Labor Struggles Have Delivered Economic Progress - Not the Cartelized “Free Market”

By Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net

September 14, 2010

Many people in the United States mistakenly believe that the standard of living and amenities which they still enjoy are somehow the automatic result of their own merits, or else simply self-evident. Such illusory beliefs are tragically wrong. Such benefits as the eight hour day, the 40 hour week, the child labor laws, worker’s compensation, the minimum wage, and the social safety net composed of unemployment insurance, food stamps, and Social Security disability payments are all the direct result of mass political struggles waged by the US labor movement. If it had been left up to the so-called “free market,” none of these benefits would prevail today. The lesson is that mass organization and mass struggle deliver human progress, and not the mythologized and fetishized “free market.”

The level of civilization enjoyed in the United States today is the heritage of times when trade unions were much stronger, and a much larger percentage of the workforce unionized than is today the case. Today US unions have about 16 million members representing 12.4% of the workforce, the lowest proportion since 1932. At the end of World War II, 36% of US workers had a union. In the private sector today, only 7.6% of workers are unionized. The public sector is somewhat better off, with 37% unionization, and these are precisely the unions that are now subjected to raving assaults by the reactionary Republicans, the Tea Party fanatics, think tanks bankrolled by finance capital, and neo-feudal ideologues.

The retreat of the US labor movement began on August 15, 1971, when Nixon and Kissinger deliberately destroyed the Bretton Woods world monetary system, which had been one of the most important gifts to the world by the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal. Nixon imposed wage and price controls, meaning in practice wage controls, and went through Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 of an anti-union strategy based on the idea of “give back” – that it was time for unions to surrender some of the improvements in wages and working conditions which they had been able to obtain in the previous decades. Nixon and his Labor Secretary George Shultz also concocted the Philadelphia Plan, a scheme for playing black unemployed workers against white building trades unions, with the net result of lowering wages for all. Under the reactionary Reagan, organized labor’s retreat turned into a rout with the cynical busting of the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981. This egregious assault on labor rights should have elicited an immediate general strike by the entire labor movement to shut down the whole country until the right wing extremist Reagan had been forced to back down. But there was no general strike. Reagan had learned his union busting from Lemuel Boulware at General Electric, and his ability to fire the air traffic controllers with total political impunity set the stage for a long series of catastrophic labor defeats. Things were made worse during the 1990s by the Clinton regime’s eager embrace of globalization and free trade. The outcome of all this is that the US standard of living has declined by about two thirds since the mid-1960s.

Freedom House lists 41 countries as granting full labor rights, and the US is not among them – a genuine scandal. Another reasons for labor’s secular weakness is the infamous Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which made it much harder to create new union locals in any part of the United States, and made it almost impossible in the anti-union states of the South, where “right to work” laws created an almost insuperable barrier to collective bargaining. This has helped to perpetuate the oligarchical political structure and lower standards of living in the southern states down to the present day. These states have become the preferred venue for Japanese, European, and other foreign corporations wishing to escape the much stricter labor laws in their own countries, all at the expense of the American worker. The overall effect has been a disastrous race to the bottom among the states, further increasing the downward pressure on the standard of living.

Many of the abuses which plague the US trade union movement today are the direct result of weakness, defeat, demoralization, and despair. There is also the problem posed by a new and sinister model of low-wage unionism under ultra-left and multicultural cover, as pioneered by Obama crony Andy Stern at the Service Employees International Union. Here the tendency is to sacrifice militant wage demands to the imperative of getting more dues-paying members, whatever this means for the workers. Stern also decisively weakened the US labor movement by the split he piloted in 2005, creating the Change to Win Federation along with the Teamsters and some other unions as a separate entity from the AFL-CIO. Since resigning from the SEIU, Stern has joined the Bowles-Simpson austerity commission, the goal of which is to carry out a wrecking job on Social Security and whatever else remains of entitlements and the social safety net. Even after the May 6 flash crash of 1000 Dow points occasioned a mass exodus of retail investors out of the stock market, Stern is apparently still recommending that part of the Social Security trust fund be invested into toxic paper offered on Wall Street, and thus made subject to the flash trading, high-frequency trading, and other forms of algorithmic program trading which anyone can see represent an astronomical risk of such investments. Stern’s devotion to Wall Street in this case is a useful indication of what he has been all along.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama has done nothing for the US labor movement but stab it in the back and betray it. The main demand of the AFL-CIO over the past two years has been the Employee Free Choice Act, otherwise known as card check, a perfectly reasonable and beneficial reform which would make it easier to organize a workplace for the purposes of collective bargaining. Card check has been demonized by TV ads paid for by wealthy reactionaries which present this a proposal to level the playing field a little as the demonic spawn of Bolsheviks and mafiosi. The main thing is that Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Democrats have done absolutely nothing to get card check passed. Richard Trumpka, the feckless president of the AFL-CIO, pretends not to notice this betrayal as he attempts to marshal his forces to vote Democratic in the November election, despite the obvious fact that the Democrats have delivered for Wall Street but not for labor.

Reactionaries are still pushing the myth that the bailout of Chrysler and General Motors represented some kind of largess for the unions. Steve Rattner, Obamas car czar, notes in his new book that the motto of Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during these auto rescue negotiations was “F*** the UAW.” The UAW was forced to accept the reduction of wages and working conditions in its Midwestern plants down to the level prevailing in the runaway shop “right to work” paradises of Alabama and Mississippi, where there is practically no union at all. In addition, certain trust funds maintained for the pensions and health benefits of retirees were looted, with the proceeds being transferred directly to Wall Street predators while the UAW was given dubious shares of stock in return. Far from representing a sweetheart deal, these proceedings represented a serious weakening of the UAW.

Since public sector unions are the key remaining bastion of US labor, Obama has focused his attacks on the teachers’ unions which tend to be the flagships among organized government workers. Working with his pro-corporate Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan, Obama has cooked up a foundation-funded strategy of charter schools, denial of tenure, merit pay, and mass firings of teachers which represents not just a strategy for busting the union, but for preparing the eventual abolition of free, universal, compulsory, education of any quality in the United States. This is what the Race to the Top actually portends. A tradition which goes back to the Northwest Ordinance for publicly funded schools enacted way back under the Articles of Confederation and the work of Horace Mann in Massachusetts is now under savage attack by right wing extremists and the neo-liberals of the Obama camp.

American System traditionalists know something which the reactionary rabble of the Tea Party and other Republicans cannot grasp: that the American tradition is one of a high wage economy, with high capital intensity, high-value added, high energy input, and a resulting high real absolute profit for the development of the entire society. The right wingers at the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute (whose libertarianism turns out to be funded by the arch-reactionary Koch family) are preparing an attack on the American middle class and its economic rights which is without precedent in recent history. As Michael Barone recently noted in the Washington Examiner, Charles Murray (the racist theoretician of Bell Curve infamy, now ensconced at the AEI neocon den) is now spewing out an analysis which maintains that the vast majority of Americans ought to be denied a college education, since the low-wage jobs available to them do not require such extensive preparation. Other reactionaries are announcing the collapse of the “higher education bubble,” taking advantage of depression-induced student loan defaults at certain for-profit universities serving adult students. The goal is clearly to strip the US middle class of the chance to go to college, which has been a presumed birthright since FDR’s GI Bill of Rights. It is only a question of time before these reactionaries seek to popularize the workhouse, the treadmill, and the orphanage, among other Dickens-era horrors which have been circulating in the right wing echo chamber since the Gingrich counterrevolution of 1994. They hope to restore a situation in which a college education is the exclusive preserve of the rich and privileged few, but the broad middle class being completely shut out. This is the future of which the Tea Party dupes are facilitating, whether they know it or not.

Any honest trade union official must now face immediate necessity of breaking with the Obama Democratic party, and of developing a new political strategy for American working people. The strategy must involve presidential politics just as much as workplace organizing, and it must feature above all a realistic and workable economic recovery program to show the country and the world the way out of the current world economic depression. Such programs are still admittedly rare, but there is a good one displayed at the top of this website, and we recommend it to the friends of labor.

Comex Paper Silver Buyers Want Physical Badly

From AgAuPM.com - Trading and Investing in Precious Metals:

Amazing is a good word to describe what’s going on in this delivery month for physical silver at Comex.
Non-logic stuff regarding Comex silver, I’ve already start reporting on Sep 2nd 2010 at Comex – Where Is Your Physical Silver.


More or less, every day of this month new buyers are adding Sep 2010 silver futures contracts and they are anxiously waiting to get their hands on Comex physical silver.


Since Comex dealers took a lease of 2.3 million ounces of physical silver from Comex customer inventory on Sep 7th 2010, there were additional 548 silver contracts added – equaling 2.24 million ounces!
Last 3 business days in a row, new silver contracts popping out (519 contracts exactly), that wants their hands on Comex silver by the end of this month.


Yesterday alone, 230 additional paper silver contracts were added to deliver physical silver by the end of September 2010.
No wonder price of silver yesterday finally closed above $20.
Now, who decided yesterday to demand additional 230 contracts = 1.15 million ounces of silver?


Frankly, I don’t care who, as long as there are investors out there wanting to end this Comex paper fraud by requesting physical silver delivery NOW.
Comex physical silver delivered so far in Sep 2010: 1,571 contracts
Left to deliver by the end of Sep 2010: 1,500 contracts = 7.5 million ounces of PHYSICAL silver.
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Related: Silver at a 30-month high, should you buy now?

Silver Signals Sizzle in GSR Break

Silver: Primed for Volatility and Sustained Trend Development

The Silver Bullet

Why silver could lead gold now

Debtflation

A very interesting excerpt from yesterday's Casey's Daily Dispatch (brilliant analysis and most plausible forecast on the debt bubble):

Debtflation

Last week we received the following comment in our Knowledge Base. As I thought the dear reader’s comment of wider interest, I wanted to share it here – along with my answer.

Investors should be prepared to sell gold as either increased inflation expectations or doubts around debt sustainability force a sharp increase in US Treasury bond yields. Simply put, in an environment of high real interest rates, the allure of gold could disappear as quickly as it did in the early 1980s when Paul Volcker took control of the Federal Reserve.

My response…
First off, I want to congratulate the reader for trying to anticipate the conditions that might mark the end of the gold bull market. Because, make no mistake, the gold bull market will come to an end – and when it does, it’s not going to be pretty for those who stubbornly stay too long at the party.
As to the possible triggers for gold’s big sell-off, the reader’s contention is directionally correct when he points out that this could occur when real interest rates (T-bill rates minus CPI) become high enough. At that point, as a non-yielding asset, gold will become less attractive to investors looking for income. And, gold will fall. 
However, the situation today is significantly different than during Volcker’s term as the head of the Fed.
The first difference can be seen in the chart here that I just dredged out of the archives of The Casey Report. Besides painting a picture that many of you will think obvious – that inflation is the biggest driver of interest rates – you can also see that gold’s stunning rise in the second half of the 1970s occurred during a period of strongly rising interest rates. So, rising interest rates and rising gold prices are not mutually exclusive.

The second difference between now and then becomes clear in the next chart showing that while there certainly was an inflation problem during Volcker’s reign, there definitely was not a debt problem. At least not compared to today.

The implications of the nation’s current debt load loom large in this discussion. Aggressively raising interest rates, as Volcker did back in the day, would not just dent today’s U.S. economy, it would destroy it. As it would evaporate a significant amount of the trillions of dollars now sitting in government debt, much of it held by pensioners.
Put another way, Volcker raised interest rates as energetically as he did because he could. Today, that couldn’t happen – at least not without pushing the U.S. economy into a death spiral. That’s why we’ve long compared the scenario faced by today’s policy makers to being stuck between “a rock and a hard place.”
While the smoking ruin solution I wrote about last week – where the government steps aside and lets the free market do its worst, so that it can then do its best – is certainly possible, the more likely scenario is that the Treasury and the Fed will keep reacting to each new chapter in the crisis by further degrading the currency in the hopes that at some point the debt becomes manageable. Of course, there is the real risk that at some point along the path, our creditors will lose faith and demand higher interest rates.
But what happens if interest rates begin to move up based on credit concerns, and not in response to a noticeable uptick in price inflation? At that point, couldn’t we see positive real interest rates relative to CPI – therefore reducing gold’s appeal?
If interest rates begin to rise for any reason – including concerns over creditworthiness – the obvious damage to the economy and to the government’s ability to service its debts will only heighten concerns over repayment. Almost overnight, creditors will begin to fear either overt debt defaults or the covert default of yet more inflation, and demand even higher rates.
At that point, with interest rates beginning to spiral, few people will be looking to buy bonds but will remain fixated on the return of capital, versus return on capital.
Being repetitious, debt is the single biggest economic challenge facing the U.S. – and much of the developed world. In time this debt will get resolved, it always does, but it’s not going to be pretty.
As I see it, unlike the inflation of the 1970s that could be treated with a strong dose of tight monetary policy, the debtflation we now face can only be resolved through default. Given that no U.S. government will want to join the ranks of history’s sovereign deadbeats, the inflation option remains the most likely course.
And in that scenario, gold is still a solid investment and so should be a core portfolio holding.
______________


Related: The US monetary system is in serious trouble: It is not Incompetence, it is Policy Manipulation by Bob Chapman, September 11, 2010

Three Powerful Trends Will Push Gold Prices To $1600

The IMF Warns Of Upcoming 'Social Explosion' And A Global Jobs Crisis

Global Grandiosity: America's 21st Century World Architecture

By Rick Rozoff
Stop NATO
September 13, 2010

Megalomania: Unreasonable conviction of one's own extreme greatness, goodness, or power. An obsession with doing extravagant or grand things. A delusional mental disorder that is marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur. An extreme form of egotism. Adolf Hitler is generally considered to have been a megalomaniac.

Delusion of grandeur: Individuals with grandiose delusional disorder have an inflated sense of self-worth. Their delusions center on their own importance, such as believing that they have done or created something of extreme value or have a "special mission." A conviction of one's own importance, power, or knowledge. [A] delusion (common in paranoia) that you are much greater and more powerful and influential than you really are.

The above are composite dictionary definitions of the afflictions in question, ones which are symptomatic of the two most severe forms of mental illness: Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

When an individual exhibits these traits he or she is correspondingly diagnosed, treated with psychotropic medications and often with court-ordered hospitalization, and monitored for being a potential threat to himself and to others.

However, when a nation, or a leader representing one, manifests the same symptoms there is to date no effective mechanism for mandating therapy or for ensuring the protection of others from one so affected.

To understand individual psychopathology magnified to the level of world affairs, imagine that in any other context a person described his own role and the qualities of his employer as unique in the world as well as history and as alone beneficial to humanity; that others are good or bad, benign or malignant, useful or dangerous in proportion as they share the person in question's estimate of himself; that the use of force, including deadly force, is the sole prerogative of that person and his friends and allies, that "If I have to use force, it is because I am me; I am the indispensable person. I stand tall and I see further than other people into the future, and I see the danger here to all of us."

The quote is an adaptation of one by then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1998. The first person singular has been substituted for the plural and personal references for those of the nation she represented as its chief voice in international relations.

A person not endowed with the trappings of government office who loudly, persistently and intolerantly proclaimed himself the world's sole superperson and the only individual capable of intervening with and resolving differences and disputes between all other people in the world, and who accused those who thought otherwise of being engaged in a furtive conspiracy against him because of his elevated, indeed messianic, status would be sent post-haste to his company's human resource department and shortly thereafter placed on a combination of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic medications. For his own protection and that of others.

Delusions of grandeur are associated with the manic phase of bipolar disorder and frequently with other delusional content typical of schizophrenics, especially delusions of persecution - paranoia. Grandiosity can be comparatively harmless, although disruptive to family and professional relations and an impediment to healthy and productive functioning in general.

But when combined with delusions of persecution it is dangerous. The reason the two are frequently linked and mutually reinforcing is that only a person who is convinced that he is uniquely and innately imbued with superior abilities and moral qualities and is assigned a role in and even above history can believe that he is an object worthy of an elaborate, relentless and unparalleled campaign of harassment and hostility. A normal person - or nation - doesn't entertain that degree of self-importance in either respect.

A recent example of the coupling of grandiosity on one hand and criticizing and belittling anyone who questions or resents the self-appointed status of superiority on the other was offered by President Barack Obama last December on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, when he denounced "a deep ambivalence about military action today...joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

Doubts, even the mildest of misgivings, about the actions of history's first - and decidedly unelected - global military juggernaut, which launched three unprovoked wars between 1999 and 2003 - Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq - and is currently conducting and participating in deadly attacks in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, could to the grandiose/paranoid mindset only be motivated by primitive instinctual reactions, irrational bias and inherently and ineradicably evil motives.

Being good, being preeminently good, being good in a manner and to a degree unmatched in the annals of time, means being incapable of anything but good motives and good actions. Ipso facto. Axiomatically.

The distinction between us and them is that of good and bad. Good persons and nations have nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for, nothing to correct, nothing to change. Good comes from good and bad from others, in direct proportion as they differ from us and refuse to concede our unmatched sense of goodness. Acts that perpetrated by others would evoke unequivocal condemnation and harsh - even deadly - responses are when performed by us and ours excusable if not praiseworthy.

On September 8 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered her latest confirmation and defense of that doctrinaire conviction.

While addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., she touted her country's achievements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - three war-stricken disaster areas - without of course admitting any responsibility for the plights of their respective populaces. The U.S. was doing nothing blameworthy in any of those three countries and never had; it is not responsible in any manner for violence, dislocation and eventual fragmentation in the nations now or at any point over the past half century.

In fact just the opposite. Washington's faultless, noble, beneficent, healing role needs to be universalized: "Solving foreign-policy problems today requires us to think both regionally and globally, to see the intersections and connections linking nations and regions and interests, to bring people together as only America can. I think the world is counting on us today, as it has in the past. When old adversaries need an honest broker or fundamental freedoms need a champion, people turn to us."

And, at least implicit in her contentions, having witnessed the effects of recent U.S. armed interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, the world is even more insistent that Washington extend its presence and enforce its mandatory model elsewhere. Everywhere.

Clinton continued: "I see it on the faces of the people I meet as I travel - not just the young people who still dream about America's promise of opportunity and equality, but also seasoned diplomats and political leaders who, whether or not they admit it, see the principled commitment and can-do spirit that comes with American engagement.

"And they do look to America - not just to engage, but to lead. And nothing makes me prouder than to represent this great nation in the far corners of the world.

"Americans have always risen to the challenges we have faced. That is who we are. It is in our DNA. We do believe there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved."

Again, an individual who proclaimed that everyone else dreamed of being like him, that he possessed unlimited talents and abilities, and that his superiority was moreover a matter of genetic inheritance would likely soon end up on a locked psychiatric ward. Even if he didn't account for the preponderance of the deadly weapons in the world and didn't have a sixty-year history of almost unbroken violence against others, often against defenseless victims.

One of the privileges of egomania writ large - megalomania - is the right to lecture others on one's unique, suprahuman, ineffably lofty qualities and to dress them down for not possessing them.

In introducing Clinton on September 8, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, reminded the audience that in slightly over a year and a half she has visited some 64 countries, a third of United Nations members, and "has racked up 350,000 miles in the process."

The following comments indicate to what extent her worldview and views of the world alike have been expanded by those travels:

"The world looks to us because America has the reach and resolve to mobilize the shared effort needed to solve problems on a global scale, in defense of our own interests but also as a force for progress. In this we have no rival. For the United States, global leadership is both a responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity."

Though she displayed either uncharacteristic modesty - an unlikely enough prospect - or the obligatory deference to her predecessors that she expects her successors, and history, to confer on her in stating:

"We know this can be done because President Obama's predecessors in the White House and mine in the State Department did it before....Those were the benefits of a global architecture forged over many years by American leaders from both political parties.

"That is why we are building a global architecture that reflects and harnesses the realities of the 21st century."

She was referring most immediately to George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice as alleged visionary leaders that with her and Obama have accomplished nothing less than building a planetary political-economic-social-military structure for an entire century. And, not to be unduly humble, a new millennium into the bargain.

Although American global dominance rests squarely on a World War Two-level $708 billion defense budget for next year, six international military commands, six navy fleets, eleven aircraft carrier strike groups, the world's largest nuclear arsenal and in general the ability to dispatch overwhelming and crushing military force anywhere in the world at short notice, another of the prerogatives of international hubris is, as noted earlier, to attribute that supremacy to genetically determined entrepreneurial and ethical advantages. According to America's top diplomat, the globe's sole superpower is entering yet a higher and more refined avatar, "national renewal aimed at strengthening the sources of American power, especially our economic might and moral authority."

At the same time, "Of course this administration is also committed to maintaining the greatest military in the history of the world and, if needed, to vigorously defend ourselves and our friends."

A hallmark trait of mania and grandiosity is the tendency of one suffering from them to speak of himself, his accomplishments and by extension those of his friends in superlatives. Hence boasts of being the world's sole military superpower and possessing the greatest military in the history of the world.

Every detail of such a person's life, even the most minute, mundane and tedious, becomes a matter of world, even historical, importance and of inestimable value, overshadowing all other events, even those affecting millions of other people: Wars, natural disasters, economic crises. Grandiloquent rhetoric is enlisted in the service of petty personal matters.

In responding to Richard Haass's introductory comments, Clinton said, "I thank you for referencing what has been the most difficult balancing act of my time as secretary of State, pulling off my daughter's wedding, which I kept telling people, as I traveled around the world to all of the hot spots, was much more stressful than anything else on my plate."

The multi-million dollar nuptials of the daughter of a former president and the son of two former congresspersons, one a convicted felon, and himself a multi-millionaire investment banker for a hedge fund, was a source of more concern - "stress" - for the head of the foreign office of the world's superpower than the nearly nine-year war in Afghanistan, the ongoing military occupation of Iraq, the devastating floods in Pakistan, the taunting of China by U.S.-led naval exercises in the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea, the economic catastrophe confronting tens of millions of Americans themselves and other matters only of interest to the victims and other billions of unimportant, disposable bit players in the grand drama of erecting a 21st century global architecture.

As with her biological, so with her politico-military family: "NATO remains the world's most successful alliance. Together with our allies, including new NATO members in Central and Eastern Europe, we are crafting a new strategic concept that will help us meet not only traditional threats but also emerging ones, like cybersecurity and nuclear proliferation. Just yesterday President Obama and I discussed these issues with NATO Secretary-General Rasmussen."

The North Atlantic military bloc's role in completing the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia and in waging a war in Afghanistan that will begin its tenth year in three weeks does warrant the use of the superlative, though questionably so when linked with the word successful.

The U.S. is the unchallenged pioneer in and master of overseas outsourcing, from most of its once unrivaled industry to tens of millions of its jobs, and the same practice is employed in regard to its international military ambitions. If other countries are better positioned geographically and can do it less expensively, then Washington can get more war for the dollar, more bang for the buck. Thus in Clinton's words, "From Europe and North America to East Asia and the Pacific, we are renewing and deepening the alliances that are the cornerstone of global security and prosperity." It takes an entire village to further the geostrategic plans of its chief.

Regarding what is one of the projects the Obama-Clinton team inherited from its Bush-Rice forerunner - recruiting the most important nation ever as an American military ally - Clinton added, "India, the world's largest democracy, has a very large convergence of fundamental values and a broad range of both national and regional interests, and we are laying the foundation for an indispensable partnership. President Obama will use his visit in November to take our relationship to the next level." By clinching a reported $5 billion arms deal.

With Europe and much of the rest of Eurasia secured through NATO, the U.S. has expanded its military and geopolitical scope and currently "our strategy has been to reinvigorate America's commitment to be an active trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific and hemispheric leader."

Referring to the state in the first person as is the wont of grandiose political personalities, Clinton affirmed: "We are a nation that has always believed we have the power to shape our own destiny and to cut a new and better path, and frankly to bring along people who were like-minded from around the world."

Language like power, destiny, better path, around the world is reminiscent of claims made in Central Europe seventy-five years ago.

Humanity is not only bifurcated into good and bad, but is divided between leaders - rather one leader - and followers.

As to those who refuse to be led, "we are approaching the Iranian challenge as an example of American leadership in action." China and Russia, though nominal friends, also came in for their share of criticism, in Russia's case for the Caucasus war of two years ago and ensuing developments.

Friends are used as sounding boards to echo boasts and bravado, as mirrors for one's vanity, as flashy accoutrements and social adornment, but are never accorded the status of persons in their own right. Narcissism is a one-sided, zero-sum proposition: Acknowledging others' qualities is to distract and detract from one's own. Having more than any other is insufficient. Having the most, more than all others combined, is not enough. Anything less than all is unacceptable.

Therefore, "time and time again I hear, as I do interviews from Indonesia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Brazil, how novel it seems to people that an official would come and take questions from the public. So we're not only engaging the public and expanding and explaining America's values and views, we're also sending a message to those leaders."

Friends and allies can be good people - they can assuredly be useful ones, which is why they are friends - but can only aspire with varying degrees of success to emulate the great ones. For at bottom they are genetically disadvantaged and hence at best poor facsimiles of the original. Claims that others are equal partners and even that one is merely first among equals are insincere. Others exist solely to acknowledge, confirm, praise, applaud and serve one's superior virtues.

It is only in Clinton's detached world with its inflated sense of self-importance that she and fellow American federal officials can be seen as engaging the public both at home and abroad.

Mechanical glad-handing and other sterile mummeries of biennial and quadrennial elections campaigns - run by mammoth advertising and public relations firms paid with billions of dollars from special interests - and state-engineered photo opportunities in the capitals of other countries are what in fact is meant.

On September 8 Clinton demonstrated what she understands as public engagement. On a Wednesday, a workday for other Americans who pay her salary through their taxes, Clinton addressed those who truly pay attention to U.S. foreign policy and whose expectations must be met if one hopes to remain in office: The Council on Foreign Relations and other planning bodies of the permanent rather than the transient and fleeting elite of temporary officeholders. Groups whose members reflect and deepen each other's sense of omnipotence and grandiosity by using the map of the world as their private chessboard.

The psychiatric ailments that give rise to delusions of grandeur are chronic. They cannot be cured, only controlled. Left untreated the prognosis is poor, even terminal. When grandiosity seizes a player on the global stage, and its major one at that, the risk exists of the world being endangered by and consumed along with the megalomaniac should the scaffolding of his pharaonic architecture collapse around his head.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
===========================
Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato

Blog site: http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/

You Exported WHAT?

From CLG: 


30,000 prisoners in Iraq without trial: Amnesty --The report alleged that prisoners were beaten with electric cables and tortured with electric shocks and drills. 13 Sep 2010 Iraqi authorities are holding some 30,000 people without trial and denying them access to lawyers, leaving them at risk of torture, the leading human rights organisation Amnesty International said Monday in a report. Secret prisons are allegedly being used to house detainees. The report - entitled 'New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful detentions and torture in Iraq' - also charged that some prisoners had died from maltreatment while in custody. [Operation Iraqi Freedom: Dictatorship, electric shocks, depleted uranium, BP, and Monsanto. Saddam Hussein: Clearly, the better deal.]


Torture and abuse rife in Iraq jails, Amnesty report says --Study finds prisoners, many detained by US forces, being held without rights by Iraqi security forces 13 Sep 2010 Up to 30,000 prisoners, including many veterans of the US detention system, are being held without rights in Iraq and are frequently tortured or abused according to a report by Amnesty International. The study has found that the human rights situation remains dire in Iraq, with arbitrary arrests and secret detention common, as well as a lack of accountability throughout the security forces.



3 dead in Baghdad violence 13 Sep 2010 At least three people were killed during the past day in Baghdad, officials said late Monday. A bomb attached to the vehicle of an Iraqi intelligence officer detonated in western Baghdad Monday afternoon killing him, an Interior Ministry official told CNN. According to the official, the bomb was attached to the car of Capt. Muthanna Ahmed and exploded in the al-Ghazaliya neighborhood.

Five killed in central Iraq violence 12 Sep 2010 Bomb attacks and firefights on Sunday in the restive central Iraqi province of Diyala killed five people, including two soldiers and a policeman, security officials said. One Iraqi soldier and a policeman were killed in a gunfight with insurgents in the agricultural village of Al-Hudaid, according to Major Mohammed al-Karkhi, spokesman for police in Diyala, north of Baghdad. Three insurgents were also killed and 10 people wounded in the shooting, which began Saturday night as armed groups sought to take control of Al-Hudaid, west of the provincial capital Baquba.

Eurointelligence Daily Briefing - 14 September 2010: ECB is buying PIGs bonds again

ECB is buying bonds again

• The European Central Bank has stepped up its purchases of Irish, Portuguese and Greek bonds, reverting a downward shift since June;
• the FT has identified a change in the ECB exit strategy: interest rates might go up while the banks are still on life support;
• European Commission produces upbeat growth outlook for the eurozone;
• Le Monde says Sarkozy illegally used secret services to spy on its journalists;
• lots of – mostly negative – reactions on Basel III: Germany’s Sparkassen are granted a ridiculously long transition period – until 2023 (or what is 3023?);
• Credit Suisse makes the point that innovations in the banking sector are likely to be so substantial that regulation is likely to lag behind;
• other critics point out that the result is uneven implementation, as some countries clearly want to go further than others;
• Goldman Sachs predicts an emerging market capital inflow bubble, and fears a regulatory backlash in the form of capital controls;
• Gideon Rachman, meanwhile, argues that of the two big anniversaries this week – Lehman and 9/11 – the financial crisis is by far the more important.

Comment and Analysis

The eurozone's banking crisis goes on and on and on

By: Wolfgang Munchau

Two years after Lehman’s collapse, the fragility of the European banking sector is still an issue. I would bet we are still talking about it in five years. That, in turn, means the financial crisis will go on and on and on, at least in the eurozone.

Allegation: Americans Flooded Out Millions in Pakistan to Protect U.S. Drone Military Base

From Washington's Blog:

Feryal Ali Gauhar served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund and is the only UN Goodwill Ambassador who quit over the invasion of Iraq.
Gauhar is a Pakistani actress, filmmaker, writer and human rights activist. Her most recent book is set in Afghanistan. It’s called No Space for Further Burials.
Gauhar told Democracy Now today:

Feryal Ali Gauhar: I just happened to stumble across a contractor ... the contractor who built the base, who inadvertently, actually, spoke about it.... So, he actually mentioned to me that the River Indus, which is one of the largest rivers in the world, carrying now a volume of water which has not been known in contemporary history, was breached on the left bank deliberately in order to protect the base, which is on the right bank. And the breaching caused, consequentially, the inundation of an entire district, which resulted in the displacement of millions, not thousands, but millions, because we have 170 million people in the country, and this particular district is one of the most densely populated. So, yes, there is a connect between, you know, what is considered to be a natural disaster, but then the management of that disaster is not natural at all.
Amy Goodman: And this is a base that is used, run by US military, to run its drone attacks?
Feryal Ali Gauhar: Oh, absolutely. In fact, it is a base where non-US military personnel are not allowed. In fact, the person I was talking who was there, who built the base, actually said to me that one of the reasons why non-US military personnel are not allowed is not just for security of the US military personnel, but because they do not wish to share the technology. They are—you know, we’ve had a long historical and political tie with the People’s Republic of China. And so, there is this fear that was expressed while the contractor was working on the base that the drone technology, you know, should remain specifically in the hands of the US military, and it should not be replicated by any other nation. So there is that protection of the technology itself. It’s not just the protection of the personnel.

Even if Gauhar's allegation is true, she is not alleging that Americans caused all of Pakistan's flooding. Specifically, the flooding started in the Northwest part of Pakistan, and then spread to the middle and finally the southern-most province of Sindh. The incident which Gauhar addressed took place in Sindh.