[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report

[Bill Totten]

Read this or George W Bush will be president the rest of your life

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (October 01 2008)


101 ways to get rich without doing anything socially useful

Why do we have this thing called a "financial crisis"? Why have we had
such a crisis periodically ever since the United States was created?
What changes occur or what happens each time to bring on the crisis? Do
we forget how to make things that people need? Do the factories burn
down? Are our tools lost? Do the blueprints disappear? Do we run out of
people to work in the factories and offices? Are all the services that
people need for a happy life so well taken care of that there's hardly
any more need for the services? In other words: What changes take place
in the real world to cause the crisis? Nothing, necessarily. The crisis
is usually caused by changes in the make-believe world of financial
capitalism.

All these grown men playing their boys' games. They create an assortment
of financial entities, documents, and packages that go by names like
hedge funds, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, index funds,
credit default swaps, structured investment vehicles, subprime
mortgages, and dozens of other exotic monetary vehicles. They create all
manner of commercial pieces of paper, of no known real or inherent
value, backed up by few if any standards. Then they sell these various
pieces of paper to the public and to each other. They slice and dice
mortgages into arcane and risky instruments, then bundle them together,
and sell the packages to those higher up in the pyramid scheme. And some
of those engaged in this Wild West buying and selling become
millionaires. Some become billionaires. They get Christmas bonuses
greater than what most Americans earn the entire year. Is all this not
remarkable?

And much of the buying is not done with the buyer's own money, but with
borrowed funds; "leveraged", they call it. The pieces of paper sometimes
represent commodities, but the actual commodities are not seen, may not
even exist; if the seller demanded the buyer's own funds, or the buyer
wanted to see the goods, the whole transaction would freeze. They sell
"long", expecting the price to rise; they sell "short", expecting the
price to fall; they sell "naked short", which means they neither possess
nor own what they're selling; a name for each gimmick. They take
ever-greater risks buying and selling increasingly-esoteric pieces of
paper. It's a glorified Las Vegas, casino capitalism.

These pieces of paper can be so complex that many of those buying and
selling them do not fully understand them; no problem, they just resell
the pieces of paper to someone else at a higher price, even when one or
both parties know that the paper, while pretending to be payable debt,
is virtually worthless. The government, even when it tries to moderately
regulate this Monopoly board, can at times also be confused by the
complexities of the pieces of paper, compounded by the
less-than-transparent practices that envelop the transactions; a
potpourri including speculation, manipulation, fraud. Billionaire
financier Warren Buffett has called the pieces of paper "weapons of mass
financial destruction".

The boys of finance have been playing their games for years, and so at
each stage of the process there are insurance policies allowing the
players to hedge their bets; they insure, and they re-insure; hopefully
covering themselves against the many risks of the game, often knowing
that they're trading in questionable debts; the giant corporation AIG, a
major player in the insurance game, has just been taken over by the
federal government. And with each transaction, at each level, someone
earns a commission or a fee. There are also other firms whose purpose in
life is to go around rating various players and their pieces of paper
and their credit worthiness and giving seals of approval which are
relied upon by investors. Some of these rating firms, we're now
learning, have been surprisingly incompetent, when not simply dishonest

President Roosevelt, confronted in the 1930s with similar players,
called them "banksters".

It's all built on faith, as fragile as the religious kind, the belief
that something is worth something because it comes with a piece of paper
with reassuring words and numbers written on it, because it's traded,
rated, and insured, because someone will sell it and someone will buy
it. The same market psychology, the same herd mentality, that went into
constructing this house of cards built on pillars of greed can cause the
house to collapse in a heap. But the Monopoly players keep their
bonuses, and bow out with multimillion-dollar golden parachutes; while
tent cities are springing up all over America.

Is this any way to run a society of human beings?

And the government is in the process of trying to bail out these
reckless traders, these parasites, rescuing them and their system from
their own nonsense. With our money; without a major restructuring of the
Alice-in-Wonderland rules of the financial games, without instituting
the toughest of regulations, oversight, and transparency, and with no
guarantee that the spoiled-little-brat Masters of the Universe will act
in any way other than their own narrow self interest, the rest of us be
damned.

Capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst
motives, will somehow produce the most good.

There is perhaps some consolation. The libertarian and neo-conservative
true believers will have a harder time selling their snake oil of
privatization of Social Security or any other social program. Government
regulation of matters vital to the public's welfare may be taken more
seriously. We may hear less of that old bromide that markets are
inherently self-correcting. It may even give a boost to the idea of
national health insurance.

And the libertarians and neo-conservatives are hurting and defensive,
albeit not yet admitting to any new-found wisdom. A Washington Post
interview with some true believers at the Cato Institute, where Ayn
Rand's picture prominently hangs, produced these quotations: "Too much
regulation got us where we are" ... "The biggest emotion we're feeling
right now is frustration that the media narrative is that this is a
crisis of the free market, a crisis of capitalism, a crisis of
under-regulation. In fact it's a crisis of subsidization and
intervention" ... "Capitalism without losses is like religion without
hell."{1}

And just think: Cuba has been tormented without mercy for fifty years
because it refuses to live under such a financial system.


Why I never watch presidential debates

During their September 26 debate, John McCain criticized Barack Obama
for saying that, as president, he'd be willing to meet President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad of Iran. McCain stated: "Now here is Ahmadinejad, who is now
in New York talking about the extermination of the State of Israel, of
wiping Israel off the map ... and we're going to sit down without
precondition across the table to legitimize and give a propaganda
platform to a person that is espousing the extermination of the State of
Israel ... "

First it must be noted that Ahmadinejad, speaking at the UN earlier in
the week, used no threatening language at all against Israel. What he
said was that Iran was submitting to the UN "its humane solution based
on a free referendum in Palestine for determining and establishing the
type of state in the entire Palestinian lands". So John McCain just made
up a story and Barack Obama said not a word in contradiction to anything
McCain said or implied about Ahmadinejad.

And that's it, America. That's all you get. You've heard a Republican
saying some awful things about an ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) and
you've heard a Democrat who has no problems with a word of that. That
equals truth, doesn't it?

This matter of Ahmadinejad and "wiping Israel off the map" has been a
heated issue for three years now. However, according to people who know
Farsi, the Iranian leader has never said anything of the kind. In his
October 29 2005 speech, when he reportedly first made the remark, the
word "map" does not even appear. According to the translation of Juan
Cole, American professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History,
Ahmadinejad said that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from
the page of time". His remark, said Cole, "does not imply military
action or killing anyone at all". It's the distortion of this to imply
some sort of extreme violence on the part of Iran that has made the
remark sound threatening.

Cole added that the quote comes from an old speech of Ayatollah
Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and "is just an inexact
translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. [Ahmadinejad] quoted
Khomeini that 'the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from
the page of time'. It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in
a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks." {2}

At a December 2006 conference in Teheran, the Iranian president said:
"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet
Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom". {3} Obviously, the man is
not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the
dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.

For a word-by-word breakdown of Ahmadinejad's remark, in Farsi and
English, see {4}.

Moreover, in June 2006, subsequent to Ahmadinejad's controversial
speech, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated: "We have
no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world,
and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention
of going to war with any state." {5}


Palintology

What's the proper term to use to categorize a person who is ... blindly
patriotic, jingoist, an evangelical Christian creationist, gun and
hunting enthusiast, National Rifle Association supporter; denies the
science behind global warming, with a philosophy of "dig, dig, dig", and
in foreign policy: "bomb", "bomb", "bomb"; untraveled, uneducated,
ignorant, a devoted book-banner, racist, opposed to equal rights for
gays, fanatically anti-abortion, anti-feminist, and has a
seventeen-year-old daughter pregnant and unmarried?

The proper American term is "white trash". Or, as the honorable governor
of Alaska apparently prefers, "redneck" - "Rouge cou" is what she called
a business she registered.

And what do you call the person if on top of all that she declares in
the year 2008 that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11 and that
"a surge in Afghanistan also will lead us to victory there as it has
proven to have done in Iraq"? The proper term is "scary", or perhaps
"scary moron".

And what do you think of this person when you learn that she believes
that the war in Iraq is a "task that is from God"? I think this is
actually a form of insanity. There are people in institutions all over
the world charged with killing others, who insist that they were acting
under God's command.

And if the above is not enough to make you fall in love with the woman,
consider that she believes that humans coexisted with dinosaurs 6,000
years ago; and have a look at a video of the
vice-president/president-to-be undergoing an exorcism performed by a
minister to free her body from "witches" {6}. When we consider the flak
that Barack Obama received because his minister is not in love with US
foreign policy, imagine what Palin will get for having a minister who
performs witch exorcism. Nothing.

So, have we forgotten anything about her charming belief system? Santa
Claus? The Easter Bunny? Oh, she must have been kidnaped by a space
alien. I hope some day to meet her and have her read my palms, my tea
leaves, my aura, my horoscope, and my tarot.


When is a holocaust not a holocaust?
When the perpetrators call it a victory.

Although the "surge" has failed as policy, it appears to be succeeding
as propaganda. It seems to be the only thing that supporters of the war
have to point to, and so they point, and they point, and they point.
Allow me to point out that while there has been a reduction in violence
in Iraq - now down to a level that virtually any other society in the
world would find horrible and intolerable, including Iraqi society
before the US invasion and occupation - we must keep in mind that thanks
to this lovely little war more than half the population of Iraq is
either dead, crippled, traumatized, confined in overflowing American and
Iraqi prisons, internally displaced, or in foreign exile. Thus, the
number of people available for being killers or victims is markedly
reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in the
country (another good indication of progress, n'est-ce pas? nicht wahr?)
- Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves
than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy
mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down;
and the powerful movement of Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr has had a
cease-fire in effect for many months, unconnected to the surge. On top
of all this, US soldiers, in the face of numerous "improvised explosive
devices" on the roads, have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of
things like ... well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is
also down. Remember that insurgent attacks on American forces is how the
Iraqi violence all began in the first place.

Just imagine - If the entire Iraqi population over the age of ten is
killed, disabled, imprisoned or forced into exile there will probably be
no violence at all. Now that would really be victory.

No American should be allowed to forget that Iraqi society has been
destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything - their
homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs,
their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal
system, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their security,
their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have
their surge.


Politicizing and militarizing sports

A few years ago I wrote in this report:

A TV ad for Anheuser-Busch shown during the recent Super Bowl: An
airport, a contingent of US soldiers in uniform is passing through,
presumably on the way to or just returning from Iraq; the people in the
terminal one by one look up, and slowly realize who's walking by - It's
(choke) ... Can it (gasp) be? ... Yes! HEROES!! Real honest-to-God
heroes!! The faces of the onlookers are filled with deep gratitude and
pride. The soldiers begin to realize what's happening as the waves of
adulation sweep over them, their faces are bursting with matching
gratitude and matching pride, their faces say "Thanks". The screen says
"Thanks". Not a dry eye in the whole damn terminal. In the Soviet Union
they might have been a group of Stakhanovite hero workers on the way to
the factory.

Last month at the United States Tennis Open women's final in New York, a
woman comes out to sing "America the Beautiful". Pretty common of course
at sporting events in beautiful America. If it's not that, it's another
well-known hymn to athleticism like "God Bless America" or "The Star
Spangled Banner". But this time, as she finishes singing, dozens of
marines in full uniform march out and unfurl an American flag a mile
long. The crowd eats it up. Two days later, at the men's final, same
thing plus four jet planes roar past above the stadium.

I wish I had been there. So I could have yelled out: "What the fuck does
this have to do with tennis?" Hardly anyone would have heard me above
the din of the patriotic orgy, but if anyone did, I would not be
surprised if they reported me to the nearest authorities (and in
present-day America one is never too far from authorities), and I'd be
asked to accompany the authorities to the security office (and in
present-day America one is never too far from a security office).

Norman Mailer wrote in 2003, a few weeks before the US invasion of Iraq:
"My guess is that, like it or not, or want it or not, we are going to go
to war because that is the only solution Bush and his people can see.
The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to
become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more
importance in our lives ... And before it is all over, democracy, noble
and delicate as it is, may give way. ... Indeed, democracy is the
special condition ... we will be called upon to defend in the coming
years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the
corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with
mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America
already" {7}


Für meine deutschen Leser

My book Rogue State has a new German edition. This is an updated version
of the previous German edition, with a much better translation. You can
read about it at:{8}


Website help needed

AOL is closing down the website service for its members.  I have to
relocate my website with its numerous separate files and pages to a new
host and convert the AOL HTML language, AOLPRESS, to the language of the
new host.  This is completely beyond my knowledge and skill.  Is there
an expert out there who can advise me?  Some payment can be arranged.


NOTES

{1} Washington Post. September 25 2008

{2} "Informed Comment", Cole's blog, May 03 2006;
www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html

{3} Associated Press, December 12 2006

{4} Global Research, January 20 2007,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527)

{5} Letter to Washington Post from M A Mohammadi, Press Officer, Iranian
Mission to the United Nations, June 12 2006

{6} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvemHKXZFs. Also see Associated
Press, September 25 2008

{7} International Herald Tribune, February 25 2003

{8}
www.amazon.de/Schurkenstaat-William-Blum/dp/3897065304/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221896103&sr=8-2


William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two
(Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common
Courage Press, 2004)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at
http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read
at this website.

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