US Downplays Report on Guantanamo Prisoner Abuse

This is a must read about Guantanamo.

It cited one common practice at Camp Delta, the main prison facility, which was applied to uncooperative detainees. They were forced to strip to their underwear, sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to the floor, and then subjected to strobe lights and loud rock and rap music while the air-conditioning was turned to maximum levels.

Pass the Buck -- The approaching financial catastrophe

This is a very important article from Ludwig Van Mises Institute (a Libertarian Think Tank) . The dollar is steadily weakening against all other main currencies of the world. What is worse is that the original problem occured because of the supremacy of the dollar in the sixties and the world pegging their currencies on the dollar. The dollar at that time was backed with gold. When Europe started collecting the gold in the 60's, Nixon bet that if he would remove the gold standard, the dollar would still be sought after and the interest game would bring money into the US, without losing the gold.

Well that worked for a while....but the game looks like it is beginning to implode. You know the fake pyramid schemes of making money from nothing....this is at a world level.

Here are some excerpts from the analysis.

The post Second World War monetary architecture crowned the dollar as the world's reserve currency, tying it to gold at a fixed sum and all other currencies fixed against each other. Under this pseudo gold standard, America's central bank would convert dollars to gold on demand for foreigners. However, U.S. policy-makers assumed that gold redemption would fail to materialize and the Fed could inflate without sanction because foreign central banks would retain the dollars as reserves on which to pyramid their own currencies.

The system worked fine, as far as America was concerned, until the 1960s when European countries replaced an inflationary bent with hard money policies. Assailed by rampant inflation, the Vietnam War, and staggering trade and budget deficits, the U.S. hemorrhaged gold at an accelerated pace, prompting President Nixon to close the gold window in 1971. The de facto declaration of national bankruptcy heralded the advent of free-floating currencies and the present stage of the dollar standard.

No longer constrained by even the nominal fetters of Bretton Wood's pseudo gold standard, America has been able to purchase imports with fiat money churned out by the Fed and uniquely finance its burgeoning indebtedness by issuing debt instruments in dollars. On the other hand, foreigners, stuck with unconvertible greenbacks since 1971, have had no choice but to adopt dollars, rather than gold, as the world's reserve asset.

Consequently, the dollar standard, in both the fixed and floating variants, has fostered an unhealthy economic relationship whereby most major economies excessively rely on exports to the U.S. and then funnel the greenback receipts back into America's credit-hungry public and private sectors. Repatriated dollars seep into America's financial system, furnishing banks a broader monetary base to pyramid credit upon, which can fund more U.S. imports, thus perpetuating the world's vicious economic cycle.[i]

The article is a bit long but very interesting to read. If you don't want to read it, it should suffice to read the last two paragraphs.

To underscore the voracity of the dollar's impending demise, the 27 November Edition of the Financial Times furnishes a telling account published in its letter-to-the-editor section. The writer, who just returned from a business trip to Vietnam, recalls how when a 7-year-old street urchin asked him for money, the child refused his offer of a dollar, instead specifying euros.[vi]

A 100% gold standard, with its inherent price-specie-flow mechanism, would have precluded the tremendous accumulation of debt and annual trade deficits by America as well as the gross distortion of the international economy, whereby most major countries orient production toward exporting goods to America. As 50 years of the fiat dollar standard "boom" ends, the U.S. and the world will reap what they have sown.

The Victims of "Victimhood"

This is an article about honor killing in Jordan. However, it actually exposes made up stories and nonsensical issues with a recent book called "Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern Day Jordan".

An excerpt

Khouri's hoax is a dramatic illustration of how harmful such gaping incredulity can be to real victims and honest dialogue. Malcolm Knox, Literary Editor of SMH, commented that Khouri "spent much of 2003 retelling this story, reducing listeners to tears and anger, in interviews, book festivals, bookshops and other events ... Khouri became a standard-bearer for oppressed Arab women and triggered a publishing trend of similar books."

Meanwhile, Sabbagh – a woman who has fought on the front lines for the real victims of honor killings – stated: "We feel defamed by this book." She feels defamed because Jordan has courageously opened up the topic of honor killings for global examination. Now the issue is being defined by sensationalized fiction, not reality.

Wendy McElroy concludes with

The sad Khouri saga is not an indictment of honor killings. It is an indictment of how society has so fallen in love with victimhood that it took 18 months and an international effort to debunk a claim that should have immediately collapsed of its own weight. But, then, that would have required asking a question.

US Foreign Policy Exposed

Here is an excerpt

In the past 100 years American foreign policy has become progressively more offensive, more militaristic, more expensive, and in every way, less republican, less constitutionally constrained, and with all that, imperial. The facts on the ground in terms of military spending (seven times the next closest spenders, China and Russia, and thirty times that of Iran, North Korea, and Syria combined), military reach (global), and general policies of interference (the U.S. "is the foremost user of economic coercion as a foreign policy tool") support Eland’s assessment that indeed, our foreign policy is beyond the pale and unsustainable. Several closet imperialistas in the neoconservative camp of both major parties, such as Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Victor D. Hanson of the Weekly Standard are frequently referenced. Even they seem to agree, ruefully at times, with the basics put forth in the book.

Thus, we have an empire, of sorts, impossible to pay for or to secure, and remarkably unguided by the kind of great ideas, kings and emperors we might read about or watch on the big screen. America has not been led to empire by some great shared vision or the ego of a larger than life leader. She has been cajoled, sweet-talked, lied to and made afraid whenever it was politically expedient, by bureaucrats and academics and ideologues who never knew war or else relished the fantasy of it.

And another one

In this important book, Eland has stripped the American empire for all to see. While it is admittedly painful, we must boldly direct our gaze at this undressed spectacle. The average American, like the clear-eyed innocent little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Emperor’s New Clothes," is completely capable of observing that in spite of what we are told by the echo chambers of administrations from Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Nixon to Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, in fact the American empire has no clothes. No profit, no richness, no honor, no loveliness, no good works or humanity. In pursuing empire for beautiful and glorious sounding reasons, in fact we have made America a laughingstock, and as a republic, she has grown scrawny and weak.

That Pre-9/11 Mindset

Sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Some quotes:

In 2000, for example – a year before 9/11 – the Mises Institute's Jon Basil Utley was predicting that the United States' disregard of international law was fueling a potential terrorist backlash. And the year before that, our own Lew Rockwell observed that thanks to its "foreign policy, imperial military reach, and global arrogance, the U.S. government is the most hated in the world," so it's "not surprising" that terrorists might "blame us for the actions of the government."

And even from Pat Buchanan

On the right, Pat Buchanan was asking in 1999:

With the Cold War over, why invite terrorist attacks on our citizens and country, ultimately with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons? … [B]attling terrorism must go beyond discovering and disrupting it before it happens and deterring it with retaliation. We need to remove the motivation for it by extricating the United States from ethnic, religious and historical quarrels that are not ours and which we cannot resolve with any finality.

The Failure of Media and Journalism by Robert Jensen

Professor Robert Jensen from the University of Texas in Austin was in the San Francisco Bay Area recently. His web page is linked to the title of this blog. He gave an interesting talk about the failure of media and journalism in the past few years and notably during the war in Iraq and the elections. Here is a summary of his talk. Also here is an article entitled The Failure of US Journalism from his website.

Professor Jensen has put together a Citizen's Oath of Office.

I do solemnly pledge that I will faithfully execute the office of citizen of the United States, and that I will, to the best of my ability, resist corporate control of the world, resist militarism, resist the roll-back of civil rights, and resist illegitimate authority in all its forms.

Citizenship in the United States involves more than "just voting". Part of making good on citizenship is being informed and among the ways to get informed is through the media. The role of media in the US can be enumerated as follows:

1. Provide an independent source of factual information. The two other main sources of information in the US are the government and the corporate world. Media plays a very important role in corroborating the information produced by the other two sources.
2. Provide a framework or a context for the information, whether historical, social, political, or economic relevance.
3. Provide as wide a range of opinion as possible, both from official sources (government and corporate) and unofficial (the public).
   

Especially during crises, the role of media becomes heightened and critical. A country that prides itself on adherence to a constitution and institutions of process to decide its actions should value the truth at all times and search for it fervently during times of crises. We see some samples of the failure of media recently.

1. In terms of providing factual information, the failure that we observed in the run-up to the Iraq war was evident and seen by many in the world and proven more recently.
2. In terms of providing a context for the information and facts, we see a blatant failure in the Middle East and the situation between Israel and the Arabs.
3. The range of opinion we get from the current media runs the gamut from A to .... B. Most of the information available from the media regarding Iraq has been from the military establishment and the retired military establishment. Other sources and points of view were marginalized and discounted without bringing out the information to the public.
   

Failure of the media to fulfill its role stems mostly from systemic problems (and therefore cannot be termed failure in reality).

1. The structure of mainstream media in the US is corporate, for profit entities. Therefore it is difficult to isolate from the corporate information centers and not able to challenge them.
2. The set of professional practices that the media follow are not objective enough. They deal in objectivity, yet they favor officials that frame the news, does not allow oneself to ignore personal prejudices and truly feret out made up data
3. The whole media sector is necessarily beholden to the idealogy of the Benevolent Empire when it comes to international news and to the understanding of capitalism as a system (not as a theory among theories as in Europe) [More on this at the end of this post]
   

How is it possible to solve or resolve this? It is actually a failure of democray not the failure of journalism. Whatever the first issue is, media is the second. This is what is needed:

1. A healthy media system is diversified and not overwhelmingly corporate. Public and alternative media exist.
   
2. The public broadcast has to be greatly expanded (professional journalism)
   
3. Grassroots media operations (non-professional and citizen media)
   

These items can be accomplished as follows:

1. Working journalist need to be empowered to have control over their work. This may be done through the unionizing of journalists to a certain extent.
   
2. Citizens need to demand accountability for the right of use of the airwave. The broadcasting companies purchase the license from the public trust and make a lot of money from it. They have to be accountable to the public.
3. The public and citizens have to continue and expand support for alternative media.

The Naturalizing of Capitalism

Professor Robert Jensen discussed the view of capitalism from within the US. While he did not condemn captialism, per se, he was critical of how it is viewed as a fait accompli in the US, just the way it is practised, with no room for modifications. Capitalism is modified in Europe to a certain extent and it vies for a segment of the mind in addition to other forms of financial compensation or as the key driver of societies.

The Benevolent Empire

Professor Robert Jensen argues that the US has always been an empire and more so after World War II. And it is only recently that this is being admitted in the media. The US empire controls in a different way than the colonizing empires of old, usurping culture and supporting dictators. Nevertheless, it still is an empire.

One difference is that the public believes, or evidence is presented for the public to believe, that even if the US is an empire, it is benevolant. That we only want what is best for the other nations and not take from them for our benefit. Of course, the public may have this feeling, but the reality on the ground for the nations of the world is different. The US has a strong history of supporting dictators that are against their own people and that, somehow, benefit the US, only to be toppled when they change their tune. Saddam Hussein is the most recent example of this. But there were many before him.

Conclusion

Very simply, the conclusion is that concentrations of power are dangerous wherever they occur. In today's climate we need to react to how far to the right US politics are and encourage use of our freedoms. In a depoliticized country freedoms are not used.

Some more articles by Professor Robert Jensen

• It's not just the emperor who is naked, it's the whole empire
• The US has lost the Iraq war, and that is a good thing
• US still adrift in the Middle East
• Your Rich Men are Full of Violence
  

Back to posting again

Somewhere and sometime in the frenzy of the campaign and the inundation of information, messages and confused not-entirely-true statements of both sides, it quickly became impractical for me to comment on all that I wanted to comment about.

Anyway, now that the election is over and things are settled down, it is really time to evaluate the political situation that we Americans find ourselves in viz-a-viz:

• Our internal bi-coastal/heartland division
• Our relationship with the rest of the world
• Definition of values (seems that is what everyone is looking for, but what values?)

I will try to keep my thoughts short (so I can blog them) and I invite your comments to any of my blogs. For those very interesting comments, I will edit my blog and include them to make the reading more interesting.

Also I will be adding the RSS feed to the blog today. Use it if you find this blog interesting.

It is a Republican week

Most of the news today is, of course, about the Republican convention. While the politicians in Madision Square Garden make a lot of sound bites, others respond to them. Here are some Op-Ed pieces from the New York Times.

Mr. Bush and the Truth about Terror

Here is are two excerpts:-

President Bush was absolutely right when he said it was impossible to win a war against terrorism - it's like announcing we can win a war against violence. Terrorism can only be minimized and controlled, and that can be done only with a worldwide strategy, joined by all of the world's sensible and peaceful nations. We hope that when Mr. Bush accepts his party's nomination for re-election tonight, he makes that argument.

If Mr. Bush is going to speak seriously about terrorism tonight, he also needs to talk about Israel. With its fixation on Iraq, the administration has allowed the situation in Israel to turn into a stalemate in which the Sharon government continues to expand its suicidal West Bank settlements while attempting to keep the Palestinians under control with sheer military force. The West Bank is not just a breeding ground for terrorists; it is the perpetual wound Arabs use to justify supporting and financing violent extremists.

And a couple of quotes about the scripted sound bites... Cutups and Cutthroats

Despite the fact that the economy is cratering, Iraq is teetering, Afghanistan is reverting to warlords, Dick Cheney is glowering at the world, the war on terror has created more acts of terror, Ahmad Chalabi is an accused spy for Iran and the Pentagon has an accused spy for Israel, Republicans felt so good about themselves that when Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was inspired to become a Republican by Richard Nixon, they exploded. When Tricky Dick is a hot applause line, they're feeling cocky.

Republicans know that plunging ahead with a course of action, even if it becomes obvious it's wrong, is an easier political sell than flip-flopping, even if it's right.

Another tongue in cheeck Op-Ed Crowning Prince George


And now for the news, still from the NY Times

Cheney and G.O.P. Mount Vigorous Assault on Kerry

Tactics by the Police Mute the Protestors, and Their Messages

Here is a quote from Kerry: Terrorists Gain From Bush Blunders

``Today, terrorists have secured havens in Iraq that were not there before, and we have been forced to reach accommodation with those who have repeatedly attacked our troops,'' he said. ``Violence has spread in Iraq, Iran has expanded its influence, and extremism has gained momentum.''

And finally, analysis from the Economist Make or Break in Manhattan

The Election Season is Depressing

Well here we are, four years later and with another election upon us. To listen to the rhetoric of both sides is to get sick. It seems that with each presidential election cycle that we live through, the name calling increases and the real issue discussions decrease. If you look at the last few elections you notice that we are getting so extremely polarized that no serious discussions are possible any more. Even the radio stations put on two competing points of view hosted by two pundits strung out on caffiene, challenging each other to insult the other person's candidate in the shortest phrase possible. Stories are twisted so far out of context that you can't look at the elections except as entertainment. Yet the election process is one of the most important acts that we do as citizens, if not the most important.

And here in the US, where a man is innocent until proven guilty, nothing is done to protect the reputation of people? Is it really acceptable to throw out a scandalous statement and watch while the targetted person squirms trying to prove a negative, yet the individual that starts this accusation or rumor is unknown and is not scrutinized at all? The candidates' election machines seem to delight in latching on any rumor and pushing it to the limit then claiming innocence. Is this how their candidate will govern the country?

That, and the electoral college insult. In a day and age when news travels so fast, we are burdened with this archaic system that is a throwback to the slave era. Either we relegate this system to the garbage heap and allow the popular vote to cover the country and in the process engage all the states' populations in the vote, or we focus on the credentials of those in the electoral college and ask them to pick a president through a new process that vets the qualifications of that person carefully. Somehow the idea of an anonymous (totally defocused by the media) electoral college and delegates is offensive especially that we saw the manipulation of it in 2000.

[Just in time, here is an op-ed piece in the NYTimes about the electoral college. Abolish the Electoral College ] TMM 2004-09-01 11:16

It is tiring to see this kind of politics year after year. We are in need of serious reform to our election processes. We need to empower the masses and shut out all the loud voices. Elections are not about bullying or dazzling people to vote one way or the other. They are deliberate processes to choose the soundest leaders for a country. Sound bites and loud rhetoric are not the way to do this for a country that prides itself on being the bastion of freedom and equality in the world. The more we trivialize our election process, the less these ideals apply.

Today's headlines and links

The Economist is telling us that the economy is not really doing as well as it should be. How is that for news? Also the Economist has an international view of the Bush Presidency. Here are the articles.

Poverty in America

The Bush presidency -- Je ne regrette rien

The Economist summarizes the Vietnam politics.

Vietnam and the presidency


Large protests today at the Republican National Convention. (You need to log onto NY Times...create an account if you don't have one...it is free, then come back to this link) By the way, it is a two-page article.

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Demonstrations: Hundreds Are Arrested as Protests Escalate