmental disasters in their home countries to stay in the U.S. In January 2018, President Donald Trump’s administration ordered an end to TPS for Salvadorans. It was set to expire in September 2019, but a U.S. district court halted that plan, allowing Salvadorans to continue to live and work in the U.S. until a final decision is made.

Off the Top of My Head

While the US Bullies, China Invests

by John Lawrence, March 9, 2019

China has been entering into mutually beneficial arrangements with many countries of the world in accordance with its Belt and Road Initiative. The US doesn't like it because the US modus operandi is to tell other countries what to do based on sanctions. If they don't comply, they will be sanctioned or even bombed. The latest country to have a cozy relationship with China is Italy. Now the US is even ordering its European allies around and European countries are rethinking their relationship with the US especially because of the idiocy of the Trump administration.

China has told the US to mind its own business after Italy was warned not to join the Belt and Road Initiative. So now the US is trying to order other countries not to participate in a mutually beneficial relationship with some other country. Is it the US prerogative to tell countries what other countries they can do business with? The US thinks so. It sees the Chinese Belt and Road initiative as a threat. The South China Morning Post reported:

China’s Foreign Ministry told Washington to mind its own business on Wednesday after US officials warned Italy that its international image would suffer if it signed up for the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious intercontinental infrastructure programme.

Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a press briefing in Beijing that Rome does not need Washington’s advice on conducting its affairs.

“This position taken by the US side is laughable,” Lu said. “As a major country, Italy knows exactly what policies serve its own interests and it can make its decisions independently.”

Lu was responding to a report by the Financial Times that Italy planned to sign a memorandum of understanding on joining the Belt and Road Initiative when President Xi Jinping visits the country later this month. ...

But White House National Security Council spokesperson, Garrett Marquis, told the FT that the Belt and Road Initiative was unlikely to help Italy economically and could significantly damage the country’s international image.

Xi is expected to visit Italy on March 22 and 23. If Italy signs the memorandum, it will be the first of the seven leading industrialised nations, or Group of Seven, to sign up officially.

On Monday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went further in criticising the initiative, saying projects under the scheme were “almost certainly designed for foreclosure”. ...

Asked by a member of the audience if the Belt and Road Initiative could remove European and Asian countries from the US sphere of influence, Pompeo said “these deals are, in fact, often too good to be true, and many countries have already begun to see that”. ...

The Belt and Road Initiative, first proposed by Xi in 2013, is a vast China-centred strategy to increase global trade with more than US$1 trillion in investment.

But the US and other countries have been increasingly critical and last year, US Vice-President Mike Pence, in a wide-ranging criticism of Beijing, accused China of using the belt and road to engage in “debt diplomacy”. ...

On Wednesday, Lu said the initiative had been welcomed by more than 150 countries and that the US should stop slinging mud at it.

Beijing will hold its second belt and road forum in April, with dozens of world leaders invited, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has criticised the cost of some projects.

So Pompeo and the rest of the US neocon establishment is concerned that China might drive a wedge between the US and some of its allies by entering into mutually beneficial arrangements without the US' permission. Who knows? Peace might even break out making the trillion dollar yearly investment by the US in its own military-industrial complex irrelevant, irrelevant, that is, except for US taxpayers that have to pay the bill. Does China have a winning strategy here? Instead of investing hugely in weapons of war and trying to order other nations around by the use of sanctions, China is facilitating the economic development of many nations and making for a more peaceful world, a world in which China's influence will no doubt supersede that of the US whose global hegemony is based on the use or implied threat of force.

THE NEOCON PLAYBOOK IS A RECIPE FOR DISASTER IN VENEZUELA

From Who.What.Why., FEBRUARY 10, 2019 | KLAUS MARRE AND DONKEYHOTEY

Neocon Nosferatu: Making South America Great Again. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.

When Donald Trump promised that he would only hire the “best people,” maybe he should have been pressed on what, exactly, they would be good at. Because it’s clearly not running the US government. Over the past two years, it has become clear that liars, grifters, conmen, opportunists, and crooks seem to be drawn to the president like flies to … well, you know.

Now, however, a situation is arising for which one of Trump’s “best people” seems ideally suited for forcing regime change somewhere in the Americas.

At a time when the president seems intent on getting the US out of Syria and Afghanistan, he appears to be equally determined to plunge headfirst into the chaos in Venezuela.

His point person for this adventure is Elliott Abrams, who has a long history of mucking around in the US’s backyard — often with dubious methods. In other words, he’ll fit right in.

To those unfamiliar with Abrams, here are the CliffsNotes: In the early 1980s, Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for human rights, which, in retrospect, seems like some kind of cruel joke. In that position, Abrams once stated that former Guatemalan leader General Efraín Ríos Montt “brought considerable progress” to human rights in his country. In case you are not familiar with Ríos Montt, he was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013.

Abrams’s motives back then seemed to be consistent with the goals of the military-industrial complex: He wanted an embargo on military aid to Guatemala to be lifted. Just as an aside, and unrelated to Abrams but possibly relevant to Venezuela, the CIA-engineered coup in Guatemala in 1954 did nothing to stabilize the country and led to a brutal and lengthy civil war.

Around the same time, Abrams sought to downplay reports of a massacre in El Salvador and testified before the Senate that the incident was being used for guerilla propaganda. A decade later, however, the UN-approved Salvadoran Truth Commission found that more than 500 civilians were “deliberately and systematically” murdered during that massacre. At the time, the Reagan administration was worried about El Salvador becoming a communist country and falling under the influence of the Soviet Union and spent billions to provide weapons to El Salvador’s military. Oh, and there was a brutal and lengthy civil war.

But Abrams truly left his mark when trying to solicit funding for the Nicaraguan Contrasfrom the Sultan of Brunei. He later tried to cover up what happened and ended up pleading guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress. He was pardoned by George H.W. Bush. All of this, of course, had to do with the US government supporting far-right “rebels” in Nicaragua and it involves a lengthy civil war that took a terrible toll on the country.

You may be detecting a pattern here.

We were certainly skeptical when it was announced that Abrams would be the special envoy for Venezuela. Throw in John Bolton and you have all of the ingredients you need for another neocon clusterfuck.

While Venezuela seems in urgent need of assistance, history has shown time and again that when the US “helps” in the Americas, almost everybody ends up worse than before — apart from the new US-backed right-wing regime and the people who supply the weapons. Just ask Abrams, who has had a front-row seat for some of the worst examples.

Based on his track record, he will make a terrible situation much worse. But maybe that’s the plan. And then he would certainly be the right man for the job.

***

The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Elliott Abrams caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), Venezuelan money (Jorge Andrés Paparoni Bruzual / Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0), Venezuelan flag (Anyul Rivas / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), and Nosferatu (Archive.org).

The Eurozone Fiasco

By Costas Panayotakis

December 19, 2011, from the Independent

In the narrative of the economic and political elites that have long shaped it, the European project has put an end to the series of bloody wars that afflicted the continent up through the first half of the 20th century. In reality, of course, the process of European unification reflected and reinforced, from its beginnings, new kinds of divisions that continue to shape Europe’s social and economic landscape. In the early postwar period the gradual formation of the European Community helped to bring together the various European countries on the capitalist side of the Cold War divide, while in more recent decades the deepening economic integration of the continent, most dramatically exemplified by the adoption of a common currency by 17 of the European Union’s member states, has increased economic and class inequality by restructuring European societies along neoliberal lines. In addition to eroding the gains that the postwar “golden age” of capitalism brought to European working classes, this neoliberal model is now in grave crisis, as the contradictions underlying the eurozone project have begun to unravel.

While mainstream U.S. media often attribute the crisis to the overspending of European countries, the reality is that the philosophy structuring European institutions has long prioritized the pursuit of low deficits, debt and inflation even at the expense of chronically high unemployment. In this respect, the European Union has been in line with the neoliberal paradigm that has prevailed in most parts of the world since the postwar model of development came to an end in the 1970s. While the deficit and debt targets were often violated by most countries in the eurozone (and not just by Greece and the countries on the European periphery), the main thrust of the European project has been to move away from the immediate postwar model, which was predicated on Keynesian social-democratic policies that sought full employment and the growth of social services and welfare states designed to give capitalism a human face.

While the postwar model of “welfare Keynesianism” was predicated on an international economic structure known as the Bretton Woods system, which protected the autonomy of economic policy-making on the national level, the deepening economic integration within Europe has pushed a model of economic development less dependent on the growth of domestic demand and more dependent on international competitiveness. Thus, while rising wages and productivity, as well as a growing welfare state, helped support economic growth in the postwar model, in the neoliberal era rising wages and a large welfare state are viewed as drags on economic growth that damage national competitiveness and reduce exports.

As has been the case in other parts of the world, this shift from the postwar Keynesian model to today’s neoliberal model has been devastating for ordinary workers and citizens, even as it helped European capital to recover from the crisis of the postwar model in the 1970s. The process of economic unification up to and including the formation and crisis of the eurozone has, moreover, encapsulated the problems with neoliberal globalization more generally. 

While neoliberals never tire of presenting free trade as universally beneficial, scholars who have studied the history of national economic development often point out that none of today’s economic powerhouses developed by adopting an open-market policy in their early stages of development. Indeed, it is the technologically and economically most advanced countries that are usually the most ardent supporters of free trade, since they (and especially the capitalist groups within them) benefit the most from such policies. This dynamic has certainly been present within the eurozone and contributed to the regional divisions that overdetermine the present crisis. 

The adoption of a common currency was especially beneficial to German industrial capital, since the economically less powerful countries on the European periphery could no longer protect their competitiveness by periodic devaluations or by industrial strategies that sought to challenge their subordinate position within the European division of labor. Unsurprisingly, the adoption of a common currency did not just increase the penetration of Southern markets by German industrial products but also decimated the industrial capacity of economically less strong countries. 

This regional imbalance was further aggravated by Germany’s tendency to bolster the competitiveness of its products even further by squeezing the wages of its workers. Those who present Germany as the model that the black sheep on the European periphery have to emulate usually neglect to mention that because of this “competitiveness” policy Germany has in recent years experienced rapidly rising poverty rates even among citizens who are employed. 

In another sense, of course, Germany is a model of the contradictions that result from the neoliberal shift from a developmental model based on domestic demand to one based on exports. There is something paradoxical about the intense pressure on countries on the European periphery to emulate Germany by adopting an export-oriented development strategy that supposedly requires a brutal assault on wages, collective bargaining and labor rights. Those who advocate this strategy seem to forget that not everybody can emulate Germany’s trade surpluses for the simple reason that for some countries to achieve such surpluses some other countries have to incur corresponding deficits. 

The other contradiction of global neoliberalism operative within the eurozone relates to the inherent instability of liberalized financial markets. Financial liberalization may benefit the financial sector, which has been as influential in shaping the European project as it has been in shaping economic policy in other parts of the world, but it has again and again wrought terrible havoc on the lives of billions of people, whenever asset bubbles burst and in the ensuing climate of panic businesses close down, jobs are lost and people’s lives are ruined. 

The formation of the eurozone a decade ago inaugurated a short-lived period of easy credit. This easy credit was made available by banks in more affluent European countries, such as Germany and France, to the citizens and governments of less affluent countries on the periphery. From the point of view of countries on the receiving end of these loans, easy credit fueled a period of prosperity that, as we know from the experience of other countries, such as the United States, might not have been possible at a time of growing economic inequality. The creditors, by contrast, underestimated the risks inherent in doing business within a eurozone that was not economically and technologically homogeneous. 

As has often happened in the last few decades around the world, an external shock is often enough to turn unrealistic euphoria into extreme pessimism, giving rise in the process to debt crises that reverberate across the global economy. Thus it was that the financial crisis triggered three years ago by the subprime loans fiasco has over time come to threaten the very survival of the eurozone. 

When the European debt crisis first surfaced in Greece, the first response of the mainstream media in the United States and Europe alike was to attribute it to the “profligacy” of Greeks and the defective political culture that allegedly fueled it. In addition to misrepresenting the manifestation of a broader systemic problem as a “national” one, this interpretation is giving rise to new divisions within Europe, as the citizens of the so-called PIGS (Portugal, Ireland/Italy, Greece and Spain) have in effect been racialized and treated as the convenient scapegoats for a crisis flowing from the structural imbalances inherent in the neoliberal architecture of the eurozone project. 

This racialization provides ideological cover for the brutal assault on the living conditions, pension and labor rights not just of Greeks but of working people across the European periphery. Being at the forefront of the crisis, Greece exemplifies the inability of these policies to address the debt problem. By leading to the collapse of internal demand, the closing of thousands of small businesses, skyrocketing unemployment and the further weakening of a banking sector at the brink of bankruptcy, austerity policies that seek to reduce deficits by cutting spending fail because they simultaneously lead to a collapse of tax revenues. 

In this context, workers and citizens across Europe are proving more perceptive than their political and economic leaders. Social and class conflict across Europe is escalating as political and economic elites insist on a self-defeating strategy that has not contained the crisis to the periphery but has led it to spread, deepen and knock at the door of the largest eurozone countries, including Spain, Italy and, increasingly, France and Germany. 

At the same time, however, the risk of losing the benefits coming from the eurozone has forced European political elites to take some incremental steps to address the crisis. Being too little and too late, these measures have not prevented the crisis from deepening. And as the crisis grows, so do the fractures within the European capitalist elites. One of the central issues under debate has been whether the European Central Bank should play a greater role in supporting countries in trouble by lending to them directly and functioning, like most central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, as a lender of last resort. 

The ECB has up to this point tried to stabilize the borrowing costs of countries in trouble by buying these countries’ bonds in the open market, but it is not allowed to lend to countries directly. This proscription, which contrasts with private banks’ easy access to low-interest loans from the ECB, is one example of tailoring the eurozone project around the needs of European financial capital. Germany is opposed to the ECB adopting a less restrictive policy stance, but as the crisis spreads to the core of the eurozone, it finds itself increasingly isolated. Germany has also been opposed adopting Eurobonds, which could ease the market pressure on the most vulnerable countries, preferring to postpone any such talk until even more draconian fiscal restrictions on eurozone countries make austerity permanent. 

Meanwhile, Germany and other countries of the European core have profited from the crisis, since, until recently, the investors who fled the bond markets of the countries on the European periphery turned to safer alternatives, such as German and Dutch bonds. 

This development has reduced the core countries’ interest rates, saving them tens of billions of euros. In addition, the interest rates such core countries earn on the loans that formed part of the rescue packages extended to countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal exceed the interest rates they themselves have to pay, thus further adding to the benefits the “rescuers” reap from the rescue operation. In a typical ideological maneuver, the true beneficiary of the rescue operation appears as a benefactor, while the citizens in the periphery who are losing everything to keep servicing their countries’ debt appear as leeches supposedly living off the largesse of German and Northern European taxpayers. 

Needless to say, this maneuver leaves the other great beneficiaries of the rescue operation — the French, German and European banks holding European sovereign debt — out of the picture, thus making large parts of the rescue packages available for the continued support of zombie banks. To add insult to injury, a banker is now Greece’s new prime minister, inaugurating a new trend of unelected technocrats favored by European capital presiding over the bleeding of their countries. Thus, the evolving eurozone crisis brings to the surface the long-standing contradiction between capitalism and democracy. As European elites’ inept attempt to defend the former threatens to sink the eurozone, it falls on ordinary European citizens and workers to defend the latter by taking to the streets and escalating their resistance against a European capitalist class that has long abandoned the pretense of presiding over a social model that lends capitalism a human face. 

Costas Panayotakis is a professor of sociology at New York City College of Technology/CUNY. He is the author of Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy. 

Congratulations, Egypt! A People's Revolution Done Right: Next Step - Prevent it From Being Hijacked

by John Lawrence

 
The people's revolution in Egypt may be a turning point in world zeitgeist. For 30 years neocon values have prevailed. On November 23, 2006 I blogged in a post entitled "Neocon Rats Leaving the Sinking Ship":

"The whole neocon idea of spreading democracy in the middle east by attacking and invading a country in order to change it from a dictatorship to a democracy is a ridiculous proposition on the face of it, but that's what the neocons were selling. And the preposterous notion that this was a moral undertaking - it was morally a good thing to do - to bring death and destruction to a nation in order to spread democracy is as repugnant as the notion that Hitler was morally correct to invade weaker countries because the Germans were the most advanced civilization composed of the stongest and best people. The American supermensch, according to the neocons, would advance the Iraqi undermensch to democracy and freedom. Depite the cost in death and destruction, they would thank us some day. They would throw flowers at the advancing troops much as the Austrians threw flowers at the German army during the Anscluss."

This pretty well sums up American policy under George W Bush and the neocons. Their notion of forcing democracy on a country by invading it played out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The IMF and the World Bank were US surrogates which forced policies of privatization, deregulation and shredding of the social safety net down the throats of any country not stong enough to resist. The neocon US saw as its duty the forcing of what they considered to be American values down the throats of the rest of the world. The result in many cases was the creation of an elite class of wealthy oligarchs and increased poverty among the majority of the people with a corrupt and repressive dictator favorable to American intersts at the top. The intersection of political and economic power was complete. Such was the case in Egypt.

For those that say that this protest came out of nowhere, let me set the matter straight. There have been protests as recently as last June. They just never got the mass publicity. In an article, Privatization and Corruption in Egypt, we find the following:

Last June there were protests against privatization in Egypt. The protests were so severe that the government actually decided to effectively end the program. Since the 1990's a key economic priority in Egypt was the privatization of state owned industries and a transition from a centrally controlled economy to a more free market oriented economy that would be part of the global capitalist system. The justification for such a move was the inefficiency of the state controlled command economy. However, the more pressing concern was to open up the country to foreign investment and also enrich crony supporters of the government through privatization of state owned assets at fire sale prices. Many in the public long believed that privatization of state companies involved corruption involving insider dealings and opposed it for this reason but also there was oppoosition from some old guard officials who thought that privatization would be destabilizing. When the state owned companies, this ownership could be used to help control dissent. Wages could be raised and people could be employed even when in purely capitalist market terms they were not needed. In fact they provided a social safety net of sorts. The privatization has already gone about as far as it could go. Remaining state companies often are technologically outdated and overstaffed with poorly trained workers. No capitalist investors are interested in buying them except perhaps at very low prices. In June of 2010 thousands of workers protested outside parliament complaining about lost jobs, wages, and social protections. Fearing even more political unrest the government decided to drop further privatization for now. The government has even bought back several companies from investors. The demand from the international business community has been for further "reform"to cut Egyptians expectations. Egyptians expect their government to do things for them not just for business! Experts claim that the fundamental mistake of the government was in failing to reduce public expectations. Under the command economy and state ownership people expected the state to be the primary provider. People supported the government because the government gave everyone jobs. The experts complain that there are still about six million state civil service employees. Of course the reform would be to privatize most of these services, make them centers for private profit and investment and hire only if this made money for investors. The new view of this is expressed by an official. Anonymous of course and to the New York Times! ‘You educate me, give me a degree, you give me a job, when I die you bury me - and I do nothing.' " Of course they did do something; they kept the system going inefficient or not. The problem is that it is not part of the system of global capitalism and it does not provide much for private profit or investors. Political scientist Amr El-Shobaki said that privatization was a way that friends of the rich and powerful could grow more rich and powerful. The privatization process had begun under Anwar Sadat but it begin in earnest in 1991. The goal was to privatize 314 companies. All the bargains are gone to investors, dissolved or merged with other state companies. 150 are still left. Shobaki said:"There is always a cost for reform, but the problem here is that people now have the impression that those who always pay the cost of every reform are the simple people, while businessmen are never held accountable for corruption and while privatization of companies takes place in secret, without the knowledge or participation of the people," Perhaps people's impressions are correct. Faced with opposition to privatization the government took another tack. Open the door to foreign investment and let state industries wither. In the Egyptian context, economists say it is a victory that this work force has shrunk, to about 300,000 from about 1.3 million in 1978. Right, it is a victory that jobs are lost. THe government that scored that victory is now in danger of falling. One of the reasons is the high unemployment. The government has adopted other "reforms" to reduce expectations of the Egyptian working class and whip them into shape. The government adopted a law that allowed state-owned companies to deal with employees in the same way as private-sector companies. In 2009 it began to carry out a new law allowing the private firms to build infrastructure, including sewage plants and hospitals, another unpopular move intended to whittle away the state-dominated system. A study of Egyptian attitudes show a quite different view of privatization and the role of government than in the U.S. Consider this: ""The majority of citizens believe that the best system would strengthen the role of the state and the public sector; only 20% of citizens considered privatization to be beneficial to Egypt’s economy. ""

There you have it, friends, in a nutshell! Privatization, a core neocon value, led to large scale unemployment and it was this that was the primary factor behind Egypt's revolution. You had large numbers of young college educated people with no job prospects. You had fantastic wealth among a tiny elite while the rest lived in poverty. This revolution was about corruption in this sense, but it was all perfectly legal. Mubarak himself had siphoned off $70 billion dollars from the system which required foreign investors to enter into partnerships with Egyptians owning 51%. The best state owned companies had been privatized and snapped up by foreign investors. The remaining state owned companies were virtually worthless. No investor wanted to buy them. In the name of efficiency workers had been laid off.

The New York Times confirmed that what was happening was the sell-off of state owned enterprises to private investors with the consequence of laid off employees and high unemployment:

Privatization began in earnest in 1991, when Egypt agreed to work with international lenders on an economic restructuring plan to help it repair a failing economy. This represented an effort to accelerate changes started in the 1970s by President Anwar el-Sadat, who began the process of dismantling the state-controlled economy fashioned by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and early ’60s. The 1991 effort started off easily enough when the state readily found buyers for assets like its beer and cement industries. But over time, the state said it was left with difficult-to-sell assets, outdated factories producing cars, instruments for textile manufacturing and other things that are either obsolete or unwanted. At the same time public pressure became intense as workers complained that their rights were being auctioned off. The goal was originally to sell off 314 companies. There are still 150 left: the rest have been sold to investors, gone public on the stock market, dissolved or merged with other state industries. “There is always a cost for reform, but the problem here is that people now have the impression that those who always pay the cost of every reform are the simple people, while businessmen are never held accountable for corruption and while privatization of companies takes place in secret, without the knowledge or participation of the people,” Mr. Shobaki said. Faced with so many obstacles, the government took another approach, trying to open the door to foreign investment while quietly allowing state industries to wither. In the Egyptian context, economists say it is a victory that this work force has shrunk, to about 300,000 from about 1.3 million in 1978. The government also adopted a law that allowed state-owned companies to deal with employees in the same way as private-sector companies. This year it began to carry out a new law allowing the private firms to build infrastructure, including sewage plants and hospitals, another unpopular move intended to whittle away the state-dominated system.

So fundamentally the revolution was about jobs. It was about economic democracy as opposed to economic aristocracy. It was a rejection of crony capitalism in which state owned assets are sold off to a group of politically powerful and connected insiders. It was about a repudiation of neocon values. The reason that the American right wing is so upset is that they are afraid that the Muslim Brotherhood will take over. They are upset over the word "Brotherhood." Any new economic system put in place by the Egyptian people that has anything to do with "Brotherhood" is antithetical to American economic values, the values of capitalism. Why it might mean redistribution of wealth not from the poor to the wealthy which they favor but in the other direction from wealthy to poor which they don't. When George W Bush and the neocons talked about "democracy," democracy was just a euphemism for American style capitalism - a top down elite of wealthy investors and a majority underclass living in poverty with a repressive dictator at the top who maintained stability so American interests in the region would not be transgressed. The American right wing has gotten so comfortable with sham democracy that it has a problem with anything approaching authentic democracy.

But the Egyptian people are interested in real democracy not sham democracy, and that real democracy very definitely has an economic component as did the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights which states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control." The Egyptian revolution is a repudiation of neocon values, a repudiation of privatization, deregulation, austerity and shredding of the social safety net. It is more than a call for free elections and a new parliament. It is a call for economic as well as political justice. Let's hope that the Egyptian people's revolution is not hijacked.

It's impossible to know what went on behind closed doors, but the final results show that the military sided with the people and against the oligarchy. If Bush were President, the results might have turned out differently. The military might have been persuaded to turn on the people thus preserving American interests in the region. The victory of the Egyptian people does not mean a repudiation of American interests, just a rejection of neocon values. Neocon values are only American values when Republicans are in control. The fact that we have a President Obama and Democrats are in power in the White House means that American values have shifted. Now American values can support and work hand in hand with a true democracy in Egypt. This might be the paradigm shift which truly delivers power and economic justice to the people and away from the interests of globalized transnational corporations and the international wealthy class of elite investors. Let's hope so.

The Iraq War: An Exercise in Futility and a Waste of Money

by John Lawrence

Want to know why the deficit is so high? How about giving credit to the Iraq war which was not only a huge waste of money, but even more importantly, the US strategic position in the Middle East is now in worse shape than before that war was started. The idea that we can go into a country and manufacture a political and economic system that will then be superior to what they had before is patent nonsense even given the fact that Saddam was a brutal dictator. Actually, he had been a US ally and he was mellowing out in his later years writing a novel just before the war began. (The picture on the left above shows Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense that prosecuted the war, shaking hands in happier times with our erstwhile ally, Saddam.) Despite Saddam's literary pursuits and the fact that he had been a US ally, after he threatened to nationalize Iraqi oil, Saddam became, in the Bush administrations's telling of it, the US' arch enemy.

Any country in the world is not going to have their political and economic system imposed on them by the United States. This is trying to erect an edifice on quicksand in an earthquake zone. Political forces in Iraq are going to eventually determine what kind of system Iraqis will have, and in the meantime what goes on there may not be pretty. Political forces there may well manifest themselves in a Civil War. Eventually, to stem the chaos, a Saddam-like dictator may emerge, and we'll be right back where we started. How ironic that would be!

Now nine years later there are more than 4 million internally and externally displaced Iraqis. Electrical and other basic services are worse than before the war. The average Iraqi is worse not better off. There are 40,000 seriously wounded or dead American service people from "hostile causes," and another 40,000 dead or wounded from "non-hostile" causes. There are perhaps a million dead Iraqis because of the war. How is this at all worth it? $1 trillion is down the drain with the cost of caring for Americans wounded in the war likely to quadruple that figure.

The whole world knows that Bush lied us into the war, and then later joked about the "weapons of mass destruction." Iraqis presently hate us. What have we accomplished? We are worse off. A trillion dollars has been added to our national debt that could have been spent repairing American infrastructure. Iraqis are worse off, and the course of future events there has nothing to do with the supposed "ameliorative" effects of American involvement. Some pundits say "we have to wait and see what happens before we will know whether or not our effort there were a success." Nonsense. Events that will unfold there will have little or nothing to do with American involvement but they will have to do with political forces within Iraq unleashed by the US. Whether Iraq eventually becomes a stable country with a reasonable lifestyle for the majority of its people has to do with Iraqi efforts from now on and not what the US has done there. By every conceivable measure the US effort has only set back the course of civilization while undermining the fiscal soundness of the US itself. Enemies have only been created not pacified. The US tried to create a society in its own image or in a glorified neocon vision of what a society should be. That entails unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism with no social safety net and privatization of the oil fields.

The "100 laws" established by L. Paul Bremer head of the Coalition Provisional Authority have been written right into the Iraqi Constitution - such laws as those that allow foreign corporations to take 100% of their profits out of the country, establishing ridiculously low taxes on corporations of 15%, not allowing cases to be brought against foreign contractors in Iraqi courts, making them effectively above the law, not requiring the hiring of Iraqi citizens for the rebuilding of Iraq etc. etc.

Although the original goal of the Bush administration was to privatize and capitalize on Iraq's oil, the achievement of that goal was largely botched with the result that China, without having fired a shot, ended up getting some of the plum oil contracts. The Iraqi government and the China National Petroleum Corporation have signed a contract in Beijing that could be worth up to $3 billion. The US tried to impose its own neocon values on Iraq in terms of an economic and political system which had nothing to do with Iraqi values. Its attempts to impose an ultra right wing version of capitalism is written into their Constitution which is probably as worthless as the paper it's written on.

Saddam at least was a bulwark against Iran. Now that the Shiites are in charge in Iraq, Iran is the winner since they are a Shiite country that has strong ties to Iraq's Shiites. Iran and Iraq will probably form an alliance now that the US is gone which leaves the US in a more precarious position than it was in before the war started and shifts the geopolitical balance not in the US' favor. All that money spent and the outcome is that the Iraqi people are worse off, a lot of them are dead or injured, and the US position is worse off strategically, fiscally and in terms of the sacrifice in young men and women, dead and wounded. At least I give Obama credit for ending the insanity, and I believe he will resist the temptation to send troops back in when things go awry, a temptation kneejerk warmongers Bush and McCain wouldn't have resisted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Irrationality of the Tea Party Movement

by John Lawrence

The Tea Party people don't make sense. A lot of them have lost their jobs so they have plenty of time to protest. But to protest what? They want smaller government even as they are sitting there collecting unemployment? A lot of them have lost their houses or their houses are underwater. So they want government, the only entity that is trying to help them, out of their lives? It just doesn't make any sense. I've often wondered - where do these people get time off from work to do all this protesting? Well now the answer is clear. According to a New York Times article, With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party, a lot of them have lost their jobs:

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care. Many Tea Party supporters argue for smaller government even as they argue it should do more. Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist. In the last year, he has organized a local group and a statewide coalition, and even started a “bus czar” Web site to marshal protesters to Washington on short notice. This month, he mobilized 200 other Tea Party activists to go to the local office of the same congressman to protest what he sees as the government’s takeover of health care. Mr. Grimes is one of many Tea Party members jolted into action by economic distress. At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.

I guess disgruntled people will seek out and join a movement, any movement. Since this one got started with corporate help and hence is known not as a grass roots movement but an astroturf movement, the activists hold to the illogical position that they want smaller government but more help with the problems they're facing. Logically then, they should ask the corporations not government for help. See where that gets them! It's clear that these people are being used by the right and corporate interests for their own political purposes.

Many Tea Party supporters argue for smaller government even as they argue it should do more.

Maybe what they really stand for is that government should help them - mostly white middle class people- and not minorities or illegal immigrants in which case their protestations are mainly code for racism and discrimination. Sarah Palin said that what we want is "freedom," and Janis Joplin said, "Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose." Well, the Tea Partyers, it sounds like, have nothing else to lose. They've lost their jobs, lost equity in their houses, are on unemployment or social security and now they want government to do for them even as they demand smaller government. In other words they want government to do for them - nice white folks - even as it shuts down programs for the poor.

The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help. Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.” “If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said. The fact that many of them joined the Tea Party after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an improvement in the economy, with people trading protest signs for paychecks. But for now, some are even putting their savings into work that they argue is more important than a job — planning candidate forums and get-out-the-vote operations, researching arguments about the constitutional limits on Congress and using Facebook to attract recruits. “Even if I wanted to stop, I just can’t,” said Diana Reimer, 67, who has become a star of the effort by FreedomWorks, a Tea Party group, to fight the health care overhaul. “I’m on a mission, and time is not on my side.” A year ago, Ms. Reimer’s husband had been given a choice — retire or be fired. The couple had been trying to sell their split-level home in suburban Philadelphia to pay off some debt and move to a small place in the city. But real estate agents told them the home would sell for about $40,000 less than they paid 19 years ago — not enough to pay off their mortgage. Then Ms. Reimer saw a story about the Tea Party on television. “I said, ‘That’s it,’ ” she recalled. “How can you get this frustration out, have your voices heard?” She liked that the Tea Party was patriotic, too. “They said the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the national anthem,” she said. She had taken a job selling sportswear at Macy’s. But when her husband found her up early and late taking care of Tea Party business, he urged her to take a leave. When the store did not allow one, she quit. “I guess I just found my calling,” she said.

While some might find it odd that a group of people living on government support should be protesting against the government, these people are doing what comes naturally to them: not thinking for themselves and falling into a convenient role set up for them by corporate America complete with flag salutations and singing of the National Anthem. The trappings of an America that they once knew and are afraid they are losing is what attracts them to this cause. The Tea Party movement was organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative group organized by Dick Armey, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical and life insurance corporations. ThinkProgress reports:

FreedomWorks represents a top-down, corporate-friendly approach that has been the norm for conservative organizations for years. As Obama prepares to push to close corporate tax loopholes, reform health care, and transition to a clean energy economy, we can expect more corporate lobbyists to create astroturf protests to oppose change.

So all these old people are protesting for an America they thought they knew in bygone days. It's nostalgia for the past fully capitalized upon by corporate lobbyists. In other words the Tea Partyers, unbeknownst even to themselves, are carrying the water for corporate America, and what does corporate America want? It wants smaller government (read "deregulation"); it wants government out of corporate America's life. The Tea Partyers, who are collecting social security and unemployment insurance checks, don't really want government out of their lives if it means they won't get their government checks any more. They just don't want groups other than themselves to get any government help. Their Weltanschaaung has been given to them by corporate America. Their mantras and slogans have been given to them by corporate America. Just as corporate America has given them their pills and their nursing homes, they like the look and feel of the ads and literature with that friendly and concerned hue that has been given to them by corporate America even as corporate America has continued to fleece them. Only don't blame corporate America for the fact that your lives aren't what they used to be. Blame government. Dick Armey and FreedomWorks have cleverly shifted the blame from corporate America to government. Corporate America has given them a cocoon within which to operate - a nice warm Snuggy.

The Tea Party movement is all about nostalgia for the trappings of mid-twentieth century America, and those trappings have been conveniently provided to them by corporate America so they don't have to think critically for themselves. They can just salute the flag, sing "God Bless America" and say "Thank you for your service" to all the veterans present.

Jeff McQueen, 50, began organizing Tea Party groups in Michigan and Ohio after losing his job in auto parts sales. “Being unemployed and having some time, I realized I just couldn’t sit on the couch anymore,” he said. “I had the time to get involved.”   He began producing what he calls the flag of the Second American Revolution, and drove 700 miles to campaign for Mr. Brown under its banner. Flag sales, so far, are not making him much. But he sees a bigger cause. “The founding fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor,” he said. “They believed in it so much that they would sacrifice. That’s the kind of loyalty to this country that we stand for.” He blames the government for his unemployment. “Government is absolutely responsible, not because of what they did recently with the car companies, but what they’ve done since the 1980s,” he said. “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.” He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact. “If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said. Tea Party groups like FreedomWorks recognize that they are benefiting from the labor of many people who have been hit hard economically. But its chairman, the former House majority leader Dick Armey, argued that their ranks will remain strong — and connected — even as members find work. “I see these folks as pretty much the National Guard,” Mr. Armey said. “They will go back to their day jobs, they will go back to their Little League and their bridge club. But they will have their activism at the ready, and they will stay in touch.” Mr. Grimes, for his part, is thinking of getting a part-time job with the Census Bureau. But he is also planning, he said, to teach high school students about the Constitution and limits on government powers. “I don’t think that the unemployment thing is going to change,” he said.

Jeff McQueen rightly blames free trade for the loss of jobs in America. And it's true that the government has promoted free trade, but at whose behest? Government has been lobbied extensively by corporate America for free trade because it benefits US transnational corporations, and it is a conservative article of faith that that's the way it should be. The conservative administrations of the last 30 years starting with Ronald Reagan have implemented free trade. To be honest, the Republican-lite Clinton administration did also, but Clinton recently has seen the error of his ways and recanted. ("I have to live every day with the consequences of what I did."). The Obama administration and Democrats in general are fighting back on free trade. Mr. McQueen needs to make a distinction between those who aid and abet and use government to promote corporate interests and those who are fighting back against the corporate takeover of government. It's not about a government takeover; it's about a corporate takeover of government which uses bought and paid for politicians, lobbyists and TV ads to convince the likes of Mr. McQueen that corporations are good, government is bad, even as they use government to promote corporate interests at the expense of Middle America.

US Killing Civilians in Afghanistan: How Is This Winning Hearts and Minds?

by John Lawrence

The stated goal of the US military in Afghganistan is to "win hearts and minds." But yet they are killing many more civilians than supposed bad guys. This creates a complete contradiction. It's impossible to win hearts and minds if you are constantly killing civilians.

NATO forces in southern Afghanistan bombed a civilian convoy, killing 27 people including women and children and injuring many more, Afghan officials said. The airstrike in a remote part of Oruzgan province yesterday capped a bloody week for Afghan civilians that has seen some 60 innocent people killed by NATO weapons. Afghanistan's cabinet called the attack "unjustifiable" and condemned the raid "in the strongest terms possible".

This should be enough to stop the war right there. The US is not winning. It is defeating itself because it can't pursue the Taliban without killing large numbers of civilians. Then after each attack General McChrystal has to get up and abjectly apologize to the Afghani people about American "mistakes." Oh we just knocked off another dozen women and children. So Solly! It's ridiculous. The Americans are losing the war not because of superior Taliban military tactics but because of inept and stupid US military tactics resulting in killing the wrong people. Winning hearts and minds would be building roads and dams; not winning hearts and minds is killing civilians. Oh, by the way that's what China is doing - building roads and cutting business deals while the US is killing civilians. Who do you think is really winning the hearts and minds?

And the US is spending billions upon billions of dollars to kill civilians in Afghanistan. That's money that can't be used to build roads and bridges in the US. That's money that's not being spent to protect US borders. That's money not being spent to create jobs in the US. How does killing civilians abroad and letting infrastructure crumble at home while going deeper into debt make the US more secure or more "free" or a better place? It's just so obvious that for a fraction of the cost the US could actually be winning hearts and minds around the world by sending in the Peace Corps instead of the Marines.

The US spends a pittance on Homeland Security and a paltry sum on US infrastructure while it devotes the major part of its resources to military adventurism. The US is spending $1 billion per year for every soldier in Afghanistan! Shouldn't that give us pause? Shouldn't we reevaluate our priorities? Then we have a huge recent victory in the Senate to pass a $15 billion jobs bill? That's just 15 soldiers worth a year in Afghanistan! It's nothing. And while the US military destroys Afghanistan and kills civilians, one guy is going around and building schools. In "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson tells about his experiences in Afghanistan that led him to go back there and build schools - one at a time. If one guy can do this kind of good, how much good could the US government with all its might and resources do if it chose to, instead of choosing to kill civilians in a quest for the fool's gold of eliminating Taliban leadership?

And the thing is no matter how many Taliban you kill, there will always be others to spring up elsewhere and everywhere around the world because the root cause is poverty and ignorance. The root cause is that earth is a Planet of Slums. One billion of earth's people live in abject poverty, living on less than a dollar a day, drinking filthy water, eating filthy food, ill housed, ill clothed. For a paltry sum, the majority of the world's people could be given a decent life, and this would do more for world peace and for the security of the US than all the civilian killing now in progress in Afghanistan ever will. Because you can't win hearts and minds by killing the hearts and minds you're trying to win. Winning and killing don't go together when the people you're trying to win are the people you're killing. Oh, I know it was just an accident - killing all those civilians - another accident, an ongoing accident. We're so solly. There's really no excuse  especially when it happens over and over and over.

When McChrystal took over last year as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, he promised to reduce the number of civilian casualties after a series of similar errant bombings. A total of 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed last year, the highest number in any year of the war, according to a U.N. report. Further complicating the U.S. effort, the deadly airstrike Sunday took place in an area under Dutch military control. A day earlier, the Dutch government collapsed over an effort to extend the mandate of 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The 2,000 troops from the Netherlands may leave by the summer. The Australian and Canadian governments are also under public pressure to pull out. And while the U.S. military and its allies continue to push forward, they wait for Afghan troops to catch up. Several media reports from the field have cited the high illiteracy rate within the Afghan National Army, and an inability of some of its troops to read maps. A report in The New York Times cited an American Marine unit whose members said they led every one of its engagements against the Taliban, organizing the Afghan forces, transporting them in American vehicles, and supplying them with weaponry and ammunition. The Afghans' lack of preparedness raises questions about President Obama's declaration that American forces will hand over more responsibility to Afghan security forces as they work toward a target date to begin withdrawing in July 2011.

2,412 Afghani civilians killed in 2009 - that's 2,412 hearts and minds that won't be won over to the American cause. Multiply that by 100 to include all the victims' relatives and townspeople and there's a whole lot more that won't be won over. How many bad guys were killed compared to the number of civilians? A handful, probably. And for all the bad guys killed there is a new generation of young men ready to pick up their banner and become freedom fighters because far from winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan what the US is really doing is creating enemies. They are losing hearts and minds and for this reason alone they are losing the war. They're creating a people who will hate America if for no other reason then that America has killed a relative, a friend, someone they knew.

The US spends more on its war machine than all the other countries of the world combined while spending a pittance on its own Homeland Security and being the world's largest debtor. US values are so out of whack that it's totally pathetic. And it has a political structure that, despite the noble efforts of a few, seems bound and determined to keep on conducting business as usual until there is a complete collapse. The level of political ignorance that is actively inculcated in the American people is alarming. The amount of money corrupting the political system is frightening. President Obama, who is to the right of Dwight Eisenhauer and Dick Nixon, is painted as a socialist! It's laughable. America is becoming a joke in the eyes of the rest of the world. It would be laughable if it wasn't also so pathetic because the US owns a nuclear arsenal that can pulverize the rest of the world. It owns military assets that can utterly destroy the rest of the world. When the likes of Dick Cheney take power again, they will be all too prepared to use it.

Right now there are over 700 US military bases in Afghanistan. There are that many or more in other countries throughout the world. The planet is literally being militarily dominated by a financially bankrupt nation whose only real asset is its military arsenal and its millitary-industrial complex. And this is the way America intends to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world? Instead it is losing hearts and minds, day by day, civilian death after civilian death.

Neocon Rats Leaving the Sinking Ship

In an article to be published in Vanity Fair, the principle neocon architects of the war in Iraq wring their hands over the total failure of the policies they advocated. They blame Bush for his incompetence. They blame Rumsfield for his incompetence. They blame Bremer. Never once do they stop and think that maybe they had their heads up their asses to advocate such a cockamamie and utterly immoral idea as preemptive war, in other words a war of aggression. They might as well blame President Cheney too because Bush was merely the Cheerleader-in-Chief, a President prior to 9/11 who was shopping for a legacy and was sold a bill of goods by the neocons, and it was a traditional Republican legacy after all: WAR. Now the neocons such as Richard Perle on the left are backing away from their involvement in designing and promoting a "splendid little war" with Iraq. The reason they were so enthusisatic about it was that toppling Sadam Hussein in their eyes was like shooting fish in a barrel. None of them had the foresight to envision the chaos and destabilization that has occurred.

According to [Richard] Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty." Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

The whole neocon idea of spreading democracy in the middle east by attacking and invading a country in order to change it from a dictatorship to a democracy is a ridiculous proposition on the face of it but that's what the neocons were selling. And the preposterous notion that this was a moral undertaking - it was morally a good thing to do - to bring death and destruction to a nation in order to spread democracy is as repugnant as the notion that Hitler was morally correct to invade weaker countries because the Germans were the most advanced civilization composed of the stongest and best people. The American supermensch, according to the neocons, would advance the Iraqi undermensch to democracy and freedom. Depite the cost in death and deatruction, they would thank us some day. They would throw flowers at the advancing troops much as the Austrians threw flowers at the German army during the Anscluss. The only difference was the Iraqis didn't throw flowers while the Austrians actuallly did.

A President shopping for a legacy was sold a bill of goods by a pretentious, pompous Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, and others and now they're blaming the Bush Administration for incompetence. If they had only executed their duties flawlessly, Iraqi democracy and freedom would be flowering. With a little American water and fertilizer, whole generations of Iraqis from the old and grizzled to Iraqi schioolchildren would be thanking us and singing our praises. And those who didn't would be the dead enders, the sore losers.

What these ideologue neocons misunderstand is human nature itself, not to mention the history and culture of the Iraqi people. And their disingenuousness belies their true motives which are much the same as Hitler's - to extend American (German) power over a greater part of the world by means of establishing humongous military bases in Iraq and turn Iraqi "freedom" into the free enterprise system (otherwise known as capitalism) goal of extracting oil for profit - said profit not to be shared in an egalitarian manner among the Iraqi people but in the best globalistic tradition put up for sale to the highest bidder whether Iraqi or some other member of the global community (read: BIG OIL).

Human nature is such that you can't invade a country in order to save it; you can't destroy a country in order to save it; you can't subjugate a people who refuse to be subjugated. Neocon doctrine is similar to Hitler era Nazi doctrine: the strong should assert their superiority over the weak. Power should be used and exerted to train and tailor the world to conform to American interests and values: Pax Americana similar to Pax Germana. This is the morality of survival of the fittest: social Darwinism which underlay Nazi as well as neocon doctrine. A nation that has it within its power to use that power to help instead wants to use that power in the interests of enriching and ennobling those who wield the power since they believe they are the natural superiors of everybody else.

Instead of using its military to "help" people, instead of using the forces of destruction to bring about a better life and a better world, America should use its might to bring about a better world by waging peace - what a novel notion! By being constructive rather than destructive, by not using military means to achieve goals, but instead using constructive means, much good could be achieved. But this is an alien notion to right-wing Republicans who have sufficiently castigated and demonized do-gooders. Instead they want the invigorating and masculine action of a fully charged military. Military action will hasten a new day, a day in which all the cobwebs of stagnating inaction have been cleared away. Helping to fight poverty and disease, supplying the basic needs of humanity for Americans (Charity begins at home) and foreign peoples, constructing rather than destructing ennabling rather than enslaving, letting people define themselves instead of trying to define them to themselves - all these things were and are possible. Instead  of being a constructive force for peace in the world, America has left it to a few good billionaires and multi-millionaire entertainers to cure disease aand to provide clean drinking water to those who lack even the bare essentials of life while winking at the corrupt politicians and businessmen who have access to the inner circles of power - the nexus between lobbyists for powerful corporations and Team Earmark, the congressional me firsters.

Rome tried to  control the world. Pax Romana was defeated by internal corruption and profligate spending as well as miltary overstretch. Then Napoleon tried it; Hitler tried it.  And now the neocons have tried to bring about Pax Americana. Just as Hitler blamed the incompetence of  his Generals and the unwillingness of the German people to assert their superiority over the undermensch, the neocons are blaming the incompetence of the Bush Administration and the impatience of the American people rather than blaming and questioning the wisdom of their own philosophy which led to their ideology of American aggression. It looks like their Pax Americana is unraveling. The American people have had enough of it. They're not wling to die for the glory of the Bush Administration and its concomitant neocon think tanks.

Liesiness and Truthiness: Illusions and Delusions

Whereas truthiness refers to the tendency in the modern world to rely on gut feeling, emotion etc rather than real facts to confer a version of the truth, liesiness is the tendency to present a version of the truth or reality which totally belies the truth and/or reality or is a distortion thereof. In both truthiness and liesiness the goal of the propagandist is to convert others to his point of view. In the former, the speaker doesn't know what the truth is; in the latter he knows very well what the truth is but presents a version of reality that is completely contrary to it and intended to deceive. As such it is not spin. Spin is when someone tries to present a version of the truth that is beneficial to him. Liesiness does not even pretend to be a version of the truth. Liesiness tries to convert people to a version of reality that totally contradicts the truth.

Both truthiness and liesiness can be used as propaganda. Propaganda tries to persuade the populace to have a particular version of reality. If that version of reality bears some resemblance to the truth, then we could call it spin or truthiness. If that version of reality has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, we call it liesiness. Take the run-up to the Iraq war: lie by lie. While the Bush Administration had already decided to invade Iraq, Bush said on 3/8/2003: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq." This was an outright lie. They were doing everything they could to justify going to war with Iraq, which was a foregone conclusion as far as they were concerned.

For example, consider Dick Cheney's performance on Meet the Press recently. Even though it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11, had nothing to do with Al Quaeda and had no weapons of mass destruction, Cheney and other in the administration continue to link Sadam with the War on Terror. Here's how they are able to lie and get away with it. First, when asked directly whether Sadam had anything to do with 9/11, they'll respond directly "No." Then they'll go on to elaborate in such a way as to suggest, imply, allude and hint that Sadam did have something to do with it. They don't come out and say directly that he did. They just suggest 10 times, compared to the brief direct statement that he didn't, that he did. Get it? Suggest 10 times that he did. Reply directly one time that he didn't. This is another form of liesiness.

Another example: the docudrama shown on ABC without commercial interruption: "The Path to 9/11." Since it was a docudrama and not a documentary, the producers were free to fabricate, make up stuff, put words in people's mouths that were never said etc. Certain scenes implied or suggested or outright portrayed things that were contrary to the truth as the producers very well knew in order to convey a certain impression or version of reality which was that the Clinton Administration was responsible for 9/11 while letting the Bush Administration off the hook although it's well documented by Richard Clark ("Against All Enemies") and others that Bush and his Administration had no interest in terrorism whatsoever prior to 9/11. This is liesiness at its best. Just put in a brief disclaimer that some of the content may be fictional, and then leave the audience to figure out exactly what that is. Of course, words were put in the mouths of real people that were never said. So what does it matter what's true and what's false? Viewers will come away with whatever point of view the producers wish to present. Exactly what liesiness is all about: converting viewers to their version of reality.

Liesiness is also running ads on TV which distort the truth and smear an opponent. The idea is to denigrate, castigate, heap aspersions upon, blame, mock, humiliate etc. The "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign against John Kerry is just one example. The Willie Horton ads against Michael Dukakis are another. The bottom line is that the campaign with the most money for negative, attack ads wins. That's why the Republicans despite all their obvious incompetence, failure and venality will probably win the mid-term elections. They have the most money for negative attack ads. This is why their philosopy of giving tax breaks to the rich makes so much sense. The rich, returning favor, have the money to donate to Republican campaign coffers which translates into more attack ads than the Democrats can muster. Lies repeated more often than their opponents' lies or, God forbid, the opponents' truth, win elections. In this game those who tell the truth are eliminated in the first round.

Neocon Principles: #4 Ceasefires are only desirable after our military objectives have been accomplished

Ceasefires should only occur after our enemy has been completely vanquished. Any ceasefire short of achieving our military objectives is a bad ceasefire. Only the enemy's surrender should signal a ceasefire. A ceasefire prior to the achievement of our objectives will only give the enemy an opportunity to rearm and resupply himself. It will only encourage the enemy to continue fighting at some future date.

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means.  Neocons say that politics is a less desirable means for the continuation of war than war itself. Indeed, there is no need to see war as a continuation of politics which is to say something that is pursued only when diplomacy breaks down. For neocons war is the primary value in itself.

Consider the following:

...one might well ask whether the military thought of Carl von Clausewitz, developed over a hundred and seventy years ago, has anything relevant to offer to soldiers of the 21st century. Indeed, one author has recently argued that Clausewitz's wake is long overdue: "[Future] war will be fought not to pursue national interests, but to kill enemy leaders, to convert opponents to one's religion, to obtain booty, or sometimes, for simple entertainment. Thus the core of Clausewitz's philosophy of war--that states wage wars using armies in pursuit of political objectives--will disappear."... Other writers have maintained that nuclear weaponry, transnational constabulary warfare, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotrafficking, and the increased compartmentalization of political and military leadership evident in modern states have rendered obsolete Clausewitz's definition of war as an act of policy, and with it his tripartite conception of war. ...We are further told that the value of Clausewitz's masterwork, On War, is diminished because of its failure to address war as a cultural phenomenon: It not only fails to explain why wars occur, it views war from only a single perspective, from within the Western nation-state paradigm.

Thus war is the primary undertaking itself not just a means of achieving political objectives. Sometimes it is even pursued for its "entertainment value." Peace is undesirable because it's boring; the emotions go into hibernation. Only the violence of war spurs men on to glorious pursuits. As Nietsche said, "A good war hallows any cause." Nietzsche went on: "You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of thy neighbor." In  other words, you can achieve glory through war, and peace is for weenies.  Peace, neighbor love and other sissy sentiments will never achieve the grand and glorious things that war can and will achieve. As Rush Limbaugh says:  "Peace follows victory." There can be no peace until war has achieved a complete and total victory, and we have beaten our enemies into complete and total submission. Anything short of victory such as a "negotiated peace" can not possibly produce a state of affairs with which real men can be satisfied.

Neocon of the month: Elliott Abrams.

As assistant Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan, Abrams was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Inexplicably appointed by George W Bush to oversee the Palestine-Israel conflict. Flew to London under the pseudonym Mr. Kenilworth and asked the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million donation to the Iran-Contra startup. Plead guilty in 1991 to witholding information from Congress. Pardoned by George H W Bush for his Iran-Contra crimes. In 2005, appointed by George W Bush as Deputy National Security Adviser.

Neocon Principles: #3 The War Process Takes Precedence Over the Peace Process

President Clinton furthered the peace process by bringing Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together. In an effort to undo all the good that Clinton did and Al Gore or John Kerry might have done, the neocons have pooh-poohed the peace process, eschewed it in fact, in favor of the war process. Our objectives can always be gained on more favorable terms by means of the war process rather than the peace process since we are the only remaining superpower.

Jimmy Carter engineered a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel by bringing Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat together. But these guys were Democrats, liberals, and hence wimps. What red-blooded neocon would want to have anything to do with a peace process when we are stronger than other nations? Therefore, they must do as we say or they are subject to being preemptively invaded by us or our allies. Neocons think the peace process is a sign of weakness. We don't negotiate with terrorists, and we don't try to "bring people together" ala Carter and Clinton. Did they sing "Kum Bay Ya?" Since neocons are highly moral and ethical (after all there has been no oral sex in the oval office for 6 years), it is incumbent on us to force our values on others. They must do what we say or else!

Neocon of the month: Richard Perle. A charter member of PNAC, Perle is known as the "Prince of Darkness" for obvious reasons. Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writing from Virginia Beach, Virginia has this to say. Perle was one of the most outspoken and influential advocates of war with Iraq. Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners which invests in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. So for the neocons war is always good for business. Without it they would hardly have the prospect of becoming rich men.

Perle castigates the French government for "appeasement" of Saddam Hussein yet maintains a Provence vacation home where he indulges a passion for French wine and food, especially souffles. Evidently, he has done very well in the war business!

Neocon Principles: #2 Diplomacy is a Waste of Time. We Can Always Accomplish our Objectives More Suitably by Taking Military Action.

Since we are not only the most powerful country on earth but the most moral and ethical, it's only our natural, God-given right to boss the other countries around. There's no need for diplomacy. Diplomacy is for wimps and Democrats. The idea of Jimmy Carter sitting around the fire in his cardigan sweater and negotiating with the Egyptians is revolting to Ann Coulter. So says her book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism" in which she also famously lambastes the "Jersey girls" for having so much fun over their husbands' deaths. Carter's efforts resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, but it was entirely the wrong approach. We should have laid it on the line to the Egyptians, and, if they didn't come around, invaded them militarily!

We don't negotiate with terrorists or anyone else. Our allies do what we tell them. Those who aren't our allies better do what we tell them or face the prospect of a military invasion. There is no need to negotiate. Talking is for girls. Let's all sit around the campfire, hold hands and sing "Cum Bay Ya."

The Neocon of the month is Paul Wolfowitz who famously said that our military excursion in Iraq would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. A trillion dollars later we are still in the process of taking over the Iraq oil fields. However, not to worry. Our good friends, the Chinese central bankers, are happy to loan us the money to cover not only the war in Iraq but massive tax cuts as well. Since we're the world's only superpower, the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Other countries have to pay for oil in dollars. So there! We can borrow as much as we want whenever we want. That's no problem.

The "Wolfowitz Doctrine" is a major part of Neocon philosophy.

Hardliners in the US administration around Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and their ideological godfather Richard Pearle, are using the fall-out from the New York and Washington attacks to rework the United States' understanding of state sovereignty in the developing world. The concerns with democracy and human rights that dominated foreign policy in the Clinton era never sat comfortably with right-wing Republican promotion of US interests to the exclusion of all else.

That's right, baby. We promote US interests to the exclusion of all else. What else is there? We're number 1. We need to act like it, and the other countries better take heed! If they give us too much backtalk, they just might get invaded!

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) represents the deep thinking that goes into Neocon philosophy. War is always preferable to peace. The war process is preferable to the peace process. We must win every war so long as we stay the course since we are the world's most powerful nation. Anything else is unthinkable. More can be accomplished through war than through peace. Peace is for wimps and Democrats.

Maybe love will win out in the long run. Since Wolfowitz, a married man, has been dating a Muslim woman, maybe he will mellow from his hawkish stance. You know. Make love, not war. Other critics have said his womanizing has come home to roost, but this does not prevent him from being one of the principal architects of Bush's preemptive strike doctrine and his obsession with democratizing the Middle East. After we kill the bad Muslims, then the good Muslims presumably including the woman he's dating, will probably have a better relationship with Israel.

Neocon Principles: #1 - The US is the Only Remaining Superpower. Therefore, We Have the Historical Imperative to Impose our Will on Weaker Nations

The US Government is being run by a Neocon cabal. They won't tell you what their principles are so I will. Since we are the world's only remaining superpower, we have the right, even the historical necessity of imposing our will on other nations in order to get them to do our bidding. Notice that this is in contrast to the dialectically opposite point of view which would say we should work side-by-side with other nations to improve our common lot. Naturally, the UN is anathema to them.

In the Neocon world view diplomacy is a sign of weakness. We indulge in diplomacy at our peril because other nations sensing we're weak will soon start trying to take advantage of us. Conflict resolution is also a sign of weakness. But war is necessary in order to impose our will on others. There is no conflict that can't be resolved by means of a military solution which is the most desirable way to resolve conflicts. Other countries, being weaker, would be wise to back down to us and do what we tell them to. As Nietzsche said, "A good war hallows any cause." The Nietzschean "Will to Power" necessitates that the US not shrink from its role as the world's most powerful nation and that role is to dominate the other nations and bend them to our will. As Nietzsche said: "What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."

The Neocons have stated their ideals in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their Statement of Principles asks the question: "Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?" In other words does the US have the "Will to Power," the will to dominate the world in such a way that is "favorable to American principles and interests"? Pre-emptive war is desirable because: "The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." The only language the rest of the world understands is the exercise of power. Therefore, if we don't exercise power responsibly, that is by ordering other nations around, they will soon take over and start ordering us around. In other words we will lose our freedom.

William Kristol, chairman and founder of the PNAC, is editor of "The Weekly Standard", a leading Neocon journal. Kristol was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first President Bush. Kristol had a lot to do with Republican strategy for "killing" the Clinton universal health care plan. In keeping with Neocon and Nietzschean philosophy that the strong should dominate the weak rather than work to improve their lot, their philosophy bears a strong resemblance to social Darwinism. In the microcosm, the family is considered the smallest unit of domination ruled over by a father with an iron will who demands complete submission much as the US demands submission not cooperation from the weaker nations of the world.

Part of the Neocon philosophy is to not tell the American people what they're really about and really up to. Bush's role is Salesman-in-Chief for the Neocon philosophy disguised in a form as to not arouse interest in their core beliefs but to instill fear in the American people to justify their putting the US on a perpetual war footing. A military solution is always preferable to a peaceful one. Notice the lack of an exit date on Bush's Presidential bust.