First US Generation to Grow Up Legally Drugged
Mapping the Online Mind of the Norway Bomber & Shooter
Chuck Spinney: The Afghanistan Disaster Part II – The Long Hard Costly Exit
Corruption, Government, Military
Given Nato's political problems with Pakistan, the Brits have elected to leave Afghanistan along the so-called Northern route to the Baltic Sea (see my 27 November posting, Afghan Dunkirk for discussion of the selection). Now, as Bryan Brady and Jonathan Owen report in the Independent, the entirely predictable baksheesh game has begun.
Think of what the far larger, more logistics-intensive US forces might have pay to who ever guards our egress route. Historians will recall that egress problem is not a one new for foreign invaders of Afghanistan. Alexander the Great had to bribe a Pashtun tribe to clear guerrillas fighters( from another tribe) who were blocking his exit thru the Khyber Pass when he left Afghanistan to go to India. My guess — entirely speculative — is that they split the difference and had a good laugh after Alex departed — but we will never know.
Chuck Spinney
A dirty deal: Uzbek dictator ‘has UK over a barrel'
Karimov demands official visit in logistics deal over Britain's pull-out from Afghanistan
BRIAN BRADY , JONATHAN OWEN, Independent, SUNDAY 08 APRIL 2012
Britain is bargaining with one of the world's most brutal dictators because we need to use his country as a transit route to bring thousands of tons of military equipment home from Afghanistan.
Senior officials admitted yesterday that Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov had the UK “over a barrel”, after his country emerged as the favoured route home when British forces are withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2014.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: The Afghanistan Disaster Part II – The Long Hard Costly Exit”
Chuck Spinney: The Afghanistan Disaster Part I – When the War Comes Home
10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers CallWEEKEND EDITION APRIL 6-8, 2012
The Afghan Disaster
by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch
The PR disasters over the last three months — including pictures of American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, the burning of Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one deranged American soldier — have morphed into a grand strategic debacle. From the perspective of the Afghan insurgency, these are gifts that will keep on giving.
Why do I use the modifier grand strategic?
Because these incidents have (1) increased the moral strength of the Afghan insurgents by handing them a coup to rally supporters and attract the uncommitted to their cause. They also widen the existing rift between the United States military and the Karzai government, which in any case is viewed by many Afghans as a corrupt, illegitimate, quisling lapdog of the US. And (2), they are visibly weakening the rapidly crumbling solidarity at home. Recent polls in America, for example, suggest the already overwhelming majority of Americans who now think it is time to exit the Afghan enterprise is growing again. Moreover, an increasing number of politicians and editorial boards are now beginning to reflect the views of the majority of American people. These incidents have magnified the already widespread perceptions among Afghans of a grotesque mismatch between the ideals we profess uphold and what we do.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: The Afghanistan Disaster Part I – When the War Comes Home”
Chuck Spinney: Goodbye Occupy – Political Engineering the Police State — Strip-Searching as Symptom
Corruption, Government, Law EnforcementThe politics of fear in insecurity are now the staple of American politics. They were used habitually during the Cold War to create powerful vested interests in a permanent war economy. These interests are clearly reflected in the pattern of political practices of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) that maintains and increases the flux of money flowing through the MICC. It is this flux that gives the MICC its from and vitality.
By 1990, the MICC's political practices had been honed to the point that they became self-sustaining and the cold-war-level defense budget proved impossible to turn off when the Cold War ended and the grossly inflated Soviet threat evaporated in 1991. In the Pentagon, we sarcastically referred to the unstoppable budget steamroller as the Pentagon's self-licking ice cream cone.[1]
The self-licking ice cream cone was in place, morphed, and survived. An after some some fits and starts in alternative threat inflation options during the 90s (e.g., the wars of the Yugoslav Succession, theories of being a indispensable power and humanitarian intervention), 9-11 provided the MICC with a political cover to morph its marketing appeal into fighting what it called the long war on terror. But 9-11 was also exploited cynically as a justification to create another political cash cow, which can be though of as domestic spinoff to the MICC, since many of the same players are involved — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), thus expanding the MICC's network of vested interests and bringing them more directly into the domestic arena. The attached op-ed in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf gives a hint of where this evolution is headed — and if you think she is being alarmist, note particularly her brief description of DHS's emerging self-licking ice cream cone (highlighted in yellow near the end of her essay).
The long war in terror may be winding down, and the alleged need for a DHS is evaporating, but like the MICC, the ‘DHS self licking ice cream cone' is likely to exhibit the kind of adaptability needed live on in a pathological mutation of its supposed intent. [2]
For those readers with a synthetic bent of mind, think about the implications of Wolf's op-ed in the context of the questions I will pose at the end of the next blaster.
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[1] New readers will find detailed albeit overlapping explanations of how the MICC's self-licking ice cream cone operates here, here, here, and here.
[2] There is another, more subtle dimension to the these political-economic evolutions: Over time, the economically pathological but politically expedient practices of the MICC undermined the commercial competitiveness of the manufacturing companies involved in weapons making. The employees and owners of these companies became ever more dependent on government money flows for their survival and growth. But, as Seymour Melman correctly predicted in his 1983 book Profits Without Production, the MICC's practices also contributed materially, together with deleterious effects of financialization, deregulation, speculation, and globalization, to deindustrialize and hollow out the high-income US economy. This political-economic evolution led directly to the Wall Street Casino that crashed in 2007-8. It is now clear that the pathological transformation of the great American economic engine took off in the late 70s, and it produced the stagnation of middle class wages and the grotesque inflation of the income disparity between and poor and rich, especially the super rich that lies at or very near root of our economic problems. So, the politics of fear are now melded seamlessly with the politics of economic insecurity (reflected in dependency, anger, and scapegoating) to shape the political discourse of the lower 80% (who are struggling to make ends meet and provide a future for their children while paying off a huge debt burden) as well as the super rich who fear the masses will rise up against them to take their wealth … it is this melding that is feeding the political and legal selection pressures underpinning the kind of evolution described by Ms. Wolf.
Chuck Spinney
By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK
06 April 2012
n a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”
In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.
Review (Guest): Conversations with Wall Street – The Inside Story of the Financial Armageddon & How To Prevent the Next One
5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)
Peter Ressler, Monika Mitchell
5 Stars
Co-authors Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell have been 20-year Wall Street insiders as partners in an executive search firm. Their book is a page-turning account of the 2007-8 meltdown and continuing unsolved issues that will inevitably lead to the next crises. Woven throughout their analysis are conversations with dozens of top executives from Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many hedge funds and private equity firms.
Only the executives' first names are used (for obvious reasons), which makes their recorded interviews with the authors more revealing, with all the vivid expletives un-redacted. We hear first-hand of how Wall Street's culture actually worked based on the “buyer beware” treatment of sophisticated clients. Pension funds were considered “big boys” who should do their own due diligence and against whom it was OK to bet that the securities sold to them would blow up. These were the market makers who, unlike the partnerships of yore, regularly took both sides of deals with their often unsuspecting customers while pushing ratings agencies to stamp these toxic products as triple-A. The prevailing culture is reflected in their language: “eat what you kill,” “ripping the face off” clients and the jungle rule of “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly associated with Charles Darwin rather than originally coined by Herbert Spencer, a British economist of that era who wrote for The Economist).
Josh Kilbourn: 51 Months of Recession – Report Card
03 Economy, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Media
51 Months After The Start Of The Recession, Here Is The Report Card
ZeroHedge, 04/06/2012
Recovery? What Recovery? 4 years after central banks have progressively injected over $7 trillion in liquidity into the global markets (and thus, by Fed logic, the economy), and who knows how many trillion in fiscal aid has been misallocated, to halt the Second Great Depression which officially started in December 2007, the US “recovery” is the weakest in modern US history! How many more trillions will have to be printed (and monetized) before the central planners realize that fighting mean reversion by using debt to defeat recore debt, just doesnt't work? Our guess – lots.
Incidentally, the US has now generated 3 million jobs since the trough of the recession in September 2010, until which point it had previously lost 8 million. Unfortunately, since the real labor force has grown by 4.6 million over the same period, or at the conventionally accepeted 90,000 labor pool entrants per month for 51 months, despite what the BLS may say, because America is after all growing, this means that the Obama administration has created a negative 1.6 million jobs net of demographics, which in turn have cost the US a modest $5.1 trillion in new debt, or an even modest $3.1 million in debt for every job lost.
Chart 1 – the current “recovery” in the context of all previous ones:
Chart 2 – Min, Max and Average… and now
Chart 3 – in bar chart format
Chart 4 – There is good news: 16 quarters after the start of the recession, US output has turned positive. Just barely.
Phi Beta Iota: What is one to do when the government, with the full complicity of the two parties that monopolize power through various illegitimate means, the full complicity of the five major media corporations whose “mouthpieces” bury their intelligence along with their integrity, all lie to the public? Have we really become a nation of idiot sheep? At what point is the government impeachable for lies to the public?
See Also:
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust
Chuck Spinney: Re-Industrialization of the USA
03 EconomyWEEKEND EDITION APRIL 6-8, 2012
Does It Matter Where the Factories Are?
by GÉRARD DUMÉNIL and DOMINIQUE LÉVY, Counterpunch
The crisis that began in 2008 has brought the deindustrialization of the US and Europe, at the center of the global economic system, to the forefront of the debate. President Barack Obama has made it a key issue of his re-election campaign. There is a new word, “insourcing,” the opposite of “outsourcing” or sub-contracting. The idea is to return industrial production to national territory.
. . . . . .
As long as the general neoliberal framework, with all its elements — the hegemony of the capitalist classes and financial institutions, the complicity of senior management, financialization and globalization — remains unchallenged by “financial repression”, of the kind that took place in the US during the postwar period, all attempts to fight the process of deindustrialization, no matter how successful, will continue to be retrograde. They undermine what remains of the social gains made in the preceding decades, without making any clear contribution to the re-establishment of growth and the rebuilding of employment.
GÉRARD DUMÉNIL and DOMINIQUE LÉVY are economists and co-authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 2011/.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very important article. A government with intelligence and integrity would re-industrialize using the Open Source Everything ethos combined with the localized food-energy-water model. As the authors point out, as long as criminal mind-sets continue to dominate government and industry, re-industrializing in the old form will make no difference to the public at large.
See Also:
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust
