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SLOVENIAN POLISH SERBIAN TURKISH ***Lisez
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Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles Prometheus Books April 2010 Wednesday,
March 20, 2013 The Iraq War
Fiasco, Ten Years Later
by Rodrigue Tremblay (Author of
the books “The Code
for Global Ethics”, and “The New American
Empire”) "International
law? I better call my lawyer; he didn't bring that up to me." George
W. Bush (1946- ),
U.S. president (2001-2009), (December 12, 2003) "I
told George Bush as early as August 2002, during a meeting in Detroit, that
we would support him if he receives the authorization from the UN. —I told
him: 'To have the backing of the U.N., it will be necessary that you
establish more clearly that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass
destruction.' —There was no such evidence. Since he [George W. Bush] did
not provide sufficient evidence, he did not get the support of the U.N. ...
Without an authorization from the United Nations, Canada must stay away from
military interventions abroad, even if they are carried out by its allies.
" Jean
Chrétien (1934- ), Prime Minister of Canada (1993-2003), (March 13, 2013) “Those who were 100 percent certain
there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq, before the March 2003 invasion] had
less than zero percent knowledge.” Hans
Blix (1928- ),
former chief United Nations weapons inspector, August 2010 “I am
saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone
knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Alan Greenspan (1926- ), former Federal Reserve
Chairman (in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New
World”, 2007) “He who wants to kill his dog accuses him of having
rabies.” Old French saying
This month marks the 10th anniversary of
the decision by the Bush-Cheney administration to invade the country of Iraq
and initiate what can be called a war
of choice. This is a good time to briefly look back at this
unsavory historical episode. Public opinion
polls
indicate that a majority of Americans now think the 2003 Iraq war,
in which tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans died, was a
mistake. In the UK., the other country most involved with the Iraq war, a
similar poll taken recently indicates that only 28
percent of Brits now believe the war was justified and made the world a safer
place. Other polls also indicate that George
W.Bush has a good chance to be considered, if not the worst,
certainly among the worst presidents the United States ever had. The man had no
moral compass. Indeed, his
personal and unilateral decision to launch an illegal war of
aggression in
2003—against Iraq, a country that had not attacked the United
States—based on disingenuous lies, fabrications, disinformation and
propaganda, and in violation of the United Nations' Charter, whose Security
Council refused to authorize the American aggression, will go down in history
as one of those abuses and pretexts that devious politicians resort to when
they want to circumvent international law in order to promote some narrow
personal or national interests. But Iraq had a
lot of oil, and it was
considered in certain circles an enemy of Israel,
a country that the current generation of American politicians supports
blindly. That was enough to want to topple its government and take control of
it. In the summer
and fall of 2002, distressed by what I considered nothing less than a neocon
cabal and a series of outrageous lies by the Bush-Cheney administration, I
began writing a book denouncing the coming war of aggression against Iraq. The book was
initially published in French six weeks before the March 20, 2003 military
assault against Iraq under the title “Why
Bush Wants War” (“Pourquoi Bush veut la
guerre”), a book presently out of print (now a collector's item). It
was published one year later, this time in English, under the title of “The
New American Empire”, and, a few years later, was published
in Europe under the title of “Le
nouvel empire américain” and was also translated into Turkish
under the title “Yeni
Amerikan ImperatorLugu”. The book
described the type of cabal and aggressive war campaign in the Bush-Cheney
administration and in many American media to push the United States toward an
illegal war of aggression in the Middle East in order to overthrow Iraq's
Saddam Hussein regime and to exert an overt influence in the way that country
uses its natural resources. Indeed, the
2003 American war against Iraq was primarily an economic war, because the
government of Saddam Hussein was excluding U.S. and U.K. companies from Iraqi
oil resource development. This was in retaliation for these two countries
supporting unconditionally Israel's decades-long oppression
of the Palestinians. As a consequence, the Bush-Cheney
administration and its vassal Tony Blair in England felt that they had to
intervene militarily in order to prevent French, German, Russian, and Chinese
oil companies to develop Iraq's oil, while U.S. and U.K. oil company
interests were excluded. Basic economic interests were thus at play and
international law was powerless to stop the military onslaught. The pretext
found was to accuse Iraq to harbor “weapons
of mass destruction” that it could possibly and
eventually use against its neighbors. Such so-called “weapons of mass
destruction” were never found because they never existed in the first place,
as the Hans
Blix U.N. inspecting commission had publicly certified. The
entire propaganda operation by the Bush-Cheney administration was nothing
more than a lie and a fraud. Mind you, the
2003 Iraq war was triggered by the Bush-Cheney administration after the
United States was already involved in a protracted war against Al Qaeda
fundamentalist conservatism in Afghanistan, and this since the fall of 2001 under
a United Nations' authorization and in retaliation for this latter country
Taliban government's support for the 9/11 terrorists. Another
oft-repeated lie by the Bush-Cheney administration was that the government of
Iraq had been involved, one way or another, in the 9/11 attack. Not a thread
of evidence has ever been produced to that effect, while all indications were
to the contrary that secular Saddam Hussein was vehemently opposed to the
religiously-bent Al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden. The American
people and a majority in Congress would probably not have supported the Iraq military
invasion had there not have been a barrage of propaganda that originated from
the pro-Israel
Lobby in the media and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Libby-Perle cabal
inside the U.S. government. These two campaigns had a tremendous impact in
persuading a passive public still shaken by the 9/11 terrorist attacks that
the lies
it was fed were facts. We pretend to
live in countries of laws and not of men and that nobody is above the law.
This can be disputed, however, in light of the fact that no one in the Bush-Cheney regime in the U.S. and in the
Tony Blair regime in the U.K. has been held accountable to date for this
massive abuse of power, a prima facie
impeachable offense. Instead, most of the actors in this tragedy have been
rewarded with plush nominations. The U.S. military officially withdrew from Iraq in 2011,
but that country is still in a mess and it will suffer economically and
politically for decades to come the destruction and destabilization it has
been subjected to by the 2003 U.S.-led military invasion. Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, a
Canadian-born economist, is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist
Principles”,
and of “The
New American Empire”) Please visit
the book site about ethics at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted,
Wednesday, March 20, 2013, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send
contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in
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All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly
attributed. _________________________________ © 2013 by Big Picture World Syndicate, Inc. Thursday,
March 7, 2013 A More Than
Questionable Bernanke Fed Monetary Policy
(Author of
the books “The Code
for Global Ethics”, and “The New American
Empire”) "If
the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their
currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and
corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all
their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered." Thomas
Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd US President "It
is well enough that people ... do not understand our banking and monetary
system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before
tomorrow morning." Henry
Ford (1863-1947),
American automobile industrialist "When
plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they
create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes
it and a moral code that glorifies it." Frederic
Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist It is becoming increasingly obvious that
the Bernanke Fed's monetary policy of fixing short-term interest rates at
close to zero percent,
and (with inflation at two percent or so) of forcing negative real interest
rates, was primarily designed not to help the U.S. economy but to shore up
the super large
American banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy when the
investment bank Lehman
Brothers failed on September 15, 2008. Indeed, with this
policy, the Bernanke Fed has transferred hundreds of billions to these super
banks at a huge cost to the rest of the economy and to international holders
of U.S. dollars. Just as the Greenspan Fed created the housing bubble and let the derivatives market explode, thus sowing the seeds of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Bernanke Fed, using faulty economic analysis, has embarked upon a policy of zero short-term interest rates for many years, —an open-ended QE3 policy of buying mortgages and other financial instruments with newly printed money, thus creating the largest bond bubble in U.S. history. When the distortions
it has created in the U.S. economy unfolds in the coming years, the true
costs of this policy will become clearer. Indeed, when the Fed tries to
unload the financial assets it has acquired from the near-insolvent super
large American banks, in a not too distant future, bond prices will be in
danger of collapsing and nominal interest rates could spike, with a very
negative impact on financial markets and on the real economy. Economists
know that price controls
and price fixing do
not work, at least, not for very long. Credit markets are not immune to this economic reality. In any
market, for any good or service, when prices are fixed by a government or a
government agency below the market clearing price, sooner or later a gap
develops between the excess quantity demanded and the insufficient quantity
offered. The classical
example of resource misallocation is rent control
implemented in some cities and in some countries. The inevitable result of
such a policy is eventually the appearance of a shortage of rental units and
a deterioration in the quality of those still offered. In fact, if any given
government wishes to create housing slums and a housing shortage, it can just
impose stringent rent controls on a permanent basis. This does not mean that
housing cannot be subsidized. But freezing prices is generally not an
efficient way to subsidize housing or any other commodity or service. Now. What
happens when the Fed artificially sets the short-term interest rate at close
to zero for a long period? A long series of negative economic repercussions
follow. -First, large
banks which have access to Fed loans at this artificially low rate will
borrow as much of that newly created money as they can and they will lend
risk-free to the deficit-laden government at two or three percent. Nice trade
if you can get it! -Second, the
demand for bank loans will go up with the banks' prime borrowing rate
artificially low. However, banks will increase their borrowing requirements
for private borrowers since they can invest their excess reserves risk-free,
either at the Fed itself, albeit a low rate, or by lending to the government
at a higher rate. Private borrowers will be frustrated and valuable projects
may remain under-financed, while the government has little incentive to curb
its deficit. -Third, banks
and their preferential clients will use part of their excess reserves
obtained at close to zero percent to buy financial assets. Stock prices and
bond prices will go up. -Fourth, other
investors such as insurance companies and pension funds, with the knowledge
that the Fed will keep short-term rates low for an extended period of time,
will buy staggered long-term bonds and keep their prices artificially high,
when one considers the inflation risk and the time risk involved. -Fifth, with
borrowing rates so low for so long, some financial operators will begin
buying up companies with leveraged money, thus placing finance ahead of
industry. —All of this translates into negative economic and financial distorsions in the long run. Maybe that's the
reason the Bernanke Fed seems so popular on Wall Street. It has been a
powerful tool for asset reflation. I even personally heard a financial
commentator on the CNBC financial TV network declare that Ben Bernanke was
the “best Fed chairman, ever” because he was being credited for a
stock market rally! Such is not the consensus among economists and on Main Street, where savers and retirees on fixed income have seen their revenues collapse over the last five years. That reminds me how Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was venerated on Wall Street, that is, until it became clear that his policy of low interest rates, easy money, junk mortgages and inadequate banking regulation brought down the financial house of cards. In economics, there is no magic, and the piper has to be paid sooner or later! I don't know if it is because of the fact that the American central bank and its federal banking system is partly owned by large private banks, or because there are so many bankers who sit on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), (the committe that sets interest rates) and who are in conflict of interest, but the Fed has a recurring and nagging tendency to create financial bubbles and economic booms and busts that end up—more often than not—benefiting large banks and their CEOs, at a huge cost to the real economy. The Fed is really an institution primarily designed to subsidize large banks with public money. The American
government itself subsidized the large banks with its $700 billion TARP program. We agree that the Fed had to intervene during the
financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers, whatever its
role in creating that crisis. However, did it have an obligation to keep
subsidizing the super large banks for five years or more and dump the cost on
the rest of the economy while imposing very little restraint on their lax behavior?
I don't think so. The Fed cannot
argue that without such a prolonged subsidy policy, the economic
recovery after the 2008-2009 recession would have been thwarted. In fact,
this has been the slowest recovery from a recession since WWII. And the
Bernanke Fed should share some responsibility for that. But now that the
Bernanke Fed has dug itself into a monetary hole, it should be extra prudent and
careful in reversing course, less it precipitate the U.S. economy into
another recession. People have suffered enough in losing their jobs and, for many, their homes, and for many retirees, the income from their savings, without again being the Fed's victims. Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, a
Canadian-born economist, is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist
Principles”, and of “The New American Empire”) Please visit
the book site about ethics at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted,
Thursday, March 7, 2013, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send
contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in
French) to: N.B.:
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to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes, and is not intended in any
way as personal advice of any sort. Disclaimer:
All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly
attributed. © 2013 by Big Picture
World Syndicate, Inc. Thursday,
February 7, 2013 The U.S.
Congress: From One Crisis to Another
(Author of
the books “The Code
for Global Ethics”, and “The
New American Empire”) “The full consequences of a default —
or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are
impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. . . Denigration of the full
faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the
domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange
markets." Ronald
Reagan (1911-2004),
40th President of the United States
(1981–89), (1983) “Decisions about the debt level [should] occur in conjunction with spending and revenue decisions
as opposed to the after-the-fact approach now used, ... [doing so] would help avoid the uncertainty and disruptions that
occur during debates on the debt limit today.” U.S.
Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) "I will not have another
debate with this Congress over whether they should pay the bills for what
they've racked up. ... We can't not pay bills that we've already
incurred." President Barack Obama, Tuesday January 1, 2013 "That’s why the American people hate
Congress." Chris Christie, New Jersey Republican Governor, (January 2, 2013, after the Republican House majority refused to vote on a $60 billion aid package for victims of Superstorm Sandy) One crisis averted, three to come! Indeed, that's what can be said after
the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on January 23, 2013, to
suspend the government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months. In fact, the
cycle of artificially created crises will go on and on in Washington D.C.
Now, the next crises are scheduled for March 1s, for March 27th and for May
19th. Stay tuned. —On March 1st, automatic sequester cuts agreed by
Congress in 2012 will take effect, causing an immediate cut of $69 billion in
public discretionary spending. Then, on March 27, the U.S. government's
ability to fund itself (the "continuing resolution") will run out.
And, of course, come May 19, the melodrama of raising the debt ceiling will
be back again in force. Ever since Republicans took control of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, a fiscal drama with the White House and the U.S. Senate has been replayed time and again. One of the political gimmick is called the “raising of the country's debt limit.” Why so many
artificial crises in the current American political system? Extreme political
polarization seems to be the answer. Indeed, since
the 2010 mid-term election, when the Republican Party took control of the
House of Representatives with some 242 seats, this party has behaved as if it
were in fact two parties in one. There is the traditional conservative
Republican Party on one side, and the radical Republican Tea Party on the
other side. With some 67 anarchist anti-tax
and anti-establishment Tea Party House members voting as a block, the
latter has been in a position to hold the balance of power in the House and
to prevent compromised solutions to the country’s fiscal problems. A good example
was the 2011 showdown between the Democratic Obama administration and the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives regarding raising the U.S.
government’s debt ceiling. In the spring of 2011, House Republicans,
spurred by Tea Party members who practice no party discipline toward the Republican Party except to themselves, and reneging on a
decades-long bipartisan tradition, refused to raise the nation’s debt
ceiling, thus threatening to push the U.S. government toward debt
default. They demanded that the Obama
administration concede to freezing tax revenues and to enacting massive spending
cuts. In the midst of a financial crisis and an economic slowdown, such huge
public spending cuts could have pushed the U.S. economy toward an economic
depression similar to the 1930’s
Great Depression. For the first
time, therefore, House Tea Party members decided to use the perfunctory
requirement to raise the debt limit to gain partisan political advantage.
That move has introduced into the functioning of the U.S. Congress an element
of radicalism and brinkmanship that could prevent the U.S. government from
operating properly for years to come. Mind you, the
obligation for Congress to vote on raising the U.S. government’s debt
ceiling has existed since a 1917 law to that effect was enacted. It allows
the U.S. Treasury to proceed with borrowing to finance government operations
as outlined in an already approved budget for a given fiscal year. Economically
speaking, indeed, there are three main ways to finance public expenditures:
-through tax revenues; -through borrowing; -or, through the printing press,
when a government borrows from its own central bank. The latter is in fact an
inflation tax
imposed on every user of the national currency. Therefore, if the U.S. Congress has already approved a
public budget of operations that does not raise taxes in a sufficient amount
to cover outlays, and if an inflation tax is out of question, the only other
avenue left is to borrow the required funds. For years, the
1917 requirement to raise the debt limit was considered redundant since the
budget had already been approved and it was seen as a simple bipartisan formality.
Since 1940, for example, the U.S. debt ceiling has been raised 94
times, 54 times by a Republican administration and 40 times by
a Democratic administration. Altogether the debt ceiling has been raised 102
times since 1917. It has been raised every year that the U.S. government has
run a deficit. If the Tea
Party members of the House keep on routinely using the 1917 law to formally raise the debt
limit as an obstructionist tool, Congress
may be constantly gridlocked and the
U.S. government will continue going from crisis to crisis. A small minority
of House members could then hold the U.S. government
hostage. As a consequence,
it could become increasingly difficult for the U.S. Administration to implement
sensible economic and fiscal policies along the principle of majority
rule. The U.S. economy is bound to suffer severely from such a
political paralysis. In 2011, former president Bill
Clinton expressed the view that the 1917 law
is unconstitutional since it goes against Article
I, sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution that requires
that Congress pay “the Debts and provide for the
... general Welfare of the United States.”
Besides, the Fourteenth Amendment (section 4) of the U.S. Constitution states
that: "the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall
not be questioned.” Therefore, if Congress does not fulfill its duties
for one reason or another, the President in whom executive power is vested
may have the right to act for the “general
Welfare of the United States”. In the coming weeks, if the House of
Representatives refuses bipartisan cooperation and keeps stonewalling the
Administration, President Obama may have no other choice but to call the Tea
Party members’ bluff by unilaterally declaring the 1917 law unconstitutional
and letting the courts sort it out later. A constitutional crisis may seem to
many to be a better alternative than a repetitive and protracted economic and
financial crisis and an economy constantly teetering on the brink of a
permanent “fiscal
cliff”. ___________________________________________ Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, a
Canadian-born economist, is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist
Principles”, and of “The New American Empire”) Please visit
the book site about ethics at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted,
Thursday, February 7, 2013, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send
contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in
French) to: N.B.:
Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise. Please
register to receive free alerts on new postings of articles. Send an
email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To
unregister, send an
email with the word "unsubscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To write
to the author: N.B.: This article is distributed privately and without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes, and is not intended in any
way as personal advice of any sort. Disclaimer:
All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly
attributed. © 2013 by
Big Picture World Syndicate, Inc. |