Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

How US Companies Help Set Up Repressive Regimes

Here is a bit from a post by Cory Doctorow on the BoingBoing blog:

Two thirds of the way through the talk, they broaden the context to talk about the role of American companies in the war waged against privacy and free speech -- SmartFilter (now an Intel subsidiary, and a company that has a long history of censoring Boing Boing) is providing support for Iran's censorship efforts, for example. They talked about how Blue Coat and Cisco produce tools that aren't just used to censor, but to spy (all censorware also acts as surveillance technology) and how the spying directly leads to murder and rape and torture.

Then, they talked about the relationship between corporate networks and human rights abuses. Iran, China, and Syria, they say, lack the resources to run their own censorship and surveillance R&D projects, and on their own, they don't present enough of a market to prompt Cisco to spend millions to develop such a thing. But when a big company like Boeing decides to pay Cisco millions and millions of dollars to develop censorware to help it spy on its employees, the world's repressive governments get their R&D subsidized, and Cisco gets a product it can sell to them.

They concluded by talking about how Western governments' insistence on "lawful interception" back-doors in network equipment means that all the off-the-shelf network gear is readymade for spying, so, again, the Syrian secret police and the Iranian telcoms spies don't need to order custom technology that lets them spy on their people, because an American law, CALEA, made it mandatory that this technology be included in all the gear sold in the USA.

Here is the video of the talk which Doctorow attended given by Tor technologists:



It is depressing that US politicians pass laws that set up the basis for the spyware and then US corporations do the multi-million dollar R&D to develop the spyware that is then deployed by repressive regimes worldwide (plus the US government and big US corporations). We live in a "big brother" world. Orwell thought he was writing a cautionary tale with his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he was documenting the hellish future we now all live in.

"Honest" Graft in the US Congress

Here is a video from CBS News that reviews the corruption and graft among pretty well everybody in Congress. If you can put up with all the intrusive commercials by CBS, watch this:



This video includes all kind of "assurances" by the politicians that they "never traded on any non-public information" while all the details in this financial affairs makes it very clear that they have an extraordinary ability to make financial transations just after their public role gives them access to non-public information. What an odd coincidence. And they all put their hands over their hearts and assure the public that they are as honest as the day is long. And the fact that they make millions while in office off these "lucky" trades is simply beyond credibility. They are corrupt. Thoroughly corrupt.

The CBS report is based on this book by Peter Schweizer:

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The Ultimate IP Sleaze from Obama

The "people's" president is supposed to be on the side of the people. Everybody understands that Republican presidents cater to the 1% and those wingnuts who aspire to be the 1%. But for everybody else there is only one choice: the Democratic president.

Obama is pushing his "jobs" agenda, but with great irony, he wants creative graphic designers to labour for free to create him a poster. No job for them. Just the glory of knowing that "they did it for a good cause". Oh yeah...

Here is a bit from a post in Rolling Stone magazine:

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you'd think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on "artists across the country" to create a poster ... for free.

And here's the kicker. It's a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster "illustrating why we support President Obama's plan to create jobs now, and why we'll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years."

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president ("approximate retail value $195").

And if you don't win? Well, that's too bad. You've not only lost the contest, you've also surrendered your intellectual property. "All submissions will become the property of Obama for America," according to the fine print.

Just like the Obama presidency knows that his job #1 is to bailout banks and make sure billionaire bankers get their humungous bonuses, the Obama presidency knows that intellectual property rights (IP) goes to the sleazeball who can squeeze it out of the dumb proletariat who will sign up for work for free and give up all rights to their ideas. Wow. Isn't capitalism great, or what? Obama is a typical 1% type, you work, he gets the money, the glory, the top job, the babes, the media, the big retirement package. You get to hang on to your warm-and-fuzzy feeling that you "helped". That and $5 will help you buy a hamburger to split with your wife and 3 kids.

Obama wants to create jobs... he wants to create 4 more years for No. 1. For the 99%? This is just a slogan. He is going through the motions, crafting this as a "message with spin and a careful political game of partisanship". Whether you get a job or not? He could care less. That's your problem, not his. He is the president for the 1%.

What the Future Looks Like

Creepy greedy corporations are winning the war. They have bought all the politicians and what you get is something like the following:

Italy's insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia

By Cory Doctorow at 4:21 am Wednesday, Oct 5

Prompted by Italy's punitive (batshit) wiretapping law proposal, Wikipedia has removed its Italian version and now directs anyone trying to find Italian Wikipedia to a page explaining that Italy's Internet law will make it impossible to have an Italian Wikipedia:

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources...

The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is, provided by the named paragraph 29, without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based and this would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting - in fact - an end to its existence as we have known until today.

My understanding is that Bill Gates has recently bought up all the rights to oxygen and is planning to implement a per-breath access fee. If you want to breathe, you will have to pay because he owns "the rights". Oh, and Apple is tired of waiting for people's eyeballs to wander over their various iEverything devices, so they have bought the copyright to all the world's languages. If you don't want to be illiterate, you will need to license from Apple the right to read. Any peek at a letter or word will cost you!

What a Bubble Looks Like

This picture screams "bubble!" to me...

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I lived through the late 1970s bubble. I remember how people I knew started chatting incessantly about gold and silver prices. I even knew people who foolishly bought the stuff convinced that it would go up forever. They lost a lot of money.

The problem with speculation and mania is that it is the ones who can least afford it who lose the most (proportionately speaking). The smart money is in early and out early (except on the odd occasion when the fail to read the tea leaves right). It is the Mom & Pop "investors" who hear all the chatter and have spent months and years watching prices crawl ever skyward who get convinced they are missing something big and get that burning itch to "get in on the action" and "make some easy money".

Sadly we live in a world that allows the markets to freely work to take advantage of people. When I was a kid the "nanny state" of the 1950s -- a mostly right wing, conservative government time -- outlawed drugs and gambling to protect people from their own weaknesses. But I've watched over the years as the government is lured by the promise of "taxing sin" to loosen up and allow gambling and ignore the "soft drugs". Worse than these, the government has always allowed shills and manipulators take advantage of markets to create bubbles and fleece the unsuspecting.

It is happening again. A criminal like G. Gordon Liddy freely sells gold as an "investment" to suckers. Media hacks who build their career on manipulating the credulous (like drug addict Rush Limbaugh and Apocalypse preaching Glen Beck) also push gold as a solid "investment". It isn't. For the small guy, there is always a very expensive premium over the public "gold price" to buy and there is always an expensive premium over the "gold price" to sell. It really isn't a "commodity". It is a speculator's wet dream because historically gold was "hard currency". But it isn't today and will never be again. It doesn't pay to hold it. It costs you to hold it. It can be stolen from you. And you will always pay a very hefty premium to buy or sell it. It is fool's gold.

Here's Paul Krugman on Glen Beck:

Glenn Beck was financially intertwined with Goldline, and therefore had a financial stake in pushing fears of hyperinflation. And he had many, many viewers. So there was a direct channel through which conservative Americans were being pushed into buying gold.
Market prices almost always tell you something useful. But sometimes what they tell you is that there’s a marketing scam in progress.

Yep... it's a bubble.

Comparing Greece and the US Subprime Crisis

The two disasters are similar in that the elites are blaming the victims and forcing the general public to pay the cost of sleazy and/or criminal activities by elites.

Here's Barry Ritholtz's take in his The Big Picture blog:

I’ve noticed something intriguing about the debate regarding the Greek default/restructuring/bailout: There is a familiar odor to the “Blame the profligate Greeks” meme now circulating. It is little more than a brilliant marketing ploy. This distraction ignores the simple reality that lending to insolvent people, institutions and countries is first and foremost the fault of the lenders.

Let us start first with the Greeks, who lied their way into the EU (with the help Goldman Sach’s financial engineers). The ridiculous pay and vacation structure, the absurdly generous pension plan, the excessive spending by Athens. They are a nation that can honestly be described as tax scofflaws. Yes, Greece is a mess.

Which begs the question: WHO THE FUCK WOULD LEND A DIME TO THESE PEOPLE?

None of these factors were well-hidden. Everything about Greece is well known to any casual visitor, from its Welfare state to its deficits. Even the shenanigans Greece went through to join the Union European were not unknown. Rather than confront their obvious lack of qualifications, the EU turned a blind eye to it, in order to form their more perfect union.

Which brings us back to the lenders. What is their role, if not to exercise expert judgment? If they cannot independently determine who is credit worthy and who is not, than why do they even exist at all? We might as well leave piles of money around and ask borrowers to self-regulate their appropriate credit limits.

Back to that “familiar odor.” There was a meme attempted during the US housing collapse to place the blame upon the home buyers and borrowers who exercised poor judgment and got in over their heads. It manifested itself in numerous ways. It was an intellectual failure, for the simple reason that it is the lenders job to assign credit, to determine who has the ability to service the debt and who is a bad risk. Indeed, lenders have legal and fiduciary duties to their shareholders, capital sources and regulators. Eejit home buyers who went wild during the era of free money have no such obligations.

Michael White, formerly of CountryWide’s Subprime Unit, had complained bitterly about the increased probability of defaults to his bosses when they decided to drop income verification in mortgage lending. “Eliminate the verification of income for a mortgage borrower, and you eliminate your ability to predict the likelihood of repayment or default” he told them, and was roundly ignored.

We need to better understand the term “Loan Origination Fraud,” when lenders willingly make bad loans, consequences be damned.

As we noted yesterday, bailouts go to the incompetent bankers. Whether bankers are foolishly giving credit to home buyers (and ignoring their lack of incomes), or making loans to Greece (and ignoring their broken financial structures), it is the LENDERS who are making these awful decisions. The LENDERS should be forced to suffer the consequences of their own incompetence and not the taxpayers.

And that means defaults, rather than bailouts . . .

The political system is broken. The politicians are acting as enablers for this con job and crime. They are facilitating by passing legislation to make "the little people" pay for the crimes of the ultra-rich as they do financial rape and pillage in broad daylight.

Going Green and the Hand Wringing Apologists

There is a lot of brow-beating of people in the developed world about their "guilt". Guilt for a "colonial" past. Guilt about outrageously self-indulgent lifestyles. Guilt about greedily seizing resources and living the underdeveloped world desperate and without.

Well... I was never a colonialist. I don't live an indulgent lifestyle. And I've never hogged resources. Sure, colonialism was rampant 300 years ago. But if you go back 2000 years you find Romans, Chinese, Persians, Indians, etc. as the great colonialists. Why don't be beat Iranians, Chinese, Indians, etc. about the ears for having "empires". My ancestors were running around half naked in the northern fringe woodlands 2000 years ago.

As for using an "unfair" share of resources:

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The above graph is from a post on energy by Ed Yardini in his blog Dr. Ed's Blog.

As the graph makes clear, the rising standard of living in China and India (and more generally in southeast Asia) means that resource consumption there has rapidly surpassed the "developed" world. Sure, the per-capita resource use is still low, but the graph shows the trend. In 30-50 years the overwhelming about of resource consumption will be with the billion+ populations of China and India.

Oil consumption is falling in the "developed" world while it is strongly rising in the "undeveloped" world. But all the anti-technology, "green", guilt-ridden propaganda used to make people in the developed world feel guilty is out-dated. It doesn't reflect the world we now live in. But it always takes time for people to throw off out-dated mental shackles.

Slitting Your Own Throat as Ideology

The right in the US is dismantling the middle class society and turning the country into a "banana republic" with a top 0.1% who own everything and the bottom 99.9% effectively peons and serfs available a starvation wages to do the bidding of the ultra-rich.

Here is a bit by Robert Reich demonstrating how the Republican party is busy with the dismantling of America:

The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers.

Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called “open shop” where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without paying union dues. Needless to say this ploy undermines the capacity of unions to do much of anything. Other Republican governors and legislatures are following suit.

Republicans in Congress are taking aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a relatively minor rule change allowing workers to vote on whether to unionize soon after a union has been proposed, rather than allowing employers to delay the vote for years. Many employers have used the delaying tactics to retaliate against workers who try to organize, and intimidate others into rejecting a union.

This war on workers’ rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy.

The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

For three decades after World War II – I call it the “Great Prosperity” – wages rose in tandem with productivity. Americans shared the gains of growth, and had enough money to buy what they produced.

That’s largely due to the role of labor unions. In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.

There's more. Go read the whole post. He has a lot more to say that is well worth reading. For example:

Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).

What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.

How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.

That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.

Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.

It is good to find voices out there, like Robert Reich's, pointing out that the path of impoverishing the bottom 99.9% is not the way to build a "strong" country. Instead, it creates a society of un-educated, politically volatile, and desperate people. This is the recipe for tearing a country apart. But this is what passes for "wise policy" from the political right in America. Not since the halcyon days of the Gilded Era have the rich been allowed to run this roughshod over Americans. The Gilded Era led to the Great Depression as the bottom 90% literally ran out of money to keep the economy going. The wealth was locked up in the hands of the few and things ground to a halt. Think of a game of Monopoly played on a grand style. The "winner" leaves everybody else destitute and the economy destroyed.

Plotting Political Strategy

Robert Reich has nailed the Republican "strategy" for 2012. Here is the opening bit in this article on his blog:

Why Washington Isn't Doing Squat About Jobs and Wages

The silence is deafening. While the rest of the nation is heading back toward a double dip, Washington continues to obsess about future budget deficits. Why?

Republicans don’t want to do anything about jobs and wages. They’re so intent on unseating Obama they’d like the economy to remain in the dumps through Election Day. They also see the lousy economy as an opportunity to sell Americans their big lie that government spending is the culprit — and jobs will return if spending is cut and government shrinks.

Democrats, meanwhile, don’t want to admit the recovery has stalled. They worry such talk will further undermine consumer confidence or spook the bond market. They don’t want to head into the election year sounding downbeat. And they don’t think they have the votes for anything that will have much effect before Election Day anyway.

But there’s a third reason for Washington’s inaction. It’s not being talked about — which is itself evidence of the problem.

The unemployed are politically invisible. They don’t make major campaign donations. They don’t lobby Congress. There’s no National Association of Unemployed People.

Their ranks are filled with women who had been public employees, single mothers, minorities, young people trying to enter the labor force, and middle-aged men who have been out of work for longer than six months. You couldn’t find a collection of people with less political clout.

What I can't believe is that Americans don't realize how they are being manipulated. Instead of focusing of the real issues, a big minority (majority?) is enthralled with the media manipulation of Sarah Palin, an idiot who couldn't find her way out of a wet paper bag, who is lecturing Americans on their "Constitution" and "history" (at least the version that this dim-wit can conjure up in front of cameras). Pathetic.

Dowd on the Catholic Scandals

I'm not a fan of organized religion. The various scandals -- preachers with prostitutes, paedophiles, drugs, and extorting money from believers -- make it pretty clear that it is ideal for giving predators easy pickings.

Here are some bits from a Maureen Dowd article on the sex scandals in the Catholic church:

Two years after learning the extent of the depraved and Dickensian treatment of children in the care of the Irish Catholic Church — a fifth circle of hell hidden for decades by church and police officials — the Irish are still angry and appalled.

The only church leader who escapes their disgust is the no-nonsense, multilingual Martin. He was sent home to Dublin in 2003 after 27 years in the Vatican bureaucracy and diplomatic corps and found the Irish church in crisis, reeling from a cover-up that spanned the tenures of four past Dublin archbishops.

I went to see him at his office in Drumcondra in north Dublin because he is that rarest of things in the church’s tragedy: a moral voice.

In February, Martin held an unprecedented “Liturgy of Lament and Repentance” at a Dublin cathedral, where he asked forgiveness from God and victims of abuse and praised the courage of those who had come forward.

Wearing a simple black cassock, he helped wash the feet of eight victims and conceded that the church “will always bear this wound within it.”

The frustrated Martin has criticized the Vatican’s glacial pace on reform and chided the church: “Denial will not generate confidence.”

...

In return for doing the right thing, he has been ostracized by fellow bishops in Ireland and snubbed by the Holy See.

Showing again that it prefers denial to remorse, the Vatican undermined Martin’s call for accountability. In 2009, after the Irish government’s 700-page Murphy report on sexual abuse came out, Pope Benedict XVI refused to accept the resignations of two Irish bishops who presided over dioceses where abuse cases were mishandled.

The following year, when Martin expected to be named cardinal, the pope passed him over.

“Martin is standing alone against the tide right now, but he’s on the right side of history,” said Jason Berry, who has written two books on the church scandal. “I think he is probably the single best hope for the church within the hierarchy.”

Yet Martin, famous protector of victims, is an outlier of the club, while Cardinal Bernard Law, notorious protector of pedophiles, has a cushy Vatican sanctuary. And Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who was in league with the notorious abuser of seminarians and inseminator of women, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, is the dean of the College of Cardinals in Rome.

Garry O’Sullivan, the managing editor of The Irish Catholic in Dublin, told me that Martin “has had a prophetic role in the church.”

“And all the prophets were stoned or murdered or ignored,” he said. “The big question is, why would the Vatican be indifferent to a guy who’s so brilliant at identifying with the victims? They should put him in charge of a protection office in the Vatican, a global watchdog against sexual abuse.”

It is pretty clear that the Catholic church won't reform. It needs to be disbanded. It is a cesspit of scandal with an ex-Nazi in charge of it. All the officials in Rome are corrupt. The Vatican should be torn down, the land plowed with salt, and all the hangers-on inside the church should be forced to get an honest job.

Making the Country Safe for Private Exploitation, uh, "Enterprise"

The Canadian government... oops, I forgot, it is now officially "The Harper Government"... has decided that providing troops in an emergency is wrong because it would inhibit the chance of "private enterprise" to profit from misery and suffering with the Quebec floods.

From the Globe and Mail:

At a time when distressed flood victims in Quebec’s Richelieu Valley were urging the federal government for more troops to help deal with the crisis, Ottawa refused to send in additional soldiers, saying it would put them “in competition with the private sector.”

In a letter sent to the Quebec government last Friday, federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews explained that the Canadian Forces were too busy with “defence activities” to respond to their demands and denied the province’s request for more troops.

It is good to see that Stephen Harper knows his priorities. When there is a choice between helping the victims of a natural disaster or giving his private enterprise buddies a chance to gouge desperate people by selling them "assistance" during the disaster, Harper has picked his ideological favourite: the rights of business over the rights of the people.

I'm guessing this isn't just Harper letting his greedy buddies exploit the suffering. I'm guessing this is Harper being vindictive about the fact that the Quebeckers aren't sufficiently enamoured with his government to vote in more Conservative MPs. This is the way Harper punishes them for not voting "correctly". It is a new concept in government services: you get service if you vote for the government party, otherwise you twist slowly in the wind hung by your recalcitrance and refusal to understand the proper mechanics of Canadian "democracy".