America’s Moronic Iraqi Policy
According to all accounts, the United States faces its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with $2 trillion in near-term financing needs for bailouts and economic stimulus. This is an enormous sum for any country, especially one that is so heavily indebted that it is close to bankruptcy. If the money can't be borrowed abroad, it will have to be printed—a policy that carries the implication of hyper-inflation.
In normal life, a borrower who must appeal to creditors makes every effort to bring order to his financial affairs. But not the Bush regime.
The out-of-pocket costs of Bush's Iraq war are about $600 billion at the present moment, a figure that increases by millions of dollars every hour.
In addition, there are the much larger future costs that have already been incurred, such as long-term care for the wounded and disabled U.S. soldiers, the replacement costs of the used-up equipment, interest payments on the war debt, and the lost economic use of the resources and manpower squandered in war. Experts estimate that the already incurred out-of-pocket and future costs of Bush's Iraq war to be $3 trillion and rising.
Even these costs might be small if an article by Richard LaMountain in the November 2008 Middle American News is accurate. According to LaMountain, U.S. refugee programs for Iraqis displaced by the U.S. invasion and occupation could result in a large and growing Muslim U.S. population. These would be people whose lives were adversely impacted by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
If the United States maintains its pro-Israeli stance against Arabs and Muslims generally, the implications of a growing Muslim population and a government obsessed with its "war on terror" are frightening for American civil liberty. In order to contain the potential terror that it will have imported, Washington would impose a total police state. We will have our own Saddam Hussein.
To avoid the immigration that would be problematic for U.S. civil liberties, the war must end. The war must also end in order that bankrupt Washington can borrow abroad the money it needs to bail out the U.S. economy.
The budget authority for the annual out-of-pocket costs of the war have been rising by $150 billion per year, an addition to the budget deficit that must be financed by borrowing abroad. A sane person might think that a government such as the United States, in need of foreign loans to save its economy, would jump at the change to get its troops out of Iraq, where they are not wanted.
Instead, the Bush regime has been struggling all year with the Iraq government in order to secure an agreement that lets the U.S. government continue to hemorrhage hundreds of billions of dollars by keeping American troops in Iraq.
The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the United States still has troops in Korea.
Germany was defeated in 1945, and the United States still has troops in Germany.
A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start.
But the U.S. government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.
It is not too late for the United States to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.
The world does not want to bring us down in this way. Our creditors would like to preserve as much as possible the values of their trillions in U.S. dollar assets. This is easier done if the dollar remains the reserve currency. Therefore, the U.S. government has an opportunity to go to its creditors with a plan.
This is what the plan must be: A declaration that repudiates the neoconservative goal to achieve U.S. hegemony over the world; a budget that reduces annual U.S. borrowing needs by several hundreds of billions by ending the Afghan and Iraq wars, by closing overseas military bases, and by cutting military spending; a new corporate tax system that brings back American jobs, manufacturing capability and export potential by taxing U.S. corporations' worldwide profits according to the value added in the United States.
Such a plan would demonstrate that the United States respects the sovereignty and aspirations of other countries and is willing to cooperate peacefully with others as an occupant of what the Russian president has termed "our common house." Such a plan would demonstrate that the U.S. government has come to the realization that there is a limit to its borrowing capacity and the loans that it can service and is prepared to put first things first. Such a plan would show that the United States can curtail its unsustainable dependency on imports without erecting a wall of tariffs.
If the United States had the leadership to approach its creditors with such a plan, a sigh of relief would emit from the rest of the world. Many of the economic hardships that Americans currently face could be avoided, and the prospect of a hyper-inflationary depression would recede.
Such a favorable outcome requires that the government in Washington give up the delusion that Americans are an "indispensable people" who have a monopoly on virtue that gives them claim to hegemony over the world.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Entries(RSS)
KMARX,
I never said I was pro-capitalism. I am a distributist, and I reject a "standard of living" that is based on purely material standards.
No, I never considered your name was Kathryn. Would you like to go by that name?
Apparently the Church didn't burn enough heretics. But your argument concerned the Church's suppossed intolerance of science. In all seriousness, I recommend Stanley Jaki's The Road of Science and the Ways to God. Even if you don't read it, you must ask this question: why did most of the great achievements in science occur in Western Europe?
I didn't say Marx would have approved of communism's manifestation in Russia and China. But detaching the results from the source is a conveniant excuse for not dealing truthfully with the destructive nature of Marx's ideas.
Did the Russian people overthrow the Tsar? Was it a mass movement by the peasants? How can you whitewash the millions of peasants and Christians who were banished to Siberia or excecuted? Also, the seminaries, monastaries, and clergy were systematically destroyed. The Russian people were not better off, even the ones who weren't murdered in the attempt to obliterate all vestiges of the peasantry, the Orthodox Church, and Old Russia.
KMarx @ 49:
Two quick notes and one question:
(1) The remarks about Bruno, heliocentrism, etc. were all absurd: the historical record is pretty clear on this. The general matter of heretic-burning has nothing to do with your specific claims, to which claims I think Josh Cooney was responding.
(2) The 'food on the table' line is a little peculiar in light of Stalin's Holodomor and Mao's Great Leap Forward. I've seen Leninist/Trotskyite rebuttals to the relevance of both of these counter-arguments, but I wonder where you stand on both matters. (Disclosure: my maternal grandparents are Ukrainian, and fled their country during the Nazi invasion; I am consequently unsympathetic to Tsarist/Soviet dichotomies, as my ancestors had little joy from either oppressive foreign power.)
And the question: What do you make of Trotsky? I happily grant that Marx was a great romantic genius (if deeply mistaken), and that dialectical materialism demands at least *seriousness* (though this doesn't make it in at all *correct*), but one of the problems Lenin and Trotsky faced, as I recall, was that Marx/Engels' philosophical writings didn't exactly provide a step-by-step manual for revolution. I've heard modern (dialectical) Marxists claim that Trotsky successfully made the argumentative move from Marxist theory to Bolshevik practice where Lenin (and later Stalin) totally failed. But I wonder what you have to say on this (since this is one of the standard arguments offered to deflect objections to communism that appeal to the Soviet Union's horrific and spectacular failure).
#32
Well said.
JE
You said:
“The remarks about Bruno, heliocentrism, etc. were all absurd: the historical record is pretty clear on this. The general matter of heretic-burning has nothing to do with your specific claims, to which claims I think Josh Cooney was responding.”
Please give me specifics. For example, you maintain that what I said about Giordano Bruno and Heliocentrism are absurd. Point out the absurdities! Are you saying Bruno was not tried and convicted for heresy? Perhaps his promulgations of the theory had nothing to do with his being condemned? The record is clear on this. Just investigate and you will see that one of his “heresies” was his teaching of Heliocentrism.
I answered the following post of J Meng:
38 J Meng
“Now, the Catholic Church with the authority given to it by Her Founder, Jesus Christ, declares that human life begins at the instant of conception; that is, God creates a new soul and unites it with the new body brought into being by his parents. The soul is as necessary to the body as the body is to the soul. Our nature is the union of body and soul.”
My intention with the following post was to demonstrate that the church is fallible. In his post J Meng is saying that the church declared that life began at conception. As far as he was concerned there could be no more dialogue on the matter because the church was the final word. It’s as if there are no other opinion on the matter.
42 KMax
“The Catholic Church with the authority given to it by Her Founder, Jesus Christ, decided that Earth was the center of solar system. It taught the ill-founded belief for several centuries and killed those non-repentants found guilty of preaching the Heliocentric Theory. Case in point, the “heretic” Giordano Bruno. Perhaps you agree with the church’s theories and its practices in this matter???
The Catholic Church with the authority given to it by Her Founder, Jesus Christ, decided that so called heretics like Galileo, should be killed by the church if they did not repent??? Perhaps you agree that heretics should be killed if they do not repent???
The Catholic Church with the authority given to it by Her Founder, Jesus Christ, decided to change its previous stance on Capital Punishment. In the past it supported it, now it stands resolutely against it. Where do you stand on this issue???
The Catholic Church with the authority given to it by Her Founder, Jesus Christ, is a fallible institution just like any other hence we should keep an open mind???”
JE said:
“The ‘food on the table’ line is a little peculiar in light of Stalin’s Holodomor and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. I’ve seen Leninist/Trotskyite rebuttals to the relevance of both of these counter-arguments, but I wonder where you stand on both matters.”
From what I’ve read about the Holodomor the verdict is still out as to whether it was due to natural causes or intention on the part of a paranoid Stalin or perhaps a combination of both or still yet other factors. The USSR is no stranger to crop failures. During the height of the Cold War under the Kennedy Administration the US agreed to sell the USSR grain as the USSR was short on its grain crops for years. There was a lot of dissension at the time by the American public but the government saw an opportunity to make money.
JE said:
“And the question: What do you make of Trotsky? I happily grant that Marx was a great romantic genius (if deeply mistaken), and that dialectical materialism demands at least *seriousness* (though this doesn’t make it in at all *correct*), but one of the problems Lenin and Trotsky faced, as I recall, was that Marx/Engels’ philosophical writings didn’t exactly provide a step-by-step manual for revolution. I’ve heard modern (dialectical) Marxists claim that Trotsky successfully made the argumentative move from Marxist theory to Bolshevik practice where Lenin (and later Stalin) totally failed. But I wonder what you have to say on this (since this is one of the standard arguments offered to deflect objections to communism that appeal to the Soviet Union’s horrific and spectacular failure).”
The Marx/Engels manifesto was not intended as a ‘How and Why’ manual. Marx believed that revolution would only speed the transition to Communism but Communism was inevitable as a part of the laws of history (a mystical, magical force akin to the ‘invisible hand of the market’).
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that some Marxists ‘claim’ that Trotsky somehow put Marxist theory into Bolshevik practice. According to Marx the laws of history are unalterable and will lead to Communism irrespective of any outside intervention. My point being that Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and that whole crew needed a philosophical mantra behind which to hide their desire for power. Do not associate Marx the Humanist with any of these others.
Precisely what does any of this have to do with America's Moronic Iraqi Policy?
51 Josh Cooney
Josh said:
“I never said I was pro-capitalism. I am a distributist, and I reject a “standard of living” that is based on purely material standards.”
I like the idea of what you call a Distributist if that it means that the society tries to set the conditions where anyone can get a real chance in life.
Josh said:
“No, I never considered your name was Kathryn. Would you like to go by that name?”
No just call me KMarx.
Josh said:
“Apparently the Church didn’t burn enough heretics. But your argument concerned the Church’s suppossed intolerance of science. In all seriousness, I recommend Stanley Jaki’s The Road of Science and the Ways to God. Even if you don’t read it, you must ask this question: why did most of the great achievements in science occur in Western Europe?”
With regard to science I was not referring to the contemporary church. I was referring to a time when the church was indeed intolerant on many issues of science which challenged its beliefs. It wasn’t long ago that the Theory of Evolution was not in the church’s vocabulary. I have great respect for Pope John II as he acknowledged that evolution can be the mechanism through which God created life. He said that if someday we contact life in other worlds it would demonstrate the breath of God’s kingdom. For these admissions and many other matters I think he will go down as a great pope.
Josh said:
“I didn’t say Marx would have approved of communism’s manifestation in Russia and China. But detaching the results from the source is a conveniant excuse for not dealing truthfully with the destructive nature of Marx’s ideas.”
Marx has been much maligned throughout the years, especially by Capitalists who never read anything written by him. I suggest you read the following books if you can find them written by one of his foremost interpreters: Eric Fromm. Fromm was a Psychoanalyst by training who applied the techniques of psychoanalysis to societies where in prior times these techniques were applied to individuals. He is not difficult to read and if you keep an open mind I believe you will see another side, a most enlightening one, regarding Marx and what he was truly about. The books are: Beyond the Chains of Illusion and Marx’s Concept of Man. I would suggest you read the latter book first.
Josh said:
“Did the Russian people overthrow the Tsar? Was it a mass movement by the peasants? How can you whitewash the millions of peasants and Christians who were banished to Siberia or excecuted? Also, the seminaries, monastaries, and clergy were systematically destroyed. The Russian people were not better off, even the ones who weren’t murdered in the attempt to obliterate all vestiges of the peasantry, the Orthodox Church, and Old Russia.”
From what I remember it was in Petrograd where there were a host of different sorts, average people, local reserve units, workers on strike and so on who rioted. The problems in Russia were enormous including shortages of food and fuel. During this time two groups were formed from the existing government. From here on out there the discontent spread. In time many groups tried to seize like the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, White Russians and so on. In all this the Tsar had to step down. There were major economic problems in Tsarist Russia. Eventually the Communist group, the Bolsheviks, won out. Look on the Internet and you can find a multitude of reading material.
In answer to another of your questions, I don’t remember whitewashing anything about those who were killed under the regime. Many of those killed were from political groups that were in conflict with one another.
I must disagree regarding whether the Russian people were better off. In most revolutions there are always some of the worst forms of persecution. Look at the French revolution for example. It has been said that revolutions do not take place in a velvet box. Intense feelings are released that wreck havoc. When I said that the people were better off after the revolution I was referring to the time after things settled down. It took the French some time for things to settle as during that time there was phase called the Reign of Terror followed the a phase called the Thermidor. A classic book titled, ‘Anatomy of a Revolution’ by the historian Crane Brinton compares the English, French, American, and Russian revolutions in terms of their unique aspects and especially their common threads.
The USSR did not become a major power until after WW II. In order to bring this about the public as a whole had to be better educated, feed and had things like healthcare provided. America realized that after WW II it had to increase funds for education and provided a GI Bill for returning veterans. This was a first. The reason was simple – the major powers saw the incredible technologies resulting from the war. They knew their people would need better educational opportunity among other things to compete.
Etienne Gervaise is right -- we've run foul of our thread's proper subject-matter. So very briefly to KMarx, in reply to #52:
Re. Bruno and heliocentrism: Since you and I are clearly citing different authorities, we can't possibly make any headway without a fully critical, independent, and dialectically conducted investigation. I doubt either of us has the time for this (at least, I'm afraid I don't), though 'just investigate' isn't very convincing; and anyway others on this site are surely better able to perform such an investigation than I. But do be aware that the general attack on ecclesiastical authority (which Bruno and heliocentrism, or for that matter any heretic-burning case as such, don't remotely touch) isn't going to make much headway here.
More or less the same goes for the Holodomor, re. the difficulty of historical inquiry, and the relation of Marx to Bolshevism, re. the philosophical/causal relation. I suspect the locus of our deepest disagreement lies in evidently contradictory evaluations of 'Marx the Humanist' -- but (assuming we've both read Marx fairly) these evaluations probably differ in respect of humanism more than in respect of Marx himself. I will observe, in passing, that the rhetorical effectiveness of even the most disingenuous masking of libido dominandi behind philosophy's impressive facade surely depends on the particular philosophy's at least *apparent* suitability to the disguised power-grab; and this appearance alone would warrant curiosity, at a minimum, toward the Marx->Bolshevik relation.
@53JE
And who orchestrated and planned the Ukrainian famine?
The Ukrainian government released a list of those involved yet it has not got any media attention why despite the recent media blitz on the issue?
Maybe because the list had majority of Lithuanians and Ukrainian Jews and only 2 ethnic Russians on it.
When Jewish organisations complained the list was retracted for “review”.
@57KMarx
The problems in Russia before the Bolshevik invasion were due to an international campaign against the Czar.
Loans were being withheld, underground Marxist groups were being setup organised and financed from abroad and financing the Japanese Navy to attack Russia all to undermine the Czar and bring about revolution.
International conferences and Marxist groups were held in Europe and the US London, New York, Czech Rep, etc.
The revolution itself was financed by New York Banker Jacob Schiff who also financed the Japanese war effort and 75% of all commissars during the revolution were Jewish including here in Britain with our Foreign minister Mllband whose granddaddy with a Bolshevik commissar.
http://www.the7thfire.com/new_world_order/zionism/jews_and_bolshevism.htm
Communism was ethnic warfare against Russia.
Marx formulated a strategy so his brethren could have total control of Russia and destruction of Russian culture which would explain the destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow yet not one synagogue was touched.
Which includes a central bank and progressive tax system (which we have in the UK and US). Interesting know that Russia has a flat rate tax system of 13%.
What was the first law the new government passed?
Anti-Semitism is punishable by death.
The same thing is going on in Russia today different group in Russia any way.
They have spent millions trying to over through Putin and weaken his government because he has is a bulwark against Brezinski’s strategy of the break-up of Russia into 3 through a series of proxy wars much like they did in the former Yugoslavia with Islamic militants we have been training in camps in Afghanistan, Turkey even military bases in the US which include chemical and biological weapons.
Interesting a few years ago with this rendition controversy that the Neocon’s were running secret prisons used by Communist in the former USSR.
Same people different name.
George, @58: My research into the Ukrainian "famine" confirms your points. Have you read Malcolm Muggeridge's journal of his tour through Ukraine in the 1930s during the "famine"? It is abysmal reading, because of the horror he records.
@60J. Meng
I have not read Malcolm Muggeridge’s journal.
Is there a website of his work or a PDF file on the internet?
I've read some background on the Russian revolution and its true makeup with extracts by famous correspondents at the time.
Like William Dudley Pelley
“…By the end of the First World War, Pelley’s prestige was such that his publisher commissioned him as a foreign correspondent on assignment in Eastern Europe. With a generous expense account and the diplomatic rank of “consular courier” conferred upon him by the United States government, he shipped out for Russia in early 1918.
http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/pelley.html
Douglas Reed and London Times correspondent Robert Wilton.
Robert Wilton book is interesting Last Days of the Romanovs, as it lists by ethnicity the post revolutionary communist state.
“pp. 184-185 -- According to the data furnished by the Soviet press, out of 556 important functionaries of the Bolshevik State. . . there were in 1918-1919, 17 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 11 Armenians, 35 Letts, 15 Germans, 1 Hungarian, 10 Georgians, 3 Poles, 3 Finns, 1 Karaim, 457 Jews
Even Jewish journals and historians like the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia have referenced the Jewish role in Communism.