While circumstances prevent the completion of some longer pieces for the moment, here’s a quick scan of the horizon:
Double Down, Triple Down, All the Way to Hell
Pentagon brass and their sycophants in mufti are now making the media rounds, laying the groundwork for the next great move by the world-historical military genius David Petraeus, the most-lauded general never to, er, actually win a war: moving ground troops into Pakistan. The Los Angeles Times has the story here.
First, of course, there will be the usual push to make the Pakistani military kill massive amounts of their own people. This will, as always, inflame the situation, exacerbate extremism and violent reaction, thus nicely setting the stage for American troops to step in — oh, as a last resort, of course! — and take control of the "deteriorating situation."
Obviously, given what happened to Stanley McChrystal when he let his aides wag their tongues a bit too much in Paris bistros, Pentagon staffers are not about to be caught "off message" these days. So the dispatch of anonymous briefers in this case can only be seen as a planned reconnaissance in force to "prepare the battlefield." Not the actual fields in Central Asia where Petraeus is now killing civilians (and throwing away American lives) at a rising clip, of course; no, we mean the battlegrounds of the Beltway, where the Pentagon bureaucrats like Winless Davy do their real fighting.
The move is being sold as a way to "show improvement" in the the war before Obama’s re-election, but that’s all a sham. Obama surely knows what is painfully obvious to any sentient being: an expansion of the ground war into Pakistan will result in a maelstrom of blood and hate that will extend and deepen the Central Asian quagmire for years, decades.
But of course, that is precisely what our war-profiteering, empire-addicted militarists want. As court stenographer Bob Woodward duly recorded, Petraeus himself told Obama: "You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting … You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives."
This the mindset that rules Washington now. From all the evidence, Obama fully shares this vision. Those who think otherwise must cling to the spin that Obama’s aides propagated through the obliging stovepipe of Woodward: that the president is a limp rag who can easily be rolled by the boys in Hell’s Bottom. (It is astounding that Obama’s people, who have praised the book, think this is some kind of positive image of their boss.) But even in the highly unlikely case that Obama is some kind of "prisoner" of the Pentagon, with his peace-loving hands are tied by military meanies, it doesn’t matter. Prisoner or willing participant, the result is the same: the militarists are in charge, and they will not stop, no matter how much death and ruin they wreak around the world — and at home.
Across the Borderline
Want to cut down on crime? Then open your borders. That’s the word from a new report that shows a deep drop in crime rates in California during an 18-year period that saw more than 3.6 million foreigners pouring into the state. Charles Davis has the stats:
If you listened to the professional demagogues on talk radio and, all too often, in public office, you might think the United States is beset by an immigration-induced crime wave, the country’s border regions home to nothing but gun battles and sadness. But statistics, those damned things, suggest otherwise, with California actually experiencing a 55 percent drop in violent crime at the same time more than 3.6 million foreigners migrated to the state.
Serious property crime in California — auto theft, burglary, arson — also dropped 29 percent between 1991-2008, according to a new paper from the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice (via The Crime Report).
Crime also dropped in the state’s border and major metropolitan regions, with San Diego’s violent crime rate dropping 58 percent at the same time more than a quarter-million foreign-born persons moved to the county. Los Angeles County likewise experienced a 68 percent decline in violent crime and a 42 percent drop in property crime even as it added more than 1.3 million immigrants to its population.
"Non‐citizens are approximately 27 percent of California’s population," the paper reports, "however, data that tracks prison inmates who have immigration holds placed on them indicate that this group constitutes approximately 11 percent of the state prison population."
No doubt this is all a clever plan on the part of them damn Mescans to disguise themselves as law-abiding denizens for two decades to facilitate their long-term plan to take over the country and impose Latino Catholic sharia law on good white folk. Better have a pre-emptive deportation right now!
Dark as a Dungeon
While the media make endless hay with the rescue of the Chilean miners, Juan Cole plays Eeyore at the picnic by asking a few pertinent questions on how they came to be stuck down there in the first place. Astute observers of contemporary history will not be surprised to find that the ultimate culprits could well be that dynamic duo of yesteryear: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
One Toke Over the Line
Glenn Greenwald has much to say on the sinister Drug War-Terror War symbiosis that has spawned so much death and corruption across the world for decades. This is a theme we’ve been banging on about for many years here as well. One of my first pieces on the hydra-headed Terror-Drug mutant was written for the Moscow Times back in November 2001 — a little more than two months after the "Terror War" began. You can see that piece here. You can also see a harrowing illustration of the kind of Drug War-bred corruption that Greenwald describes, in this piece from 2006, which tells a sickening tale of complicity in state murder that went all the way to the top of the "shining city on the hill." A case now completely forgotten, needless to say.
The Hard Truth of Quantitative Easing
It was the work of Arthur Silber that first pointed me to two of the best guides through the economic morass that our betters have made for us: Mike Whitney and Michael Hudson. Writing separately, usually at Counterpunch, they provide a potent one-two punch that demolishes the conventional wisdom and willful ignorance that surrounds the relentless, bipartisan effort to drive the nation and the world into a state of neo-feudalism.
This week, both Whitney and Hudson addressed the scam of "quantitative easing." This stimulus programs are ostensibly designed to pump government money into the national economy during an economic crisis, priming the pump to keep businesses — and their employees — afloat in the choppy waters.
But somehow it doesn’t work out that way. The low — practically zero — interest on the trillions pumped out by government "easing" is snapped up by a few big investors, who then immediately bank it and invest it overseas, where the interest rates are higher. They make huge profits, but the "stimulus" money doesn’t stay in the local economy, and the economic problems don’t get addressed. By putting no real restrictions on the use and flow of tax money given to banks, quantitative easers only enrich a small number of people immensely, while letting millions of people languish in economic doldrums.
But that’s only the half of it. As Hudson points out, these programs are also a form of economic warfare on the rest of the world. Foreign nations are swamped by elite investors funneling American stimulus money into their economies, buying up "foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized instrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership." This influx forces up the price of the local currency, wreaking havoc on exchange rates, exports and employment. As Hudson notes:
Such inflows do not provide capital for tangible investment. They are predatory, and cause currency fluctuation that disrupts trade patterns while creating enormous trading profits for large financial institutions and their customers. Yet most discussions of exchange rate treat the balance of payments and exchange rates as if they were determined purely by commodity trade and “purchasing power parity,” not by the financial flows and military spending that actually dominate the balance of payments. The reality is that today’s financial interregnum – anarchic “free” markets prior to countries hurriedly putting up their own monetary defenses – provides the arbitrage opportunity of the century. This is what bank lobbyists have been pressing for. It has little to do with the welfare of workers.
Obama and the Fed are now gearing up to inject another $1 trillion into this profit funnel. And because they will refuse to take any responsibility for ensuring that the new stimulus is directed at addressing the nation’s financial crisis, much if not most of that money will simply end up in the hand of a tiny sliver of elite investors, who will use it to enrich themselves, war economic war abroad — and leave American workers and homeowners (and the long-forgotten poor) to sink further into the mire.
But then again, for the easers, as with the militarists, quagmire is a feature, not a bug.
**Photo © 2010 by Alexey Floyd