The Silent Super Power

[Nur]

A Shattering Moment In America's Fall From Power

 

The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over.

 

By John Gray

 

29/09/08 "The Observer" --- -- Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

 

You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the renationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

 

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

 

Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

 

Which version of the bail out of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bail out means for America's position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

 

In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

 

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

 

There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit.

 

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

 

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

 

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

 

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

 

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

 

• John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Allen Lane)

[Nur]

Bush, McCain Abuse Their Legacy.

 

By Robert Scheer

 

08/10/08 "Creators Syndicate" -- I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George W. Bush would stop asking God to bless America.

 

Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president's evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi WMD, the destruction by flood of New Orleans, the betrayal of the nation by the moneychangers - from Enron to Goldman Sachs - who Bush welcomed into the temple of the White House?

 

What's next? Pestilence, frogs, locusts or incurable boils? Dare we risk four more years of catastrophic misrule by a "W" alter ego? For those indifferent to the serious implications of that question, I recommend Oliver Stone's new bio-flick, which brilliantly captures the "banality of evil" that has controlled our political life these past eight years. The phrase, from Hannah Arendt's depiction of the mundane cruelty that so marked much of the daily experience of European fascism, has a frightening resemblance to the mindset of the Republican leadership that has damaged this nation's reputation for democratic integrity.

 

Cynicism rules even as ritualistic prayer breaks, as depicted in the film "W," abound. The pretense of piety earns the president and his accomplices a get-out-of-jail-free card; at no point in the film, with scenes captured so accurately and far more depressingly from real life, do any in the top ranks of the Bush administration accept one iota of accountability for how much damage they have wrought. Unrepentant, the same Republican apparatchiks are employing the familiar Rovian tactics of divide and conquer to continue their hold on power. Once again, they seek to focus attention on hot-button social issues and patriotic litmus tests to draw attention from the fact that family values are being destroyed by the loss of jobs and homes.

 

Perhaps John McCain is not a perfect replica of Bush, but the parallels go beyond the senator's enthusiastic support for the toxic mix of Bush's imperial foreign policy and his arrogant indifference to the travails of our domestic existence. Neither man seems to have a sense of how we actually live or what we need from government. How else to explain their common antipathy to Social Security and Medicare which, after public education, represent the nation's most successful programs? Can you imagine the panic today if McCain and Bush had succeeded in tying Social Security to investments in the stock market? They view government as nothing more than a proud sponsor of the military-industrial complex while ignoring the threat to homeland security from corporate pirates.

 

Don't say we weren't warned.

 

Bush came into office fervently believing that what was good for Enron and its CEO Kenneth Lay, Bush's top financial sponsor whom he called "Kenny Boy," was good for the country. So, too, McCain, who chose Phil Gramm as co-chair of his presidential campaign, ignoring the huge loophole in Gramm's Commodity Futures Trading Act that allowed Enron, where his wife Wendy Gramm served on the board of directors, to so shamelessly game the energy market.

 

Trumpeting the benefits of the legislation he tacked on to an omnibus spending bill the day before the 2000 Christmas recess, Gramm stated: "It protects financial institutions from over-regulation. It provides legal certainty for the $60 billion market in swaps." Those swaps created the toxic investments that U.S. taxpayers are now stuck with in order to save those unregulated financial institutions from bankruptcy.

 

McCain, who should have learned the cost of radical deregulation from his own involvement in the savings-and-loan scandal as one of the infamous "Keating Five," totally bought Gramm's line. McCain was the chair of Gramm's 1996 presidential bid and, up until major Wall Street firms collapsed, continued to echo the insistence of the former Texas senator-turned banker that there was no real crisis in the financial markets.

 

McCain evidences all of the distorted priorities of a son of privilege doing battle with the legacy of more gifted and responsible family ancestors, which is the underlying motivator attributed to Bush in Stone's movie. Both Bush and McCain grew up as spoiled screwups, repeatedly bailed out of trouble by their highly accomplished fathers, in McCain's case an admiral, and both assume, as a matter of legacy, that they have a right to rule. What they ignored in their legacy was a Christian's obligation to make the economic system that handsomely rewarded their kin at least minimally responsive to the needs of ordinary folk.

 

Robert Scheer is author of a new book, "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America."

 

Copyright Creators Syndicate Inc

[Nur]

Liquidating the Empire.

 

By Patrick j. Buchanan

 

14/10/08 "ICH" --- “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.”

 

So Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised Herbert Hoover in the Great Crash of ‘29.

 

Hoover did. And the nation liquidated him — and the Republicans.

 

In the Crash of 2008, 40 percent of stock value has vanished, almost $9 trillion. Some $5 trillion in real estate value has disappeared. A recession looms with sweeping layoffs, unemployment compensation surging, and social welfare benefits soaring.

 

America’s first trillion-dollar deficit is at hand.

 

In Fiscal Year 2008 the deficit was $438 billion.

 

With tax revenue sinking, we will add to this year’s deficit the $200 to $300 billion needed to wipe the rotten paper off the books of Fannie and Freddie, the $700 billion (plus the $100 billion in add-ons and pork) for the Wall Street bailout, the $85 billion to bail out AIG, and $37 billion more now needed, the $25 billion for GM, Chrysler and Ford, and the hundreds of billions Hank Paulson will need to buy corporate paper and bail out banks to stop the panic.

 

As Americans save nothing, where are the feds going to get the money? Is the Fed going to print it and destroy the dollar and credit rating of the United States? Because the nations whose vaults are full of dollars and U.S. debt — China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arabs — are reluctant to lend us more. Sovereign wealth funds that plunged billions into U.S. banks have already been burned.

 

Uncle Sam’s VISA card is about to be stamped “Canceled.”

 

The budget is going to have to go under the knife. But what gets cut?

 

Social Security and Medicare are surely exempt. Seniors have already taken a huge hit in their 401(k)s. And as the Democrats are crafting another $150 billion stimulus package for the working poor and middle class, Medicaid and food stamps are untouchable. Interest on the debt cannot be cut. It is going up. Will a Democratic Congress slash unemployment benefits, welfare, education, student loans, veterans benefits — in a recession?

 

No way. Yet, that is almost the entire U.S. budget — except for defense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and foreign aid. And this is where the axe will eventually fall.

 

It is the American Empire that is going to be liquidated.

 

Retrenchment has begun with Bush’s backing away from confrontations with Axis-of-Evil charter members Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs, and will likely continue with a negotiated peace in Afghanistan. Gen. Petraeus and Secretary Gates are already talking “reconciliation” with the Taliban.

 

We no longer live in Eisenhower or Reagan’s America. Even the post-Cold War world of George H. W. Bush, where America was a global hegemonic, is history. In both relative and real terms, the U.S.A. is a diminished power.

 

Where Ike spent 9 percent of GDP on defense, Reagan 6 percent, we spend 4 percent. Yet we have two wars bleeding us and many more nations to defend, with commitments in the Baltic, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans we did not have in the Cold War. As U.S. weapons systems are many times more expensive today, we have fewer strategic aircraft and Navy ships than Ike or Reagan commanded. Our active-duty Army and Marine Corps consist of 700,000 troops, 15 percent women, and a far higher percentage of them support rather than combat troops.

 

With so few legions, we cannot police the world, and we cannot afford more. Yet, we have a host of newly hostile nations we did not have in 1989.

 

U.S. interests in Latin America are being challenged not only by Cuba, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Honduras. Brazil, Argentina and Chile go their own way. Russia is reasserting hegemony in the Caucasus, testing new ICBMs, running bomber probes up to U.S. air space. China, growing at 10 percent as we head into recession, is bristling over U.S. military sales to Taiwan. Iran remains defiant. Pakistan is rife with anti-Americanism and al-Qaida sentiment.

 

The American Empire has become a vast extravagance.

 

With U.S. markets crashing and wealth vanishing, what are we doing with 750 bases and troops in over 100 countries?

 

With a recession of unknown depth and duration looming, why keep borrowing billions from rich Arabs to defend rich Europeans, or billions from China and Japan to hand out in Millennium Challenge Grants to Tanzania and Burkina Faso?

 

America needs a bottom-up review of all strategic commitments dating to a Cold War now over for 20 years.

 

Is it essential to keep 30,000 troops in a South Korea with twice the population and 40 times the wealth of the North? Why are McCain and Obama offering NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees against Russia, to a Georgia run by a hothead like Mikheil Saakashvili, and a Ukraine, millions of whose people prefer their kinship to Russia to an alliance with us?

 

We must put “country first,” says John McCain.

 

Right you are, Senator. Time to look out for America first

 

 

 

This article was first published at http://buchanan.org

[Nur]

Truth is slowly coming out in America. America's moral failure caused its financial failure, and its fall from grace and Superpower status.

 

The Moral power is shifting away from America, as well as the financial and technological advantage, all shifting eastward, the short-lived first Nation status is about to end in our lifetime, a major historical event.

 

Watch the series of Torturing Democracy, soon to broadcast by PBS TV.

 

http://www.torturingdemocracy.org/

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

Nomads

 

As eNuri has predicted, events in the news may prelude to my predictions of the imminent collapse of the American Empire, juts like other Empires in History, here is another view"

 

 

http://fora.tv/2009/02/13/Dmitry_Orlov_Social_Coll apse_Best_Practices#chapter_02

 

Nur

 

 

Transcript:

 

Dmitry Orlov: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It's certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion isn't a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that's gone wrong. I know it's a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn't you instead want to go and eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for that after my talk.

 

I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious, professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May, or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno some of my favorite people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the sights, and then I'll fly back to Boston and go back to my day job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then everyone has a book, or so it would seem. You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to speak here tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the limelight, because I am one of the very few people who several years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global superpower.

 

The idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed preposterous at the time. It doesn't seem so preposterous any more. I take it some of you are still hedging your bets. How is that hedge fund doing, by the way? I think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because I have learned from experience luckily, from other people's experience that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA ("F" is for "Former"). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn't make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person. I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of community service. So, if you don't like my talk, don't worry about me. There are plenty of other things I can do. But I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company.

 

My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden. Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very tedious company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that's my little intervention. If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested.

 

The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients "The Superpower Collapse Soup." Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality. Please don't be too concerned, though, because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory. I've been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so often is the case, having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The two most important methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned this in engineering school – from a certain professor. I am not that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time. I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up straddling the two worlds – the USSR and the US. I grew up in Russia, and moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian, and I understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a native Russian can. But I went through high school and university in the US .I had careers in several industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet collapse first-hand.

 

By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since. The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and history buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that would be useful in our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be most instructive. When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to muddle through. How was that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker's paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness. In comparison, the American system could produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be survivable. The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War victory, getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, and the foreign policy wonks coined the term "hyperpower" and were jabbering on about full-spectrum dominance.

 

All sorts of silly things were happening. Professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan Greenspan chided us about "irrational exuberance" while consistently low-balling interest rates. It was the "Goldilocks economy" – not to hot, not too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was actually more of a "Tinker-bell" economy, because the last five or so years of economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on various debt pyramids, the "whole house of cards" as President Bush once referred to it during one of his lucid moments. And now we can look back on all of that with a funny, queasy feeling, or we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo. While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best to keep my comparative theory of superpower collapse to myself. During that time, I was watching the action in the oil industry, because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles' heel of the US economy. In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the century. But then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at least half a decade. Perhaps you've noticed this too, there is a sort of refrain here: people who try to predict big historical shifts always turn to be off by about half a decade. Unsuccessful predictions, on the other hand are always spot on as far as timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at midnight on January 1, 2000.

 

Perhaps there is a physical principal involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known universe. So please make a mental note: whenever it seems to you that I am making a specific prediction as to when I think something is likely to happen, just silently add "plus or minus half a decade." In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the time was ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn't too far off. In June of 2005 I published an article on the subject, titled "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post- American Century," which was quite popular, even to the extent that I got paid for it. It is available at various places on the Internet. A little while later I formalized my thinking somewhat into the "Collapse Gap" concept, which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The slide show from that presentation, titled "Closing the Collapse Gap," was posted on the Internet and has been downloaded a few million times since then. Then, in January of 2008, when it became apparent to me that financial collapse was well underway, and that other stages of collapse were to follow, I published a short article titled "The Five Stages of Collapse," which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in October of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I announced on my blog that I am getting out of the prognosticating business. I have made enough predictions, they all seem very well on track (give or take half a decade, please remember that), collapse is well underway, and now I am just an observer. But this talk is about something else, something other than making dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they have come true. It's like looking at last year's amazingly successful stock picks: what are you going to do about them this year? What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post- collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – "Social Collapse Best Practices" – and I thought that it was an excellent idea.

 

Although the term "best practices" has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little more than "good ideas," initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It's a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works. In organizations, especially large organizations, "best practices" also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to "think outside the box" whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn't feel so compelled to spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different box inside of which to think – a box better suited to the post-collapse environment. Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That's just not the case. The old ways of doing things don't work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let's go through some specifics. We'll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.

 

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can't easily get more because they don't have any credit. Prior to collapse, it's good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can't unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them. If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing on what is commonly understood as "economic health." Prior to collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy. After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some television bobble-head said so. But let's take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going.

 

We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let's just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let's see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that's important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that's our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we've been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly! So that's what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting "Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!" Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won't be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don't recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish. Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don't have any idea what to do next. So, what is there for them to do? Forget "growth," forget "jobs," forget "financial stability." What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless.

 

If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de- industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms. Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn. The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms.

 

Collectivization undermined the ancient village-based agricultural traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests – United States and Canada – and eventually expanded this to include other foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to raise livestock to try to address this problem. Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available at the government stores, the resulting diet would have been rather poor, and so people tried to supplement it with food they gathered, raised, or caught, or purchased at farmers' markets. Kitchen gardens were always common, and, once the economy collapsed, a lot of families took to growing food in earnest. The kitchen gardens, by themselves, were never sufficient, but they made a huge difference. The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score something edible. I remember one particular joke from that period. Black humor has always been one of Russia's main psychological coping mechanisms. A man walks into a food store, goes to the meat counter, and he sees that it is completely empty. So he asks the butcher: "Don't you have any fish?" And the butcher answers: "No, here is where we don't have any meat. Fish is what they don't have over at the seafood counter." Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never collapsed completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread continued even during the worst of times, partly because has always been such an important part of the Russian diet, and partly because access to bread symbolized the pact between the people and the Communist government, enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary slogans. Also, it is important to remember that in Russia most people have lived within walking distance of food shops, and used public transportation to get out to their kitchen gardens, which were often located in the countryside immediately surrounding the relatively dense, compact cities. This combination of factors made for some lean times, but very little malnutrition and no starvation.

 

In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers' access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they are no longer able to drive. Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation's nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is all that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs. Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying food-that-isn't-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that aren't really burgers, like the bread that wasn't really bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor. Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario?

 

The Russian example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do something similar? There is already a healthy gardening movement in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square feet. The ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation. Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation, allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to the population centers after taking in the harvest. An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses. How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually helped by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones. The government could theoretically head up such an effort, purely hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence that such an effort is being considered.

 

For our fearless national leaders, such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they need to do is print some more money, right? Moving on to shelter. Again, let's look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person's internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own. These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable.

 

With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children's time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren't strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear. Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much lower?

 

A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a "realistic" price. This thought is connected to the notion that housing is a necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to live. Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity, be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container... The list is virtually endless. But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out. As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to improvise some solution. One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them. Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses.

 

The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards. College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don't we. Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people don't get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow, catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers, as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining habitable dwellings. All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a "bumpy plateau." An all-time record was set in 2005, and then, after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices crashed, along with oil production.

 

More recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether different "bumpy plateau": the oil prices are bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can't seem to go any lower. It would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price. Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil market. On top of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start insisting on payment in kind – in some sort of tangible export commodity, which the US, in its current economic state, would be hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent decline, and can provide only about a third of current needs. This is still quite a lot of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that's needed for some small but critical mission. I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle's wife, who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time came. No dice. The pat answer was: "Everybody is 8 months pregnant!" How can you argue with that logic? So 10 liters was it for us too, belly or no belly. So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they hold large amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all without the use of fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced. Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again, some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear.

 

In my book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building, marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just as we run out of gas. Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of shutting down. On the other hand, the government's actions continue to disappoint. Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather continue to create boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new cars.

 

The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn't be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results. Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to pick up hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down and matched up with people who need a lift. Yet another idea: since passenger rail service is in such a sad shape, and since it is unlikely that funds will be found to improve it, why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos. The energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the hobos don't require stops because they can jump on and off, and only a couple of cars per train would ever be needed, because hobos are almost infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that's what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it's loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal. And so we come to the subject of security.

 

Post-collapse Russia suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant, veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves, there were numerous contract killings, muggings, murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general, the place just wasn't safe. Russians living in the US would hear that I am heading back there for a visit, and would give me a wide-eyed stare: how could I think of doing such a thing. I came through unscathed, somehow. I made a lot of interesting observations along the way. One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it's often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don't want to part with. If you can't afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood. A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn't think there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars, and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has the world's largest prison population, and will not be able to afford to keep so many people locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually, over time, rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them) and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like that is starting to happen as well, except for the currently planned little side-trip to Afghanistan. I also proposed a Biblical jubilee – forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let's give that one… half a decade? But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament. And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not "on the force" and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality.

 

The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them. I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good or bad per se; everything has to be considered within a context. And, in a post-collapse context, not having to worry whether or not something is legal may be a very good thing. In the midst of a collapse, we will not have time to deliberate, legislate, interpret, set precedents and so on. Having to worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system is the last thing we should have to worry about. Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners' association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don't own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic – you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time's sake, then they probably won't give you that ticket or seek that court order. Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and distribute, a new agricultural implement. It's a sort of flail studded with sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost-effective, and reasonably safe provided you don't lose your head while using it, although people have taken to calling the "flying guillotine." You think that this is an acceptable risk, but you are concerned about the issues of consumer safety and liability insurance and possibly even criminal liability.

 

Once again, it is very helpful to have a large number of influential, physically impressive, mildly psychotic friends who, whenever some legal matter comes up, can just can go and see the lawyers, have a friendly chat, demonstrate the proper use of the flying guillotine, and generally do whatever they have to do to settle the matter amicably, without any money changing hands, and without signing any legal documents. Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things and people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much of a cut from commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or your town decides to conduct its own foreign policy, and the federal government sees it fit to interfere. Then it may turn out to be a good thing if someone else has the firepower to bring the government, or what remains of it, to its senses, and convince it to be reasonable and to play nice. Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that you can provide some relief to people who wouldn't otherwise have any health care. You don't dare call yourself a doctor, because these people are suspicious of doctors, because doctors were always trying to rob them of their life's savings. But suppose you have some medical training that you got in, say, Cuba, and you are quite able to handle a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to suture wounds, to treat infections, to set bones and so on. You also want to be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan periodically send you, to ease the pain of hard post-collapse life. Well, going through the various licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits and the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary, provided you can surround yourself with a lot of well- armed, well-trained, mentally unstable friends. Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important. Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other's defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what's right. Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world's highest prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department. I've covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to think that way. The danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be made: you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay the course, and then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later. So how do you prepare? Lately, I've been hearing from a lot of high-powered, successful people about their various high-powered, successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like this: "My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his money in gold, b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this normal?" And I tell them, yes, of course, that's perfectly harmless. He's just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that's not really preparation. That's just someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way. So, how do you prepare, really? Let's go through a list of questions that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to each of them.

 

OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if we calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great Depression, instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is trying to feed us now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to think it'll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is around the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but retirement savings are also evaporating. The federal government is broke, state governments are broke, some more than others, and the best they can do is print money, which will quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don't have any money? How is that done? Good question. As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation, and security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the moment. It is still very much overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But then you might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant properties around. Finding a good place to live will become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties will only increase. The best course of action is to become a property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can't find a position as a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go to next, and keep your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are, the people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property, but you also look out for all the squatters, because they are the reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so much better than living in a ghost town. What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn't matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off. If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don't own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exis

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God 'will not give happy ending'

 

God will not intervene to prevent humanity from wreaking disastrous damage to the environment, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

 

In a lecture, Dr Rowan Williams urged a "radical change of heart" to prevent runaway climate change.

 

At York Minster he said humanity should turn away from the selfishness and greed that leads it to ignore its interdependence with the natural world.

 

And God would not guarantee a "happy ending", he warned.

 

Dr Williams has often spoken out about environmental issues.

 

'Ultimate tragedy'

 

Speaking on Wednesday he said just as God gave humans free will to do "immeasurable damage" to themselves as individuals it seemed "clear" they had the same "terrible freedom" as a human race.

Robert Pigott, religious affairs correspondent

 

Along with his dramatic urging for people to achieve a personal "conversion" in their attitude to the environment, Archbishop Williams is using the opportunity to teach a slightly more sophisticated take on what Christianity says about the issue.

 

The concept of a loving and forgiving God has always been central to Christian teaching, even if some traditionalist evangelicals do anticipate the approach of a world-ending apocalypse. Dr Williams is reluctant to allow Christians to use their faith in a benevolent God - or their fatalism about an apocalypse - to opt out of personal responsibility for the planet Earth. His key message was about free will - the idea God exercises no control over what people choose to do. He has used the economic recession to ask fundamental questions about what constitutes genuine wealth and wellbeing, and to argue material consumption has not brought true happiness. Dr Williams evidently sees the potential for similar lessons to emerge even from the looming crisis over climate change.

 

"I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin," he said.

 

"God's faithfulness stands, assuring us that even in the most appalling disaster love will not let us go - but it will not be a safety net that guarantees a happy ending in this world."

 

Without a change of heart, Dr Williams warned, the world faced a number of "doomsday scenarios" including the "ultimate tragedy" of humanity gradually "choked, drowned, or starved by its own stoopidity."

 

The poorest and most vulnerable and our children and grandchildren would pay the heaviest price for climate change, he added.

 

A Greenpeace spokesman welcomed the speech: "Hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year because we haven't taken the necessary steps to stop climate change.

 

"Whilst there's nothing wrong in hoping for a miracle, relying on one does seem to be more than a bit reckless.

 

"We need to all do what we can now, or we're giving up on this world."

 

Friends of the Earth's executive director, Andy Atkins said: "Humans are responsible for escalating climate change. We have a choice as to how we respond, but we and future generations will live with the consequences of this generation's choice."

 

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the British Humanist Association said: "The fact that god is not going to help us handle climate change will come as no surprise to many.

 

"But nor will the reinterpretation of ancient texts to be about stewardship rather than dominion, or indeed any faith in some non-human support.

 

"What may help us to manage it is human reason and the application of technology, and a recognition that we are on our own on this earth and must handle our own problems."

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Nomads

 

 

Full Spectrum Dominance and the New World Order

 

A Must See Video!

 

 

 

Nur

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Perpetual War for Perpetual War

 

Get ready for a “lasting military presence” in Iraq

 

By Jeff Huber

 

August 08, 2009 "American Conservative" -- -U.S. Army Col. Timothy R. Reese says it’s time for the U.S. to “declare victory” in Iraq and “go home.” It was time to declare victory and go home in January 2007, when the Bush administration decided to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and charged off on its cockamamie “surge” strategy.

 

The original stated objective of the surge was political reconciliation in Iraq. By September 2007, when it was clear that the political objective was not in sight, Gen. David Petraeus pulled a bait-and-switch and announced that the military objectives of the surge were being met. Petraeus hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks slipped Freudian in February 2009 when he confessed that Petraeus’s goal was never to end the Iraq conflict but to trick Congress and the American public into extending it indefinitely by achieving short-term results though bribing Iraq’s militias.

 

According to Colonel Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, the surge’s real objectives still haven’t been met and never will be. In a recent memorandum, Reese asserts that “the ineffectiveness and corruption” of Iraq’s government ministries is “the stuff of legend.” The government is “failing to take rational steps to improve its electrical infrastructure and to improve their oil exploration, production and exports.” There is “no progress towards resolving the Kirkuk situation,” transition the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi Security Forces “is not happening” and “the Kurdish situation continues to fester.” Violent political intimidation is “rampant.” Iraq’s security forces are a disaster. The officer corps is corrupt. Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are rampant. Laziness, lack of initiative, and absence of basic military discipline are endemic. Iraq’s military leadership is incapable of leading; it can’t plan ahead, it can’t stand up to the Shiite political parties, it can’t stick to its agreements.

 

The U.S. military in Iraq has accomplished “all that can be expected,” Reese says.

 

Gen. Ray Odierno’s propaganda officer, Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberlem, told the New York Times that Reese’s memo “does not reflect the official stance of the U.S. military.” The memo “Reflects one person’s personal view at the time we were first implementing the Security Agreement post-30 June,” Abaelem said. “Since that time many of the initial issues have been resolved and our partnerships with Iraqi Security Forces and [government of Iraq] partners now are even stronger than before 30 June.”

 

Right. We shaved our monkey in Iraq for six years and change, but since June 30 everything’s gone hunky dory.

 

Oddly enough, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on July 29 that the relatively low levels of violence in Iraq might allow commanders to “moderately accelerate” troops reductions. He added, though, that Odierno would have to recommend speeding up the withdrawal before any decision is made. That pretty much tells you how things work in the Department of Defense. Gates isn’t in charge of his four-stars; they’re in charge of him.

 

Odie is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2015, so, predictably enough, on August 4 he rejected the idea of an accelerated pullout, saying that the surge hasn’t reached its goals yet and we need to “stay the course.” (Yes, he really used that moronic Bush-era mantra.) The Desert Ox doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the Status of Forces Agreement that requires all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki doesn’t appear to be overly committed to the agreement either. In a July 23 appearance at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, Maliki opened the door for indefinite U.S. presence in his country, saying, “If Iraqi forces need more training and support, we will reexamine the agreement at that time, based on our own national needs.”

 

Even Reese isn’t all that committed about U.S. forces leaving Iraq. In his memo, he says that during the withdrawal period the U.S. and Iraqi governments “should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations.”

 

Lasting military presence. That’s been the objective of the neoconservatives all along. In their September 2009 manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses Cheney’s pals at the infamous Project for the New American Century argued, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The neocons’ Pax Americana vision has translated into the Pentagon’s “long war,” a strategy that does not seek to win wars but rather to create a sequel to the Cold War in which Islamofacism substitutes for communism and puny Iran, whose defense budget is less than one percent of ours, replaces the Soviet juggernaut.

 

That might be justified if military applications overseas were making us safer from terrorism, but they are not. In 2008 the highly respected national security analysts at Rand Corporation released a report titled How Terrorist Groups End. The study involved a comprehensive analysis of terror organizations that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006. 83 percent of the groups ended as a result of policing and political action. Military force accounted for a mere 7 percent of success against terrorists. Rand analysts recommend that the best course of counterterrorism actions should involve “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.” We’re almost certainly, as Donald Rumsfeld suspected in 2004, making multiple new terrorists for every one we capture or kill. We have discovered a new style of warfare: reverse attrition. The more enemy we attrite the more enemy we have.

 

All the talk about withdrawing from Iraq is an Orwellian card trick. Reese says our “lasting military presence” should not “include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise.” Why would we need to leave noncombat forces behind? So they can cook and clean for the combat forces that provide them force protection? The exercises we might do with the Iraqis would involve practicing for the invasions of Iran and Syria, which is the real reason the warmongery wants to keep an enduring base of operations in Iraq. There’s no need to conduct defensive exercises. None of Iraq’s neighbors is capable of invading and occupying it or crazy enough to try.

 

President Obama’s promise to remove all U.S combat troops from Iraq by August 2010 was also a see-through canard. As Gareth Porter revealed in March, the “advisory and assistance brigades” that will remain after that date will in fact be combat brigades augmented by a handful of advisers and assistants. The Cold War justified defense spending for a half-century. Now, the Pentagon is trying to validate its existence with another long war in the Middle East.

 

Sun Tzu famously said, “No nation ever profited from a long war.” The 27- year Peloponnesian War ended Athens’ reign as a superpower. The Thirty Years’ War Balkanized the Holy Roman Empire, dividing German power among multiple smaller states. The 46-year Cold War forced the Soviet Union to change its name back to Russia.

 

Don’t expect us to withdraw from Iraq or the Bananastans any time soon. The American warmongery, a confluence of Big War, Big Energy, Big Jesus, Big Israel, Big Brainwash, and Big Brother, is trying to entangle us in a state of constant armed conflict that will carry on into the next American century. There’s no need for anyone to challenge our hegemony; all they have to do is sit back and watch us collapse under the weight of our own stuupidity.

 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals(Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative

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Going Hungry In The USA

 

America's Economic Pain Brings Hunger Pangs

 

 

USDA report on access to food 'unsettling,' Obama says

 

By Amy Goldstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

 

November 18, 2009 - "Washington Post" Tuesday, November 17, 2009 --The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.

 

At a time when rising poverty, widespread unemployment and other effects of the recession have been well documented, the report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides the government's first detailed portrait of the toll that the faltering economy has taken on Americans' access to food.

 

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling."

 

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

 

Among Americans of all ages, more than 16 percent -- or 49 million people -- sometimes ran short of nutritious food, compared with about 12 percent the year before. The deterioration in access to food during 2008 among both children and adults far eclipses that of any other single year in the report's history.

 

Around the Washington area, the data show, the extent of food shortages varies significantly. In the past three years, an average of 12.4 percent of households in the District had at least some problems getting enough food, slightly worse than the national average. In Maryland, the average was 9.6 percent, and in Virginia it was 8.6 percent.

 

The local and national findings are from a snapshot of food in the United States that the Agriculture Department has issued every year since 1995, based on Census Bureau surveys. It documents Americans who lack a dependable supply of adequate food -- people living with some amount of "food insecurity" in the lexicon of experts -- and those whose food shortages are so severe that they are hungry. The new report is based on a survey conducted in December.

 

Several independent advocates and policy experts on hunger said that they had been bracing for the latest report to show deepening shortages, but that they were nevertheless astonished by how much the problem has worsened. "This is unthinkable. It's like we are living in a Third World country," said Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America, the largest organization representing food banks and other emergency food sources.

 

"It's frankly just deeply upsetting," said James D. Weill, president of the Washington-based Food and Action Center. As the economy eroded, Weill said, "you had more and more people getting pushed closer to the cliff's edge. Then this huge storm came along and pushed them over."

 

Obama, who pledged during last year's presidential campaign to eliminate hunger among children by 2015, reiterated that goal on Monday. "My Administration is committed to reversing the trend of rising hunger," the president said in a statement. The solution begins with job creation, Obama said. And he ticked off steps that Congress and the administration have taken, or are planning, including increases in food stamp benefits and $85 million Congress just freed up through an appropriations bill to experiment with feeding more children during the summer, when subsidized school breakfasts and lunches are unavailable

 

In a briefing for reporters, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, "These numbers are a wake-up call . . . for us to get very serious about food security and hunger, about nutrition and food safety in this country."

 

Vilsack attributed the marked worsening in Americans' access to food primarily to the rise in unemployment, which now exceeds 10 percent, and in people who are underemployed. He acknowledged that "there could be additional increases" in the 2009 figures, due out a year from now, although he said it is not yet clear how much the problem might be eased by the measures the administration and Congress have taken this year to stimulate the economy.

 

The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work.

 

The report suggests that federal food assistance programs are only partly fulfilling their purpose, although Vilsack said that shortages would be much worse without them. Just more than half of the people surveyed who reported they had food shortages said that they had, in the previous month, participated in one of the government's largest anti-hunger and nutrition programs: food stamps, subsidized school lunches or WIC, the nutrition program for women with babies or young children.

 

Last year, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, compared with 3.9 million in 2007, while people in about 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, nearly 90,000 more than the year before.

 

Food shortages, the report shows, are particularly pronounced among women raising children alone. Last year, more than one in three single mothers reported that they struggled for food, and more than one in seven said that someone in their home had been hungry -- far eclipsing the food problem in any other kind of household. The report also found that people who are black or Hispanic were more than twice as likely as whites to report that food in their home was scarce.

 

In the survey used to measure food shortages, people were considered to have food insecurity if they answered "yes" to several of a series of questions. Among the questions were whether, in the past year, their food sometimes ran out before they had money to buy more, whether they could not afford to eat nutritionally balanced meals, and whether adults in the family sometimes cut the size of their meals -- or skipped them -- because they lacked money for food. The report defined the degree of their food insecurity by the number of the questions to which they answered yes.

 

© Copyright 1996-2009 The Washington Post Company

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Global Warfare

 

U.S. Military Operations in All Major Regions of the World

 

By Rick_Rozoff

 

November 18, 2009 "Centre for Research on Globalization" -- On January 20, a changing of the guard occurred in the United States White House with two-term president George W. Bush being replaced by former freshman senator Barack Obama.

 

Bush had continued the policies of his predecessor Bill Clinton in relation to the Balkans, Iraq and Latin America - with troops and a massive military base in Kosovo, regular bombings of Iraq and a monumental expansion of military aid to Colombia - and in addition launched two wars of his own, those against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq two years later.

 

Obama, so thoroughly does U.S. polity predetermine individual administrations' policies, entered office by intensifying the deadly drone missile attacks in Pakistan begun by Bush in late 2008 and announced that he was doubling the number of American troops in Afghanistan.

 

Already presiding over the world's largest military budget, officially 41.5% of world expenditures in 2008 and far larger with non-Defense Department spending factored in, in April the new president requested from Congress an additional $85 billion in supplemental funding for the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq.

 

U.S. lawmakers were more than accommodating and on July 24 Obama signed Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations amounting to $106 billion.

 

On October 28, he signed the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act which includes another $130 billion to fund what his administration now calls overseas contingency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

With the authorization of $106 billion in July, the last official supplemental appropriation for the wars, and $130 billion last month for Afghanistan and Iraq the combined official spending for both wars will exceed $1 trillion. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 2009 Year Book, total international military spending for 2008 was not much more than that: $1.464 trillion.

 

Eight days after the authorization of the $680 billion Pentagon budget for next year, the New York Times reported that the top American military commander, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, said "he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," with the newspaper estimating the size of the demand to be $50 billion. [1]

 

Despite the Obama administration's pledge to the contrary, July's war supplement may not be the last one. It will simply be renamed an emergency appropriation. The first of many more to come.

 

Not only does one country account for the overwhelming plurality of world military expenditures, but that nation also has troops and bases on all six habitable continents (as well as a 54-year military mission in Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze) and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups and six navy fleets that roam the world's oceans and seas at will. It is also expanding a global interceptor missile system on land, on sea, in the air and into space that will leave it invulnerable to retaliation.

 

Reports from the first twelve days of November indicate the global scope of the first attempt in history by one nation to achieve uncontested worldwide military power.

 

A survey of that period will trace recent trends across the globe with the alphabet as a compass.

 

Afghanistan

 

Any day now Washington may announce plans to add 40,000 or more troops to the 68,000 already there. [2] Plans are underway to accommodate that influx.

 

The American military compound at and fanning out from the Bagram Air Field has been expanded from 3,993 to 5,198 acres since 2001 and is in the process of further enlargement. It already hosts some 25,000 U.S. troops and contractors and "a new parking ramp supporting the world's largest aircraft is to be completed this spring is continuing to grow to keep up with the requirements of an escalating war and troop increases." [3]

 

Regarding non-military personnel at Bagram and elsewhere in the nation, "Contractors in Afghanistan outnumber U.S. troops there" [4] as they do in Iraq.

 

The Army Times recently reported on the main purpose of the airbase at Bagram. Last month the number of U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan was the highest since July of 2008, with 647 bombs dropped in October compared to 752 a year ago July. "The airstrike numbers don’t include strafing runs, attacks by special operations AC-130 gunships, launches of small missiles or helicopter attacks." [5]

 

Africa

 

A U.S. Defense Department news source reported on November 5 that Air Forces Africa commanders visited Mali and Senegal in West Africa. Vice commander Michael Callan "visited Mali's 33d Parachute Regiment, a unit that carries out operations using tactical vehicles and communication equipment provided by the U.S. Defense and State Departments." The Malian military is involved in a counterinsurgency war in the nation's north aided by Washington.

 

A commander of Mali's armed forces said, "Ninety-five percent of our soldiers were trained by the U.S, and we've engaged with you in exercises like Flintlock, Joint Planning and Assessment Teams and special bilateral training." [6] Flintlock military exercises have been held in different locations on the African continent for years, this year's being conducted by the new Africa Command (AFRICOM) for the first time. The U.S. also recently led multinational military exercises in Gabon and Uganda on both ends of the continent. [7]

 

The USS San Juan, "a fast-attack submarine," arrived in South Africa on November 4, "setting the stage for a series of first-ever, at-sea engagements with the South African Navy submarine force." [8]

 

Armenia

 

Robert Simmons [9], NATO's special representative to the South Caucasus and Central Asia - former Senior Adviser to the United States Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs on NATO - was in this South Caucasus nation earlier this month and announced that he had recruited an initial contingent of Armenian troops for the war in Afghanistan. This marks the first deployment to that nation of soldiers from the Russian-led seven-nation Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a potential counterbalance to NATO in post-Soviet space.

 

"Simmons expressed NATO's 'appreciation to Armenia for its strong contributions' to alliance missions, which he said began in Kosovo and will now be repeated in Afghanistan." [10]

 

In reference to his mission of pulling yet another Russian ally into the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization orbit, Simmons said, "We are continuing cooperation with the Armenian Defense Ministry. NATO assists the implementation of reforms and the development of strategically important documents." [11]

 

Baltic Sea

 

After participating in NATO war games off the coast of Scotland, the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole paid visits to the capitals of Finland and Estonia in the Baltic Sea. "Cole hosted a reception in Helsinki, which was joined by Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, U.S. Naval Forces Africa and Allied Joint Forces Command Naples.

 

"Immediately following the departure from Helsinki, Cole arrived in Tallinn, Estonia, a few hours later." [12]

 

The beginning of this month the guided-missile frigate USS John L. Hall with sailors of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 48 "completed a theater security cooperation (TSC) port visit to Klaipeda, Lithuania."

 

A U.S. Navy official stated: "We are here as part of the United States Navy's continuing presence in the Baltic Sea....We are also here to work with the Lithuanian Navy, who has been a valuable partner and our visit here is part of the ongoing relationship between our two countries and our two navies." [13] [14]

 

On November 3 Estonian Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo was at the Pentagon to meet with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Associated Press reported on the occasion that he was "discussing with the United States why NATO needs plans in case his region is attacked." [15]

 

Bangladesh

 

In early November three high-ranking American military officials arrived in the country. The three - U.S. Army Lieutenant General Benjamin R. Mixon, Commanding General of U.S. Army, Pacific, Vice-Admiral John M. Bird, Commander of U.S. Navy 7th Fleet, and U.S. Marine Corps Major General Randolph D. Alles, Director for Strategic Planning and Policy at the U.S. Pacific Command - engaged in discussions focusing "on interoperability, readiness in the region, security-force assistance, and bilateral approaches to maintaining regional stability." [16]

 

On November 12 the U.S.-led Tiger Shark military exercises to train Bangladeshi naval commandos ended. A press release on the operation stated: "The training demonstrates the United States government's commitment to Bangladesh and to regional security by promoting military-to-military relationships throughout Asia and the Pacific." [17]

 

Black Sea

 

The Pentagon's European Command (EUCOM) reported on November 2 that its Joint Task Force-East had completed an almost three-month series of trainings in Bulgaria and Romania which began on August 7 and included Stryker and Airborne units destined for the war in Afghanistan. [18] "Nearly 600 members of the Romanian Land Forces, 500 Bulgarian Land Forces, and more than 1,500 U.S. service members participated in this year's combined training." [19]

 

After U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden's visit to the country on October 22, a news source in Romania wrote of Washington's new interceptor missile plans: "A strong and modern surveillance system located in Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey could monitor three hot areas at once: the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian and relevant zones in the Middle East." [20]

 

Colombia

 

The Obama administration signed a ten-year military treaty with the Alvaro Uribe government on September 30 which "gives American military forces access to seven Colombian army, navy and air force bases, but also to major international civilian airports in the country. In addition, U.S. personnel and defense contractors will enjoy diplomatic immunity under the agreement." [21]

 

A copy of the pact surfaced on November 4 and detailed that it "allows Washington access to civilian airports as well as military bases" and as a result "the US will have access to all international airports across the Andean nation including airports in the cities of Barranquilla, San Andres, Cartagena, Bogota, Cali, Medellin and Bucaramanga." [22]

 

In the initial phase an estimated 1,400 U.S. personnel will be assigned to the seven bases with the likelihood that the number will be increased as Washington sees fit. [23]

 

Eva Golinger observed that one of the newly acquired bases, that at Palanquero, was identified by a American Air Force document as providing the Pentagon "an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America...." [24]

 

Two South American nations bordering or near Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia, were not slow to respond.

 

Earlier this month Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stated in his weekly radio and television address that "We cannot waste one day to fulfill our mission: to prepare for war and help the people to get ready for war," [25] warning that an armed conflict with the U.S. client regime in Bogota "could extend throughout the whole continent." [26]

 

Days earlier two Venezuelan National Guard troops were killed at a checkpoint near Colombia and Caracas deployed 15,000 troops to the border.

 

In his November 13 address Chavez added. "Don't make a mistake, Mr. Obama, by ordering an attack against Venezuela by way of Colombia." [27]

 

On the same day his Bolivian counterpart, President Evo Morales, warned "I am convinced that where there are military bases, the social peace, the democracy and the development of the nations as well as their integration are not guaranteed. These facilities are an open provocation against the peace."

 

Morales also said that he failed to comprehend how the American head of state could have been awarded the Peace Nobel Price "when his country does everything to promote wars and conflicts.

 

"Obama must justify that award by withdrawing all the troops of his country from around the world...." [28]

 

Czech Republic

 

Following up on his visit to Prague in late October, on November 5 U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden hosted Czech President Vaclav Klaus at the White House and "they mostly discussed the U.S. plan for a new missile defence architecture."

 

The two "also talked about the situation in Afghanistan and Iran" and "Klaus said the United States knows that it is necessary to continue with the anti-missile project in Europe." [29]

 

The next day U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Alexander Vershbow met with Czech defense officials in their nation to discuss new American missile plans for Eastern Europe, ones intended to be "stronger, smarter, and swifter" than the previous Bush administration version and to incorporate all of Europe under a NATO umbrella.

 

Vershbow characterized the content of the talks as having presented "some concrete ideas to begin that process of developing the Czech role in the new approach" and said that the Czech contribution could include "potential facilities here on the territory of the Czech Republic." [30]

 

On November 4 the local press announced that "A few U.S. delegations will visit the Czech Republic in November, following up on the recent visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, including an expert military team that arrives in Prague this Friday."

 

One of those delegations will include Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher, who "recently said the command for the managing and control of elements of the new version of anti-missile defence could be stationed in the Czech Republic."

 

"The USA wants to build the system in cooperation with NATO." [31]

 

Georgia

 

Earlier this week U.S. Marines completed the two-week Immediate Response 2009 military training exercises in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia. The preceding maneuvers of the same name, those of 2008 in which over 1,000 American troops participated, ended one day before Georgia started shelling neighboring South Ossetia and killed several people including a Russian peacekeeper. [32]

 

Days after that the U.S. client regime launched an all-out invasion of South Ossetia, triggering a five-day war with Russia.

 

The official purpose of this year's exercises was to train Georgian troops to serve under NATO command in Afghanistan, but a Russian news source saw matters differently:

 

"Immediate Response was clearly designed not to fight against the Taliban or al-Qaeda.....Commander of US Army in Europe General Carter Ham visited Georgia to inspect the exercises but no one came from Afghanistan.

 

"Perhaps, the exercises were aimed at issuing a warning to Russia." [33]

 

As the drills were ending Alexander Shliakhturov, chief of Russia's military intelligence, said "that he did not rule out that Georgia might again use force against breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia." [34]

 

A lengthier account of Shliakhturov's concerns appeared in the Georgian media and included these quotes:

 

"According to our information, Georgia is still getting military aid from Ukraine, Israel and NATO. NATO countries, especially Eastern European countries, provide Georgia with arms and equipment, Israel provides Georgia with air equipment, the USA trains Georgian troops and Ukraine provides Georgia with heavy equipment, namely, tanks."

 

"The Russian Intelligence Service is addressing other dangers too, namely, the efforts being made by the USA and NATO to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance and the new US plan to locate anti-missile systems in Europe." [35]

 

Four days later other Russian sources revealed "that the United States plans to supply weapons, including a Patriot-3 air defense system and shoulder-launched Stinger missiles, worth a total of $100 million, to Georgia." [36]

 

The next day Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov "recalled the situation in the summer of 2008 when many countries ignored Russian warnings that modern arms in Saakashvili’s hands might prompt this man to unleash military aggression." [37]

 

The chief of the Russian General Staff, General Nikolai Makarov, said "Georgia is getting large amounts of weapons supplied from abroad" and "Georgian military potential is currently higher than last August [2008]." [38]

 

India

 

Shortly after the Pentagon wrapped up the largest joint U.S.-Indian military exercises ever, Yudh Abhyas [Preparation for War] - which featured the first deployment of new American Stryker armored combat vehicles outside of Iraq and Afghanistan - at the end of October [39], it was announced that "India is negotiating with the United States to acquire state of the art Javelin anti-tank missiles worth several million dollars for large-scale induction." [40]

 

Days earlier former president George W. Bush was in India and called on his host nation to join in the war in Afghanistan, urging the U.S. and India to "work together to win the war in Afghanistan." [41]

 

Iraq

 

In early November Arabic language news sources revealed that "The US military has finished erecting an advanced radar system in Iraq to monitor the border with Iran, Syria and Turkey" and that "the radar is a preparatory measure aimed at providing the United States and its allies advanced control capabilities in event of a US military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities." [42]

 

Israel

 

The largest-ever joint American-Israeli military exercises, the two-week Juniper Cobra 10, ended on November 3. They concentrated on live-fire missile interception exercises described by many observers as a test run for the new continent-wide NATO missile shield planned for Europe. [43]

 

Over 2,000 troops from the two nations and 17 U.S. warships participated in the war games to create "the infrastructure that would be necessary in the event that the Obama administration decides to deploy US systems here in the event of a conflict." [44]

 

The top military commander of United States European Command and of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, paid a three-day call to Israel for the occasion and met with "Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Gantz and several other commanders." [45]

 

On November 1 American arms manufacturer Raytheon Company announced that it had secured contracts worth $100 million for a joint interceptor missile program of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and the Israel Missile Defense Organization.

 

The Pentagon's European Command has over 100 troops stationed in Israel's Negev Desert manning an advanced missile radar site there.

 

Korean Peninsula

 

The South Korean Yonhap News Agency reported on November 1 that "The US and South Korea have completed joint action plans for responding to a regime collapse and other internal emergency situations in North Korea...." [46]

 

Citing an unidentified South Korean official, the report contains these details:

 

"South Korea and the US had long worked on Concept Plan 5029, to prepare for a regime collapse and other internal emergencies in North Korea.

 

“Since its inauguration last year, the [south Korean President] Lee Myung-bak government has pushed to convert the concept plan into an operational plan and it was recently completed.

 

"If the South Korea-US combined forces intervene in North Korea's internal instabilities, the South Korean military will assume the leading role in consideration of neighboring countries, while the US military will be responsible for the removal of the North's nuclear facilities and weapons." [47]

 

On the final day of last month Washington expressed its satisfaction at South Korea redeploying troops to Afghanistan shortly after Pentagon chief Robert Gates' visit to Seoul and the South Korean defense ministry on October 22.

 

"Washington supports and welcomes South Korea's plans to deploy troops to Afghanistan...the U.S. Department of State said." [48]

 

Kosovo

 

This month began with former U.S. president Bill Clinton arriving in the capital of Kosovo for the unveiling of a gaudy 11-foot gold-sprayed bronze statue of himself on November 1. [49]

 

He was being hailed by the breakaway entity's nominal prime minister, former Kosovo Liberation Army chieftain Hashim Thaci, for his role in launching the 78-day NATO air war against Yugoslavia in March of 1999. That sustained bombing campaign, Operation Allied Force, inaugurated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an active war-making machine and issued in the ten-year war cycle that continues to this day with no indication of it ever abating.

 

A Russian commentary of the following day put the ceremony in perspective:

 

"Over the course of the 10-week conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions; even the German Luftwaffe had its first taste of combat over the skies of Yugoslavia since having its wings clipped in World War II.

 

"The ensuing 78-day aerial bombardment campaign, which grew continuously more aggressive and reckless, spared little infrastructure: factories, bridges, roads and power stations were all bombed with deadly accuracy. As a result, thousands of innocent civilians suffered great deprivation on both sides of the battle.

 

"In perhaps the worst public relations disaster for NATO during the conflict, five US 'smart' bombs severely damaged the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists. NATO officials, in an effort to cool Chinese outrage, blamed the error on outdated maps. Chinese officials rejected both the apologies and explanations." [50]

 

Pakistan

 

Over the past year the nine-year-long U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan has been extended into Pakistan, the so-called AfPak theater of operations.

 

On November 4 the U.S. launched its latest drone missile attack into North Waziristan, killing two Pakistanis.

 

"According to independent reports, since August 2008 alone, around 70 cross-border predator strikes carried out by American drones have resulted in the death of 687 Pakistani civilians." [51]

 

The Nation, a Pakistani daily newspaper, reported on November 12 that the massive increase in NATO convoys crossing the country en route to Afghanistan are overwhelming the country's highways and that "Pakistani authorities are simply helpless in checking truckloads of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces badly damaging the Indus Highway, the repair of which would cost billions of rupees to the national exchequer....NATO trucks and trailers have not been [held accountable] even once for the repair and maintenance work, while cracks are developing on the Indus Highway after every three to four months due to overloading...." [52]

 

Persian Gulf

 

A local news sources wrote on November 9 that "The US has deployed a new expeditionary force in the Persian Gulf - the first time a permanent self-sustaining US naval force has been set up in the region.

 

"The newly established Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) 5 will serve in the area of responsibility of the US Navy 5th Fleet Combined Task Force (CTF) 51 in Manama, Bahrain," where the entire U.S. Fifth Fleet is based. [53]

 

The Philippines

 

Two American servicemen were killed in a mine attack in Mindanao in late September, the first official deaths in the U.S.-assisted counterinsurgency war against not only the Abu Sayyaf Group but also the Moro National Liberation Front and the New People's Army.

 

Filipino senators "called for the abrogation of the [Visiting Forces Agreement], saying the US Seabees killed in the explosion weren't supposed to be there, as...the presence of the alleged land mine constitutes the area as a war zone." [54]

 

Pentagon chief Robert Gates insisted earlier in the month "that some 600 US counter-terrorism troops will remain in the southern Philippines...." [55]

 

An opponent of the active American military involvement in the country said that "the US military has established its permanent presence in the Philippines through the auspices of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). Many of the US soldiers are currently deployed in Mindanao under the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines headquartered in Zamboanga City." [56]

 

On November 12 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Manila after the Philippine Senate recently passed a nonbinding resolution calling on the government to renegotiate the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement, "which enables U.S. forces to train and assist Philippine troops" and "vowed...to continue American military support." [57]

 

Poland

 

Before departing for the Philippines Clinton hosted Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in Washington "to discuss the new anti-missile shield plan." [58]

 

On the same day, November 2, U.S. Air Force personnel transferred five C-130 Hercules military cargo planes from the Ramstein Air Base in Germany to the Powidz Air Base in Poland.

 

A U.S. Air Force website offered these details: "Prepping Polish aircrews and maintainers for the transition to the larger Lockheed-Martin built Hercules has been accomplished with a blend of English language and specialty knowledge training at bases in Texas and Arkansas and through a type of work mentorship exchange between U.S. and Polish air force personnel...."

 

A Polish air force officer revealed the purpose of the U.S. transfer in stating "The main task for the C-130s is to support our contingency operations in Afghanistan, Chad, Africa and everywhere Polish troops and supplies are needed." [59]

 

After NATO defense chiefs, including the U.S.'s Gates, met in Slovakia late last month and U.S. Vice President Biden visited Poland at about the same time, Warsaw announced that it was deploying 600 more troops to Afghanistan, bringing the nation's total toward the 3,000 mark.

 

Sweden

 

Sweden's Chief of Defense Staff General Sverker Goranson was in Washington, D.C. in early November and was interviewed by Defense News.

 

His nation, which has for decades presented itself as neutral, has 500 troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan - Sweden and Finland are in charge of four northern provinces for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force - and five Swedish soldiers were injured in a roadside bomb explosion on November 11, two them seriously.

 

Goranson's comments demonstrate how far from anything resembling neutrality Sweden has recently strayed:

 

"The transformation we are conducting is a huge turnaround, and as I told Adm. [Michael] Mullen [u.S. Joint Chiefs chairman], we know where we are going....The major shift is globalization and the fact that most of the things we are dealing with aren't necessarily about national boundaries.

 

"What turned Sweden around is not focusing on national defense, but being a part of this globalized world and solving issues together, because wherever conflicts are, whether in the Balkans or Afghanistan...."

 

When asked about the potential for a showdown in the Arctic Circle with Russia, he spoke about starting "discussions between the United States, Norway, Denmark and Canada [all NATO members] about what are the borders....As part of the Nordic Battle Group, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark are already sharing the operational picture in the air and on the sea, and that can be extended to the High North."

 

Lastly, the Swedish visitor, whose meetings included one with the U.S.'s top military commander, acknowledged: "We had a defense resolution in 1996 that said the Swedish armed forces should be completely NATO-interoperable, which is the standard we have worked to accordingly, to make sure that wherever we go, as we did to Afghanistan." [60]

 

Yemen

 

The government of Yemen is waging military operations against Shiite rebels in the north of the country and neighboring Saudi Arabia started launching air strikes against them earlier this month.

 

On November 10 Yemen's official news agency, Saba, announced that the U.S. has signed a military cooperation agreement with the nation.

 

The news agency also quoted Brigadier General Jeffrey Smith, the commander of the U.S. 5th Signal Command, "as renewing Washington's support for Yemen's unity, security and stability." [61]

 

One account of the agreement was provided under the headline "Yemen, US sign military deal to fight rebels." [62]

 

As the rebels are Shiite Muslims, Washington is exploiting the conflict to recruit Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations against Iran.

 

Yemen, on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, lies directly across from Djibouti where the Pentagon maintains its only permanent base in Africa, Camp Lemonier, and from Somalia, which U.S. warships periodically shell from the Indian Ocean.

 

 

Notes:

 

[1]. New York Times, November 5, 2009

 

[2]. Afghanistan: West’s 21st Century War Risks Regional Conflagration, Stop NATO, October 12, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yfh65p7

 

[3]. Associated Press, November 1, 2009

 

[4]. Reuters, November 3, 2009

 

[5]. Army Times, November 11, 2009

 

[6]. U.S. Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service, November 5, 2009

 

[7]. AFRICOM Year Two: Seizing The Helm Of The Entire World, Stop NATO, October 22, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yk4ljbx

 

[8]. Navy Newsstand, November 5, 2009

 

[9]. Mr. Simmons’ Mission: NATO Bases From Balkans To Chinese Border, Stop NATO, March 4, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yh7cqqj

 

[10]. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 9, 2009

 

[11]. PanArmenian.net, November 6, 2009

 

[12]. United States European Command, November 3, 2009

 

[13]. United States European Command, November 2, 2009

 

[14]. Baltic Sea: Flash Point For NATO-Russia Conflict, Stop NATO, February 27, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yccrh52

 

Scandinavia And The Baltic Sea: NATO’s War Plans For The High North, Stop NATO, June 14, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yfpme5z

 

[15]. Associated Press, November 2, 2009

 

[16]. All Headline News, November 2, 2009

 

[17]. Financial Express, November 13, 2009

 

[18]. Bulgaria, Romania: U.S., NATO Bases For War In The East, Stop NATO, October 24, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yf5f3zj

 

[19]. United States European Command, November 2, 2009

 

[20]. The Diplomat, November, 2009

 

[21]. AllGov, November 6, 2009

 

[22]. Press TV, November 4, 2009

 

[23]. Twenty Years After End Of The Cold War: Pentagon’s Buildup In Latin America, Stop NATO, November 4, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/ygf9eyk

 

[24]. VHeadline, November 5, 2009

 

[25]. Xinhua News Agency, November 9, 2009

 

[26]. Press TV, November 9, 2009

 

[27]. Ibid

 

[28]. Xinhua News Agency, November 10, 2009

 

[29]. Czech News Agency, November 6, 2009

 

[30]. Associated Press, November 6, 2009

 

[31]. Czech News Agency, November 4, 2009

 

[32]. NATO War Games In Georgia: Threat Of New Caucasus War, Stop NATO, May 8, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/ylfq2r8

 

[33]. Voice of Russia, November 9, 2009

 

[34]. Civil Georgia, November 5, 2009

 

[35]. Interpressnews, November 6, 2009

 

[36]. RosBusinessConsulting/Komsomolskaya Pravda, November 10, 2009

 

[37]. Voice of Russia, November 11, 2009

 

[38]. Voice of Russia, November 10, 2009

 

[39]. U.S. Expands Asian NATO Against China, Russia, Stop NATO, October 16, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/ye743gv

 

[40]. Daily Times, November 11, 2009

 

[41]. Indo-Asian News Service, October 31, 2009

 

[42]. Press TV, November 2, 2009

 

[43]. Israel: Forging NATO Missile Shield, Rehearsing War With Iran, Stop NATO, November 5, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/ydq6z57

 

[44]. Jerusalem Post, October 31, 2009

 

[45]. Israeli Defense Forces, November 3, 2009

 

[46]. Press TV, November 1, 2009

 

[47]. Yonhap News Agency, November 1, 2009

 

[48]. Russian Information Agency Novosti, October 31, 2009

 

[49]. Kosovo: Marking Ten Years Of Worldwide Wars, Stop NATO, October 31, 2009

http://tinyurl.com/yzxf3ng

 

[50]. Russia Today, November 2, 2009

 

[51]. Press TV, November 4, 2009

 

[52]. The Nation, November 12, 2009

 

[53]. Press TV, November 9, 2009

 

[54]. Business Mirror, September 30, 2009

 

[55]. Mindanao Examiner, September 13, 2009

 

[56]. Ibid

 

[57]. Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2009

 

[58]. Polish Radio, November 2, 2009

 

[59]. U.S. Air Forces in Europe, November 12, 2009

 

[60]. Defense News, November 2, 2009

 

[61]. Agence France-Presse, November 10, 2009

 

[62]. Daily Times, November 12, 2009

Stop NATO

 

© Copyright Rick Rozoff, Stop NATO, 2009

[Nur]

Going South

 

Militaristic, corrupt America increasingly resembles a Third World state.

 

By Ximena Ortiz

 

December 08, 2009 "American Conservative" -- Despite a change of presidents, America remains mired in economic, institutional, and cultural purgatory, with Obama’s exalted oratory circling the stratosphere like a taunt.

 

Angry nationalism shouts down prudence. Disproportionate military spending threatens economic wellbeing. Industry has its hand so deep in the government’s purse that private enterprise is becoming public property. The currency falters, the infrastructure crumbles. And a supine media, once a watchdog of the powerful, happily licks the strongman’s hand.

 

If the picture looks familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it many times before, from Argentina to Chile to Russia. The U.S. is third worlding.

 

That statement may smack of hyperbole. It may also understate the phenomenon, for many of the countries that the United States increasingly resembles are not only Third World—they are authoritarian, even rogue.

 

This is not to say the U.S. will be indistinguishable from a Third World country any time soon. We’re clearly nowhere near Sudanese levels of violence or Bangladeshi depths of poverty. But in terms of institutional structure, financial stability, and even national spirit, the U.S. looks little like the country it was a generation ago and more like nations it has long condemned.

 

The turning point came on 9/11. Terrorism is now a weary concern: other issues dominate the headlines—stimulus, healthcare, climate change. Yet the attacks were a pretext for a host of foreign and domestic policies that promised to secure America against its hell-bent enemies but have instead dragged the country down, eroding the qualities that distinguished it from the rest of the world.

 

Honor Killing

 

As George W. Bush was fond of doing, Barack Obama looks penetratingly into the camera, addressing all the South Asian terrorists watching CNN from their burrows. He vows to defeat them—using other people’s lives. With demagogic mastery, he, too, has tapped America’s proud warrior culture, a latent force before the age of terror.

 

This emphasis on offended honor—particularly male honor—is an integral part of life in the Third World. Where the rule of law is weak, men learn to fend for their own charges, and humiliation must be quickly avenged to uphold street cred. This cultural strain exists even among educated elites, who dress and sound much like their American counterparts, but harbor ingrained machismo.

 

A repressive leader quickly realizes that the best way to unite his countrymen is to rally them against an outside threat—actual or invented. When Evo Morales became president of Bolivia, he stoked hostility with Chile, blocking the construction of a pipeline to export Bolivian natural gas, at significant cost to his own nation, because it would pass through Chile. In North Korea, a tradition of defiance and nationalistic self-reliance, known as juche, is a cultural imperative. If the regime abandoned its bellicose posturing, its power mystique would shatter. Across the Muslim world, the pursuit of honor is a crucial driver in jihadi recruitment. As Akbar Ahmed puts it in Islam Under Siege, a sense of grievance motivates extremism, but even “those societies that economists call ‘developed’ fall back to notions of honor and revenge in times of crisis.” Sept. 11 proved his point.

 

The fact that 19 misfits with boxcutters scarcely constituted an invading army was of little consequence—that anyone could touch us so shocked the American system that we lashed out with disproportionate fury. When wounded ego drives policy, force becomes the default. Far from being a passing spasm, this honor impulse has become a way of life. It rules our international conduct and makes our wars nearly impossible to quit. Andrew Bacevich, a former U.S. Army colonel and author of The New American Militarism, writes, “There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. stoops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared.”

 

As the martial spirit rises, soldiers are necessarily heroes, even though they are treated as expendable. Patriotism is defined in militaristic terms. And it’s not unusual for an American president to wear a jacket with “Commander in Chief” emblazoned across the chest—an only slightly subtler version of Chavez and Castro couture.

 

From the Shadows

 

In countries with a history of authoritarianism, it is not uncommon for the practiced agitators who presided over a crisis to hold sway long after they appear to exit power. In Russia, former president Vladimir Putin rules extra-officially. In Chile, for years after the transition to democracy, the military was guaranteed seats in the legislature. In Argentina after the Dirty War, the army staged rebellions to compel the executive to limit the scope of prosecutions. Even after a crisis subsides, much of the population remains in panic mode and supports the bare-knuckled approach of the previous government.

 

America is similarly afflicted. Dick Cheney wields such clout that even after his term ended he gave the order and previously classified information on “enhanced interrogation” was made public. His contention that the disclosure proves the value of those interrogations remains inconclusive, but he demonstrated his reach.

 

Barack Obama, for all his pledges of transparency, has upheld government secrecy to shield the previous administration and the former vice president in particular. He blocked the release of the FBI’s interview of Cheney in the Valerie Plame case, though a federal judge recently rejected arguments for keeping the file sealed. The Obama administration has promoted, through its actions and its rhetoric, the fiction that post-9/11 abuses were committed by “bad apple” agents rather than condoned by high-ranking officials. The Obama and Bush administrations have both sought to block the release of detainee abuse information. Obama has also declined to release new pictures of prisoner mistreatment, breaking his earlier pledge. His Justice Department’s investigation of CIA excesses will be circumscribed to lower-ranking, “rogue” agents. And Cheney has already de facto immunized those who transgressed the Bush administration’s abusive guidelines. In August, Chris Wallace asked him, “So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re OK with it?” Cheney, unhindered by such quaint constraints as the rule of law, responded with a succinct “I am.”

 

Here the Third World shames us. There, when prosecution has been problematic, post-crisis justice has included truth commissions, which rigorously document abuses (as in Chile after the transition to democracy) or complement prosecutions targeting those on the very top (as in Argentina after the Dirty War). Interestingly, Cheney appears to have cribbed from the Argentine junta’s self-aggrandizing farewell statements. He claims abusive interrogators risked their lives and “deserve our gratitude”—as he surely does, too.

 

Our current president may make pious pronouncements about America’s founding principles, but his actions belie his luminous words. In a May speech, Obama professed, “I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” He then pledged that he would continue imprisoning detainees who “cannot be prosecuted” for lack of evidence. And the administration is mounting a legal challenge to transfer, in effect, Guantanamo to Bagram, making the latter prison America’s primary human warehouse for detainees that the government holds without charges. In 30 of the 38 Guantanamo-related habeas corpus cases lower courts have heard since the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision in 2008, judges have found that the government lacked credible evidence—the lowest evidentiary burden—to continue incarceration of detainees.

 

Do indefinite imprisonments, immunity for favored agents, and rule by executive diktat sound like best democratic practice? Crisis-rocked Third World countries eventually move on, setting up truth commissions and holding trials. But the United States remains very much in the grip of a 9/11 emergency mentality.

 

The War on TV

 

Writing about the Argentine media during the Falklands War, Rodolfo Braceli recalled, “The majority of the media and many notable journalists, more than being submissive and saving their skin, had a good time. They were not victims. Nor were they innocents. To say they were not innocents is the gentlest of ways of saying that they were, also, particularly culpable. … And there is more to reexamine: submission out of fear is one thing, and quite another is the genuflection, sugar-coated and gleeful, of complicity. Of the latter there was too much.”

 

We are not much better today. Reporter Ashley Banfield described coverage of the Iraq War by embedded reporters: “It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor.”

 

The U.S. media has long enjoyed an independence that even its European counterparts, with their strict defamation laws, don’t have. In terms of objectivity and freedom, Third World media has always been the weaker cousin of America’s Fourth Estate. Journalists do not come from the moneyed class and are routinely bullied by high-ranking officials who have accrued generations of privilege.

 

That independence eroded dramatically after Sept. 11. Americans tuning in to the evening news saw flags undulating in the background of war reports, often coupled with a subtle, flapping sound-effect tying war to patriotism. State TV it was not—not yet anyway. But just when the media’s role became most critical, it turned uncharacteristically compliant.

 

Recall May 1, 2003, the “Mission Accomplished” moment, when coverage sounded more like unmodified PR than impartial reporting. An equal participant in the pageantry, CNN informed viewers that Bush had made a “picture-perfect landing,” was greeted by the roar of the seamen’s approval, and had underwater survival training to prepare for his flight. All that was missing was a reverential bow to “Dear Leader.”

 

Long before the Pentagon discovered embedding, the Argentine junta selected the journalists allowed into the Falklands to cover the conflict and checked all news content. As Stars and Stripes reported in a recent series, the Defense Department has been following a similar strategy, hiring the Rendon Group to prepare graded reports on journalists seeking embed positions, assessing how favorable their coverage has been. (That the Pentagon continued to use Rendon at all is highly suspect given the group’s disreputable history. Prior to the Iraq War, Rendon promoted million-dollar contracts to Ahmad Chalabi, who, in turn, forwarded fraudulent intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons to the Pentagon.)

 

In September, after the Associated Press distributed a photo of a dying Marine, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attempted to block publication, claiming it would mark an “unconscionable departure from the restraint most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since Sept. 11.” He was uncharacteristically correct: AP did break from common practice by showing the reality of the war. Gates’s public rebuke highlights the degree to which the U.S. government is willing to interfere with journalistic prerogatives—and how little space remains between us and the Third World nations we condemn for restricting freedom of press.

 

After eight years of lost life, money, and credibility in Afghanistan, the new administration now promotes the war in a more subdued way. President Obama and General McCrystal acknowledge steep challenges, but argue there is a “newness” to the campaign in Afghanistan. It cannot be put into historical context of any kind. The media and commentariat nod obediently.

 

The Good War

 

The armed forces of states such as Russia and Pakistan enjoy considerable clout and resources, but that often benefits only the upper tiers, which deploy foot soldiers with little planning or consideration of risk. In 1996, during Russia’s war with Chechnya, national security adviser Alexander Lebed admitted that Russian soldiers were “hungry, lice-infested and underclothed.”

 

Despite the lip service paid to U.S. troops, they face similar, often life-threatening shortfalls. Recall the haphazard, bring-your-own-armor approach to the early phase of the Iraq War. Gen. Anthony Zinni echoed some of Lebed’s concerns when he said of the preparations for the Iraq War, “I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.”

 

In September, a former Air Force staff sergeant working for a private contractor was found dead in a shower in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Adam Vernon Hermanson had served three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Uzbekistan. A military medical examiner concluded that he was killed by low-voltage electrocution. Earlier this year, an electrical expert for the Army Corps of Engineers, Jim Childs, testified that roughly 90 percent of contractor KBR’s new construction in Iraq was not properly wired. Yet KBR was paid more than $80 million in bonuses for its electrical work. To this day, it has not been held accountable for the injuries and deaths of troops who guarded a toxin-polluted facility that provided treated water. According to whistleblowers and memos, KBR knew the facility was contaminated with sodium dichromate, which is linked to cancer, long before the company informed U.S. officials. Nearly 1,200 troops were exposed to the substance, and the Army is refusing to provide most of the injured veterans with health benefits. But again, KBR received bonuses.

 

How smoothly our leaders speak of supporting the troops—only to command them carelessly and forbid them from leaving when their tours end. To fill its quotas, top brass persists in the institutional sleight of hand known as “stop loss,” forcing troops to serve prolonged and serial deployments. Many who return home scarred will struggle to get care: 37 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer mental-health issues. The Marine Corps Times reports that 915,000 unprocessed claims are waiting at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

 

Once we followed the Third World into the strategic cul de sac of relying on force to solve problems, we needed a deep supply of cannon fodder. And when the democratic will waned, mercenaries were brought in to make up the difference. In Afghanistan, they outnumber U.S. troops, with 68,197 contractors in the theater, 67 percent of the total force. In Iraq, there is one KBR worker for every three U.S. soldiers.

 

In tone, President Obama departs from the Third World approach to problem solving. He outlines a decorous AfPak policy, calling for development funding, declaring America’s “great respect for the Pakistani people,” and stating that “a campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone”—all while ratcheting up violent confrontation and employing the bluntest instruments of warfare. He has escalated drone attacks, which have caused significant civilian deaths, and has requested an increase in funding for unmanned aircraft.

 

During his campaign, Obama promised to raise military spending—as did every other major candidate. He has kept his word, even though the United States spends more than all other countries combined on defense. In the CIA’s ranking of military spending as a percentage of GDP, Third World countries dominate the first 50-plus slots, with the United States in the middle of the heap at number 28, flanked by Chad and Libya—hardly flattering company. This disproportionate devotion to military spending has had profound costs, hastening the country’s economic meltdown.

 

Bailout of Necessity

 

In the Third World, crises often beget ill-considered policies that result in economic blowback—which in turn breeds further crises. Leaders try to rush their initiatives before legislatures (where they exist) and the media (where it is allowed to operate) have a chance to air drawbacks or propose more moderate alternatives.

 

This became America’s modus operandi after the banking crisis morphed into a global economic catastrophe. The U.S. government found itself in an unenviable position: the treasury had been depleted by two wars, and the American people had already been called upon to show their patriotic conviction by shopping. So it resorted to calling for emergency measures with a huge price tag and, in Third World-style, courted considerable moral hazard.

 

Like America today, Argentina in the 1980s had not recovered economically from its war and the profligacy of the junta when crisis struck. President Carlos Menem responded by invoking 472 Decrees of Urgency and Necessity from 1989 to 1998, refining the Third-World art of crony capitalism and state-power centralization. He used privatization as a form of political patronage, doling out the country’s assets at below-market prices, with no bidding, or vetting.

 

Now the U.S. government has passed its own bipartisan policies of urgency and necessity. In a letter to congressional leaders shortly before Obama’s inauguration, Larry Summers made the appeal for the second round of TARP funds, claiming that the need for billions of dollars was “imminent and urgent.” Obama promised to improve TARP’s transparency: “Many of us have been disappointed with the absence of clarity, the failure to track how the money’s been spent.” But his Treasury Department has done the opposite. Moreover, TARP has overwhelmingly aided the big banks; homeowners have seen scant relief. The rhetoric is populist, the practice elitist.

 

It is not only the opacity with which TARP spoils have been divided that suggests crony capitalism; the banking sector itself is becoming an oligopoly, less removed from the Third World’s skewed, non-competitive structures than U.S. citizens would like to admit. TARP, after all, amounts to small change when compared to the arcane government programs benefiting the big banks—TLGP, TALF, PPIP: a stew of acronyms incomprehensible to the citizens who write checks. Banks with more than $100 billion in assets are borrowing at interest rates 0.34 percentage points lower than the rest of the industry. In 2007, that difference was only 0.08 percentage points.

 

In his book Latin America at the End of Politics, Forrest Colburn argues that economic turmoil shocked Third World citizens into accepting a strain of so-called liberalization that is heavily weighted toward monopolies and maintains chasmic inequalities in exchange for relative stability. America’s bank rescues have taken on similar dimensions.

 

As in Menem’s Argentina, the Obama administration has chosen winners and losers. And as the market-distorting impact of his programs becomes evident and public anger grows, our president has taken to the bully pulpit to showcase his talent for economic demagoguery, another well-worn tactic of Third World leaders. Obama singles out unpopular market actors for scorn, much like former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who at the end of the ’90s blamed George Soros and other “speculators” for the collapse of his country’s currency. A decade later, the American president would fault “a small group of speculators” who endangered “Chrysler’s future.”

 

Hector E. Schamis wrote of Menem’s maneuvers, in a passage that now seems prophetic of what would happen in the U.S., “by colluding with the largest segments of Argentina’s business groups, Menem cemented a minimum winning coalition that benefited from the economic reform program and provided key political support. By distributing selective incentives among potential opponents, he divided and disarticulated rivals.”

 

As in so many collapsed countries, an increasingly large portion of American wealth goes toward debt. Infrastructure sags. Only industries favored by the government thrive. The middle class shrinks as it is squeezed to fund programs that keep the wealthy comfortable and the poor from rioting. The only difference is that the U.S. has an ability to continue borrowing—for now.

 

Decline and Fall?

 

The Third Worlding of America is less cinematic but more serious than empire-in-decline analogies suggest. After all, Britain no longer wields global supremacy, but it is still firmly in the First World, its political class scrutinized by an independent, assertive media. And even after its post-World War II penury, it did not backpedal on political reforms at home. This is not to excuse the colonizer’s brutality abroad but rather to distinguish Britain’s imperial decline from America’s homeland decay.

 

The United States has transgressed her traditions in the fog of war before, only to redeem herself later. But we are now engaged in a war without borders against a self-multiplying enemy. There is no army to trounce, so no clear end to the bloodletting or bankrupting.

 

The patchouli-scented youth, who protest in the streets of D.C. with their towering papier-mâché effigies, may have been correct after all in highlighting the breadth of America’s all-encompassing problems—if not their remedies. Crisis has pushed the U.S. toward Third World policies with alarming swiftness. But the risk is not that Americans will bring out the pitchforks and join the protestors. Rather, citizens seem as disaffected and resigned as their Third World brethren, only occasionally roused from reality TV by their favorite pundit peddling the outrage du jour.

 

The far Right wallows in paranoia with its dreams of overturning an election by discovering a Kenyan birth certificate. Most on the Left seem too mesmerized by the president to hold him accountable. The media ranges from insipid to hysterical. This country may never see the reasons for—and the parallels to—its disintegration.

 

Ximena Ortiz is a former executive editor of The National Interest and bureau chief for Associated Press-Dow Jones in Santiago, Chile.

[Naxar Nugaaleed]

If for other reason then the fact that there exist no nation that can fit the shoes the world's sole super power, America will remain a super for quite some time to come.

[Nur]

Naxar bro.

 

Watch out for the BRIC countries who will combine their human capital wealth and their natural resources to not only wear the shoes of this ailing Super Power, but possibly make life on earth a bit more responsible, cleaner and cheaper.

 

Brazil is rich in natural resources, India and China are rich in cheap skilled human resources, Russia is rich in both human and natural resources.

 

The gifted students in China alone are more than all of American students, yet, when they graduate, they are willing to work for 5 dollars an hour thereby producing better products at cheaper prices. When you combine the production capacities of China ( hardware) and India ( Software) in addition to untapped natural resources of Brazil and Russia (including the Advanced Theoretical work in Russia that will find in China the feasible production environment ), and compare that side of the equation to the American side and it's 14 trillion debt owed to communist China and other sovereign funds and the decaying American industrial base and it's outsourcing of all the basic industries to China and India, its no brainer to see where the trend is heading.

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

Oil spills are threatening the whole gulf of Mexico's beaches and all of its diverse natural life, seafood business and tourist attractions, just when the region recovered from her sister Katrina's devastating attack.

 

Add this to active earthquake tremors that are threatening southern California and the Tornadoes that threaten the whole south-mid eastern states, the financial crises caused by greedy blood suckers causing bankruptcies, while hypocritical politicians continue expanding foreign wars and the ailing infrastructure ( Roads, railways bridges etc) is falling apart to result a net loss of industrial production capacity to compete with the Asian economic tigers.

 

 

Here is what the news said today:

 

"The oil slick could become the nation's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez in scope. It imperils hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.

 

"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press about the spill. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."[

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

The Downward Slope of Empire

Talking With Chalmers Johnson

 

By HARRY KREISLER

 

May 07, 2010 "Counterpunch" -- Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire. He appeared in the 2005 prizewinning documentary film Why We Fight. He lives near San Diego.

 

Kreisler: Once upon a time you called yourself a “spear-carrier for the empire.”

 

Johnson: “—for the empire,” yes, yes.

 

That’s the prologue to Blowback; I was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the CIA during the time of the Vietnam War. But what caused me to change my mind and to rethink these issues? Two things: one analytical, one concrete. The first was the demise of the Soviet Union. I expected much more from the United States in the way of a peace dividend. I believe that Russia today is not the former Soviet Union by any means. It’s a much smaller place. I would have expected that as a tradition in the United States, we would have demobilized much more radically. We would have rethought more seriously our role in the world, brought home troops in places like Okinawa. Instead, we did every thing in our power to shore up the Cold War structures in East Asia, in Latin America. The search for new enemies began. That’s the neoconservatives. I was shocked, actually, by this. Did this mean that the Cold War was a cover for something deeper, for an American imperial project that had been in the works since World War II? I began to believe that this is the case.

 

The second thing that led me to write Blowback in the late 1990s was something concrete. Okinawa prefecture, which is Japan’s southernmost prefecture, is the poorest place in Japan, the equivalent of Puerto Rico; it’s always been discriminated against by the Japanese since they seized it at the end of the nineteenth century. The governor at that time, Masahide Ota, is a former professor. He invited me to Okinawa in February of 1996 to give a speech to his associates in light of what had happened on September 4, 1995, when two marines and a sailor from Camp Hansen in cen-tral Okinawa abducted, beat, and raped a twelve-year-old girl. It led to the biggest single demonstration against the United States since the Security Treaty was signed. I had not been in Okinawa before. Back during the Korean War, when I was in the navy, I took the ship in to what was then called Buckner Bay, now Nakagusuku Bay, and dropped anchor. Other officers on board went ashore. I took a look at the place through the glasses, and I thought, “This is not for me.” But we were anchored in the most beautiful lagoon, so I went swimming around the ship. So I had been in Okinawan waters, but I’d never touched ground before.

 

I have to say I was shocked to see the impact of thirty-eight American bases located on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, with 1.3 million people living cheek-by-jowl with warplanes . . . the Third Marine Division is based there; the only marine division we have outside the country. And I began to investigate the issues.

 

The reaction to the rape of 1995 from, for example, General Richard Meyers, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—he was then head of U.S. forces in Japan—and all he said was that these were just three bad apples, a tragic incident, unbelievably exceptional. After research, you discover that the rate of sexually violent crimes committed by our troops in Okinawa leading to court-martial is two per month! This was not an exceptional incident, expect for the fact that the child was so young and, differing from many Okinawan women who would not come forward after being raped, she was not fully socialized and she wanted to get even. This led to the creation of a quite powerful organization that I greatly admire called Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence.

 

I began to research Okinawa, and my first impulse—again, as a defensive American imperialist—was that Okinawa was exceptional: it’s off the beaten track, the press never goes there, the military is comfortable. I discovered over time, looking at these kinds of bases and other places around the world, that there’s nothing exceptional about it. It’s typical. Maybe the concentration is a little greater than it is elsewhere, but the record of environmental damage, sexual crimes, bar brawls, drunken driving, one thing after another, these all occur in the 725 bases (the Department of Defense–acknowledged number; the real number is actually considerably larger than that) that we have in other people’s countries. That led me to write Blowback, first as a warning.

 

But it also led you to publish this book Okinawa: Cold War Island, edited by you, which looks at the various aspects of this. And what you’re saying is, it’s not only the social cost; it has impinged on the people of Okinawa’s right to have some kind of democratic existence.

 

Essentially, Okinawa is used as a dumping ground by the Japanese. They want the security treaty, but they don’t want American troops anywhere near mainland Japanese. So they put them down, as I say, in the equivalent of Puerto Rico, and the conditions fester. The governor of Okinawa today, a very considerably con servative man, Mr. Inamine, is still, nonetheless, always saying, “We’re living on the side of a volcano. You can hear the magma down there. It may blow. And when it does, it’ll have the same effect on your empire that the breaching of the Berlin Wall had on the Soviet empire.”

 

In one of your books you say that as a consultant or an adviser to the CIA, you were not impressed with the reports and analysis that you were viewing. So we were not in a position to understand what was going on, just as a matter of the information we were getting.

 

This is what blowback means. “Blowback” is a CIA term that means retaliation, or payback. It was first used in the after-action report on our first clandestine overthrow of a foreign government, the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, when, for the sake of the British Petroleum Company, we claimed he was a Communist when he just didn’t want the British to keep stealing Iranian resources. In the report, which was finally declassifi ed in 2000, the CIA says, “We should expect some blowback from what we have done here.” This was the first model clandestine operation.

 

By blowback we do not mean just the unintended conse-quences of events. We mean unintended consequences of events that were kept secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation comes, the public has no way to put it into context. Just as after 9/11, you have the president saying, “Why do they hate us?” The people on the receiving end know full well that they hate us because of what was done to them. It’s the American public that is in the dark on that subject.

 

I conceived of Blowback—written in 1999, published in 2000—as a warning to the American public. It was: you should expect retaliation from the people on the receiving end of now innumerable clandestine activities, including the biggest one of all, the recruiting, arming, and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s who are the main recruiting group for Al Qaeda today.

 

The warning was not heeded. The book, when it was first published, was more or less ignored in this country. It was very nicely received in Germany, and in Japan, and in Italy, in places like that. But then after 9/11, when all of a sudden, inattentive Americans were mobilized to seek, at least on an emergency basis, some understanding of what they were into, it became a best-seller.

 

You’re raising a very important point, which is that our policies often lack an understanding of our own actions. But also—

 

Not just lack of understanding. They’ve been kept secret. That’s why the subtitle of The Sorrows of Empire is “Militarism, Secrecy”—I want to stress secrecy and say a word or two about that in a moment—“and the End of the Republic.”

 

Two days after 9/11, when the president addressed Congress and asked rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?” my response was: “The people immediately around you are the ones who could tell you with precision why. That is, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage”—these are the people who ran the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

 

“They could explain to you, in detail, why.” Once the Soviet Union had been expelled in 1989 from Afghanistan and we simply walked away from it, the people we had recruited, trained, and equipped with things like Stinger missiles—the first time the Stinger was ever used against a Soviet gunship was in Afghanistan. Once we had achieved our purposes, we just walked away, and these highly armed young men felt, “We’ve been used. We were cannon fodder in a little exercise in the Cold War, in a bipolar competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Then we compounded that with further mistakes like placing infidel troops (our troops) in Saudi Arabia after 1991, which was insulting to any number of Saudi Arabians, who believe that they are responsible for the most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden is so typical of the kinds of figures in our history, like Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein, who were close allies of ours at one time. We know Saddam at one time had weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts!

 

Osama bin Laden comes from a wealthy family of a construction empire in Saudi Arabia. He’s the sort of person that you would more likely expect to see on the ski slopes of Gstaad with a Swiss girl on his arm, or as a houseguest in Kennebunkport with the first President Bush and the notorious “petroleum complex” of America. But he was insulted. He had been in Afghanistan. The base where he trained mujahideen, at Khost, the CIA built for him. It was one of the few times we knew where to hit. Because we built it, we did know where they were. He then was disgusted with us and certainly gave us fair warning in the attack in 1993 on the World Trade Center.

 

Talk a little about what militarism is, and what imperialism is.

 

What I want to introduce here is what I call the “base world.” According to the “Base Structure Report”, an annual report of the Department of Defense, in the year 2002 we had 725 bases in other people’s countries. Actually, that number understates in that it does not include any of the espionage bases of the National Security Agency, such as RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.

 

So these are bases where we have listening devices?

 

These are huge bases. Menwith Hill downloads every single e-mail, telephone call, and fax between Europe and the United States every day and puts them into massive computers where dictionaries then read them out. There are hundreds of these. The official Base Structure Report also doesn’t include any of the main bases in England disguised as Royal Air Force bases even though there are no Britons on them. It doesn’t include any of the bases in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, any of the bases in Afghanistan, the four bases that are, as we talk, being built in Iraq. They put down one major marine base for Okinawa—there are ten—and things like that. So there is a lot of misleading information in it, but it’s enough to say 700 looks like a pretty good number, whereas it’s probably around 1,000.

 

The base world is secret. Americans don’t know anything about it. The Congress doesn’t do oversight on it. You must remember, 40 percent of the defense budget is black. No congressman can see it. All of the intelligence budgets are black.

 

No public discussion.

 

In violation of the first article of the Constitution that says, “The American public shall be given, annually, a report on how their tax money was spent.” That has not been true in the United States since the Manhattan Project of World War II, even though it is the clause that gives Congress the power of the purse, the power to supervise.

 

The base world is complex. It has its own airline. It has 234 golf courses around the world. It has something like seventy Lear Jet luxury airplanes to fly generals and admirals to the golf courses, to the armed forces ski resort at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Inside the bases, the military does every thing in its power to make them look like Little America.

 

There are large numbers of women in the armed forces to-day, [yet] you can’t get an abortion at a military hospital abroad. Sexual assaults are not at all uncommon in the armed forces. If you were a young woman in the armed forces today and you were based in Iraq, and you woke up one morning and found yourself pregnant, you have no choice but to go on the open market in Baghdad looking for an abortion, which is not a very happy thought.

 

Militarism is not defense of the country. By milita rism, I mean corporate interest in a military way of life. It derives above all from the fact that service in the armed forces is, today, not an obligation of citizenship. It is a career choice. It has been since 1973. I thought it was wonderful when PFC Jessica Lynch, who was wounded at Nasiriyah, was asked by the press, “Why did you join the Army?” She said, “I come from Palestine, West Virginia; I couldn’t get a job at Wal-Mart.” She said, “I joined the Army to get out of Palestine, West Virginia”—a perfectly logical answer on her part. And it’s true of a great many people in the ranks to-day. They do not expect to be shot at. That’s one of the points you should understand; it’s a career choice, like a kid deciding to work his way up to Berkeley by going through a community col-lege, and a state college, and then transferring in at the last minute or something like that.

 

Standing behind it is the military-industrial complex. We must, once again, bear in mind the powerful warnings of probably the two most prominent generals in our history. George Washington, in his farewell address, warns about the threat of standing armies to liberty, and particularly republican liberty. He was not an isolationist; he was talking about what moves power toward the imperial presidency, toward the state. It requires more taxes. Everything else which he said has come true. The other, perhaps more famous one was Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, where he invented the phrase “military-industrial complex.” We now know that he intended to say “military-industrial-congressional complex,” but he was advised not to go that far.

 

What interests me here is that we’re talking about something that looks very much like the end of the Roman Republic—which was, in many ways, a model for our own republic—and its conversion into a military dictatorship called the Roman Empire as the troops began to take over. The kind of figure that the Roman Republic began to look for was a military populist; of course, the most obvious example was Julius Caesar. But after Caesar’s assassination in 44B.C., the young Octavian becomes the “god” Augustus Caesar.

 

I’m not trying to be a sensationalist, but I actually do worry about the future of the United States; whether, in fact, we are tending in the same path as the former Soviet Union, with domestic, ideological rigidity in our economic institutions, im perial overstretch—that’s what we’re talking about here—the belief that we have to be every where at all times. We have always been a richer place than Russia was, so it will take longer. But we’re overextended. We can’t afford it.

 

One of my four “sorrows of empire” at the end of the book is bankruptcy. The military is not productive. They do provide certain kinds of jobs, as you discover in the United States whenever you try and close a military base—no matter how con servative or liberal your congressional representatives are, they will go mad to try and keep it open, keep it functioning. And the military-industrial complex is very clever in making sure that the building of a B-2 bomber is spread around the country; it is not all located at Northrop in El Segundo, California.

 

I have grave difficulty believing that that any president can bring under control the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, the military-industrial complex. The Department of Defense is not, today, a department of defense. It’s an alternative seat of government on the south bank of the Potomac River. And, typical of militarism, it’s expanding into many, many other areas in our life that we have, in our traditional political philosophy, reserved for civilians. [For example,] domestic policing: they’re slowly expanding into that.

 

Probably the most severe competition in our government today is between the Special Forces in the DOD and the CIA over who runs clandestine operations.

 

What you’re really saying is that, lo and behold, we’ve created an empire of bases, a different kind of empire, and that it’s basically changing who we are and the way our government operates.

 

The right phrase is exactly what you said: “lo and behold.” It reminds you of the Roman Republic, which existed in its final form with very considerable rights for Roman citizens, much like ours, for about two centuries. James Madison and others, in writing the defense of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, signed their name “Publius.” Well, who is Publius? He was the first Roman consul. That is where the whole world of term limits, of separation of powers, things like that, [began].

 

Yet by the end of the first century B.C., Rome had seemingly “inadvertently” acquired an empire that surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea. They then discovered that the inescapable accompaniment, the Siamese twin of imperialism, is militarism. You start needing standing armies. You start having men who are demobilized after having spent their entire lives in the military. It’s expensive to pay them. You have to provide them, in the Roman Empire, with farms or things of this sort. They become irritated with the state. And then along comes a military populist, a figure who says, “I understand your problems. I will represent your interests against the Roman Senate. The only requirement is that I become dictator for life.” Certainly, Julius Caesar is the model for this . . . Napoleon Bonaparte, Juan Perón, this is the type of figure.

 

Indeed, one wonders whether we have already crossed our Rubicon, whether we can go back. I don’t know.

 

In your indictment of what we are becoming, or maybe have become, you go through a list. We can’t do all of it; we don’t have enough time. But, essentially, civilians who think in military ways now making decisions, the Pentagon expropriating the functions of the State Department, a policy being perceived as military policy as opposed to all of the dimensions of—

 

People around the world who meet Americans meet soldiers. That’s how we represent ourselves abroad, just as the Roman Empire represented itself abroad as the Legionaires. People have to conclude, even if they don’t come into military or armed conflict with us, that this is the way the Americans think. This is the way they represent themselves today. It’s not foreign aid any longer. It’s not our diplomats. It’s not the Fulbright program. It’s the military. It’s uniformed eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old young men and some young women.

 

As a student of Asian political economy, you wrote the classic on MITI. In the final analysis, your judgment is that we will not only suffer political but also economic bankruptcy.

 

[/b]So, what do I suggest probably will happen? [/b]

 

I think we will stagger along under a façade of constitutional government, as we are now, until we’re overcome by bankruptcy. We are not paying our way. We’re financing it off of huge loans coming daily from our two leading creditors, Japan and China.

 

It’s a rigged system that reminds you of Herb Stein, [who], when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in a Republican administration, rather famously said, “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” That’s what we’re talking about today. We’re massively indebted, we’re not manufacturing as much as we used to, we maintain our lifestyle off huge capital imports from countries that don’t mind taking a short, small beating on the exchange rates so long as they can continue to develop their own economies and supply Americans: above all, China within twenty to twenty-five years will be both the world’s largest social system and the world’s most productive social system, barring truly unforeseen developments.

 

Bankruptcy would not mean the literal end of the United States, any more than it did for Germany in 1923, or China in 1948, or Argentina just a few years ago, in 2001 and 2002. But it would certainly mean a catastrophic recession, the collapse of our stock exchange, the end of our level of living, and a vast series of new attitudes that would now be appropriate to a much poorer country. Marshall Auerbach is a financial analyst whom I admire who refers to the United States as a “Blanche Dubois economy.” Blanche Dubois, of course, was the leading character in Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, and she said, “I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” We’re also increasingly dependent on the kindness of strangers, and there are not many of them left who care, any more than there were for Blanche. I suspect if the United States did start to go down, it would not elicit any more tears than the collapse of the Soviet Union did.

 

Do you see a configuration of external power, Japan, China, the EU, that will be a balancer that might not just confront us but might help guide us to changes that would be good for us and them?

 

Once you go down the path of empire, you inevitably start a process of overstretch, of tendencies toward bankruptcy, and, in the rest of the world, a tendency toward the uniting of people who are opposed to your im perialism simply on grounds that it’s yours, but maybe also on the grounds that you’re incompetent at it. There was a time when the rest of the world did trust the United States a good deal as a result of the Marshall Plan, foreign aid, things of this sort. They probably trusted it more than they should have. Today that is almost entirely dissipated At some point, we must either reduce our empire of bases from 737 to maybe 37—although I’d just as soon get rid of all of them. If we don’t start doing that, then we will go the way of the former Soviet Union.

 

Harry Kreisler’s interview with Chalmers Johnson is taken from his new book Political Awakenings, just published by the New Press, printed here by permission of the publisher.

 

Copyright 2010 Harry Kreisler.