Wars Based On Lies

A short video editorial discussing America's war in the middle east. Featuring clips from the documentary "Why We Fight", along with footage of speeches made by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

Peter Joseph vs The Senate

By Peter Joseph
Culture In Decline

"Culture in Decline" is a satirical yet serious expression that challenges various cultural phenomena existing today which most of society seems to take for granted. Nothing is considered sacred in this Series except for a detached benchmark of fundamental logic and reason - forcing the viewer to step out of the box of "Normality" and to consider our societal practices without traditional baggage and biases. Common themes include Politics, Economics, Education, Security, Religion, Vanity, Governance, Media, Labor, Technology and other issues centric to our daily lives.

US Dollar Will Be DeThroned As World's Defacto Currency

Canadian billionaire businessman Ned Goodman predicts the end of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency. He predicts the transition out of the U.S. Dollar will become, "...quite ugly."

Lecture at Cambridge House's Toronto Resource Investment Conference 2013 on Thursday, September 12, 2013.

"In my view, the dollar is about to become dethroned as the world's de facto currency. I'll tell you how I came to that conclusion so quickly... the new President of China, Xi Jinping, his first visit on the day of his becoming President, was at his request to meet with Mr. Putin. And he immediately made a deal with Mr. Putin to get all the oil that he needs, which he can buy in Renminbi."

"We're headed to a period of stagflation, maybe serious inflation, but stagflation for sure, and the United States will be losing the privilege to print at its will, the world's reserve currency. A period that's going to be very inflationary, and I can tell you that before that happens, it is likely that it is going to get quite ugly." - Ned Goodman

Baby Go Boom

By Culture In Decline

 Episode #5 "Baby Go Boom!" by Peter Joseph - May 1st 2013

Subtitle Project: http://dotsub.com/view/0837813d-5220-...

In this installment of Peter Joseph's public access parody,the subject of Security and True Safety will be investigated. The evil terrorists are revealed to be at it again with a new airline scare; our Guy In A Tie reminds us of who is in control and a special award show finds a very special recipient in the Gun Control Debate..

Special guest appearances by Chad Fisher (Alex Jones) & Rick Overton.

www.chadfishercomedy.com

www.rickoverton.net

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"Culture in Decline" is a satirical yet serious expression that challenges various cultural phenomena existing today which most of society seems to take for granted. Nothing is considered sacred in this Series except for a detached benchmark of fundamental logic and reason - forcing the viewer to step out of the box of "Normality" and to consider our societal practices without traditional baggage and biases. Common themes include Politics, Economics, Education, Security, Religion, Vanity, Governance, Media, Labor, Technology and other issues centric to our daily lives.

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American Power In Terminal Decline

DAVE LINDORFF writes,

The US is on the way out as a hegemonic power.

That is the primary conclusion of a new report out of the National Intelligence Council — a government organization that produces mid-term and long-range thinking for the US intelligence community.

Titled “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds,” this 140-page study says emphatically that the “relative decline” of the US is “inevitable,” but adds that its future role in the international system is “much harder to project,” and goes on to say that “the degree to which the US continues to dominate the international system could vary widely.”

Among the factors that could determine what the US role in global affairs might be a little less than two decades from now are whether the US dollar continues to be the world’s reserve currency, how China handles the transition from a country of poor workers and peasants to a country with a large middle-class, and whether the US “will be able to work with new partners to restructure the international system.”

The study is interesting in that it is represents a complete rejection of the notorious Project for a New American Century, which was a private Neoconservative blueprint for long-term US hegemony over the rest of the globe and which became the driving philosophy underlying the Bush-Cheney administration’s domestic and foreign policy in the first decade of this century. The PNAC called for the US to establish unchallenged global dominance and to do whatever was necessary to “prevent” any other nation from challenging that dominance going forward.

The authors of this new study take it as a given that the heyday of the US is over. As they put it, “The ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana — the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 — is fast winding down.” They say, optimistically, that the US is likely to remain “first among equals” at least into 2030 “because of its preeminence across a range of power dimensions and legacies of its leadership role.” But that’s a far cry from being able to dictate to the rest of the world.

The study offers four possible scenarios for the future: 

In what it calls the “most plausible worst-case scenario,” the US would withdraw inward, allowing globalization to “stall.” While many people in other countries would likely consider this scenario an optimistic one, not a “worst-case” one, given the hugely destructive role the US has played over the decades since its emergence at the end of World War II as the world’s dominant power, the report’s authors see such a move towards US isolationism as leading to increased conflict and instability in the world.

A second scenario they postulate, which they term “fusion” and describe as the “most plausible best-case scenario,” would see an increasingly economically dominant and militarily powerful China joining in an era of cooperation with the US. Such cooperation, they say, could lead to solutions to such global challenges as climate change and to “broader global cooperation.” Again, other countries might view such a two-state collaboration between the world’s two biggest economies and militaries as less benign.

A third scenario postulated as less likely would be a “genie-out-of-the-bottle” world in which growing inequality leads to explosions in many nations, while climate-change and population-pressure driven shortages of water, food and energy, lead to increasing international conflicts, with the US no longer able to act in the role of “international policeman.”

Finally, a fourth scenario, which seems almost science fiction, envisions a weakening of nation states, as new technologies allow non-state actors, such as mega cities and shifting coalitions of non-state actors, to become leaders in dealing with the world’s issues like climate change, explosive population growth and international conflict over scarce resources.

With regard to the Middle East, America’s continued obsession with Iran’s nuclear ambitions is on full display, with the Intelligence Council authors worrying that “If the Islamic republic maintains power…and is able to develop nuclear weapons, the Middle East will face a highly unstable future.” It is an odd apprehension, given the current degree of instability in the region — civil war in Syria and Yemen, public protests in Bahrain and Egypt, uncontrolled violence in Libya, continuing violence in Iraq, and of course war in Afghanistan–and the fact that at present only one country — Israel — has nuclear weapons, which it adamantly refuses to submit to international inspection or control — or even to acknowledge.

No one, obviously, can hope to predict with any confidence what the world will look like in 2030, particularly given the unprecedented threat posed by catastrophic climate change, which could see global temperatures even by that year rising significantly, with disastrous consequences for both coastal populations and for countries already facing droughts and water shortages. Even the US, as the intelligence analysts note, will not escape climate change unscathed, as its drier regions, notably the southwest and midwest — both important crop-growing regions — face unprecedented droughts. If other trends continue too — notably the decline of the dollar as a global reserve currency, and continued growing indebtedness of the US — America could be forced to, as the authors put it, “withdraw inward.”

Via: "CounterPunch"

Is The World Abandoning The U.S. Economy?

By Brandon Smith,
Courtesy Of "Alt-Market"

... there is no such thing as an invincible economy, especially if it is predicated on overt debt creation, fiat printing, and reckless foreign policy.  When it comes down to the raw data, the American system is just as fragile as any corrupt third world shanty-town nation.  

The possibility of a U.S. without financial hegemony is very real.  To understand that this possibility exists is one thing; to understand that the process of destabilization has already begun is another.  Many analysts with their heads stuck in the mainstream clouds attempt to argue against the “theory” of foreign markets decoupling from the U.S., not realizing that their entire debate platform is pointless because the decoupling is happening right under their noses…  

The recent press covering the ongoing plan by BRIC nations (or “BRICS” if you count the latest bilateral agreements with South Africa) to establish their own supranational banking hub merely highlights the fact that developing countries are not simply “talking” about decoupling from the United States, they are taking actions to make it happen:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-16/goldman-sachs-s-o-neill-sees-brics-bank-gathering-momentum-1-.html

The response from mainstream financial analysts is, of course, that the project for a BRIC bank will fail.  Their argument, however, usually revolves around the assumption that this new central bank is designed to “compete” with the IMF, and is a merely an overreaction to the IMF and World Bank’s failure to give developing nations more inclusion in decision making processes.  I see no evidence that the BRICS are trying to create a counter-system which would conflict with IMF control.  Instead, it would seem that the BRICS are much more interested in forcing the issue of greater inclusion, and garnering greater favor within the already existing IMF structure:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/imf-idUSL2E8FJ90K20120419 
Last year the G20 discussed heightened participation by China and the BRICS in the IMF’s global basket currency, the SDR.  French Finance Minister and later “elected” IMF chief Christine Lagarde agreed with the idea while stating that certain conditions, including appreciation of the Yuan’s value, would have to take place:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12905205

Contrary to the belief that the BRICS are building opposition to the IMF, China has on several occasions called for the EXPANSION of the IMF’s power, as well as widespread circulation of the SDR:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-03/chinese-president-hu-calls-for-reform-of-imf-sdr-currency-basket.html 

How have the MSM talking heads missed this trend?  Simply put:  Bias, controlled and pre-written talking points from their editors, as well as many half-baked presumptions.  The popular belief amongst financial academia is that the IMF is a product of American economic might, and that the organization will do whatever is in the best interests of the U.S. at all times.  The reality is that the IMF is fast becoming the central authority of economic operations around the globe, and America just happens to be paying the largest “tithe” to the respective coffers of the banking syndicate.  Do you get more control in the operations of the IRS when you pay more taxes?  

The IMF’s goal is world centralization of economic control.  For them, any sovereign nation is expendable in pursuit of the end game, including the United States.  The IMF would not be pushing the issuance of a new world reserve currency to unseat the dollar if they did not intend to follow through, and they certainly would not hobble the greenback if they cared in the slightest about American economic concerns.     

Rather than running counter to the IMF, BRIC partners and the newly realized ASEAN bloc are making themselves indispensible to the globalists, ensuring wider partnership in the near future.  A BRIC central bank is, I believe, a bargaining chip to be used to open the door to more leadership in the IMF while reducing American influence.  To summarize, the BRICS are not in conflict with the IMF, rather, they are in conflict with the U.S., and this conflict is coming to a climax…

Trade amongst BRIC nations continues to climb while exports to the U.S. have diminished.  Between 2001 and 2009, exports and imports between BRICS skyrocketed, even amidst the derivatives collapse:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13046521

Last year, ASEAN overtook Japan as China’s third largest trading partner.  With the announcement of increased participation by Japan in the ASEAN bloc this year, the economic body looks poised to eclipse the U.S. and perhaps even the EU as China’s primary source of export and import business:

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/1197997/1/.html

Meanwhile, overall exports around the world have dropped for five consecutive months in 2012 on slowing demand in the West.   The expectation of a massive resurgence in consumer demand from the U.S. has been proven unfounded, while the recession in the EU is exacerbating the downturn.  U.S. exporters, who not long ago held dreams of foreign buyers clamoring for goods in the midst of Federal Reserve inflation and dollar devaluation, have discovered that they are instead floundering:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/business/global/chinas-slowing-economy-puts-pressure-on-american-exporters.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

The mainstream claim is that this is due to a breakdown in general Chinese demand, but with exponential bilateral trade deals (many of which cut out the U.S. dollar completely as a reserve currency) being made between China and major producing and consuming countries, it is clear that this is not just a demand issue in China; it is an ongoing process of removal of the U.S. from the trading picture.  That is to say, China is deliberately reducing purchases of U.S. goods and turning towards BRIC and ASEAN partner countries to fill the void.  This may be the reason why China recently surpassed the U.S. as the top sanctuary for foreign investment:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203406404578074683825139320.html?mod=asia_home 

A Treasury report on China’s status as a “currency manipulator” already due but now delayed until after the elections may become the catalyst for the final phase of the global shunning of American markets.  With China being presented as a primary issue during the presidential debates, it would seem that regardless of who “wins” the election there will be strain applied to Chinese trade relations.    

China’s incredible gold buying extravaganzas over the past few years (including an estimated 500 tons in 2011 and another 500 tons so far in 2012) indicate that they are indeed hedging against what they obviously expect will be devaluation in the dollar or multiple currencies around the world including the dollar.  India continues its long tradition of gold buying, while Russia is now increasing its reserves by half-a-billion dollars a month.  These are the actions of countries getting ready for a break in the financial system, not a recovery, and certainly not a return to the old days of American consumer bliss.

The argument over whether or not the BRICS and the rest of the world can drop the U.S. economy and move onward has, ultimately, been rendered obsolete.  Many will claim that a decoupling is impossible, but the fact remains that a decoupling is taking place.  The consequences of this fiscal divorce remain to be seen, and the mainstream could very easily predict disaster for the BRICS.  The real question they should be asking themselves, though, is which countries are better placed to survive such an event?  Is the U.S. economy really built to withstand a loss of the dollar as the world reserve currency?  Is the U.S. prepared for plummeting foreign investment and a reduction in its already dismal production capacity (production taking place by Americans on American soil, that is)?  Is the U.S. really ready for extreme inflation in imported goods (most of the goods we consume)?  Who really needs who more?  It is time for the pundits and average Americans alike to set aside their commercialized and subsidized fake patriotism and question how strong our economy truly is.  To ignore vast weakness today, is to feel vast pain tomorrow…

How Democracies Die

By Mike Lofgren,
Courtesy Of "Truth-Out"

Picture a country at the height of its international power and prestige. It has military forces stationed around the globe. It is an intellectual leader. Its citizens are pleased to insist that the national idea, their country's way of life, is a beacon of enlightenment and human rights for the rest of the world. Indeed, they are wont to harp on the notion that the country embodies the very concept of Western Civilization.

But beneath the façade of greatness there is creeping rot. The rich (who are accustomed to getting their way in all things) corrupt the system and buy the people's representatives in this venerable democracy. The country lurches towards political polarization and, predictably, the machinery of orderly governance becomes gridlocked. The politicians of the right, who take every opportunity to bellow for increased spending on the military, refuse to raise the revenues to pay for it. Why?

Because the wealthy citizens who happen to own these representatives refuse to pay a single cent in additional income taxes. Their class solidarity as alleged "'job creators"' who are owed unconditional deference outweighs their loyalty to the nation at large. 

They successfully demand that even the crushing expense of a long war should be paid for by loans from abroad (the interest payments on which merely add to the expense) rather than by direct taxes from those citizens best able to afford them. Naturally, a growing share of the population develops a visceral sense that the system is rigged.

There is worse to come. There gradually coalesces a bitterly reactionary political alliance between the plutocratic rich; a retrograde religious Right seeking to roll back the secular state; hidebound militarists; and the species of glib, pseudo-intellectual malcontents who are drawn to political extremism like iron filings to a magnet. They all seek a purported restoration of a country that never existed: a pious, socially harmonious nation where everybody else knows their place. The political groupings of the center and left, on the other hand, are dithering, irresolute, and have not the courage of their own alleged convictions.

This uncomfortably familiar-sounding litany of social dysfunction actually refers to the French Third Republic (1870-1940). One of the most informative, and for English-speaking readers, popularly accessible accounts is still William L. Shirer's magisterial "The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940." Shirer, although a sentimental Francophile himself, delivered a damning indictment of the pathological tendencies of the Third Republic. The immediate cause of the stunning German breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940, and the subsequent French surrender, may simply have been defective military technique. To Shirer, however, the deeper cause was a depressed national morale fostered by political polarization, governmental gridlock and an upper class that had psychologically seceded from the country.

Shirer's account of the Republic's efforts to put its finances in order after the enormous expenditures of World War I bears an eerie resemblance to the current farce in Washington. There was a theoretical limit on what the Bank of France (a privately held entity like the Federal Reserve) could advance to the government that was much the same as the statutory debt limit in the United States. This was no problem for the conservative Poincaré government: the breech was committed, and went unremarked in the press. But when the moderately left-of-center Herriotgovernment breeched the same limit, a cacophony arose about fiscal irresponsibility. And when the Herriot ministry sought to redress this fiscal crisis with an overdue levy on France's wealthy, the cacophony became a firestorm in the plutocracy-owned media. Herriot's proposed solution also met with blackmail: the possessing class threatened to expatriate its capital in the manner of the present-day American tycoon who incorporates himself in the Cayman Islands or Singapore.

Several of the French overclass proceeded to attack the basis of parliamentary democracy itself. François Coty (of the perfume fortune) bought the mildly conservative Le Figaro and turned it into an extremist rag, while later pouring millions of francs into right-wing anti-parliamentary movements, some of them overtly fascist paramilitaries. When the moderately socialist government of Léon Blum was elected in 1936, the estrangement from France of much of its millionaire class and the right-wing groups they supported was such that they adopted the slogan "Better Hitler than Blum!" Their preference for a German dictator who had spoken and written for 15 years about his unshakable determination to militarily subjugate France to a government that had proposed a 40-hour work week requires no further analysis. When the German panzers broke through at the River Meuse and France fell, many of France's better sort were not unduly discomfited. The next year, the racing season at Longchamp carried on much as before, with Paris's high societyturning out in all its finery.

Consistent with its penchant for creating its own reality, the American Right is fond of fabricating quotes about the way the world works. A creative variant is when the Right attributes such quotes to famous historical figures to give the words an aura of timeless sagacity. One such chestnut is this: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy." This quote has been variously "credited" to Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. Its actual origins appear to be no more exalted than the opinion page of the Daily Oklahoman of December 9, 1951. But it accurately distills the right-wing conceit about the cause of decadence in democracies.

A compelling counterexample to this "wisdom" about how the rabble with its boundless sense of entitlement supposedly destroys democracy is furnished by the French Third Republic. In that country, the native plutocracy, and the corrupt reactionary politicians who did its bidding, refused to act as citizens bound in patriotic duty to give as well as take. They meanly betrayed the majority of their countrymen and left the nation - once the world's inspiration as the cradle of the rights of man - a squalid dictatorship.

The End Of The New World Order

By Seumas Milne
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

In the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of the New World Order. In August, the US client state of Georgiawas crushed in a brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested territory of South Ossetia.

The former Soviet republic was a favourite of Washington's neoconservatives. Its authoritarian president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato's eastward expansion. In an unblinking inversion of reality, US vice-president Dick Cheney denounced Russia's response as an act of "aggression" that "must not go unanswered". Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on Iraq, George Bush declared Russia's "invasion of a sovereign state" to be "unacceptable in the 21st century".

As the fighting ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise South Ossetia's independence. Russia did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black Sea. The conflict marked an international turning point. The US's bluff had been called, its military sway undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. After two decades during which it bestrode the world like a colossus, the years of uncontested US power were over.

Three weeks later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the heart of the US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, the credit crisis finally erupted in the collapse of America's fourth-largest investment bank. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers engulfed the western world in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.

The first decade of the 21st century shook the international order, turning the received wisdom of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled, we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be confined to culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs.

In 1990, George Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.

But between the attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed.

It was the reaction of the US to 9/11 that broke the sense of invincibility of the world's first truly global empire. The Bush administration's wildly miscalculated response turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into the most successful terror attack in history.

Not only did Bush's war fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the world, while its campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping discredited Western claims to be guardians of human rights. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on subject peoples prepared to fight back. That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies.

This passing of the unipolar moment was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated capitalist order it unleashed, speeding up relative US decline.

This was a crisis made in America and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets and unfettered corporate power.

A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.

The failure of both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early 21st century. Not only did the country's dramatic growth take hundreds of millions out of poverty, but its state-driven investment model rode out the west's slump, making a mockery of market orthodoxy and creating a new centre of global power. That increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states.

China's rise widened the space for the tide of progressive change that swept Latin America – the fourth global advance. Across the continent, socialist and social-democratic governments were propelled to power, attacking economic and racial injustice, building regional independence and taking back resources from corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them.

These momentous changes came, of course, with huge costs and qualifications. The US will remain the overwhelmingly dominant military power for the foreseeable future; its partial defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for in death and destruction on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of conflict. The neoliberal model was discredited, but governments tried to refloat it through savage austerity programmes. China's success was bought at a high price in inequality, civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America's US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the social gains, as they succeeded in doing by violent coup in Honduras in 2009. Such contradictions also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world in 2010-11, sparking another shift of global proportions.

By then, Bush's war on terror had become such an embarrassment that the US government had to change its name to "overseas contingency operations". Iraq was almost universally acknowledged to have been a disaster, Afghanistan a doomed undertaking. But such chastened realism couldn't be further from how these campaigns were regarded in the western mainstream when they were first unleashed.

To return to what was routinely said by British and US politicians and their tame pundits in the aftermath of 9/11 is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic fantasy. Every effort was made to discredit those who rejected the case for invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.

Michael Gove, now a Tory cabinet minister, poured vitriol on the Guardian for publishing a full debate on the attacks, denouncing it as a "Prada-Meinhof gang" of "fifth columnists". Rupert Murdoch's Sun damned those warning against war as "anti-American propagandists of the fascist left". When the Taliban regime was overthrown, Blair issued a triumphant condemnation of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and war on terror. We had, he declared, "proved to be wrong".

A decade later, few could still doubt that it was Blair's government that had "proved to be wrong", with catastrophic consequences. The US and its allies would fail to subdue Afghanistan, critics predicted. The war on terror would itself spread terrorism. Ripping up civil rights would have dire consequences – and an occupation of Iraq would be a blood-drenched disaster.

The war party's "experts", such as the former "viceroy of Bosnia" Paddy Ashdown, derided warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a "long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign" as "fanciful". More than 10 years on, armed resistance was stronger than ever and the war had become the longest in American history.

It was a similar story in Iraq – though opposition had by then been given voice by millions on the streets. Those who stood against the invasion were still accused of being "appeasers". US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the war would last six days. Most of the Anglo-American media expected resistance to collapse in short order. They were entirely wrong.

A new colonial-style occupation of Iraq would, I wrote in the first week of invasion, "face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone" and the occupiers "be driven out". British troops did indeed face unrelenting attacks until they were forced out in 2009, as did US regular troops until they were withdrawn in 2011.

But it wasn't just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense. For 30 years, the west's elites insisted that only deregulated markets, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy could deliver growth and prosperity.

Long before 2008, the "free market" model had been under fierce attack: neoliberalism was handing power to unaccountable banks and corporations, anti-corporate globalisation campaigners argued, fuelling poverty and social injustice and eviscerating democracy – and was both economically and ecologically unsustainable.

In contrast to New Labour politicians who claimed "boom and bust" to be a thing of the past, critics dismissed the idea that the capitalist trade cycle could be abolished as absurd. Deregulation, financialisation and the reckless promotion of debt-fuelled speculation would, in fact, lead to crisis.

The large majority of economists who predicted that the neoliberal model was heading for breakdown were, of course, on the left. So while in Britain the main political parties all backed "light-touch regulation" of finance, its opponents had long argued that City liberalisation threatened the wider economy.

Critics warned that privatising public services would cost more, drive down pay and conditions and fuel corruption. Which is exactly what happened. And in the European Union, where corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded into treaty, the result was ruinous. The combination of liberalised banking with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both left and right in this case) had always argued risked breaking apart was a disaster waiting to happen. The crash then provided the trigger.

The case against neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had opposition to the US-led wars of invasion and occupation. But it was strikingly slow to capitalise on its vindication over the central controversies of the era. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from the left's 20th-century defeats – including in its own social alternatives.

But driving home the lessons of these disasters was essential if they were not to be repeated. Even after Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was pursued in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. The western powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with intervention and Iran with all-out attack.

And while neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power.

Revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority, the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a "sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall". It was commonly objected that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.

The same would be true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions.

The upheavals of the first years of the 21st century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order, and of genuine social and economic change. As communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered 20 years later, nothing is ever settled.

The Passing Of World Leadership From The U.S. To China

WILL THE PASSING OF WORLD LEADERSHIP FROM THE UNITED STATES TO CHINA BE PEACEFUL?

Yes.

The starting point here is my belief that China will be the world leader in 2052. In 2052 China will have a population three and a half times bigger than that of the United States. The Chinese economy will be nearly two and a half times larger, and Chinese per capita production and consumption will be more than 70% of the U.S. equivalents. China will be the premier driving force on the planet.

In some ways this is already the case. Current China is capable of acting in a manner that far exceeds the maneuverability of the two competitors for global supremacy: the European Union and the United States. The United States still has the biggest muscle (the U.S. GDP equals 13 T$/yr, similar to that of the EU), but China is much more agile in the use of its somewhat smaller muscle (China’s GDP is near 10 T$/yr). Militarily the United States is still more powerful outside U.S. territory, but economically the Chinese influence is rising fast. It does not weaken the Chinese hand that it already owns 1 T$ of U.S. federal debt, one-quarter of the U.S. federal debt held by foreigners. This equals ownership of more than one month of the total output of the U.S. economy.

Many believe that China won’t reach hegemonic status because of lack of domestic resources or because of counterrevolution. My view is that China has sufficient coal and shale gas to run the economy in the transition stage, enough sun to fuel it in the long run, sufficient understanding of the climate threat to work up front to reduce the loss, and a sufficient tradition of Chinese independence to be willing to develop internally the resources it does not currently hold. But most important is the willingness and the ability of the Chinese to govern investment flows so as to achieve their goals. It should also be remembered that in the long run, China will no longer need all the energy and resources it currently uses for the production of export goods. In the long run it will suffice to have a sustainable interior supply of energy and resources sufficient to provide for the Chinese population, which will peak at 1.4 billion people around 2020 and be down to 1.2 billion in 2052.

Clearly things can go wrong for China, but I think this will take time. The alignment of the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and the great mass of Chinese is near perfect. Both need rapid growth in per capita consumption. Both will applaud when it is achieved. Both will hurt when it fails, and try once more. There is, of course, at any time a group that would like to emphasize values other than material growth, but I believe they will be in the minority for a long time (just like in the United States), and their softer goals suppressed.

To do more with less will be the mantra of Chinese growth, in order to continue the goal of the last two thousand years, namely, to be a self-sufficient China independent of the barbarians from outside the Middle Kingdom. Increased energy and resource efficiency will be pursued with enthusiasm. Since both are achievable in principle, through the planned use of money and manpower, they will be achieved.

So what will the Americans do when the Chinese hegemony further exposes its full body? Not much. I believe in a friendly resolution of the potential conflict between China and the United States, because the United States also has enough resources inside its boundaries to run a self-sufficient shop for its inhabitants. It is true that the country currently depends on vast oil imports from abroad, but like China, the United States has enough coal and shale gas to run its economy for a long time (assuming little real GDP growth in the country over the next 40 years, as I do). It has large agricultural muscle (more than sufficient for its domestic population--and if Americans decide to eat more healthily, also for quite a bit of biofuels). Furthermore the United States has some space that will be livable after climate change. Water may be a problem where it is currently needed, but activities can and will be moved if that is required to have enough water. And GMO crops will be used large-scale to reduce water scarcity, despite their drawback. If the American democracy finally decides to try to solve its obvious societal problems in a collaborative manner, the U.S. investment capacity is huge and the problems solvable.

I think the latter sentence contains the essence of the U.S. fate over the next 40 years. The United States could maintain its hegemony if it decided to do so. But I don’t think the American system of governance will be capable. Quick, bipartisan decision making is certainly not a U.S. strength. And I see little that will change this fact on a 40-year horizon. Since the country is already rich, and the resources are there at least for living at a slightly lower footing, the United States can allow itself to slide into a secondary role, as a provincial and self-content country. Much like Europe smoothly moved down to second rank after the two World Wars.

Both China and the United States will be bothered by climate change. But both countries are big enough to include places that are relatively less affected. Their starting points are very different, the United States being rich and China much poorer (GDP per person today is one-sixth of the U.S. rate). But their governance systems differ, will differ, and will help China move fast when the United States will be floundering. This won’t create war since China’s ambition is to be self-contained.

Via: "Fast Company"

Recognizing There Is A Problem

The First Step In Solving Any Problem, Is Recognizing There Is one

Beginning scene of the new HBO series The Newsroom explaining why America's Not the Greatest Country Any Longer... But It Can Be.

America Isn’t The Greatest Country In The World Anymore

Post by "Sayf Maslul"



At 1:11 he starts preaching. At 1:36 he may piss everyone off. At 1:57 he pisses off liberals. At 2:06 he pisses of conservatives. At 2:32 he starts making a significant point. At 3:22 he talks about how awesome we once were. At 4:34 he gets to the point.

War Or Revolution Every 75 Years

It's Time Again?

By Paul Buchheit
June 11, 2012
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

When Charles Dickens wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" to begin "A Tale of Two Cities," he compared the years of the French Revolution to his own "present period.”  Both were wracked with inequality.  But he couldn't have known that 75 years later inequality would cause the Great Depression. Or that 75 years after that, in our own present period, extreme inequality would return for a fourth time, to impact a much greater number of people. He probably didn't know that the cycles of history seem to drag the developed world into desperate times about every 75 years, and then seek relief through war or revolution.

It's that time again.

Three cycles (225 years) ago, in the years before the French Revolution, inequality was at one of its highest points ever. While it's estimated that the top 10% of the population took almost half the income, as they do today, the Gini Coefficient was between .52 and .59, higher than the current U.S. figure of .47. The French Revolution began a surge toward equality that lasted well into the 19th century.

Two cycles ago, in Dickens' day of the 1860s, European inequality was again at a nearly intolerable level. It took the second industrial revolution and the U.S. Civil War to start correcting the economic injustices.

One cycle ago was the Great Depression. The New Deal, World War 2, and the laborious process of war recovery put an end to this third period of extreme inequality.

Now, nearly 75 years after we started World War 2 production, we again feel the agony of a wealth gap expanding, like grotesquely stretched muscle, to intolerable limits. If history repeats itself, we will be part of another revolution of long-subjugated people. Indeed, it has already begun, in Europe and Canada and with the Occupy Movement.

The face of plutocracy has changed, but not the consequences. Just before the French Revolution, Paris and London were dismal places for the masses, with islands of unimaginable splendor for aristocrats, who, like the multi-millionaires of today, found it hard to relate to the commoners. Dickens portrayed it well. Exclaimed the Marquis St. Evremonde to a gathering crowd: "It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done to my horses?" This he said after his carriage had struck and killed a young child.

Today the two cities could be Los Angeles and Chicago, both among the ten most unequal metropolitan areas in the United States. Instead of lords and noblemen, we have CEOs and hedge fund managers. The economic injustices are fashioned in more civilized ways. Insidious ways.

Los Angeles is the biggest city in a state with a $9-16 billion budget deficit. It is facing severe cuts in education, health care, social services, and the court system. College tuition increased 50% in two years. Public schools are down to one counselor for every 800 students.

But California's deficit wouldn't exist if corporations had paid their state taxes. Apple is a prime example of nonpayment. While the company's 10% federal tax rate has been widely publicized, its 2% state payment (rather than the required 9%) is less well known. For state avoidance purposes, they claim residency in Nevada. And despite conducting most of its research and development in the United States, they channel much of their sales through Luxembourg and Ireland and the Caribbean.

What about Chicago? It has the highest sales tax in the country. Illinois cut 2012 education spending by a greater percentage than any other state. The state tax rate was just increased by 66%. Property taxes went up by about $300 per homeowner. Illinois was recently named one of the ten "Most Regressive State Tax Systems," with the third-highest "Taxes on the Poor."

Yet if just 20 large Illinois companies had paid state taxes at the required statutory rate over the past three years, an additional $7.5 billion would have come back to the state, or about half of the state's current deficit.

Just as Los Angeles loses out to technology, Chicago is victimized by finance. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), with billions of untaxed contracts worth well over a quadrillion dollars, and whose profit margin over the past three years is higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation, demanded and received an $85 million per year tax break.

"A man grown grey in treachery...who once when it was objected, to some finance scheme of his, 'What will the people do?' - made answer, in the fire of discussion, 'The people may eat grass.'" -- Thomas Carlyle, "The French Revolution," the main source for Dickens' novel.

In our 'civilized' times people aren't being run down by noblemen or forced to eat grass. 

The aristocracy has learned a lot about suppressing crowds in 225 years. But they need to fear the growing revolution. They need to fear, as Dickens put it, "the remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them."

This this article was first published at Nation Of Change

The Great Lie

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"


By "Trudell"



At its most basic level, Trudell is an eye-opening documentary that challenges belief systems. At its loftiest, Trudell will inspire you to reawaken your spirit.

"The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization." -John Trudell

John Trudell is an American author, poet, actor, musician, and former political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes' takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz

http://www.johntrudell.us/

http://www.appaloosapictures.org/
http://www.mothersworldmarket.com
http://www.dickshovel.com/JTT.html

Support for John Trudell and for Those who help in a great understanding .

Just a Powerful story of one native looking for some Respect for his People and Getting None .

Peace Love =)

Preparing For A Post-Imperial Future

By Daniel McCarthy
JUNE 7, 2012
Courtesy Of "Crisis Magazine"

Conservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries, who insist there is nothing left to conserve, show that they don’t know the meaning of the word. Conservatism has always had to make the best of a bad situation—the human situation in general.

But conservatism earned its name in the context of a particular kind of bad situation, that of imperial Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The great conservatives of the time were all stalwarts of empire—think of British conservatives from Edmund Burke to Lord Salisbury and beyond, or of Clemens von Metternich on the continent struggling to uphold the Hapsburg order.

These statesmen saw that Europe faced a choice not only between empire and anarchy—or rather nationalism, which seemed to be the same thing—but also between different varieties of imperium. Would empire abroad be liberal and commercial—and thereby also extractive and conformist—or would it be traditional and tolerant of local custom? In the heart of Europe, would the model of imperial sovereignty be Napoleon or, say, Francis I of Austria?

Empire made acute problems that conservatism was designed to answer. How could harmony be maintained not only between rich and poor, noble and common, merchant and farmer—divisions endemic to political society heretofore—but also between Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic; Irish, Scots, and English; Hindu and Muslim; colonist and native? Neither faith nor blood nor citizenship, still less any national “proposition,” could unite the disparate peoples and sects of Europe’s empires. Unity was rather a fine balance to be sought, and peace required respect, in due measure, for every part of the whole.

Acknowledgement of authority supplied cohesion, and as Burke understood, this meant not only the periphery’s acknowledgement of authority at the imperial center but also the empire’s acknowledgement of authority in the provinces. When George III transgressed against the authority of America’s colonial constitutions, Burke sided with the colonists, for what the king could do to the Americans today he might attempt against the metropole tomorrow.

Empire made conservatism, and conservatism made empire durable and endurable. But the United States were born in rebellion against empire, and the most conservative Americans—the men branded Tories by the revolutionaries—opposed the breach with the mother country. The political labels tell the story. Americans from the time of the revolution called themselves republicans, Whigs, even democrats; their enemies were Tories or loyalists, words synonymous with “conservative” in the old country.

Jefferson may have mused about an empire of liberty, but the Founding generation and their sons rejected the imperial ways of Europe: America would be an exception to the entangling alliances of the European state system. Unlike every great power of the Old World, America would not seek hegemony. Were she ever to become “dictatress of the world,” John Quincy Adams warned, “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

America exhibited her own kind of conservatism, but it could not be as unabashed or uninhibited as Burke’s or Metternich’s. The Adams family illustrated the problem: the clan’s conservative tendencies too often expressed themselves in tones approaching despair. America’s public persona was everything that Toryism was not: optimistic, Protestant, enlightened, and republican. And it was anti-imperial—or claimed to be.

The nature of the American Revolution—its rejection of British monarchy and European great-power politics—contributed an anti-imperialist cast to our national consciousness. But however much Americans might insist they hated empire, human nature said otherwise. What state has ever chosen modest republicanism over world power given the opportunity to seize the latter? Switzerland is a republic by necessity as much as choice. Athens, Rome, France, and semi-republican Britain all succumbed to imperial temptation. Why should America be any exception?

But if American conservatives have always been disadvantaged by the country’s Whiggish roots, the American empire has been exceptionally irresponsible because of its lack of self-awareness and the absence of conservative restraint. Because Americans prefer not to embrace Old World conservatism and have habitually denied the imperial character of our foreign policy since the 1890s, ours has been an exclusively liberal, commercial, and ideological empire. While we pretend to confront one great question that haunted Europe in the 19th century—empire or nation?—we refuse to consider the other—what kind of empire?

The last decade has shown us what happens to our kind of empire. Full of rational and cheerful contempt for the ways of the people we subjugate, we are astonished when our armies are met not with garlands but with suicide bombers and improved explosive devices. We have no respect for established authorities in the lands to which we bring Burger King and bikini contests, and thus we abolish illiberal orders but are shocked to discover we have unleashed tribal and sectarian civil war.

Thanks to modern medicine and Predator drones, only a few thousand Americans need die for this folly. But the toll upon the peoples we liberate is incalculable—as is the toll on our liberty and security at home, to speak nothing of our character. What did Adams say about becoming dictatress of the world?

It is not a coincidence that Americans began to call themselves conservatives at the same moment as they began to accept that their country had become an empire. At the dawn of the Cold War, Americans discovered a new passion for Burke in the works of such authors as Peter Viereck (Conservatism Revisited, 1949) and Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind, 1953). And in George Kennan, we had perhaps the makings of an American conservatism of empire. A hard reality, the end of our republican innocence and prolonged adolescence, had to be faced.

But new varieties of liberal imperialism arose too, and rehabilitated the myth of American exceptionalism. We could have our armies stationed in far-flung lands without sacrificing our republican ideals. To the contrary, McEmpire was the fulfillment of those ideals, delivering the blessings of natural rights and free markets to a world that had always longed for them without even knowing it. Conservatism, always an ill fit for the American temperament, proved no match for Cold War liberalism, which soon stole its vanquished foe’s very identity.

By the time President George W. Bush came to recycle the liberal platitudes of Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, so-called conservatives had become the chief energumens of the gospel of bombs and Big Macs. Neoconservative David Frum denounced doubters as “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in the pages of National Review; he went on to write with Richard Perle a book that promised An End to Evil. Robert Kagan, meanwhile, set out to show that America had always been a Dangerous Nation and an empire aborning. There was a dollop of truth in all this: America does have an unspoken imperial tradition alongside its much discussed “isolationist” one, and conservatives who dissent from liberal empire are indeed out of step with the public creed—at least as it stood in the first term of George W. Bush’s administration.

But a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual peace. Ideological liberalism failed spectacularly in its nation-building enterprise, and Americans voted out of office the party of the president who had launched our version of the disastrous Athenian “Sicilian expedition.” Reality trumped opium dreams of global democratic revolution. And soon economic reality would bring the liberal economy crashing down to earth. What price empire now?

Serious conservatives are not essentially imperialists—they are realists, they work with the material at hand, however flawed it may be. In a perfect world Burke and Metternich may not have wanted empire; but empire was an established fact in imperfect reality. An empire restrained by tradition was preferable to the conflagrations of liberal imperialism or nationalism.

American conservatives today face a twofold challenge: to constrain our country’s imperial ambitions within the bounds of reality while preparing for a post-imperial future. For a choice that presented itself to Burke and Metternich—that of a durable empire—is not open to us, even if we had wanted it. Time moves faster now: empires topple in decades, not centuries. The pretensions to world power of the Ottomans, the British, the Germans, and the French rapidly dissolved in the 20th century. The Soviets gained and lost an empire of historic dimensions in the space of sixty years.

But America is different. We may yet lose this liberal empire only to gain another of a worse kind—for the collapse of liberalism has, in the past hundred years, often led to naked militarism and outright Caesarism. Our alternatives are limited: if the liberal dream is dying, the socialist dream is already buried. Only a sober conservatism seems to offer any prospect of a future not rationed or regimented. If our empire collapses, conservatism has the philosophical resources to train us to accept a more limited world. Or if we prove truly exceptional, conservatism may show a path back from Rome, so to speak, to Switzerland. In either case, the reality of empire and the “un-American” nature of conservatism must be accepted.

For all the horrors of the past decade, some remarkable works of scholarship and literature have shown us that American conservatism can at least diagnose our malady. Andrew Bacevich’sAmerican Empire is the best introduction to the character of our liberal imperialism; his other works of the decade, from The New American Militarism to The Limits of Power and Washington Rules are equally valuable. John Lukacs’s Democracy and Populism: Fear and Loathing illustrates how much worse things might yet get. And works such as Thomas E. Woods’s Meltdown and Patrick J. Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower pointedly show the watershed we have reached.

But all of that is just a beginning. There is still need for a conservative remedy, one that applies the hard but humane wisdom of European thinkers like Burke and Metternich to the very different circumstances of the American empire today.

Originally published in University Bookman