Posts Tagged ‘US’
Blowback
Some unintended consequences in the “War on Drugs”: murderous gangs who lay waste to whole towns.
On the other side, a brutal war between drug gangs has forced dozens of fearful families from the Mexican town of El Porvenir to come to the border seeking political asylum, and scores of other Mexicans have used special visas known as border-crossing cards to flee into the United States. They say drug gangs have laid waste to their town, burning down houses and killing people in the street.
Americans are taking in their Mexican relatives, and the local schools have swelled with traumatized children, many of whom have witnessed gangland violence, school officials say.
“It’s very hard over there,” said Vicente Burciaga, 23, who fled El Porvenir a month ago with his wife, Mayra, and their infant son after gang members burned down five homes in their neighborhood and killed a neighbor. “They are killing people over there who have nothing to do with drug trafficking,” he said. “They kill you just for having seen what they are doing.”
Now, it occurs to me that if you decriminalize “drugs”, the people who trade in them can take advantage of a modern judiciary to settle their disputes instead of simply killing each other.
Iraq Elections: US Chooses its Favorite
It looks as though our trusty client Maliki will come out ahead in the 2010 Iraqi elections after all, if this McClatchy dispatch is any indication. Carrying out long-standing political discrimination against the disgraced Ba’ath party, six major candidates will lose their votes and seats, costing Allawi (another US client) his victory. The six candidates committed the awful crime of having been associated with the Ba’ath party before the US invasion:
Six winning candidates in Iraq elections will be stripped of their votes and lose their seats – which would cost secular politician Iyad Allawi’s bloc its narrow victory – if a federal court upholds a broad purge of candidates who are suspected of past involvement with the late dictator Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath Party, Iraqi officials said Monday.
What’s most appalling about this development is not that the Iraqis had to choose between two pro-occupation candidates, but that Ahmad Chalabi is in charge of the so-called ‘de-baathification”, and thus in a position to unilaterally decide who can and cannot contest elections in Iraq. Chalabi, you must remember, was a major architect of the 2003 invasion, and went so far as to provide fake intelligence to convince Bush to bomb Baghdad. Astoundingly, Chalabi also contested the 2010 Iraqi Elections, while retaining the power to disqualify candidates at will. (Unsurprisingly, he won re-election.)
Aram Roston has written several excellent articles detailing Ahmad Chalabi’s crucial role in the Iraq invasion, and his 2008 article in The Nation entitled “Chalabi’s lobby” is a must read. Why Chalabi is still in such a powerful position after the Senate Intelligence Committee determined he had (in their words) “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information” is totally beyond me.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, some master brain or another must have decided that the US would rather have Maliki in the Prime Minster’s seat rather than Allawi, and gave the order to Chalabi (who has been collaborating with the US Department of War since the ’90s) to disqualify such-and-such candidates to make Maliki come out on top.
The truth is, it doesn’t really matter – not to the Iraqis, anyway. Either Allawi or Maliki would have carried out US policy like the obedient servants they are. Whoever won, the Iraqis would still be saddled with a long-term occupation force of 50,000, their oil would still have gone up on the international market, with no chance of nationalizing it, and their elections would continue to be rigged in favor of the US – just as this one was.
When they said we’d be bringing “democracy” to Iraq, I’m sure our leaders meant “US-style democracy”. You know, the kind where the electorate chooses between two candidates with identical policies and who are funded by the same corrupt sources. Just like we have it here!
Fallujah Sees Dramatic Rise in Birth Defects After US Battle
From the BBC:
We went to a house where three children, all under six, were suffering from birth defects.
Two boys were partially paralysed, and their sister clearly had serious brain damage.
Like all the other parents we spoke to, their mother had no doubt that the American attacks were responsible.
Outside, a man who had heard we were there had brought his four-year-old daughter to show us. She had six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot.
She was also suffering from a number of other serious health problems. The father told us that the house where they still lived had been hit by an American shell during the fighting in 2004.
There may well be a link with drinking-water, especially in al-Julan.
After the fighting was over, the rubble from the town was bulldozed into the river bank, and most people in this area get their water from the river.
Six Largest US Banks Own 63 Percent of GDP
A startling statistic buried within an outstanding New Republic article:
As a result of the crisis and various government rescue efforts, the largest six banks in our economy now have total assets in excess of 63 percent of GDP (based on the latest available data). This is a significant increase from even 2006, when the same banks’ assets were around 55 percent of GDP, and a complete transformation compared with the situation in the United States just 15 years ago, when the six largest banks had combined assets of only around 17 percent of GDP. If the status quo persists, we are set up for another round of the boom-bailout-bust cycle that the head of financial stability at the Bank of England now terms a “doom loop.”
Good god. I knew that these banks were big, but I had no idea they were this big. The New Republic devotes the rest of its article to explaining why Obama’s bank regulations are (surprise!) a sham. But then, we should have already known that. When Treasury Secretary Geithner appeared on Newshour a few days ago, he baldly stated that these new regulatory rules “will not include breaking up the banks“. Forgive me, but what is the point of “regulation” if our banks are allowed to keep their “too big to fail” status and continue to engage in the same practices that brought down our economy in 2008? The so-called Volcker rules do nothing to stymie the relationship between Wall Street and Washington, they do nothing to prevent banks from over-leveraging (as they had during the run-up to the crisis), they allow the banks to retain their gargantuan size… so what were the Volcker rules supposed to do again? Oh yeah, it bans “proprietary trading”, somthing which only accounts for 5 percent of total bank revenue.
Meanwhile, President Obama is proposing yet another giveaway to the banks, this time in the form of $30 billion in loans at below-market interest rates. If I sell you something about below-market value, then I’m giving you a gift. That’s what these “loans” are. The Washington Post attempts to bury the issue in the middle of the piece, and refers to the subsidy as going to “community banks”, without noting that most of these “community banks” have long since been bought up by our banking behemoths.
I don’t really know what else to say here. The banks own Congress; they own the House; they own Obama (check out his campaign donors) – there doesn’t seem to be any way out of this. I think some mobs with torches and pitchforks would not go amiss at this point.
Banks Bet Hard Against Greek Debt They Sold
The Times continues its reporting on the Greek crisis:
Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.
These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.
“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.
Fabulous. So let me see if I have this straight: our banks sold Greece predatory loans which they knew Greece would never be able to repay – then they took out “insurance” on those loans, effectively betting against Greece’s solvency. Heads they win; tails Greece loses. It’s important to note that this is the exact same behavior they indulged in during the sub-prime fiasco. They sold loans to people whom they knew would never be able to pay them back, and then bet that those loans would default. If, by some miracle, the debtor was able to pay these banks back, they’d get a nice interest rate. If, as the banks bet, the debtor couldn’t pay them back, they’d get re-imbursed via the Credit Default Swaps. It’s a classic win-win for the banks – and a lose-lose for whatever poor sucker they entrapped.
Only now its happening on the level of entire countries. I want to stress that Greece is neither the first nor the last nation to default on account of the malfeasance of US banks. Iceland came before it, and Spain, Ireland, or even France are likely to come afterward.
It is clear that our banks are purely malevolent forces, who benefit only from the destruction of others, and that, for the sake of the world economy, they must be thoroughly audited and broken up. And it is equally clear that this will never happen.
Trillions to Burn?
(c/o Kevin Drum)
The Project for Defense Alternatives has just put up its 2011 guide to Pentagon spending, entitled Trillions to Burn – complete with nine handy charts which excruciatingly detail the United States’ military dominance of the world. We will be hearing a lot in the coming months about the US budget deficit – how this or that proposal will be “unfeasible” because of its budgetary implications, or how we must reduce social spending (via education, social security, medicare, etc.) in order to show “fiscal responsibility”. Just know that all of those statements are hogwash and bullshit (or hogshit, if you like).
In reality, the single biggest contributor to the United States budget deficit is so-called “defense spending”. We spend upwards of $5000 per second in Iraq (source) and spend a similar amount per unit time in Afghanistan. This spending does nothing for anybody. It does not make us “more safe”, it does not help these impoverished people “achieve democracy”, and it certainly hasn’t made oil any cheaper. The only thing – and I do mean the only thing – it does is transfer the nation’s wealth from the taxpayer to a select group of war profiteers.
That’s it. That’s all our “defense spending” does. The next time you hear some “Republican” or “Democrat” spout off about how we need to spend this money in order to “defeat our enemies”, check to see who their campaign contributors are (via OpenSecrets), and ask yourself if these people would still be our “enemies” if we weren’t spending the equivalent of South Korea’s GDP every year attempting to bomb them out of their homes. Remember the Fort Hood shooter, who specifically stated that his motivation was outrage over US massacres of Iraqi and Afghan civilians? Or the so-called “shoe bomber” who similarly claimed he was compelled to attack the US because of its ongoing support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza? (Aid to Israel = “Defense spending”, in the eyes of our budget office). Osama bin Laden himself, assuming he was responsible for 9/11, repeatedly cited the US occupation of Saudi Arabia and its continued ‘aid’ to Israel as his primary beefs with the United States.
It is clear that the gargantuan sums of money we allocate for ‘defense’ have precisely the opposite of their intended effect. That we should spend our time squabbling over whether or not health care reform should “add to the deficit” demonstrates just how far removed from reality our discourse has become. Anyone who claims to worry about the deficit yet still thinks we need to prosecute our foreign adventures is either an idiot or in the pay of our ‘defense contractors’. Either way, we should all benefit from their swift and timely death.
US Escalates Aggression in Iran
The Obama administration is accelerating the deployment of new defenses against possible Iranian missile attacks in the Persian Gulf, placing special ships off the Iranian coast and antimissile systems in at least four Arab countries, according to administration and military officials.
…
Military officials said that the countries that accepted the defense systems were Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. They said the Kuwaitis had agreed to take the defensive weapons to supplement older, less capable models it has had for years. Saudi Arabia and Israel have long had similar equipment of their own.
…
He also described a first line of defense: He said the United States was now keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf at all times. Those cruisers are equipped with advanced radar and antimissile systems designed to intercept medium-range missiles. Those systems would not be useful against Iran’s long-range missile, the Shahab 3, but intelligence agencies believe that it will be years before Iran can solve the problems of placing a nuclear warhead atop that missile.
It’s important to remember that in the mouths of our “military planners”, words have a tendency to mean their opposite. Thus, “defensive” means “aggressive”; “defense systems” mean “offensive weapons platforms” and “deterrence” means “coercion”. With that in mind, the true designs of the United States become evident.
Iran, you see, is not allowed to have nuclear weapons – or even peaceful nuclear power plants. Only the United States is mature enough to decide who can and cannot be “trusted” with nuclear weapons. Iran, naturally, doesn’t consider this legitimate or fair. So to “protect” themselves from the Iranian “threat”, the US sets up umpteen missile bases all along Iran’s border and arms its neighbors to the teeth. For “defense’, you see.
It’s also worth mentioning that “missile defense” is error-prone, unreliable and impracticable. There is no technology capable of reliably shooting a missile out of the sky. None. The real point of setting up “missile defense” systems on Iran’s border is for offense – to have a quick button we can push if Iran further incurs our displeasure.
Talkin’ Taliban
Kai Eide is the UN “special representative” in Afghanistan, and his former student, Peter Galbraith, has repeatedly accused him of corrupt influence within the Karzai administration, including allegations of vote rigging in last year’s elections (which were widely seen as a fraud). Galbraith was later fired for his accusations.
Now the Times reports Mr. Eide has engaged in high-level talks with Taliban leaders.
Kai Eide, the United Nations’ special representative in Afghanistan, met with a group of Taliban leaders in the days leading to this week’s international conference in London, where President Hamid Karzai invited the Taliban to enter peace talks.
It’s unclear at this point what sort of game Mr. Eide is playing, especially since no details of the meeting (where/when it was held, who represented the Taliban, what was said, etc) are available. But I think it’s pretty clear that the UN – and by extension, the US – are rapidly shifting their strategy from “we don’t negotiate with Terrorists” to “Hey guys, let’s talk about this”.
The plan seems simple enough. To use the overwrought war-as-football metaphor, the US would seem to have “moved the goalposts”. It now appears that we are resigned to some portion of Afghanistan being ruled by the Taliban – perhaps even most of Afghanistan – but at the same time we are unwilling to let go of Hamid Karzai. If I could divine the strategy of our oh-so-wise policy planners, I would think they envision some form of power-sharing arrangement wherein the Karzai government controls Kabul and the heroin-producing regions of Afghanistan and the Taliban take the outlying desert. That way the US can extricate itself with some “credibility” left intact while leaving in place its “stooge” for whatever future plans they have for Afghanistan (permanent military bases, of course, but perhaps a natural-gas pipeline as well).
Eide’s role in all of this is still a bit mysterious. It is clear, from numerous previous statements, that Mr. Eide is very close to the Karzai regime and is willing to invest quite a lot to see it saved. That he fired his subordinate for leaking the Afghan election fraud is further evidence of this. It seems likely Mr. Eide is using his role as a UN envoy to prop up the Karzai regime and shield it from international criticism.
It’s still unclear whether the Taliban will be willing to negotiate a power-sharing agreement. This must be a very difficult decision for them. On one hand, the Americans are on the run and lack the resources to prosecute their effort for more than another year. Just holding out for a few more months can get them a better deal – and if (as our planners fear) the Taliban have the resources to resist indefinitely, control of Afghanistan is almost assured to them. On the other hand, if the Taliban find themselves running low on resources, morale or income, the smart thing to do would be to negotiate now. They might not get a better deal later.
But given the string of audacious attacks on Kabul, I think it safe to say the Taliban’s operations proceed unhindered. So I expect they will reject the offer of negotiation and press on.
The Karzai regime is immensely unpopular, and the only thing between him and an angry mob are American soldiers. Unless he can secure some sort of deal with the Taliban, it looks as though his days are numbered.
Tony Blair Grilled on Iraq
Poor Mr. Blair. Deceived into a war he wanted nothing to do with, too weak and conciliatory to point out a bad idea when he saw it, a veritable Sancho Panza to our dear Bush’s Quixote, he finds himself the subject of an intense series of questions on the Iraq War. By now everyone knows that the original rationales (WMDs, “evil tyrants”, etc.) were mostly lies, and it is now Mr. Blair’s unhappy task to try and justify his slavish devotion to Mr. Bush, seven years after the fact.
Mr. Blair acknowledged that the nature of the Iraqi regime sharpened his perception of Saddam Hussein as a threat not just to the region but to Britain. Calling Mr. Hussein a “probably wicked if not psychopathic man,” Mr. Blair said that if he had been able to pursue a program to develop weapons of mass destruction “at some point we were going to be involved in the consequences of that.”
And so you were, my good sir – so you were.
What’s striking about these hearings is how far removed they seem from American discourse. Witness for instance, the protesters marching outside:
Mr. Blair entered the inquiry building two hours before the scheduled start of hearings in a cramped committee room, using a cordoned-off rear entrance. Demonstrators, outnumbered by police, chanted slogans like “Jail Tony” and “Blair Lied — Thousands Died.”
“We haven’t come here expecting an apology,” one protester, Gary Walker, 31, said, “But it’s important to show seven years on that people still care about the illegal war.”
We in America have moved far from such sentiments, and one cannot help but feel the public just wishes this issue would go away.
The hearings are scheduled all week and they present, at the very least, a humane reaction to an inhumane enterprise.
India: A View From the Top
A very wealthy friend of mine in India sat to discuss the various maladies that plague this dark and beguiling continent:
“Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. What do you make of all this Telangana business? People are really getting agitated about it. On the way here I saw an open-top truck full of activists – there was one policeman and and about twenty people shouting “Jai! Telangana!” at the top of their lungs. I guess they were being taken in or whatever, but the truck stopped at a light and they all climbed over the sides and started laying down in the road! They were shouting “Jai! Telangana! and waving flags the entire time. One SUV screeched to a halt just before hitting one of them.”
– “It’s a problem. But what you have to realize is that this has been boiling up for more than 60 years. I definitely think the central government botched this issue – in fact I can’t see how they could have done a worse job of it. All these contradictory pronouncements, the half-decisions and endless recanting – it’s making these agitations much worse. It’s clear nobody knows what they’re doing. But with that said, you really have to go back in history to understand why these people feel so strongly about this.
Why do you think Andhra Pradesh is even a a state to begin with? Nehru – the first prime minister – he wanted “linguistic” states; every language its own state. This was one of those rare instances where the wants of the population and the politician’s schemes line up perfectly. Before 1956 India was organized much as it had been under the British. But people were angry – a lot of language groups were split up – and the borders themselves were a colonial legacy. At the same time, the politicians saw the value of the idea – Hindi is by far the most prevalent language in India. If you could get all the Hindi-speakers under one political structure, the vote bank would basically decide elections. And so it has, since then. The north is mostly Hindi-speaking; you have Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar – these are some of the largest states. With the way things are organized, the North can overrule the South. I believe you had a similar situation in America.
And you have to ask: were the borders drawn correctly? Did they do a good job? It is very ironic that Andhra Pradesh – the state from which Telangana wishes to secede – was itself the product of a bitter secession movement. Before 1956, this whole area belonged to what was then a Tamil-speaking state. Even now many Telegu villages exist in Tamil Nadu, and all over India there are villages in a similar situation. Remember, this country has 18 distinct “languages” and hundreds upon hundreds of dialects.
So when Andhra Pradesh got its independence from the Madras state, it took the Telangana region, which used to be the Hyderabad state, along with it. They spoke the same language, after all! But no one really asked Telangana if it wanted to come. Later its only rivers were dammed up to provide electricity to the coastal region, diverting them from the Telangana farmlands. That’s a major reason why they’re upset now.
We need to ask ourselves: ‘How do we want our country to be organized?’ ‘Was it even a good idea to have linguistic states’? In my opinion it was not such a great idea – and even if it was, the implementation has been atrocious. Ask me, I think the administrative divisions should be done by population or resources. I think that would make the most sense.”
“It’s interesting that you bring up Nehru. I’ve really noticed a shift in people’s attitudes regarding their erstwhile Prime Minister. Time used to be when his name was almost synonymous with god. What happened?
– “Nehru was a man whose time had come and gone, but nobody knew it. He didn’t know it – and the country certainly didn’t either. They kept voting him back in, more from habit than anything else by the end. Only now are we beginning to realize that many of the problems we just can’t seem to solve sprang up under his rule.
Who else can we blame for Partition? Jinnah, maybe – well, probably. But who gave Jinnah his voice? Who listened to him? Nehru. He was the leader of the largest – indeed, the only – mass political party India had ever known. It was certainly within his power to block Partition. But he went along with it. Why? Well, that’s a mystery – maybe he just wanted to get independence over with and – who knows? – maybe he actually thought the Muslims had a point. But I think he just didn’t care what happened to those desert-and-swamp areas; just so long as he could have his India. You know the day after Independence, he moved right into the former Viceroy’s mansion. That’s when you knew.
Think of Kashmir – Nehru’s home state. Do you think that had something to do with it being incorporated into India? They originally offered a plebiscite, but then they backed down when it looked like the Kashmiris were going to vote to become part of Pakistan. So he let the Hindu king of Kashmir decide. Hence the dispute. But what was done cannot be undone, and now Kashmir finds itself surrounded on three sides by countries who want a piece of it – Pakistan, India and China.
And think of the colossal corruption that went on under his watch! Twenty years after Nehru died, his grandson, Rajiv, calculated that out of every 100 Rupees the Indian government spends, only 15 gets to its intended target. 85% is stolen by bureaucrats! Under whom did this system start? For that matter, who consolidated the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty? Why is India being ruled by an Italian whose sole virtue is that she happened to marry Nehru’s grandson?
He was a vain man, you see. He thought the country would be lost without him; that only he knew how to rule India. So he surrounded himself with people who believed just that. And pretty soon nobody questioned it. And he kept running – and kept winning! After all, he’d convinced the whole country it was unsafe in any other hands. Your George Washington – what did he do in a similar situation? He quit after two terms. Nehru couldn’t do that – or he wouldn’t. Anyway, I can’t be sure anymore that we benefited all that much for his 18 years of rule.”
“But it’s just as you said, isn’t it? There was no one else. Nehru had to run – you know? To what extent is he responsible that no one else came forward? And at any rate, you have to admit Nehru was popular. People adored him, worshiped him even. Surely that played a role as well.”
– “It’s a vicious circle. The people here are extremely susceptible to the cult of personality. You’re surely seen the political posters last election. There’s a reason they all show only faces. Most people, that’s all they recognize. Don’t bother asking about policy. The leader is leader. It’s our duty to vote for him, and that’s that. The people blend their identities in with the leader – they believe in him, you see, because they have little else to believe in.
“Do you think this might relate to the Telangana issue? One thing I remember hearing from the protesters I spoke with was the ‘self-respect’ angle. A lot of people saw this as a battle for their self-respect. I think that’s a big appeal of this K.C. Rao, who’s apparently leading this mob – they see him as a beacon of Telangana self-respect. And I guess I notice that not only Telangana lacks self-respect, but at times Indians do as well. I’ve often heard people describing their own country as a “backwater” and their fellow citizens “second-rate people”.
– “Well to get those sentiments in context you really have to remember what India went through over the last millenium – what it’s still going through. Let’s see, we had 600 years of Muslim rule and… well, let’s say 200 years of British Empire. That’s 800 years of invasion – 800 years of foreign rule. Of slavery, really. I mean, I know people get touchy about that word but “Colonial rule” is nothing but a dressed-up euphemism. For 800 years India was made to feel like dirt, worthy only of scorn. The Muslim invasion badly wounded us, and the British nearly finished off whatever dignity we may still have retained. And it goes deeper than just the mentality – it gets into the genes. 800 years – that’s almost 30 generations of slaves. Slave genes – that’s what developed. That’s why you see such apathy among the public, such slavish devotion to the thieving politicians and thieving West.
“But it goes farther back than that, doesn’t it? What do you think of the caste system? Wasn’t that essentially inward colonialism – inward slavery? I read somewhere that something like 60% of the population were so-called “untouchables”, forbidden to interact with “caste Hindus” and relegated a life of hardship, labor and disappointment.”
– “Oh yes, the caste system is a terrible blight upon our civilization, and it still goes on today. How dare we preach peace to the world when our own house is in such frightening disarray? The Brahmins were slave-masters, yes – and the whole country bowed down to them. And you have to realize the rigidity of the system they devised. Where do you think the idea of karma came about? You hippies in the West, I hear you love talking about karma. Do you know what it means? Karma was a justification for Brahimincal tyranny – a justification for slavery. If you can make people believe that they deserve their station, that it’s no use trying for anything better, that their suffering is due to misdeeds in some imaginary previous life – well, then, you’ve got them exactly where you want them. That’s why for centuries – millennia! – there was no reform movement in Hinduism. Everyone stuck to their place, and in fact, they were proud to do so! This is where the concept of Dharma comes in – the concept of one’s “duty”. They convinced the latrine-cleaners and street sweepers that it was their duty to endure the abuse of the higher castes! You couldn’t possibly imagine a more insidious or effective ideology for controlling slaves.
“But there were reform movements, weren’t there? What about Buddhism?”
– “Buddhism, right – you know what happened to Buddhists in India, don’t you? The Brahmins kicked them all out! They were getting too uppity, and challenging Brahmincal authority. You see all the lower-castes – those 60% of Indians who were the dirt of society – they all began converting to Buddhism en masse. They began to want equality, some fairness in who does what jobs. Obviously you couldn’t have this, so the Brahmins got together and kicked them out. A thousand years later you saw the same thing happen with the Muslim invasion – all the trodden-upon members of society began to convert to Islam. At least as Muslims they’d be equal in theory – as Hindus they were nothing. Likewise when the British showed up with their Christianity. So Hinduism got some big chunks taken out of it – but the system of control was so ingrained that most people stayed. In fact, we didn’t really get a reformer until Swami Vivekananda, and that was in the 19th century, 3000 years after the Vedic Civilization! And then you had Gandhi, who I’m sure meant well, but… well look at the condition of many Indians today. 500,000,000 without regular food supplies. Clearly the reforms haven’t worked.”
“I want to know your views on Pakistan and China. The Pakistani intelligence service – the ISI – is widely blamed for the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai. They’re taking aid from both America and China, and seem to have a single-minded desire for India’s destruction. Will India and Pakistan ever get along? What is the role of the US in all of this?”
– “I’ll say this about Pakistan – they’ve got some clever rulers. Clever! Sometimes I wonder why their people are so impoverished, since their leaders seem to be so smart. But I guess it isn’t cleverness per se – merely dull opportunism. They’re clever like a bully is clever. They understand power. I mean look at the game they’re playing right now; pitting America and China up against one another. And America is playing the same game – pitting Pakistan and India against each other. All that money America gives to Pakistan – you think it actually goes toward “combating terrorism?” No! It goes to commit atrocities in India. The 26/11 attackers were paid for with American dollars.
But at the same time, America wants India as a bulwark against China. So they court us with civilian nuclear deals and “technical assistance”. To tell you the truth, I really resent that India needs America’s permission to build nuclear reactors – that we’re forced to play their one-sided game. But how can we refuse? They go to Pakistan otherwise. America certainly looks as if it’s warming up to India – but they want to keep a Pakistan strong, too. It’s in America’s interest to keep the Indo-Pakistani rivalry going; only then can America take advantage of both. You’ve heard the phrase ‘divide and rule’? So, no, I don’t see peace between India and Pakistan – at least not for the foreseeable future.
Similarly, China wants a strong Pakistan to keep India weak, which makes perfect sense. China sees India as a threat – not a traditional threat, mind you, but like this nuisance to the east that can only slow their growth. Recently we had a diplomatic situation with China wherein they wanted to dam up a shared river – cutting off flow to India. We really had no choice but to let them do it. And it’s only a matter of time before all the rivers will be dammed. The next wars will be over water. Remember that.
We in India don’t have the political will to meet these threats – in fact, we’d just as soon not hear of them. We’re too wrapped in our own cocoons – too beholden to the grip of tradition to notice or care.”
“That’s a little unfair, isn’t it? I mean, you have to admit that ‘development’ (such as it is) is occuring in India. Millions of people are getting their lives lifted out of poverty. Literacy rates are up, unemployment is down, and people really seem to be breaking out of this cycle of tradition. Wouldn’t you say?”
– Don’t make me laugh! Whatever “development” you see is solely due to the West – due to a desire to emulate the West. What kind of indigenous “development” have you seen in your time here? You think we’re “developed” because rich people can eat Pizza Hut now? You think Microsoft and Wal-Mart constitute social change? We’re exactly in the same position we were in under the British, only now we pledge allegiance to America instead. But the the hundreds of millions of Indian peasants, who still find themselves ground under the heel of starvation and want, this decade of “prosperity” has meant nothing to them. And always remember that these gains of the Indian middle class cannot last. We dithered for too long – we got into the game too late. Most of the oil has already been burned, most of the coal already extracted. We’re playing this ridicilous game of “catch-up to the West”, but the joke is on us. India will never be a first-rate global power. Maybe if we ask nicely China and America will let us into the club. But we’ll always be second-rate. We’ve got too much baggage – too much dead weight.
Sometimes I think we’d be better off as a one-party state, like China or your America. Here nothing ever gets done. We debate and debate, compromise and vote, and in the end we end up with half-decisions, or more usually, no decision at all. This Telangana issue is just one example. I think we have too much democracy. We need someone to tell us what to do – that much is painfully clear. First it was the British, and now America – they say jump, we say ‘how high?’; they say ‘develop’, we say ‘right away, sahib.’
“That’s pretty bleak. Anything else you’d like to add?”
– “We’ve been independent for 60 years. It’s astonishing that we haven’t even begun to solve any of our problems – in fact, they’ve gotten far worse under our watch. Overpopulation, starvation, bonded labor, inequality – these were all crimes we laid at the feet of the British. Who are we to blame now?”
Bagram Detainee List Revealed
The State Department has finally decided to reveal the names of those being held indefinitely, without trial, at our infamous prison complex in Bagram, Afghanistan. The move toward “transparency” comes after numerous Freedom of Informaion Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union. The list of 645 names can be downloaded from the ACLU website here.
The New York Times, in its article, finds someone to state the obvious:
“While it’s very important in terms of U.S. government transparency, it means very little to the individuals named because the U.S. government still maintains that everybody whose name appears on that list is not entitled to any human rights under U.S. law,” Ms. Foster said.
Bingo! And given that the ACLU had to employ extraordinary persistence to gain what should be public knowledge – the names of those held illegally by the US government – it seems unlikely we will ever learn the real strategic information in this detention-imbroglio: why the ‘detainees’ are there in the first place.
Soon after 9/11 the most horrifying stories emerged of lawless bounty-hunters kidnapping whomever was convenient and selling them to the Americans as “enemy combatants” while receiving a hefty reward for their trouble. This ‘bounty scheme’ resulted in thousands of innocent citizens being falsely imprisoned for no reason other than unfortunate luck. And once imprisoned they had to stay in jail – it looks very bad, after all, for a country to kidnap and torture innocent citizens and then let them go. The citizens have a tendency to tell stories, and that, of course, “wouldn’t do”. As long as the US government keeps the so-called ‘crimes’ of its detainees secret, they can forever trumpet that they only imprison “the worst of the worst”, as they had in Guantanamo. If it came out that a sizable portion of the detainees were actually innocent – well, that would be the real scandal.
Hats off to the ACLU for its tenacity in pursuing this, but the fight for justice for those illegally detained and tortured by US forces is still far from over. Should we be surprised the Obama Administration is opposed to releasing the names?
In My Country, We Have Laws Against That
The Nation treats us to a harrowing exposé of America’s secret prisons. Not for “terrorists” – no, these prisons are merely for garden-variety “illegals”, an unknown number being held indefinitely in more than 186 sites across the US.
The article opens with one hell of a quote:
“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.
Apparently, right under our very noses, the US government has set up and operated a vast ring of secret detention facilities, whose unfortunate inmates have no right to habeas corpus, no right to a lawyer – hell, they’d be lucky to get a kangaroo-trial this century. The prisons, run by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, are entirely unmarked and unlisted – one could exist right in the midst of your hometown, and you’d never know.
A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on background, saw the list and exclaimed, “You cannot have secret detention! The public has the right to know where detention is happening.”
Ah, but that was in the old America! After President Bush’s Constitutional reforms (and President Obama’s dutiful adherence to Bush’s legacy), the public has no such right.
These reports are truly outrageous, and carry strong echoes both of Orwell’s 1984 and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:
It’s also not surprising that if you’re putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18 [a typical detention center], as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.
You may recall reading in the history of a totalitarian state how the government would kidnap citizens on flimsy pretexts and hold them incommunicado for an indefinite period. Compare those stories to the one below:
Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held.
We citizens may find comfort in telling ourselves that “oh, they only do it to ‘illegals’,” and “It’s not my problem – I’m a law-abiding citizen”. But the danger of these practices is that one never does know against whom they’ll be used next. One day it’s the “illegals”, the next it may be “dissidents”. Those who would defend these actions simply do not understand that when you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they are used against you, instead of for you.
I think this may be something to which our Nobel Peace Laureate would want to devote some attention.
Copenhagen Finale
Well, the Copenhagen Climate Conference is just about over, and the amount of “binding agreements” which have so far been enacted would cause an impassioned observer to weep. The airplanes used by the delegates to get to Denmark probably emitted far more carbon than their collective agreement will cut.
Furthermore, a memo intercepted by (you guessed it) The Guardian expresses in stark detail just how far the goalposts have moved.
As they say:
The draft says countries “ought” to limit global warming to 2C, but does not bind them to do so. Rises of 2C and above are the levels scientists say would result in catastrophic consequences in many parts of the world.
It does not give specific targets for emissions cuts or a peak year for global emissions but says only that “deep cuts” are required and that emissions should peak “as soon as possible”. However, the text makes it clear that this subject is still under negotiation.
The text, drafted by a select group of 28 leaders – including UK prime minister, Gordon Brown – in the early hours of this morning, proposes extending negotiations for another year until the next scheduled UN meeting on climate change in Mexico City in December 2010.
So the world went (in three short days) from demanding that global temperatures rise only 2 degrees C to making that number “more of a guideline”. No binding emissions cuts have been agreed upon, and the world has decided, in essence, to procrastinate yet another year.
I have always thought that if our leaders weren’t so implacably old, we would have gotten on climate change much more vigorously. After all, if one is older than 50, greenhouse gases, emissions cuts, and sea-level rises don’t really mean that much. Those over 50 will be dead long before the effects of climate change make themselves known. Those between 10 and 35 years old, however, will have a front row seat for the havoc our short-sighted leaders will wreak. I, for instance, at age 22, will be quite alive during the doomsday year of 2050, and will likely see the sea levels rise, the deserts encroach, the rains dry up, the ice caps melt. The ones making these decisions, however, can rest assured that, after having lived a fruitful and extravagant life, they will sleep the great sleep before things become too hairy.
No wonder they don’t care!
UN Opera
The Times gives us a juicy piece in today’s issue about an American UN official named Peter Galbraith who plotted *gasp* to depose the fraudulent Hamid Karzai and install a more “western-friendly” leader in Afghanistan. The journalists at the Times treat this matter with the delicacy of threading a needle, for though it is clear Hamid Karzai’s victory was illegitimate, they want to make it clear that ousting a president is very, very bad (unless, of course, the US government does it).
Shortly after making this suggestion, Mr. Galbraith mysteriously left the country and was subsequently fired:
Mr. Galbraith abruptly left the country in early September and was fired weeks later. Mr. Galbraith has said that he believes that he was forced out because he was feuding with his boss, the Norwegian Kai Eide, the top United Nations official in Kabul, over how to respond to what he termed wholesale fraud in the Afghan presidential election. He accused Mr. Eide of concealing the degree of fraud benefiting Mr. Karzai.
Galbraith was one of the few voices crying “fraud” after the August elections. He was soon vindicated, after almost one-third of Karzai’s votes turned out to be fakes in a UN audit this October. Galbraith then set upon outlining his plan to remove Karzai, which first took form in a letter to his boss, Eide. After reading the letter, Eide remarked that the plan was:
“unconstitutional, it represented interference of the worst sort, and if pursued it would provoke not only a strong international reaction” but also civil insurrection. It was during this conversation, Mr. Eide said, that Mr. Galbraith proposed taking a leave to the United States, and Mr. Eide accepted.
The whole election was “unconstitutional”, of course, and there can be no worse sort of “interference” than an armed invasion by a global superpower, but the question merits consideration: since Karzai is an illegitimate president, having won no elections, would the US be justified in forcibly replacing him? I have the feeling two wrongs do not make a right.
But the story gets even more complicated. Galbraith has repeatedly accused his boss of having corrupt ties to the Karzai government, and while I don’t think he specifically mentioned it, I’m sure the accusation is that Eide is somehow profiting from the vast heroin fortune that runs through the Karzai family.
The Times only mentions that Eide will be “in Afghanistan until the end of his term”, and says nothing else on the matter. But the policy blogs have been buzzing about Galbraith’s recent accusation (circa only three days ago) that the real reason his boss isn’t running for a second term is that Eide, in fact, was fired, for his corrupt contacts with the Karzai government.
It is interesting that The Times neglects to mention this accusation, and equally interesting that it places most of it’s article’s focus on Galbraith. Though it has not refrained from criticizing the August election (proclaiming it “deeply flawed” though not yet an outright fraud), The Times has displayed itself as a fundamentally pro-Karzai paper. Then it should be clear why they would focus on a failed coup idea (which led to its progenitor’s dismissal) and not to a benefactor of Karzai’s corruption (which also led to a dismissal.)
Meanwhile, this sorry little episode exemplifies, if anything, the staid dysfunction under which the UN operates, the pettery personal politics, and at times, outright corruption.
Something Monsanto This Way Comes
The AP has just published a harrowing investigation into the business practices of agriculture giant Monsanto, and the company does not come out looking very good. Coercion, monopolistic contracts, predatory licensing agreements, and widespread fraud are all par for Monsanto’s course.
With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.
Much has been said about the ethics of patenting genes and to what extent one can truly “own” a particular series of nucleotides, but these discussions are lost on Monsanto.
For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto’s genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission _ giving Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto’s genes.
Monsanto’s business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws. The practices also are at the heart of civil antitrust suits filed against Monsanto by its competitors, including a 2004 suit filed by Syngenta AG that was settled with an agreement and ongoing litigation filed this summer by DuPont in response to a Monsanto lawsuit.
By now, Monsanto has wrested control of a frightening proportion of agricultural seeds:
We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,” said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades. “The upshot of that is that it’s tightening Monsanto’s control, and makes it possible for them to increase their prices long term. And we’ve seen this happening the last five years, and the end is not in sight.”
With a veritable monopoly on these seeds, Monsanto can raise its prices at will, and farmers will have to pay.
The price of seeds is already rising. Monsanto increased some corn seed prices last year by 25 percent, with an additional 7 percent hike planned for corn seeds in 2010. Monsanto brand soybean seeds climbed 28 percent last year and will be flat or up 6 percent in 2010, said company spokeswoman Kelli Powers.
So, uh… maybe somebody should do something about this?
Sino-American Bickering
Hopeful observers of the Copenhagen climate talks have been holding their breath to see when the first major dispute between China and the US would erupt. The two countries, after all, come to the conference with irreconcilable goals – the US wants the world to forget that most of the CO2 already in the atmosphere was made in America, while China wants the US to quit hoggin’ all the carbon, and let someone else try burning for a while. It seemed only a matter of time before these two viewpoints clashed, and behold, they just have.
China refuses to allow international inspectors to see firsthand its promised carbon cuts, which is leading many to assume that, like their vaunted GDP figures, their emission reductions will be true on paper only. The US also believes that China’s stated target (a reduction of “carbon intensity” by 40 percent) is “disappointingly low”. Carbon intensity means emissions per unit GDP, so carbon emissions could still grow precipitously, even if “intensity” is cut, provided GDP also grows (a safe bet, given China’s decade-long 8% annual growth).
This, of course, makes the US “reluctant” to adopt emissions cuts of their own, and it is clear that without a firm committment from both the US and China, the Copenhagen talks will have been a failure. After all, Zimbabwe isn’t exactly the one we need to convince.
One question which every American needs to answer, but which few have so far been willing to concerns per capita emissions, of which the US stands at the head. US per capita emissions are 4 times that of China and more than 10 times that of India. What gives an American the right to emit four times as much carbon as a person from China? Don’t bother asking our delegates to Copenhagen! (They either don’t know, or don’t care.)
The Food Stamp Queue
I have often heard people remark, “If things are so bad, where are the bread lines?”
Observe:
Food Stamp Participation
There they are!
The Obama Nobel Speech, Annotated
The Internet has seen much commentary on yesterday’s Nobel Peace acceptance speech, but in exception to the traditional left-right paradigm, the speech saw enthusiasm from “both sides” of the aisle. The infamous Karl Rove praised the speech as “tough”, “superb” and “effective”, while Washington Post liberal Ruth Marcus entitled her summary “Obama’s Brilliant Nobel Speech”. Few, however, have offered anything more than knee-jerk praise; certainly nothing approaching an annotated review. Which is a shame, because “stirring” though Obama’s speech may have been, it remains riddled with inaccuracies, evasions, and at times, outright omissions.
Obama began strongly, much to his credit, by saying what was on everyone’s mind and tacitly denying he deserved the prize:
Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.
He immediately follows that up with the other thing on everyone’s mind: the two brutal wars which he commands.
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.
So far, so good – very good, in fact – but this is where things begin to slide downhill. Obama next extolls the virtues of the US’s actions during the Cold War
Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed. But there has been no Third World War. The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced.
Citizens of Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Poland, or any of the archipelagic African states must have taken great offense to these lines. In one sentence, to dismiss the brutality of US policy as “terrible wars fought and atrocities committed”! Obama does not mention that a majority of these “terrible wars” were directly funded and perpetuated by the United States, in many cases for whole decades. We paid for the East Timor genocide; we caused a 30-year civil war in Guatemala; we reduced Vietnam to a smoky ruin. When Obama claims “There has been no Third World War”, he must mean there has been no nuclear war; failing that, it is difficult to see how continuous warfare around the world does not qualify as a “third world war”.
The rest of the speech takes the form of a full-throated defense of our current actions in Afghanistan, beginning, of course, with an obligatory comparison to Hitler:
For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
He then, (incredibly!) claims full responsibility for America in “stabilizing” the world after WWII:
But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.
“From Germany to Korea”, eh, Obama? I think you forgot to mention someone: Vietnam. We certainly “underwrote security” for them, did we not? Likewise, I surely doubt citizens of Iraq would thank us for the security we afforded them. And those are just the well-publicized countries. Ask any victim of our secret wars, in Nicaragua, say, or Indonesia, or the Philippines, who still languish under US-funded dictatorships. See what they have to say about the so-called “global security” we underwrote.
As an example, Obama remarks:
I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war.
Ah, the Balkan myth! I thought this had already died. Obama (and the rest of the US establishment) would have the public believe that the US bombed Serbia in the late ’90s for humanitarian reasons: “to stop a genocide”. However, as Professor Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out, the widespread massacres began in Serbia only after we launched our cruise missile strikes. The real reason we went to the Balkans, according to Chomsky and many others, was to secure the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, an end which has been nicely accomplished.
And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed.
As you well know, Mr. Obama, Guantanamo is neither the largest nor the most brutal of our secret prisons. And given that one of your first actions in office was to expand our secret prisons in Afghanistan (most notoriously, the Bagram dungeon), it remains difficult to take you seriously on this one. Of course, you prohibit “torture”, so did President Bush, but you have explicitly endorsed “renditions” (that is, kidnapping) to secret prisons, and you refuse to allow Red cross inspectors into them. What were those rules we abide by again?
He ends with an ironic appeal to emotion – ironic because it describes (inadvertently) the beneficiaries of US “justice”
Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government , but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school — because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child’s dreams.
A surer description of Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Poland, South Africa, Zaire, Indonesia, the Philippines, or Pakistan, one could hardly find.
Bonus Tax
Yet more evidence that our friends across the Atlantic have a firmer grasp on democracy than we do: Britain is set to levy a major one-time tax on those scurrilous “bonuses” the banks are handing out with taxpayer money.
The UK government will hit the bankers with a 50% tax on any bonuses greater than $40,000, this year only. In doing so, they will make up a good portion of their budget shortfalls and send a clear message to the financial industry that the taxpayer bailouts are not a gift to the few.
Can such a thing happen here? In the words of the Brookings Institution: not likely.
“I think it is very unlikely that you would see this kind of tax on bonuses here in the U.S.,” Douglas J. Elliott at the Brookings Institution in Washington said. But, he added, “There are going to be big bonuses this season. There will be high levels of public anger. Therefore there will be some bills introduced. I just don’t think they are going to make it through.”
Why? Because unlike in Britain, our entire legislative process has been bought by the major financial institutions, part and parcel.
As Finance Minister Alistair Darling said:
“If they insist on paying substantial rewards, I am determined to claw money back for the taxpayer.”
Can one even imagine such words coming from our own Bailout Chiefs?
Danish Equality
The Copenhagen Climate Conference kicked off today with a secret memo circulating amongst the ‘rich’ participants. Originating with the US and UK, the memo details a significant departure from the Kyoto Framework. If its recommendations are enacted, rich countries will no longer be obliged to reduce their carbon emissions in proportion to poor countries – indeed, they would be permitted to continue emitting more than twice the carbon of the “developing world” all the way to 2050. This is truly a scandal.
From The Guardian:
A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:
• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;
• Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
This development cannot be seen as anything less than an attempt by the “developed” world to renege on its Kyoto obligations. Working together, these rich polluters have much more “negotiating power” than their poor counterparts, and will likely be in a position to dictate terms.
One diplomat says:
“It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,” said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.
Such talk smacks of neocolonialism, of utter disregard for the United Nations or international law. Ideas of “carbon exchanges” and “cap-and-trade” are meaningless if the rich still get to pollute twice as much as the poor. This memo is evidence of implicit bad-faith on the part of the 20th century colonists, and I’m not sure if the conference will be able to regain its credibility.
Death in Pakistan
The Guardian has some truly gruesome details regarding yesterday’s suicide attackin Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
At least four gunmen stormed into the mosque on Parade Lane, a five-minute drive from army headquarters, firing guns and throwing grenades at a crowd of at least 150 men, women and children.
The crowd scattered for cover but the militants singled out some for murder in cold blood, according to witnesses. “They took the people, got hold of their hair and shot them,” a retired officer who survived the attack told a local television station.
The attack comes as a surprise, as Rawalpindi is one of Pakistan’s most heavily-guarded cities, and one of its holiest.
More than 400 Pakistanis have died since early October in attacks on UN offices, security installations and crowded bazaars. The capital, Islamabad, increasingly resembles cities such as Kabul, with rising sandbagged walls, checkpoint-clogged streets and shopping areas bereft of foreigners and, increasingly, Pakistanis.
It is important to realize that prior to 2007, Pakistan had zero suicide attacks per year. It’s rapid and precipitous rise in suicide bombings coincided directly with the ouster of Musharraf and the escalation of drone attacks in Pakistan.
At least the victims seem to have an idea of what causes these attacks:
The violence also feeds anti-Americanism. After the bombing some Rawalpindi residents blamed the US presence in Afghanistan for fuelling militancy.
Perhaps someone might inform President Obama of this.
I.O.U
The Times ran a fantastic article last week which I think deserves a careful look, as it presents in uncharacteristically sharp terms the economic situation before us.
They begin with some fun facts:
With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
$700 Billion, as many must recall, was the magical “really big number” Bush and Paulson sold us last September, promising that we likely shouldn’t spend it all, and will probably “see a return on our investment”. I remember the awe with which we once held the TARP program: “$700 Billion, have they lost their minds?” None of us (certainly not I) could have fathomed such a large sum being spent at one time. It is a testament, then, to our infinite ability to adapt that $700 Billion no longer seems so very great, and we can swallow easily the prospect of such an annual payment.
The Times is somewhat disingenuous in claiming $500 billion a year to be “greater than the combined federal budgets for… Iraq and Afghanistan”. As The Times are surely aware, President Obama recently signed a $680 Billion war bill in October, with (according to The Times), “$550 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget in fiscal 2010 and $130 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” But I digress.
Much of this new debt, as The Times is kind enough to report, has to do with the massive dumping of cash onto the open market via the Federal Reserve. Euphemistically, the article states:
“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”
“Teaser rates” of course, means lending at 0% interest, essentially lending for free. This is the policy our Fed has chosen over the past year. It, combined with the trillions of untraceable dollars injected into our five major banks, have expanded the Treasury beyond anything previously imaginable. As the article claims:
On top of that, the Fed used almost every tool in its arsenal to push interest rates down even further. It cut the overnight federal funds rate, the rate at which banks lend reserves to one another, to almost zero. And to reduce longer-term rates, it bought more than $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and government-guaranteed securities linked to mortgages.
What this all means, what the Times doesn’t see fit to mention, is that the US government is bankrupt. That’s it. Our liabilities overshadow our assets, our debts are greater than our ability to pay them; we are underwater, over our heads, sunk.
And we aren’t the only ones:
The United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt. Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.
It looks like the US and Europe will be coming to terms with some hard realizations next decade.
The Reasoned Review 