Coup d' État in Washington
Paper Tiger - The United
States and the World
Fiery Dragon: China in East
Asia
André Gunder Frank is
currently an Associate of the Luxembourg Institute for
European and International Studies, Luxembourg and
Senior Fellow, World History Center, Northeastern
University, Boston, Mass.
For details on André Gunder
Frank`s writings, see
http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/index.html
Political
Background
Recent events in
Iraq that require no further elucidation here make
this essay now more timely than when it was written.
For this essay is
a combination of two related articles:
First, my
earlier paper focusing on the 2000 [Election] Coup
d'Etat. This paper related to the illegitimacy of
the Bush government and the long standing agenda of
the Cheney group which has made another Coup
within the Bush Coup.
Secondly, my
paper on the paper tiger, concerning
the underlying Achilles heels vulnerability of
American power that rests only on the paper
dollar and the military Pentagon.
Vice President
Gore’s major speech damning the policy of the Bush
administration and calling the President himself
incompetent, as he surely is, nonetheless judiciously
avoided any direct mention of the illegitimacy of the
president and his administration.
Bush's presidency
was derived from a veritable coup d’ Etat, not in
having lost the popular vote, but first in having also
lost the vote in the key state of Florida and "won" it
through fraud and violence.
And then they
violated the fourteenth amendment of due process
through the stacked vote in the Supreme Court and its
refusal to let anybody abide by due process.
Moreover, not
only did Dick Cheney manage the entire transition to
and construction of the Bush administration, but as
Vice President he has continued to run the President’s
show from behind the scenes. That is so much so that
after their joint three hour testimony to the 9/11
commission about their Iraqi malfeasance, the New
York Times was moved to editorialize that it made
evident that the President is no more than a puppet
managed by the Vice-President.
And as we know
and the coup part of this essay further documents, the
Vice-President himself was captured and molded to its
own ends of long standing by a team of the PNAC –
Program for the New American Century – maniacal
adventurers, led by "Wolfowitz of Arabia."
This illegitimacy
of the President and his administration’s inauguration
now takes further significance with the revelations
that after having lied to the electorate, they have
continued to lie and mislead the American public and
the world regarding the State of the Nation and that
of the world, as well as with regard to the
devastating impacts of their foreign and domestic
policies.
The documentation
is overwhelming, but not even the tip of the iceberg
is yet emerging that the Administration and President
Bush himself have consistently lied and covered up
about September 11, 2001.
They have lied
about security and have deliberately weakened it and
have themselves terrorized the American public, not to
mention that they have torn the Bill of Rights to
shreds and otherwise have violated the Constitution.
By sending the
machine gun toting National Guard into every airport
in the country, they are every day violating the Posse
Comitatus Act that prohibits military participation in
domestic civilian affairs that has stood since 1878.
They have also violated a more recent law prohibiting
the CIA from doing so as well. All this only to scare
the public and Congress into accepting their
unconstitutional Patriot Acts and other measures from
the agenda of a small right minority.
And of course
they have perpetrated monstrous lies about their war
against Afghanistan and now against Iraq.
Thus, an
illegitimate president who promised "gentle
conservatism" has instead taken the most radical
departure of militarizing American society at home,
privatizing the US Military abroad, and antagonizing
the rest of the world by his unilateral militarism and
anti-environmentalism, not to mention his
administration's befuddled ‘’justification."
His and his
government’s verbal denunciation combined with de
facto generation and sponsorship of terrorism is
wearing thin and has in a totally irresponsible
fashion led them and us into a Catch 22 damned if you
do, damned if you don’t debacle.
The one in Iraq
demonstrates one of several underlying vulnerabilities
of American reliance on the Pentagon.
The Paper
Tiger Dollar
As this essay
argues, this military Achilles heel also further
weakens the other one, which is based on the paper
tiger dollar. That has declined in value against
the Euro and the Yen since I first wrote about this
threat and how it in turn would weaken the Pentagon
that must be financed by devalued dollars, especially
in its increasing ventures abroad.
At the same time,
while the revelations and soul searching about
American torture in Iraq – and now we know long since
also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo - the US occupation
in Iraq is proceeding relentlessly with its major
agenda there: OIL and the economy.
The Cheney
sponsored oil pipeline through Afghanistan that the
Taliban was supposed to implement but was unable to
guarantee, thus converting it from friend to enemy, is
now in the hands of the new American appointed
government in Kabul.
In Iraq, it is
yet difficult to tell WHAT the US occupation is doing
– nobody even bothers to look beyond the torture any
more - about the oil and the economy, other than that
they are being privatized and sold off at bargain
basement prices to big American companies, with Vice
President Cheney’s Haliburton in the lead. He still
derives income from it, although his super-hawk friend
Richard Perle resigned his high Defense Dept position
so that his conflict of interest would ‘’not hurt the
President’s re-election chances.’’
Meanwhile
President Bush himself defends giving a near monopoly
of contracts for ‘’re-building Iraq’’ to US near
monopolies on the grounds that ‘’WE’’ put our lives on
the line and so are we legitimately entitled to the
economic rewards there from.
But more
important, with the region’s second largest oil
deposits in Iraq , what is the US really doing there
on the world oil market and its efforts to control or
break OPEC?
One thing is
sure, and the oil section of the paper tiger part of
this essay speaks to this issue: Iraqi oil is again
being priced in US dollars and no longer in Euros as
under Saddam Hussein.
In the meantime
also, the dollar has indeed fallen significantly
against the Euro and the Yen. This devaluation of the
dollar would at least make US industrial and
agricultural products more salable on the world market
– if they were otherwise competitive . But the
industrial ones are not and the agricultural ones
thrive only thanks to the huge government subsidy, the
same as in Western Europe and Japan.
On the other
hand, a devalued dollar makes the US less
attractive for the continued inflow of foreign capital
from overseas savings on which the US economy and the
American standard of living and way of life is so
vitally dependent.
All presidential
administrations have lied to the American public about
the sources of their well being that are allegedly
based on American efforts and skills promoted by
healthy government domestic and foreign economic
policies. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The Clinton boom
years of the 1990s – after the 1989-92 recession -
were based entirely on the suction and flight of
capital first from the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe who were forced into a depression far deeper
than that of the 1930s and after the financial crisis
of 1997 in Southeast Asia that was deliberately
sponsored by Larry Summers, now President of Harvard
but then at the World Bank and the US Treasury.
That resulted in
declines of income by 40 and 50 percent and the
deliberately managed misery and death of millions in
East Asia – and the flight of their own and foreign
speculative capital to the US safe haven of Treasury
certificates (where it permitted a sudden but
temporary balanced budget) and into Wall Street. There
it fired the bull market that attracted Main Street to
invest in Wall Street and made Mr. And Mrs. America
feel rich and able to spend – also on $ 100 billion of
excess imports of textiles and gadgets from China.
The Chinese in
turn also sent the dollars they earned thereby back to
Washington to buy Treasury certificates, so that the
poor Chinese are by now the world’s largest creditors
to the rich Americans.
More recently
however, China has begun to import more itself, in
particular from Southeast Asia and using it’s American
earned US dollars to get at least something more that
worthless Treasury certificates on which the US is
bound to default, because it will be neither able nor
willing to make good.
All depends on
how long the rest of the world is still willing to put
up with the US dollar as the world currency and what
alternatives thereto there are. And this brings
us back to the Pentagon as a shaky support for the
dollar and the Iraq debacle as yet another chink in
the rusty armor of confidence in the US in general and
its money in particular.
And it leads us
forward to examine the expanding role in the world of
China, whose ten percent annual economic growth has
been duplicating income every six years and making it
a, and soon perhaps the, major player in the world
economy.
What is the
basis and security of the United States position and
power in the world? The answer is the twin pillars of
the Dollar and the Pentagon.
The dollar is
a paper tiger – literally so, much more than when
Mao applied this term to the US. The Pentagon’s
strength and mobility is dependent on the dollar,
which in turn is supported by US military might. But
these two supporting towers of the US are also its
two Achilles heels. Through them, like the twin towers
of the World Trade Center in New York, the entire US
edifice can come crashing down in one morning – not by
terrorism but through the operation of the world
market economy and the foolish policies of the United
States government itself.
With the end of
the cold war in 1989 and the subsequent decline of
Russia as a serious immediate contender, as well as
the decline during the 1990s of the hype of JAPAN AS #
1 [Vogel 1979] two other regions, states and powers
came into contention. They are the United States whose
fortunes and prospects seemed to have declined after
1970 but recovered in the 1990s; and yet it is a paper
tiger. The other is the rising Fiery Chinese Dragon In
global terms, we could regard this as a process of
continued shift of the world center of gravity
west-ward around the globe, from East Asia/China to
Western Europe, then across the Atlantic to the United
States, and there then from the eastern to the western
seaboard, and now onwards across the Pacific back to
East Asia, as observed in my "Around the World in
Eighty Years" [Frank 2000]. Let us inquire further
into the so far last part of this historical process.
Coup d'Etat
in Washington
Be wary of
conspiracy theories, beware of real conspiracies, and
be aware of a grab of power.
It has happened
in Washington and its instigators are pursuing a
policy of (several) faits accomplis that
attracts ever more people to jump on the band wagon.
The Busch administration has made a real Coup d’Etat
and achieved its apparently unknowing acceptance by
America and the World. Even Hitler and Mussolini came
to power by electoral routes and Stalin and Latin
American dictators had to resort to violence to make
their coups d’etat. Busch and his small coterie
required none of these to get to the seat of power.
The Coup
To begin with,
Bush’s accession to the Presidency was in violation to
the Constitution. It is not that he received a
minority of the popular vote, because the Constitution
provides for the President’s election by the Electoral
College. But Bush received the Electoral College vote
by fraud, for he lost the decisive popular and thereby
electoral vote in Florida. His brother Jeb as Governor
of Florida with the help of Mrs Harris as Secretary of
State first deprived hundreds of thousands of African
American and presumably Democratic voters of the vote
through incarceration, intimidation, and other means.
The Republican
Cuban Mafia sent its goon squads physically to prevent
a recount in Broward County. Mrs. Harris did all she
could, which was plenty, to interfere with recounts in
other counties in Florida. The alleged recounts that
were made were a sham. They only recounted votes that
were NOT counted in the first count by voters who had
been unable to punch holes all the way through the
voting cards without leaving the infamous hanging
chads. Yet much more importantly one either before the
decision or afterwards when the newspapers did it
again, NO one ever recounted the votes that HAD been
for the Democrats but were discounted because voter
mistakenly also punched a second hole on a confusing
ballot. Yet even the third and most conservative
candidate Pat Buchanon declared publicly that these
duplicate votes in heavily Jewish and Democratic
counties were surely not for him but for the
Democratic Party candidate. These votes [or even half
of them if they had been allotted also to other
candidates] would have given a decisive majority of
the popular vote and therefore of the Electoral
College votes in Florida to the Democrats. Yet they
were never counted or recounted for the Democrats.
In the end Bush
was not elected, but was SElected in the
Supreme Court by the decisive political swing vote of
Justice Kennedy. The Supreme Court's appeal to the 14th
amendment, which guarantees due process of Law to all,
was ironically biased. For it was selectively applied
without due process to squash the popular vote in
Florida, but the same due process procedures were not
applied to challenged votes in any other State. That
in itself was already a de facto coup d’ Etat.
Then, several
members of the House of Representatives called for a
challenge of the Electoral College under
Constitutional provisions that permit the Congress to
do so if the challenge has the support of at least one
member of both houses. Yet they were not joined by
even a single Senator, who would have made the
challenge legally effective. In other words, the
Congress simply acquiesced to this power grab by the
Bush administration through a Coup d’eat with the help
of the Supreme Court but in clear violation to the
Constitution.
That was the
beginning of the violation of the Constitutional
separation of powers and checks and balances. Since
then, the Bush administration has carried these
violations farther than any previous one in the
history of the United States. Not even President
Lincoln in the Civil War, nor President Roosevelt in
the Second World War nor his previous attempt to stack
the Supreme Court, ever grabbed and concentrated as
much power for the executive branch while
marginalizing the Legislative branch and the
Judiciary.
Beware of
Conspiracy Theories. But be aware that it was really
Vice-President elect Dick Cheney who then put together
the Bush Administration, selecting whom to place in
which positions of power, especially in defense
affairs. And beware of PNAC, the Project for a New
American Century, which was already lobbying
Washington with their plans for a "Pax Americana" in
1992, 1997, and 2000 among other notable dates.
PNAC issued a
long report in September of 2000 entitled "Rebuilding
America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for
a New Century." Its statement of principles calls for
a massive increase in military power, U.S. military
domination of Eurasia to prevent the rise of hostile
powers; and pre-emptive [not just pre-ventive]
military action against states suspected of developing
weapons of mass destruction. PNAC’s prescriptions have
been converted into official US policy and praxis by
the Bush Administration.
PNAC founding
members and signatories of its statements include;
-
Cheney himself,
-
Lewis Libby, Cheney's top
national security assistant and now the
Vice-President’s chief-of-staff
-
Donald Rumsfeld, also a
founding member, now Secretary of Defense
-
Paul Wolfowitz [of Arabia], now
Deputy Defense Secretary and arguably the groups
ideologue
-
Eliot Abrams, pardoned by Bush
Sr. in the Iran/Contra scandal and now member of the
National Security Council
-
John Bolton, Undersecretary for
Arms Control and International Security
-
Richard Perle, the most
outspoken hawk in the Reagan administration who
advocates dumping the United Nations, then chairman
of the powerful Defense Policy Board, who was forced
to resign one of his positions over a conflict of
interest scandal,
-
Randy Scheunemann, President of
the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who was
Trent Lott's national security aide and who served
as an advisor to Rumsfeld on Iraq in 2001
-
Bruce Jackson, now Chairman of
PNAC and former vice president of weapons
manufacturer Lockheed-Martin who headed the
Republican Party Platform subcommittee for National
Security where he called for – as had Wolfowitz for
some years - the removal of Saddam Hussein
-
William Kristol, noted
conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, a
magazine owned along with the most hawkish Fox News
Network owned by Ruppert Murdoch
-
Norman Podhoretz, editor of the
right wing New Republic
-
and others, like Norman Kaplan
and Douglas Feith.
The core group of
the PNAC now hold the highest positions of policy
making power in the Pentagon and much of it in the
White House.
They have also
planted one of their group in the State Department to
keep an eye and check on Colin Powell who is the only
major foreign policy player who is not a member of
this inner sanctum.
An interesting
sidelight is that Wolfowitz , Perle and Feith also
went to Israel to serve as advisors to Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, for whom they drew up a battle plan
against the Palestinians. Behind them lies the strange
ideological bed-fellow political alliance of two of
the most powerful lobbies in the United States:
Organized Zionism and Christian Fundamentalism. For
good measure, throw in the Cuban Mafia as well.
Another matter to
consider are some of the connections of these same
people with the private sector. Two examples should
suffice to give a general idea. Cheney was chairman of
Halliburton Inc., which in turn owns Brown & Root and
other habitual contractors of the Defense Department
for major construction and/or petroleum projects
around the world.
One of these
companies was awarded a 1 Billion dollar contract to
re-build the Iraqi oil fields in case they should be
damaged in the war. Another, of which the now "Prime
Minister" of Afghanistan was a former employee, namely
UNOCAL, is first in line to build the proposed oil and
gas pipeline across Afghanistan from Central Asia to
the Indian Ocean. The Bush family and George W. Bush
himself have long standing business relations with the
Carlyle Group, which also represents the Bin Laden
family (including Osama), with whom they have also
maintained direct relations.
The White House
and the Executive Branch generally has made full use
of its new power to serve its economic and political
allies. Those who made the largest campaign
contributions have been handsomely rewarded with
government hand-outs and regulations, or rather
de-regulation. The Bush administration has issued at
least 200 separate executive orders to roll back
regulations enacted by previous administrations, even
Republican ones, to protect the environment and/or
Public Health and Safety. Executive Order has received
a whole new meaning: Special interests write an order
that is passed to the President for his signature,
whereby mostly without knowing what he is doing he
converts it into an Executive Order.
The Pentagon has
petitioned the White House to exempt it from existing
environmental protection regulations that hamper their
disposal of spent munitions and other hardware and
thereby interfere with ‘’national security. " The
President deliberately appointed as Secretary of the
Interior a person known for her ties to the timber and
oil industries to whose exploitation she seeks to open
thousands of acres of federally owned lands as well as
the Alaska Wilderness for the construction of a new
pipe-line – all in the interest of course of
‘’national security."
The Bill Of
Rights and the Constitution
More serious
still, the Bush administration has shredded the
Bill of Rights, abrogated the Constitution, and even
violated the age - old common law of Habeus Corpus,
which prohibits the detention and holding of anybody
against his will without due process of law.
Elsewhere in the
Executive Branch, President Bush appointed and lent
full support to Attorney General John Ashcroft who was
already known for his racist and authoritarian
inclinations. Although many Senators had doubts about
his appointment, the Senate ratified it anyway. Since
then, Attorney General Ashcroft and his staff have
converted several arms of the Department of Justice
into those of a police state. The Executive has
encouraged and permitted the Attorney General and the
Department of Justice Judiciary Branch to violate the
Bill of Rights and the Constitution on multiple
counts. For instance, the US Government already claims
the right to monitor all e-mail and to bug telephone
conversations without specific judicial permission.
The Bush
Administration brought Admiral Pointdexter back into
government after his participation in the Iran-Contra
Scandal and lyiung about it to Congress. His new
mission is a project, called Total Information
Awareness Project (TIAP): to develop computers to
monitor "vast quantities of data generated by US
civilians in their daily lives: Academic transcripts,
ATM receipts, prescription drugs, telephone calls,
driving licences, airline tickets, parking permits,
mortgage payments, banking records, emails, website
visits and credit card slips" [The Guardian
November 23, 2002].
In critique of
all this and the Patriot Act, only the lone voice in
Congress of Representative and presidential candidate
Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) has asked
"How can we
justify in effect canceling
- the First
Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to
peaceably assemble?
- the Fourth
Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against
unreasonable search and seizure?
- the Fifth
Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for
indefinite incarceration without a trial?
- the Sixth
Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial?
-the Eighth
Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual
punishment?
- And Justice
for All?"
The Constitution
makes all the rights it guarantees extensive to
anybody in the US, but the Attorney General has
declared that non- citizens are not worthy of
protection by the Constitution.
We do not know
yet how much of a loss that is because the Department
of Justice and its Immigration and Naturalization
Service[INS] have also taken it upon themselves also
to divest naturalized and even native-born American
Citizens of their citizenship, again in clear
violation of the Constitution.
And even those
who remain citizens are under constant threat to have
their rights violated without due process under the
fourteenth amendment, or to be detained in violation
of Habeus Corpus.
They are denied
representation by legal counsel and trial in civil
courts, as provided for by the Constitution. In
particular, hundreds of thousands of American
residents and Citizens of Arab descent or even of
features that appear to individual agents of the
Department of Justice or the police’s racial profiling
as perhaps being Arab, or Muslim, or who knows what
else have been called in for questioning. When they
appeared in Los Angles, they were detained without
charge. They now live in constant fear of the infamous
knock on the door at 3AM that was made infamous by
Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s GPU. That is so if they
are even favored by a knock on the door before a blast
of gunfire of shooting first and asking questions
later.
So far as we know
of over 700 people who have remained in detention
since September 2001; though there may be many more,
since nobody knows or says where they are, or who they
are, or what they are accused of. Indeed, only a dozen
of these have ever been charged with anything. The
others remain out of sight and out of mind except for
their families who are not allowed even to secure
legal representation for them. So do the innocent
Afghani prisoners the US keeps in in Guantanamo and
the countless ones still detained under horrible
conditions in Afghanistan. How come there is no public
outcry about any of these?
On the other
hand, the same Executive Branch has divested the
Judiciary of powers and the citizenry of judicial
protection by illegally transferring powers of the
Judiciary to itself. Perhaps only the most visible
tip of the iceberg of this process is the Bush
Administration and Pentagon declaration that it will
bring normal civil suits before military tribunals
that operate under rules of court marshal and other
procedures of Military "Justice" that can order death
sentences without appeal. Moreover, the accused do not
know whereof, cannot chose legal counsel, and their
conversation with whom can be overheard by the
authorities. The prestigious very conservative
publicist William Saffire refers to them as ‘’kangaroo
courts" and observes that "no longer does the judicial
branch and an independent jury stand between the
government and the accused.
In lieu of
those checks and balances central to our legal system,
non-citizens face an executive that is now
investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or
executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order
calls this Soviet-style abomination "a full and fair
trial."
The Land of
the Free?
John Ashcroft has
also issued instructions to the Department of Justice
to resist as far as possible the delivery of documents
under the Freedom of Information Act.
And the
Executive itself has severely restricted the kind and
number of documents of its own that it is prepared to
make public. In other words, transparency and
therefore control or even critique of the ever
widening powers and their use by the Executive Branch
is itself being severely restricted.
On the other
hand, the Executive Branch has multiplied its own
access to information. During the congressional debate
on John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, an American Civil
Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill's assaults on
the Bill of Rights revealed that Section 215 of the
act "would grant FBI agents across the country
breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the
FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . .
. requiring any person or business to produce any
books, records, documents, or items." That includes
bookstores and public libraries being obliged to
divulge who is reading what. This is now the law,
Alas, the
Congress has been intimidated into passive acceptance
of virtually everything and anything the Executive
proposes and demands. It passed the Patriot Act that
severely restricts civil liberties virtually without
reading it.
The proposed
Patriot Act # 2 has not even bee submitted to the
Congress for study and yet the version leaked by the
Press suggests that it proposes even more of a police
state than the first one. When the Leader of the
Democratic Majority in the Senate voiced only the
mildest doubts about Bush’s military moves, he was
immediately reprimanded by his Republican Majority
Leader counterpart Lott, for ‘’how dare he criticize
the President in time of war!" Both have been forced
to resign since then, but for scandals unconnected to
that one.
Moreover, the
Executive has been more than secretive about the
events and circumstances of September 11, 2001; and
the Congress has not launched any serious inquiry of
its own. Neither have the Media. There has not even
been any public inquiry or disclosure into the failure
of the Air Force or National Guard to scramble fighter
aircraft to investigate the airliners that had clearly
gone off course. That is every day routine standard
operating procedure, but it was called off or at least
not enacted during the 90 minutes that elapsed between
the crash into the first World Trade Tower and the one
into the Pentagon – that is IF the Pentagon was
damaged by an aircraft which has been seriously
questioned if only because no evidence has ever been
made public for such an occurrence.
Nor has the
government given any account of its receipt and
disregard of multiple forewarnings from intelligence
agencies among its allies in Pakistan, Russia,
Germany, France, Israel. In other words, the very
circumstances that allegedly require all these
domestic and foreign responses by the Bush
Administration are themselves wrapped in a shroud of
self-imposed secrecy.
The violation of
the Constitutional provisions for the separation of
powers is particularly flagrant regarding the powers
reserved to the Legislative Branch of the Congress and
the Constitutional prohibition against military action
in domestic civil affairs.
Bush also
disregards the Constitutional provision that only
Congress may declare war, and it violates the 1976 War
Powers act that Congress passed to regulate that
Constitutional provision after it had been grossly
violated in the Vietnam War. The Bush administration
has de facto-also abrogated the 1878 Posse Comitatus
Act that prohibits military participation in the
enforcement of civil law, and it violates the general
Constitutional provision against the military action
in domestic affairs.
Instead, the Bush
Administration has visibly mobilized the Armed Forces
and National Guard around all US airports and
elsewhere, and the Pentagon is drawing up plans for
its intervention in endless domestic affairs. It
stands to reason that the machine gun toting military
presence in the passenger areas of airports has not
added one iota to security but serves only to
terrorize the public into blind and passive acceptance
of the violation of their civil rights there and
elsewhere. Even the government has stated repeatedly
that any other terrorist attack on the US is not
likely to copy that of September 11, 2001 but to take
totally different forms against which this military
presence would offer no defense. Indeed, it would not
have prevented that of September 11 either. The
pretext that the country is at war is being used as
cover for US government terror of its own at home and
abroad; and the country is being militarized as never
before, not even in war time.
The Pentagon is
extending its actions in American Civil Affairs ever
more, also by establishing a new office of Under
Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security, which then
created a northern command to coordinate military
response to domestic threats. The Pentagon also has a
new Under Secretary for Intelligence,
Stephen Cambone,
who said the existing agencies will continue with
their work but that his unit will ensure that they are
meeting the intelligence needs and priorities laid out
by the Pentagon, also at home. [Boston Globe June 8,
2003].
Pax Americana
The Pentagon is
also expanding into previously unimagined places and
roles overseas. There are now well over 100 US
military bases around the world. and current US
military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of
Africa, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, South Korea,
the Philippines, and former Soviet states such as
Georgia. The latest details, disclosed by the Wall
Street Journal on June 10th 2003, include plans to
increase U.S. forces in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa
across the Red Sea from Yemen, setting up
semi-permanent "forward bases" in Algeria, Morocco,
and possibly Tunisia, and smaller facilities in
Senegal, Ghana, and Mali that could be used to
intervene in oil-rich West African countries,
particularly Nigeria. Similar bases--or what some call
lily pads--are now being sought or expanded in
northern Australia, Thailand, Singapore, the
Philippines, Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, throughout
Central Asia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Qatar, even
Vietnam, and Iraq. [Needless to say that the
construction of these military bases constitute
lucrative multimillion contracts for US corporations
including Bechtel and Halliburton. (Edtor)]
The new republics
in former Soviet Central Asia and the former Soviet
satellite states in Eastern Europe are a particularly
strong magnets for U.S. military presence, and a
glance at the map will show that the US is
systematically encircling China. Moreover, the
Pentagon military missions are marginalizing the State
Department diplomatic ones, with the senior military
officer having more resources and greater influence
than the US ambassador [Boston Globe, June 8 2003].
Even so, the
Associated Press reports on February 24 that " senior
U.S. officials have been quietly dispatched in recent
days to the capitals of key Security Council countries
where they are warning leaders to vote with the United
States on Iraq or risk "paying a heavy price."
Although this kind of blackmail has been SOP in all
American administrations, the Bush Administration has
carried the threat and practice to previously unheard
of new heights. As President Bush declared in his
State of the Union address "Those who are not with us,
are against us" – and will pay a heavy price.
"We are in the
process of taking a fundamental look at our military
posture worldwide, including in the United States,"
said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on a
recent visit to Singapore, where he met with military
chiefs and defense ministers from throughout East Asia
about U.S. plans there. "We're facing a very different
threat than any one we've faced historically." But
recall that this is the same Wolfowitz of Arabia
talking who drew up his and PNAC’s plans to face this
different threat already in his memos of 1992, 1997
and 2000.
The Law of the
West
The Bush
administration has also set aside centuries of
International law. It wages illegal war, prohibited by
numerous international treaties and by the United
Nations Charter. Indeed it makes war without even
declaring it, which even Hitler took the trouble to
do.
The US armed
forces wantonly violate Geneva conventions of crimes
against humanity, genocide, weapons of mass
destruction such as depleted uranium, cluster bombs,
massive ‘’Daisy Cutter" bombs, destruction of civilian
facilities to provide as power, water, and sanitation,
and even neutral international waterways as when it
deliberately blocked shipping on the Danube.
The Bush
Administration (though Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr.
also already earlier) have completely emasculated the
United Nations instruments and procedures set up by
the US and its allies after World War II to preserve
the peace. Bush even had the gall to go to the UN and
charge it with dereliction of duty and of its
reputation by failing to give its stamp of approval
for his War against Iraq – when the clear duty of the
UN and especially of its Security Council is not to
make war but to keep the peace.
His government
and his lackey press mislead the public into believing
that a Security Council resolution could legalize his
war. The fact is that even with a SC resolution, his
father’s War against Iraq in 1991 was in clear
violation of Articles 2, 27, 41, 42, 43 and 53 of the
UN Charter, among others.
The NATO states
and President Clinton failed even to consult the UN
before going to War against Yugoslavia. Then the
present President waged War against Afghanistan
without the slightest provocation from its government,
without UN approval. And then it made War on Iraq in
clear violation of the expressed desires of the UN
membership. What this illustrates is the total
abandonment of the UN as an institution and instrument
for peace.
The demise of
the UN as an International Body
After the US
bombs a country into shambles, it then goes to the UN
to ask it to pick up the pieces, or in plain English
allegedly to legitimize the US military occupation of
the country it had just destroyed.
But not only
that, the violation of international law also
constitutes ipso facto a violation of national law,
because Senate ratification of an international treaty
converts it into US law as well. Moreover, domestic
democracy has been sacrificed to waging international
war as well, as when NATO did so against Yugoslavia
without even a single member country government
troubling itself to ask its parliament or Congress for
authorization to do so.
In a word, the US
has replaced existing International law by new Law IN
the West on the model of its own old Law OF the West.
Then in the 19th century, vigilante lynch
mobs formed ad hoc to go hang whomever they wanted;
and now the US is imposing this Vigilante "Law" on the
rest of the world by force. And as the vigilantes
bought off or terrorized the sheriff and the judge to
‘’legitimize" themselves, so is the US, doing the same
world wide in the real world, following the scripts of
fictitious Spaghetti Western movies.
The Media
And what of the
Fourth Estate – the Media?
They are strictly
the mouthpiece of the Administration.
Note their
behavior at White House, State Department, or Pentagon
news conferences. All their questions are limited to
technicalities about the implementation of
Administration policies that are themselves accepted
as cartes blanches.
Never ever has
any representative of the US media posed a question
that challenges the basis of the official policy in
even the most timid way.
Indeed, not only
what the press says or does not say reflects the
policy and press- releases of the Administration. The
very Media selection of what is or is not ‘’news,’’
e.g on the 6.30 pm Evening News of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN,
Fox, and shame on PPS for carrying the just as bad Jim
Lehrer News Hour, is a simple reflection of what the
White House or the State Department have declared to
be ‘’news’’ that morning.
No matter how
world shaking an event, if it has not shaken the
piper, it does not merit mention by the media. But
whatever the White House or the State Department
declares to be news IS news. And even they have been
obliged to make an agonizing reappraisal , albeit
still only partial, of their own, after the
revelations of torture of Iraqis has cast a shadow on
their previous glowing reports about bringing
democracy to them.
Their pieces in
the press are little better. In a survey of op-eds in
the Washington POST over four months, Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman found twice as many columns for as
against the war, and in February 2003 the count was 24
in favor and 10 against, while the POST itself brought
9 editorials of its own to support the war. And that
was regarding a war that had the highest popular
opposition ever.The TV and radio talk shows are even
more dominated by defenders of Administration policy.
No matter that the Administration cooks, blends,
massages and even simply invents the news; as is
finally emerging regarding the non-existent weapons of
mass destruction, which were the alleged reason for
waging War against Iraq.
The Home of
the Brave from 1984 to 2003
George Orwell
would have to regard his dire predictions of Big
Brother for 1984 as a benign Alice in a charming
Wonderland version of Animal Farm. The latter is to be
compared to the 2003 Bush and Ashcroft reality of
double-think and new-speak in which, however, some are
no longer equal than others, either at home or abroad,
but still WAR IS PEACE – really – the President said
so.
But the capacity
of the United States to rule the world is more than
questionable, especially after its 2003 debacle in
Iraq.
Paper Tiger -
The United States and the World
The US still has
the world’s largest economy, which saw boom times
during much of the 1990s, and it has unrivalled
military power exceeding the total of the next dozen
or more military powers combined. Moreover, the
present Bush administration makes use of both of them
in unilateral policies to impose its will on the rest
of the world, friend and foe alike, to all of which
Bush threw down the gauntlet of ‘’you are either with
us or against us."
With means you do
as we say, and against means you are under threat to
be destroyed economically and politically, as well as
militarily if we wish.
In case there be
any doubt about our intentions and capabilities,
Russia and Argentina are prime examples on the
economic front as are Iraq through the boycott, Serbia
and Afghanistan are so on the military front as well.
The latter – but really both – are what President Bush
father called THE NEW WORLD ORDER when he bombed Iraq
in 1991. I termed it THIRD WORLD WAR in two senses,
one that it takes place in THE THIRD WORLD and
secondly that this war against the Third World
constitutes a THIRD World War [Frank 1991].
The prosperity
and welfare of the American people rests primarily on
its position in the world today as Britain’s did in
the nineteenth century. That observation is
fundamentally different from the political and media
hype about the sources of American exceptionalism that
are supposedly in its genius, morality, productivity,
and other characteristics that allegedly differentiate
America from the rest of the world. On the contrary,
America rests on two – maybe three- pillars:
1.The DOLLAR as
the world currency whose monopoly privilege the US
has to print at will, and
2. The PENTAGON
with its unrivalled military capacities.
3. A third
pillar perhaps is the government, educational and
media fed IDEOLOGY that obscures these simple facts
from public view. Moreover each supports the other:
It costs dollars to maintain the Pentagon, its bases
in 80 countries around the world, and the deployment
of its military forces around the globe. Military
expenditures are the prime causes of the twin
American deficits, in the federal budget and in the
balance of trade. Conversely, Pentagon strength
helps sustain global confidence in the dollar.
But this same
mutual reliance for strength, therefore, also
constitutes two mutually related American Achilles
heels.
The dollar is
literally a Paper Tiger in that it is printed on paper
whose value is based only on its acceptance and
confidence in the same around the world. That
confidence can decline or be withdrawn altogether
almost from one day to the next and cause the dollar
to lose half or more of its value.
Apart from
cutting American consumption and investment as well as
dollar-denominated wealth, any decline in the value of
the dollar would also compromise US ability to
maintain and deploy its military apparatus.
Conversely, any
military disaster would weaken confidence in and
thereby the value of the dollar. Indeed, at the 2003
World Economic Forum in Davos, the assembled world
political and business elites expressed very serious
fears that the mere deployment of the US military,
e.g. against Iraq, would bring on a world depression.
TIME Magazine this week reports on a comprehensive
study of the US airline industry, which concludes that
a war against Iraq would drive half of it into
immediate bankruptcy. If so, what of still weaker
non-American airlines? The insecurity that comes with
military saber rattling and threats undermine
confidence in the dollar and put brakes on investment.
And no amount of ideology is sufficient completely to
obscure that economic situation.
In fact, the
world already is in depression, from which so far only
the United States, Canada and Western Europe are
partially exempt.
And the latter is
so, because of the privileged position of the American
economy within the global one, from whose mis-fortune
Americans have been deriving the benefits of that
position, which to repeat is essentially derived from
the privilege of printing the world currency with
which Americans can first buy up the production of the
rest of the world at depressed prices and then have
the same dollars be returned from abroad to be
invested in Wall Street and US Treasury certificates
for safe-keeping and/or higher earnings than are
available elsewhere.
In the mid 1980s
James Tobin [the inventor of the Tobin tax on
financial transactions] and I were to my knowledge the
only ones already to published predictions of DE-flation
as the coming world economic danger. Economic policy
makers however ignored these warnings and this risk
[not really risk, but necessary consequence] while
continuing their policies designed to fight IN-flation.
Nonetheless,
since then commodity prices have fallen sharply and
consistently and more recently industrial prices have
fallen as well. Moreover in WORLD economic terms, high
inflation in terms of their national currencies
[pesos, rubles, etc.] and their sharp DEVALUATION
against the DOLLAR world currency has been an
effective de facto major DE-flation in the rest of the
world. That has reduced their prices and made their
exports cheaper to those who buy their currencies with
dollars, primarily of course consumers, producers and
investors in - and from ! - the United States. These
additionally, which is hardly ever mentioned!, can and
do buy up the rest of the world with dollars that
''cost'' only their printing and distribution, which
for Americans have virtually no cost. [The $ 100
dollar bill is the world's most used cash currency on
which runs the entire Russian economy, and there are
two to now three times as many of them circulating
outside as inside the US].
The American boom
and welfare and then ''balanced'' federal budget
1992-2000 Clinton administration, contrary to its
populist claims, only happened to coincide with this
boom. The also same 8 year long prosperity of the
United States was entirely built on the backs of the
terrible depression, deflation and thus generated
marked increase in poverty in the rest of the world.
During this one decade, production declined by over
half in Russia and Eastern Europe and life expectancy
in Russia declined by 10 - ten - years, infant
mortality, drunkenness, crime and suicide increased as
never before in peacetime. Since 1997, income in
Indonesia declined by half and generated its ongoing
political crisis. That is dissipation of entropy
generated in the US and its export abroad to those who
are obliged to absorb it in ever greater DISorder. It
would be difficult to find better examples – except
the destruction of the entire society in Argentina,
Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone, previously prosperous and
stable Ivory Coast – not to mention the countries that
have been visited by destruction through American
military power
All this has
among others the following consequences: in the US. it
can export inflation that would otherwise be generated
by this high supply of currency at home, whose low
rate of inflation in the 1990s was therefore no
miracle result of domestic ''appropriate'' Fed
monetary policy.
The US has been
able to cover its twin balance of trade and budget
deficits with cheap money and goods from abroad. The
US trade deficit is now running at over 500 billion
dollars a year and still growing. Of that, 100 billion
are covered by Japanese investment of their own
savings in the US that saves nothing and which the
Japanese may soon have to repatriate to manage their
own banking and economic crisis – especially if an
American war against Iraq causes a n even temporary
spike the price of oil on whose import Japan is so
dependent.
Another $ 100
billion comes from Europe in the form of various kinds
of investment, including direct real investment, which
could dry up as the European recession continues, the
Europeans become exasperated with American policy, or
they have any number of other reasons to reduce their
dollar reserves and put them into their own Euro
currency instead.
A third 100
billion is supplied by China, which first sells the US
its cheap manufactures for dollars and then
accumulates those dollars as foreign exchange reserves
– thus in effect giving away its poor producers’ goods
to rich Americans. China does this to keep its exports
flowing and its industries going, but if it decided to
devote these goods to expanding its own internal
market more, its people would gain in income and
wealth, and the United States would be out of luck.
The remaining $ 200 billion of deficit are covered by
other capital flows, including debt service from the
poor Latin Americans and Africans who have paid off
the principal of their debts already several times
over and yet keep increasing the total amount owed by
rolling it over at higher rates of interest. The idea
of declaring US chapter 11 or 9 type insolvency is
however finally catching on.
Thus, deflation /
devaluation elsewhere in the world has like a magnet
attracted speculative financial capital from the rest
of the world - both American owned and foreign owned –
into US Treasury certificates [ stopping up the US
budget deficit] and into Wall Street. That is what fed
and supported its 1990s bull market, which in turn has
increased, supported and spread wider a speculative
and illusory in increase in wealth for American and
other stock holders and through this also illusory
''wealth effect'' has supported higher consumption and
investment. The subsequent and present bear market
decline in stock prices nonetheless is a still a
profit boon for enterprises who issued and sold their
stocks at bull market high and rising stock prices.
For they are now buying back their OWN stocks at what
for them are bargain basement low prices, which
represent an enormous profit for them at the expense
of small stock holders who are now selling these
stocks at low and declining prices. The US
''prosperity'' now rests on the knife edge also of an
unstable enormous domestic corporate and consumer
[credit card, mortgage and other] debt.
Moreover, the US
is also vastly over-indebted to foreign owners of US
Treasury certificates, Wall Street stock and other
assets, which can be called in by foreign central
banks who have been keeping reserves in US dollars and
other foreign owners of US debt. Indeed, it is the
very US policy that has contributed so much to
destabilization elsewhere in the world [e.g. through
the destabilization of Southeast Asia that undermined
the Japanese economy and financial system even more
than it would otherwise have been] that now threatens
and now soon makes much more likely that especially
Japanese and European holders of US debt must cash it
in to shore up their own ever more unstable instable
economic and financial systems. The liabilities of the
US to foreigners now equal two thirds of annual US GNP
– and therefore can and will never be paid off.
However any hick in rolling this debt over and over,
can result in foreign attempts to get out as much
money as they can – resulting in a crash of the
dollar.
Another major
consequence is that the US - and world! - economy is
now in a bind from which it most probably can NOT
extricate itself by resorting to Keynesian pump
priming and much less to full scale macro-economic
policy and support of the US and Western/Japanese
economy, as the Carter and Reagan administrations did.
Military Keynesianism, disguised as Friedman/Volker
Monetarism and Laffer Curve Supply-Sideism, was begun
by Carter in 1977 and put into high gear in 1979, when
Carter the Fed was run by Carter appointee Paul
Volker, who in October 1979 switched Fed monetary
policy from high money creation / low interest price
thereof to attempted low money creation / high
interest [ to 20 percent monetary! ] to rescue the
dollar from its 1970s tumble and attract foreign
capital to the poor US. At the same time, Carter began
Military Keynesianism in June 1979., which was then
escalated further by President Reagan In that they
then succeeded..
It is highly
unlikely however that analogous policies could succeed
again now. The US would need to invoke the same re-flationary
policy again for itself and its allies, now. but it
can not do so! The Fed has already lowered the
interest rate so far that it cannot go much lower and
is not likely to stimulate investment by doing so. On
the other hand, raising the interest rate to continue
to attract funds from abroad would risk choking off
all domestic investment and working capital. Brazil
tried that, admittedly with extravagant monetary
interest rates at 60 percent to attract foreign
capital, and ruined its domestic economy.
The US may
[should? must ??] now attempt a repeat performance of
the 1980s to spend itself and its allies [now minus
Japan but plus Russia?] out of the present and much
deeper world recession and threatening globe
encompassing depression. The US would then again have
to resort to massive Keynesian deficit [ using
September 11 as a pretext for probably military] RE-flationary
spending as the locomotive to pull the rest of the
world out of its economic doldrums. However, the US is
already the world consumer of last resort, but it can
be so with the savings, investments and cheap imports
from abroad, which themselves form part of the global
economic problem.
Moreover, to
settle its now enormous and ever growing foreign debt,
the US may chose also to resort to IN-flationary
reduction of the burden to itself of that debt and its
also ever growing foreign debt service. But even the
latter could - in contrast to the above summarized
previous period- NOT avoid generating a further SUPER
trade balance particularly if market demand falls
further and pressure increases abroad to export to the
US demand/er of last resort. But this time, there will
be NO capital inflows from abroad to rescue the US
economy. On the contrary, the now downward pressure to
devalue the US dollar against other currencies would
spark a
capital flight
from the US, both from US Government bonds and from
Wall Street where significant stock price declines
generate further price declines and deflation in world
terms even if the US attempts domestic inflation.
The price of oil
is yet another fly in the political economic ointment,
whose dimension and importance is inversely
proportional to the health or illness of the ointment
itself. And today that is quite sick and deteriorating
already. The world price of oil has always been a two
edged sword whose double cutting edges can be
de-sharpened with the help of successful alternative
economic and price policies. On the one hand, oil
producing economies and states and their interests
need a minimum price floor to produce and sell their
oil instead of leaving it underground and also
postponing further oil productive investment while
waiting for better times. The US is a high cost oil
producer. A high oil price is economically and
politically essential also for important states like
Russia, Iran and especially Saudi Arabia, as well as
US oil interests. On the other hand, a low price of
oil is good for oil importing countries, their
consumers including oil consuming producers of other
products, and supports state macro economic policy, eg
in the US, where low oil prices are both good politics
and good for the economy. These days, the high/low
price line between the two seems to be around US$ 20 a
barrel - at the present value price of the dollar! But
nobody seems to be able to rig the price of oil at
that level. The present conflict, long since no longer
within OPEC, is primarily between OPEC that now sells
only about 30 to 40 percent of the world supply and
other producers that supply 60 percent, today
especially Russia but also including the US itself as
both a significant producer and a major market,
although that is increasingly shifting to East Asia.
Recession in both and the resultant decline in demand
for oil drags its price downward. US strategy and wars
against Afghanistan and Iraq. is to gain as much
CONTROL of oil as it can and for now to share as
little of it as it must with Russia in Central Asia,
Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions. And that
control, even if it cannot control the price of oil,
is to be used as an important geo-political economic
lever to manipulate against US oil import dependent
allies in Europe and Japan and ultimately its
strategic enemy in China.
For US Keynesian
spending re-flation as well as in-flation can no
longer put the floor under the price of oil needed
today and tomorrow. No policy, but only recovery
generated world market demand I- and/or limitations in
the supply of oil -can now provide a floor to and
prevent a further fall in the price of oil - and its
deflationary pull on other prices. And further
deflation in turn will increase the burden of the
already vastly over-indebted US, Russian and East
Asian, not to mention some European and Third World,
economies.
Thus the
political economy of oil is likely to add to further
deflationary pressure. That would - indeed already
does - again significantly weaken oil export dependent
Russia. But this time it would also weaken US oil
interests and their partners abroad, especially in
Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the low
price of oil during the 1990s has already transformed
the Saudi economy from erstwhile boom to a bust. That
has already generated middle class unemployment and a
significant decline in income that has also already
generated widespread dissatisfaction and now threatens
to do so even more at precisely the time when the
Saudi monarchy is already facing destabilizing
generational transition problems of its own. Moreover
a low oil price would also make new investment
unattractive and postpone both new oil production and
eliminate potential profits from laying new pipelines
in Central Asia.
indeed, there is
an even more immediate urgent need for the US to
control Iraqi oil reserves, the second largest in the
region and the most under-drilled with a large
capacity to increase oil production and drive down
prices. But that is not all or even the heart of the
matter. Many people were surprised when President Bush
added Iran and North Korea to his ‘’axis of evil."
Though they may not be so surprised at American
efforts to promote a coup and change of regime in
Venezuela, which supplies about 15 percent of US
imports. So what do these countries have in common,
many people ask. Well, three of them have oil, but not
North Korea. So what is its threat that puts it in
Bush’s axis. Surely not geography or alliances [Iraq
and Iran were mortal enemies, and North Korea does not
play ball in their league.
The answer is
simple and resolves not only that puzzle but what
could otherwise appear as a rather confused and
confusing US foreign policy:
[1.] Iraq
changed the pricing of its oil from dollars to Euros
in 2000.
[2] Iran
threatens to do so.
[3] North Korea
has changed to deal only in Euros.
[4] Venezuela
has withdrawn some of its oil from dollar pricing
and is instead swapping it for goods with other
third world countries. Besides an old friend of
mine, Venezuela’s Fernando Mires at OPEC
headquarters in Vienna, proposed that all of OPEC
should switch from pricing its oil in dollars to
pricing it in Euros!
OPEC has
recently re-examined his possibility and now Russia
has as well. Nothing else, no amount of terrorism,
could be more threatening to the US; for any and all
of that would pull all support out from under the
dollar as oil importers would no longer buy dollars
but instead Euros to buy their oil. Indeed they would
want also to switch their reserves out of the dollar
and into the Euro. Iraq, prior to the invasion,
already gained about 15 percent with its switch as the
Euro rose against the dollar.
And besides, the
Arab oil states who now sell their oil for paper
dollars would be unlikely to continue turning around
and spending them again for US military hardware. It
is this horrific scenario that US occupation of Iraq
is designed to prevent, with Iran next in line.
Curiously, this oil-dollar-euro ‘’detail’’ is never
mentioned by the US government or media. No wonder
that major European states are opposed to Bush’s Iraq
policy, which is supported only by the UK, which is a
North Sea oil producer itself. Simple how one little
piece of incidental information can make the other
pieces of the entire jig-saw puzzle fall into place!
All of these
present problems and developments now threaten to
[will?] pull the rug out from under US domestic and
international political economy and finance. The only
protection still available to the United States still
derives from its long since and still only two pillars
of the ''NEW WORLD ORDER'' established by President
Bush father after ''Bush's Gulf War" against Iraq and
the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. President
Bush son is now trying to consolidate his father's new
world order [no doubt with the latter still as a power
behind the throne] beginning with the WAR AGAINST
AFGHANISTAN and threatening once again against Iraq,
and the Bush-Putin effort now also to construct a
US-Russian Entente - or is it Axis.
The dollar pillar
is now threatening to crumble, as it already did after
the Vietnam War but has so far remained standing
through three decades of remedial patch work.
But as we have
seen, the US is now running out of further economic
remedies to maintain the dollar pillar upright. It's
only protection would be to generate serious inflation
in the short run by printing still more US dollars to
service its debt, which would then undermine its
strength and crack the dollar pillar and weaken the
support it affords still more.
That would leave
only the US military pillar to support US political
economy and society.
But it and
reliance on it also entails dangers of its own.
Visibly, that is the case for such countries as Iraq,
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and of course all others
who are thereby deliberately put on notice to play
ball by US rules in its new world order on pain of
eliciting the same fate for themselves.
But the political
blackmail to participate in the new world order on US
terms also extends to US - especially NATO - allies
and Japan. It was so exercised in the Gulf War [other
states paid US expenses so that the US made a net
profit from that war], the US war against Yugoslavia
in which NATO and its member states were cajoled to
participate, and then by the War against Afghanistan
as part of President Bush's new policy pronouncement.
He used the early Cold WAR terminology of John Foster
Dulles that ''You Are Either With Us Or Against Us"]
But US reliance on this, the then only remaining,
strategy of military political blackmail can also lead
the US to bankruptcy as the failing dollar pillar
fails to support it as well; and it can come also to
entail US ''OVERSTRETCH'' in Paul Kennedy terms and
''BLOWBACK' in CIA and Chalmers Johnson terms.
In summary and
plain English, the US has only two assets left to rely
on, both admittedly of world importance, but perhaps
even so insufficient. They are the dollar and its
military political assets. For the first, the
economic chickens in the US Ponzi scheme pyramid of
cards are now coming home to roost even in the United
States itself.
The second pillar
is now in use to prop up the new order the world over.
Most importantly perhaps is the now proposed US/Russia
entente against China instead of [or to achieve?] a US
defense against a Russia/China [and India?] entente.
The NATO War against Yugoslavia generated moves toward
the latter, and the US War against Afghanistan
promotes the former]. God/Allah forbid that any of
these nor their Holy War against Islam blow us all up
or provoke others to do so.
However that may
be, US imperial political military blackmail may still
blowback on the United States also, thus not out of
strength but out of the weakness of a true Paper
Tiger.
So who shows any
strength? The Chinese Dragon! And THAT is now the
primary pre-occupation and preparation of the Pentagon
and of far sighted American strategists like Zbigniew
Brzezinski who has taken up the century old
Huntington – not the clash of civilizations one but a
previous one! – thesis about the geo/economic
political need to control the Inner- Eurasian core.
Steps to that are
not only the war against and control of Afghanistan
and the string of military bases there and in a half
dozen former Soviet Caucasus and Central Asian
republics that are now converted into US client states
under the Orwellian PfP rubric of "Partnership for
Peace."
Nor is it only
controlling Central Asian oil and the pipelines for
its export westward to Europe and southward to the
Indian Ocean and Asia, but also precluding pipelines
eastward in growing competition with China and its
growing thirst for oil. It also includes maintaining
military presence in the Korean Peninsula and Japan
including especially Okinawa, and returning to the
Philippines. All under the cover of fighting
‘’terrorism’’ and countering ‘’rouge’’ states, the
overall U.S. strategy is to encircle China militarily
and to straight jacket it economically as far as still
possible. But how far is that?.
Fiery Dragon:-
China in East Asia
A financial and
economic crisis erupted in East Asia in 1997 and
brought evident relief to many observers in the West.
As a result and mis-led by day-to-day press media
reports and short term business and government
analysis and policy, even "informed" public opinion in
the West has changed again. Now the former "East Asian
Miracle" is said to have been no more than a mirage, a
dream for some and a nightmare for others.
The previously
supposed explanations and sure-fire strategies of
success are being abandoned again as quickly as they
had come into fashion. We hear less about Asian values
or guarantees from the magic of the market and no more
security from state capitalism . So much the better I
would say, since these supposed explanations and
correct policies were never more than ideological
shams anyway.
The historical
evidence presented here shows that no one particular
institutional form or political economic policy offers
or accounts for success [nor failure!] in the
competitive and ever changing world market. The
contemporary evidence shows the same. In that respect,
Deng Xiao-ping’s famous aphorism is correct. The
question is not whether cats are institutionally, let
alone ideologically, black or white; the real world
issue is whether or not they catch economic mice in
competition with others in the world market. And that
depends much less on the institutional color of the
cat than it does on its opportune position in the
world economy at each particular place and time. And
since the obstacles and opportunities in the
competitive world market change over time and in
place, to succeed the economic cat, no matter what its
color, must adapt to these changes or fail to catch
any mice at all. Among these different institutional
forms including relations among state-finance-
productive and sales organizations, perhaps the most
attention and positive evaluation has been devoted
abroad to those of Korea and then of Japan but also of
Greater China including its vast network of overseas
Chinese. But the very fact that they differ, and in
Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere
as well, should already forewarn us against
privileging one institutional form over all others.
At best and that
is already very much, the evidence is that none of
these institutional forms is necessarily an impediment
or insurmountable obstacle to success on the domestic,
regional and world market. Most noteworthy perhaps in
view of the widespread Western propaganda about its
own alleged virtues is the demonstrated fact that no
Western model need or should be followed by Asians in
Asia or even elsewhere.
The significance
of position and flexible response in the world economy
is particularly important during periods of economic
crisis B phase that is in Chinese of [negative] danger
and [positive] opportunity. In the present economic
crisis so far, the focus has been far too
predominantly on its undoubtedly serious negative
consequences. But the opportunities it poses have
received insufficient attention, except perhaps in the
United States and China, both of which are seeking to
reap competitive advantages from the political
economic problems and alleged meltdown of Japan,
Korea, and Southeast Asia.
But the dismissal
of East Asian and particularly Chinese economic
strengths and prospects may be premature and certainly
is based on a shortsighted neglect of the historical
evidence as presented in my 1998 book ReORIENT and
further pursued in my present work on the 19th
century, as well as on a serious misreading of the
contemporary evidence. I believe that this latest
quick dismissal of Asia is mistaken for the following
reasons among others:
1] Since Asia
and especially China was economically powerful in
the world until relatively recently, and new
scholarship now dates the decline as really
beginning only in the second half of the nineteenth
century, it is quite possible that it may soon be so
again. Contrary to the Western mythology of the past
century, Asian dominance in the world has so far
been interrupted by an only relatively short period
of only a century or at most a century and a half.
The oft-alleged half century or more decline of
China is purely mythological.
2] Chinese and
other Asian economic success in the past was not
based on Western ways; and much recent Asian
economic success was not based on the Western model.
Therefore, there is also no good reason why Japanese
or other Asians need or should copy any Western or
other model. Asians can manage their own ways and
have no good reason to now replace them by Western
ones as the alleged only way to get out of the
present economic crisis. On the contrary, Asian
reliance on other ways is a strength and not a
weakness.
3] The fact
that the present crisis visibly spread from the
financial sector to the productive one does not mean
that the latter is fundamentally weak. On the
contrary, the present crisis of overproduction and
excess capacity is evidence of the underlying
strength of the productive sector, which can
recover. Indeed, it was excess capacity and
productivity leading to over-production for the
world market that initiated the financial crisis to
begin with when Asian foreign exchange earnings on
commercial account were no longer able to finance
its service of the speculative short run debt.
4] Not that
economic recessions will or can be prevented in the
future. They never have been prevented in the past
even under state planning in China or the Soviet
Union. More significant is that this is the first
time in over a century that a world recession
started not in the West and then moved eastward, but
that instead it started in the East and then moved
around the world from there. And that was precisely
because as per # 3 East Asian and particularly
Japanese, Korean and then Chinese productive and
export capacity had gro