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Gary Edwards

Is The US Finally Ready For Revolution? - Democratic Underground - 1 views

www.democraticunderground.com/101970

ready-for-revolution

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13
     
    Written in June of 2012, before the national elections, this commentary remains the ringing truth.  Maybe more Americans are ready to listen this fourth of July? ........................... "Is America Ready For Revolution? I have always strongly believed that it's not possible to be a good Christian without standing up against social injustice and government corruption in all its forms. As I take a look around me today I find a lot of things wrong with our country. In fact, I have been a proponent for radical change for several years now, and I have written and published 2 books on this very topic. Where shall I begin? In God-blessed America, the land of the free where everyone is an economic slave, our founding fathers' sacred idea of a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has become but a cruel joke. Former president George W. Bush has notoriously called our Constitution - our supreme law of the land - "that (expletive) piece of paper". The federal government is currently spending at least $60 billion per month on military excursions in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and northern and western Africa - including operating between 800 and 1,000 foreign military bases all over the world. Our country's over-used flying drone aircraft kills hundreds daily overseas, many of whom are only innocent bystanders. Meanwhile here on the home front, one in seven people are on food stamps, and at any given time one in four American children are going hungry today. Our country spends more money incarcerating people than it does on education. What's up with that? Our political system is openly rigged against the best interests of the American people. A massive market mechanism is securely entrenched in our political system where political influence is openly bought and sold. Tens of thousands of highly-paid middlemen called "lobbyists" facilitate the legal transfer of billions between moneyed special interests and our so-called "representatives" i
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden: A 'Nation' Interview | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...wden-exile-exclusive-interview

surveillance state Snowden-interview

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Snowden: That’s the key—to maintain the garden of liberty, right? This is a generational thing that we must all do continuously. We only have the rights that we protect. It doesn’t matter what we say or think we have. It’s not enough to believe in something; it matters what we actually defend. So when we think in the context of the last decade’s infringements upon personal liberty and the last year’s revelations, it’s not about surveillance. It’s about liberty. When people say, “I have nothing to hide,” what they’re saying is, “My rights don’t matter.” Because you don’t need to justify your rights as a citizen—that inverts the model of responsibility. The government must justify its intrusion into your rights. If you stop defending your rights by saying, “I don’t need them in this context” or “I can’t understand this,” they are no longer rights. You have ceded the concept of your own rights. You’ve converted them into something you get as a revocable privilege from the government, something that can be abrogated at its convenience. And that has diminished the measure of liberty within a society.
  • From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there’s the political and the technical. I don’t believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives. And we do not live in a revolutionary time. People are not prepared to contest power. We have a system of education that is really a sort of euphemism for indoctrination. It’s not designed to create critical thinkers. We have a media that goes along with the government by parroting phrases intended to provoke a certain emotional response—for example, “national security.” Everyone says “national security” to the point that we now must use the term “national security.” But it is not national security that they’re concerned with; it is state security. And that’s a key distinction. We don’t like to use the phrase “state security” in the United States because it reminds us of all the bad regimes. But it’s a key concept, because when these officials are out on TV, they’re not talking about what’s good for you. They’re not talking about what’s good for business. They’re not talking about what’s good for society. They’re talking about the protection and perpetuation of a national state system. I’m not an anarchist. I’m not saying, “Burn it to the ground.” But I’m saying we need to be aware of it, and we need to be able to distinguish when political developments are occurring that are contrary to the public interest. And that cannot happen if we do not question the premises on which they’re founded. And that’s why I don’t think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators] Udall and Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.
  • The Nation: Every president—and this seems to be confirmed by history—will seek to maximize his or her power, and will see modern-day surveillance as part of that power. Who is going to restrain presidential power in this regard? Snowden: That’s why we have separate and co-equal branches. Maybe it will be Congress, maybe not. Might be the courts, might not. But the idea is that, over time, one of these will get the courage to do so. One of the saddest and most damaging legacies of the Bush administration is the increased assertion of the “state secrets” privilege, which kept organizations like the ACLU—which had cases of people who had actually been tortured and held in indefinite detention—from getting their day in court. The courts were afraid to challenge executive declarations of what would happen. Now, over the last year, we have seen—in almost every single court that has had this sort of national-security case—that they have become markedly more skeptical. People at civil-liberties organizations say it’s a sea change, and that it’s very clear judges have begun to question more critically assertions made by the executive. Even though it seems so obvious now, it is extraordinary in the context of the last decade, because courts had simply said they were not the best branch to adjudicate these claims—which is completely wrong, because they are the only nonpolitical branch. They are the branch that is specifically charged with deciding issues that cannot be impartially decided by politicians. The power of the presidency is important, but it is not determinative. Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The Nation: Explain the technical reform you mentioned. Snowden: We already see this happening. The issue I brought forward most clearly was that of mass surveillance, not of surveillance in general. It’s OK if we wiretap Osama bin Laden. I want to know what he’s planning—obviously not him nowadays, but that kind of thing. I don’t care if it’s a pope or a bin Laden. As long as investigators must go to a judge—an independent judge, a real judge, not a secret judge—and make a showing that there’s probable cause to issue a warrant, then they can do that. And that’s how it should be done. The problem is when they monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there’s a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.
  • Since the revelations, we have seen a massive sea change in the technological basis and makeup of the Internet. One story revealed that the NSA was unlawfully collecting data from the data centers of Google and Yahoo. They were intercepting the transactions of data centers of American companies, which should not be allowed in the first place because American companies are considered US persons, sort of, under our surveillance authorities. They say, “Well, we were doing it overseas,” but that falls under a different Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn’t even authorized by law. It’s just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan’s signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers—sending hundreds of millions of people’s communications back and forth every day—were completely unprotected, electronically naked. GCHQ, the British spy agency, was listening in, and the NSA was getting the data and everything like that, because they could dodge the encryption that was typically used. Basically, the way it worked technically, you go from your phone to Facebook.com, let’s say—that link is encrypted. So if the NSA is trying to watch it here, they can’t understand it. But what these agencies discovered was, the Facebook site that your phone is connected to is just the front end of a larger corporate network—that’s not actually where the data comes from. When you ask for your Facebook page, you hit this part and it’s protected, but it has to go on this long bounce around the world to actually get what you’re asking for and go back. So what they did was just get out of the protected part and they went onto the back network. They went into the private network of these companies.
  • The Nation: The companies knew this? Snowden: Companies did not know it. They said, “Well, we gave the NSA the front door; we gave you the PRISM program. You could get anything you wanted from our companies anyway—all you had to do was ask us and we’re gonna give it to you.” So the companies couldn’t have imagined that the intelligence communities would break in the back door, too—but they did, because they didn’t have to deal with the same legal process as when they went through the front door. When this was published by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post and the companies were exposed, Gellman printed a great anecdote: he showed two Google engineers a slide that showed how the NSA was doing this, and the engineers “exploded in profanity.” Another example—one document I revealed was the classified inspector general’s report on a Bush surveillance operation, Stellar Wind, which basically showed that the authorities knew it was unlawful at the time. There was no statutory basis; it was happening basically on the president’s say-so and a secret authorization that no one was allowed to see. When the DOJ said, “We’re not gonna reauthorize this because it is not lawful,” Cheney—or one of Cheney’s advisers—went to Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, and said, “There is no lawful basis for this program. DOJ is not going to reauthorize it, and we don’t know what we’re going to do. Will you continue it anyway on the president’s say-so?” Hayden said yes, even though he knew it was unlawful and the DOJ was against it. Nobody has read this document because it’s like twenty-eight pages long, even though it’s incredibly important.
  • The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses. They thought, “No one trusts our products anymore.” So they decided to fix these security flaws to secure their phones. The new iPhone has encryption that protects the contents of the phone. This means if someone steals your phone—if a hacker or something images your phone—they can’t read what’s on the phone itself, they can’t look at your pictures, they can’t see the text messages you send, and so forth. But it does not stop law enforcement from tracking your movements via geolocation on the phone if they think you are involved in a kidnapping case, for example. It does not stop law enforcement from requesting copies of your texts from the providers via warrant. It does not stop them from accessing copies of your pictures or whatever that are uploaded to, for example, Apple’s cloud service, which are still legally accessible because those are not encrypted. It only protects what’s physically on the phone. This is purely a security feature that protects against the kind of abuse that can happen with all these things being out there undetected. In response, the attorney general and the FBI director jumped on a soap box and said, “You are putting our children at risk.”
  • The Nation: Is there a potential conflict between massive encryption and the lawful investigation of crimes? Snowden: This is the controversy that the attorney general and the FBI director were trying to create. They were suggesting, “We have to be able to have lawful access to these devices with a warrant, but that is technically not possible on a secure device. The only way that is possible is if you compromise the security of the device by leaving a back door.” We’ve known that these back doors are not secure. I talk to cryptographers, some of the leading technologists in the world, all the time about how we can deal with these issues. It is not possible to create a back door that is only accessible, for example, to the FBI. And even if it were, you run into the same problem with international commerce: if you create a device that is famous for compromised security and it has an American back door, nobody is gonna buy it. Anyway, it’s not true that the authorities cannot access the content of the phone even if there is no back door. When I was at the NSA, we did this every single day, even on Sundays. I believe that encryption is a civic responsibility, a civic duty.
  • The Nation: Some years ago, The Nation did a special issue on patriotism. We asked about a hundred people how they define it. How do you define patriotism? And related to that, you’re probably the world’s most famous whistleblower, though you don’t like that term. What characterization of your role do you prefer? Snowden: What defines patriotism, for me, is the idea that one rises to act on behalf of one’s country. As I said before, that’s distinct from acting to benefit the government—a distinction that’s increasingly lost today. You’re not patriotic just because you back whoever’s in power today or their policies. You’re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people of your country, your community and your family. Sometimes that means making hard choices, choices that go against your personal interest. People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy—one of the early charges leveled against me. But it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail. But you are also asked to take an oath, and that’s the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution—to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and former NSA director Keith Alexander did not. You raise your hand and you take the oath in your class when you are on board. All government officials are made to do it who work for the intelligence agencies—at least, that’s where I took the oath.
  • The Nation: Creating a new system may be your transition, but it’s also a political act. Snowden: In case you haven’t noticed, I have a somewhat sneaky way of effecting political change. I don’t want to directly confront great powers, which we cannot defeat on their terms. They have more money, more clout, more airtime. We cannot be effective without a mass movement, and the American people today are too comfortable to adapt to a mass movement. But as inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying—as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.
  • The Nation: You really think that if you could go home tomorrow with complete immunity, there wouldn’t be irresistible pressure on you to become a spokesperson, even an activist, on behalf of our rights and liberties? Indeed, wouldn’t that now be your duty? Snowden: But the idea for me now—because I’m not a politician, and I do not think I am as effective in this way as people who actually prepare for it—is to focus on technical reform, because I speak the language of technology. I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what “digital rights” should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them? What I can do—because I am a technologist, and because I actually understand how this stuff works under the hood—is to help create the new systems that reflect our values. Of course I want to see political reform in the United States. But we could pass the best surveillance reforms, the best privacy protections in the history of the world, in the United States, and it would have zero impact internationally. Zero impact in China and in every other country, because of their national laws—they won’t recognize our reforms; they’ll continue doing their own thing. But if someone creates a reformed technical system today—technical standards must be identical around the world for them to function together.
  • As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them—it does all of us—a disservice, because it “otherizes” us. Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes—even though what they have done is heroic—is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed, and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.
  • The Nation: Considering your personal experience—the risks you took, and now your fate here in Moscow—do you think other young men or women will be inspired or discouraged from doing what you did? Snowden: Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I’m still free. I talk to people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I’m able to participate in the debate and to campaign for reform. I’m just the first to come forward in the manner that I did and succeed. When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense. The charges they brought against me, for example, explicitly denied my ability to make a public-interest defense. There were no whistleblower protections that would’ve protected me—and that’s known to everybody in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.
  • The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns to the people most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people themselves authorized. Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg, it is clear that the government is not concerned with damage to national security, because in none of these cases was there damage. At the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific damage that had been caused by the massive revelation of classified information. The charges are a reaction to the government’s embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities, or they would substantiate what harms were done. We’re now more than a year since my NSA revelations, and despite numerous hours of testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an ax to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government, has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that former NSA director Keith Alexander said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation. Some months after he made that statement, the new director of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said that, in fact, he doesn’t see the sky falling. It’s not so serious after all.
  • The Nation: You also remind us of [Manhattan Project physicist] Robert Oppenheimer—what he created and then worried about. Snowden: Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people. It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused. When I was working in Japan, I created a system for ensuring that intelligence data was globally recoverable in the event of a disaster. I was not aware of the scope of mass surveillance. I came across some legal questions when I was creating it. My superiors pushed back and were like, “Well, how are we going to deal with this data?” And I was like, “I didn’t even know it existed.” Later, when I found out that we were collecting more information on American communications than we were on Russian communications, for example, I was like, “Holy shit.” Being confronted with the realization that work you intended to benefit people is being used against them has a radicalizing effect.
  • The Nation: We have a sense, or certainly the hope, we’ll be seeing you in America soon—perhaps sometime after this Ukrainian crisis ends. Snowden: I would love to think that, but we’ve gone all the way up the chain at all the levels, and things like that. A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they’re really sore—the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment—they’re the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don’t like that at all. The Obama administration almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They’re afraid of death by a thousand cuts—you know, leaks and things like that.
  • The Nation: You’ve given us a lot of time, and we are very grateful, as will be The Nation’s and other readers. But before we end, any more thoughts about your future? Snowden: If I had to guess what the future’s going to look like for me—assuming it’s not an orange jumpsuit in a hole—I think I’m going to alternate between tech and policy. I think we need that. I think that’s actually what’s missing from government, for the most part. We’ve got a lot of policy people, but we have no technologists, even though technology is such a big part of our lives. It’s just amazing, because even these big Silicon Valley companies, the masters of the universe or whatever, haven’t engaged with Washington until recently. They’re still playing catch-up. As for my personal politics, some people seem to think I’m some kind of archlibertarian, a hyper-conservative. But when it comes to social policies, I believe women have the right to make their own choices, and inequality is a really important issue. As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production—year after year after year—some of that needs to be reinvested in society. It doesn’t need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be 
addressed.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14
     
    Remarkable interview. Snowden finally gets asked some questions about politics. 
Gary Edwards

Byron York: Justice Department demolishes case against Trump order | Washington Examiner - 1 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2613988

Byron-York Trump-Immigration-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17
     
    "James Robart, the U.S. district judge in Washington State, offered little explanation for his decision to stop President Trump's executive order temporarily suspending non-American entry from seven terror-plagued countries. Robart simply declared his belief that Washington State, which in its lawsuit against Trump argued that the order is both illegal and unconstitutional, would likely win the case when it is tried. Now the government has answered Robart, and unlike the judge, Justice Department lawyers have produced a point-by-point demolition of Washington State's claims. Indeed, for all except the most partisan, it is likely impossible to read the Washington State lawsuit, plus Robart's brief comments and writing on the matter, plus the Justice Department's response, and not come away with the conclusion that the Trump order is on sound legal and constitutional ground. Beginning with the big picture, the Justice Department argued that Robart's restraining order violates the separation of powers, encroaches on the president's constitutional and legal authority in the areas of foreign affairs, national security, and immigration, and "second-guesses the president's national security judgment" about risks faced by the United States. Indeed, in court last week, Robart suggested that he, Robart, knows as much, or perhaps more, than the president about the current state of the terrorist threat in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other violence-plagued countries. In an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michelle Bennett, Robart asked, "How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?" "Your Honor, I don't have that information," said Bennett. "Let me tell you," said Robart. "The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you're here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries, and there's no support for that."
Gary Edwards

Rand Paul's Tea Party Response: Full Text - 0 views

www.newsmax.com/...490118

Rand-Paul Libertarian USA-Constitution

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • With my five-year budget, millions of jobs would be created by cutting the corporate income tax in half, by creating a flat personal income tax of 17%, and by cutting the regulations that are strangling American businesses.
  • America has much greatness left in her. We will begin to thrive again when we begin to believe in ourselves again, when we regain our respect for our founding documents, when we balance our budget, when we understand that capitalism and free markets and free individuals are what creates our nation’s prosperity.
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Feb 13
     
    Outstanding statement about what made America great, an dhow are government is destroying that greatness.  This is the full Text of Sen. Rand Paul's Tea Party Response to Obama's State of the Union Address: I speak to you tonight from Washington, D.C. The state of our economy is tenuous but our people remain the greatest example of freedom and prosperity the world has ever known. People say America is exceptional. I agree, but it's not the complexion of our skin or the twists in our DNA that make us unique. America is exceptional because we were founded upon the notion that everyone should be free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. For the first time in history, men and women were guaranteed a chance to succeed based NOT on who your parents were but on your own initiative and desire to work. We are in danger, though, of forgetting what made us great. The President seems to think the country can continue to borrow $50,000 per second. The President believes that we should just squeeze more money out of those who are working. The path we are on is not sustainable, but few in Congress or in this Administration seem to recognize that their actions are endangering the prosperity of this great nation. Ronald Reagan said, government is not the answer to the problem, government is the problem. Tonight, the President told the nation he disagrees. President Obama believes government is the solution: More government, more taxes, more debt. What the President fails to grasp is that the American system that rewards hard work is what made America so prosperous. What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith. In the year we won our independence, Adam Smith described what creates the Wealth of Nations. He described a limited government that largely did not interfere with individuals and their pursuit of happiness. All that we are, all that we wish to be is now threatened by the notion that you can have something for nothing, that you can have your cake and ea
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Richard Ebeling on Higher Interest Rates, Collectivism and the Coming ... - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...tivism-and-the-Coming-Collapse

Richard-Ebeling The-Daily-Bell Austrian-Economics Liberty-Tryanny

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The "larger dysfunction," as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people.
  • While many on "the left" ridicule the idea, there is a strong case for the idea of "American exceptionalism," meaning that the United States stands out as something unique, different and special among the nations of the world.
  • the American Founding Fathers constructed a political system in the United States based on a concept on which no other country was consciously founded:
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • But the American Revolution and the US Constitution hailed a different conception of man, society and government.
  • n the rest of the world, and for all of human history, the presumption has been that the individual was a slave or a subject to a higher authority. It might be the tribal chief; or the "divinely ordained" monarch who presumed to rule over and control people in the name of God; or, especially after the French Revolution and the rise of modern socialism, "the nation" or "the people" who laid claim to the life and work of the individual.
  • the idea of individual rights.
  • That is, as long as the individual did not violate the equal rights of others to their life, liberty and property, each person was free to shape and guide his own future, and give meaning and value to his own life as he considered best in the pursuit of that happiness that was considered the purpose and goal of each man during his sojourn on this Earth.
  • Governments did not exist to give or bestow "rights" or "privileges" at its own discretion.
  • Governments were to secure and protect each individual's rights, which he possessed by "the nature of things."
  • The individual was presumed to own himself. He was "sovereign."
  • The real and fundamental notion of "self-government" referred to the right of each individual to rule over himself.
  • Each individual, by his nature and his reason, had a right to his life, his liberty and his honestly acquired property.
  • during the first 150 years of America's history there was virtually no Welfare State and relatively few government regulations, controls and restrictions on the choices and actions of the free citizen.
  • But for more than a century, now, an opposing conception of man, society and government has increasingly gained a hold over the ideas and attitudes of people in the US.
  • It was "imported" from Europe in the form of modern collectivism.
  • The individual was expected to see himself as belonging to something "greater" than himself. He was to sacrifice for "great national causes."
  • He was told that if life had not provided all that he desired or hoped for, it was because others had "exploited" him in some economic or social manner, and that government would redress the "injustice" through redistribution of wealth or regulation of the marketplace.
  • If he had had financial and material success, the individual should feel guilty and embarrassed by it, because, surely, if some had noticeably more, it could only be because others had been forced to live with noticeably less.
  • left on its own, free competition tends to evolve into harmful monopolies and oligopolies, with the wealthy "few" benefiting at the expense of the "many."
  • They are the crises of the Interventionist-Welfare State: the attempt to impose reactionary collectivist policies of political paternalism and redistributive plunder on a society still possessing parts of its original individualist and rights-based roots.
  • it is in the form of communism's and socialism's critique of capitalism.
  • Unregulated capitalism leads to "unearned" and "excessive" profits; unbridled markets generate the business cycle and the hardships of recessions and depressions;
  • These two conflicting conceptions of man, society and government have been and are at war here in the United States.
  • And if it cannot be gotten and guaranteed through the redistributive mechanisms of the European Union and the euro, well, maybe we should return power to our own nation-states to provide the jobs, the social "safety nets" and the financial means to pay for it through, once again, printing our own national paper currencies.
  • This is the political-philosophical bankruptcy of the West and the dead ends of the collectivist promises of the last 100 years.
  • Ludwig von Mises's book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, originally published in 1922, demonstrated how and why a socialist, centrally planned system was inherently unworkable.
  • The nationalization of productive property, the abolition of markets and the prohibition of all competitive exchange among the members of society would prevent the emergence and operation of a price system, without which it is impossible to know people's demands for desired goods and the relative value they place on them.
  • It also prevents the emergence of prices for the factors of production (land, labor, capital) and makes it impossible to know their opportunity costs – the value of those factors of production in alternative competing uses among entrepreneurs desiring to employ them.
  • Without such a price system the central planners are flying blind, unable to rationally know or decide how best to utilize labor, capital and resources in productively efficient ways to make the goods and services most highly valued by the consuming public.
  • Thus, Mises concluded, comprehensive socialist central planning would lead to "planned chaos."
  • And, therefore, there is no guarantee that the amount of investments undertaken and their time horizons are compatible with the available resources not also being demanded and used for more immediate consumer goods production in the society.
  • As a consequence, financial markets do not work like real markets.
  • Thus, the interventionist state leads to waste, inefficiency and misuses of resources that lower the standards of living that we all, otherwise, could have enjoyed.
  • We cannot be sure what the amount of real savings may be in the society to support real and sustainable investment and capital formation.
  • Government intervention prevents prices from "telling the truth" about the real supply and demand conditions thus leading to imbalances and distortions in the market.
  • We cannot know what the "real cost" of borrowing should be, since interest rates are not determined by actual, private sector savings and investment decisions.
  • Government production regulations, controls, restrictions and prohibitions prevent entrepreneurs from using their knowledge, ability and capital in ways that most effectively produce the goods consumers actually want and at the most cost-competitive prices possible.
  • This is why countries around the world periodically experience booms and busts, inflations and recessions − not because of some inherent instabilities or "irrationalities" in financial markets, but because of monetary central planning through central banking that does not allow market-based financial intermediation to develop and work as it could and would in a real free-market setting.
  • But in the United States and especially in Europe, government "austerity" means merely temporarily reducing the rate of increase in government spending, slowing down the rate at which new debt is accumulating and significantly raising taxes in an attempt to close the deficit gap.
  • The fundamental problem is that over the decades, the size and scope of governments in the Western world have been growing far more than the rates at which their economies have been expanding, so that the "slice" of the national economic "pie" eaten by government has been growing larger and larger, even when the "pie" in absolute terms is bigger than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
  • European governments, in general, take the view that "austerity" means squeezing the private sector more through taxes and other revenue sources to avoid any noticeable and significant cuts in what government does and spends.
  • So there is "austerity" for the private sector and a mad rush for financial "safety nets" for the government and those who live off the State.
  • In reality, of course, it is the burdens of government regulation, taxation and impediments to more flexible labor and related markets that have generated the high unemployment rates and the retarded recovery from the recession.
  • Instead, the "common market" ideal has been transformed into the goal of a European Union "Super-State" to which the individual countries and their citizens would be subservient and obedient.
  • Keynesian policies offer people and politicians what they want to hear. Claiming that any sluggish business or lost jobs are due to a lack of "aggregate demand," Keynes argued that full employment and profitable business could only be reestablished and maintained through "activist" government monetary and fiscal policy – print money and run budget deficits.
  • What Britain and Europe should have as its goal is the ideal of the classical liberal free traders of the 19th century – non-intervention by governments in people's lives, at home and abroad. That is, a de-politicization of society, so people may freely work, trade and travel as they peacefully wish, with government merely the protector of people's individual rights.
  • Take the benefits away and tell people they are free to come and work to support themselves and their families. Restore more flexibility and competitiveness to labor markets and reduce taxes and business regulations.
  • Then those who come to Britain's shores will be those wanting freedom and opportunity without being a burden upon others.
  • What was needed was a change in ideas from the statist mentality to one of individual freedom and unhampered free markets.
  • In an epoch of collectivist ideas, don't be surprised if governments regulate, control, intervene and redistribute wealth.
  • The tentacle of regulations, restrictions and politically-correct social controls are spreading out in every direction from Brussels and its European-wide manipulating and mismanaging bureaucracy.
  • In the name of assuring "national prosperity," politicians could spend money to buy the votes that get them elected and reelected to government offices.
  • And every special interest group could make the case that government-spending programs that benefitted them were all reasonable and necessary to assure a fully employed and growing economy.
  • Furthermore, the Keynesian rationale for government deficit spending enabled politicians to seem to be able to offer something for nothing. They could offer, say, $100 of government spending to voters and special interest groups but the tax burden imposed in the present might only be $75, since the remainder of the money to pay for that government spending was borrowed. And that borrowed money would not have to be repaid until some indefinite time in the future by unspecific taxpayers when that "tomorrow" finally arrived.
  • instability
  • Keynes argued that the market economy's inherent
  • arose from the
  • who were subject to irrational and unpredictable waves of "optimism" and "pessimism."
  • animal spirits" of businessmen
  • Mises argued that there was nothing inherent in the market economy to bring about these swings of economic booms followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
  • If markets got out of balance with the necessity of an eventual correction in the economy to, once again, set things right, the source of this instability was government monetary policy.
  • Central banks too often followed a policy of trying to create "good times" in the economy by expanding the money supply through the banking system.
  • With new, excess funds created by the central bank available for lending, banks lower rates of interest to attract borrowers.
  • But this throws savings and investment out of balance, since the rate of interest no longer serves as a reliable indicator and signal concerning the availability of real savings in the economy in relation to those wanting to borrow funds for various investment purposes.
  • The economic crisis comes when it is discovered that all the claims on resources, capital and labor for all the attempted consumption and investment activities in the economy are greater than the actual and available amounts of such scarce resources.
  • The recession period, in Mises's view, is the necessary "correction" period when in the post-boom era, people must adapt and adjust to the newly discovered "real" supply and demand conditions in the market.
  • Any interference with the "rebalancing" of the economy by government raising taxes, imposing more regulations, or new artificial government "stimulus" activities merely makes it more difficult and time-consuming for people in the private sector to get the economy back on an even keel.
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, once observed, unemployment is not "caused" by stopping an inflation, but rather inflation induces the artificial employments that cannot be sustained and which inevitably disappear once the inflation is reined in.
  • The recession of 2008-2009 was the result of several years of central bank stimulus.
  • From 2003 to 2008, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about 50 percent.
  • Interest rates for much of this time, when adjusted for inflation, were either zero or negative.
  • Awash in cash, banks extended loans to virtually anyone, with no serious and usual concern about the borrower's credit-worthiness.
  • This was most notably true in the housing market, where government agencies like Fannie May and Freddie Mac were pressuring banks to make mortgage loans by promising a guarantee that they would make good on any bad home loans.
  • Since 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve has, again, turned on the monetary spigot, increasing its own portfolio by almost $3 trillion, by buying US Treasuries, US mortgages and other assets.
  • So why has there not been a complementary explosion of price inflation?
  • In some areas there has been, most clearly in the stock market and the bond market, But the reason why all that newly created money has not brought about a higher price inflation is due to the fact that a large part of all newly created money is sitting as unlent reserves in banks.
  • This is because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a rate of interest slightly above the market interest rates to induce banks not to lend.
  • (a) general "regime uncertainty," that is, no one knows what government policy will be tomorrow; will ObamaCare be fully implemented after January 2014?;
  • Among the reasons for the sluggish jobs growth in the US are:
  • (b) what will taxes be for the rest of the current president's term in the White House
  • (c) what will the regulatory environment be like for the next three years – in 2012, the government implemented around 80,000 pages of regulations as printed in the Federal Registry;
  • (d) how will the deficit and debt problems play out between Congress and the White House and will it threaten the general financial situation in the country; an
  • (e) what wars, if any, will the government find itself involved in, in places like the Middle East?
  • China
  • is still a controlled and commanded society, with a government that works hard to try to determine what people read, see and think.
  • All these building projects have been brought into existence by a government that not only controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates but also heavy-handedly tells banks whom to specifically loan to and for what investment activities.
  • Central planning is alive and well in China, with the motives being both power and profits for those inside and outside the Communist Party having the most influence and connections in "high" places.
  • In my opinion, China is heading for a great economic crisis, resulting from a highly imbalanced and distorted economic system still guided far more by politics than sound market decision-making.
  • global financial markets in any foreseeable future. It is a money that still primarily exists to serve the political purposes of those who sit in the "inner circles" of power in Beijing.
  • One hundred years ago, in 1913, how many could have predicted that a year later a European-wide war would break out that would lead to the destruction of great European empires and set the stage for the rise of totalitarian collectivism that resulted in an even worse global war two decades later?
  • Thus, whether, at the end of the day, freedom triumphs and the future is one of liberty and prosperity is partly on each one of us.
  • Near the end of his great book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises said:
  • "Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us . . . Whether society shall continue to evolve or where it shall decay lies . . . in the hands of man."
  • In my view, the idea of a "soft landing" is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to "micro-manage" the all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.
  • It was Mises's clear vision that once society has broken the relationship between value and payment, sooner or later people would not know the price of anything.
  • At this point, investment ceases and business becomes furtive and transactional.
  • People cannot plan for the future because they do not understand the reality of the present.
  • Society begins to sink.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13
     
    Incredible.  A simple explanation that explains everything.  Rchard Ebeling's "Unified Theory of Everything" is something every American can understand.  If only they would take a break from "Dancing with the Stars" and pay attention to the future of their country and the world.  It's a future where either "individual freedom", as defined by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, will win out; or, the forces of fascist socialism / marxism will continue to roll and rule.  Incredible read!!!!
Paul Merrell

The Virtue of Subtlety: A U.S. Strategy Against the Islamic State - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...tegy-against-the-islamic-state

war & peace ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must — with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait — and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed. The tactical application of strategy is the problem. In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition. Such an American strategy is not an avoidance of responsibility. It is the use of U.S. power to force a regional solution. Sometimes the best use of American power is to go to war. Far more often, the best use of U.S. power is to withhold it. The United States cannot evade responsibility in the region. But it is enormously unimaginative to assume that carrying out that responsibility is best achieved by direct intervention. Indirect intervention is frequently more efficient and more effective.
  • The United States cannot win the game of small mosaic tiles that is emerging in Syria and Iraq. An American intervention at this microscopic level can only fail. But the principle of balance of power does not mean that balance must be maintained directly. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have far more at stake in this than the United States. So long as they believe that the United States will attempt to control the situation, it is perfectly rational for them to back off and watch, or act in the margins, or even hinder the Americans. The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them. It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins. The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance. The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
  • There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions. To counter this, I would argue that the uprising by Iraq’s Sunni community was inevitable, with its marginalization by Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite regime in Baghdad. That it took this particularly virulent form is because the more conservative elements of the Sunni community were unable or unwilling to challenge al-Maliki. But the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago. Moreover, although the Islamic State is brutal, its cruelty is not unique in the region. Syrian President Bashar al Assad and others may not have killed Americans or uploaded killings to YouTube, but their history of ghastly acts is comparable. Finally, the Islamic State — engaged in war with everyone around it — is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack. In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The issue is whether the United States can live with this situation or whether it must reshape it. The immediate question is whether the United States has the power to reshape it and to what extent. The American interest turns on its ability to balance local forces. If that exists, the question is whether there is any other shape that can be achieved through American power that would be superior. From my point of view, there are many different shapes that can be imagined, but few that can be achieved. The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
  • A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us. The United States has an inherent interest in Ukraine and in Syria-Iraq. Whether we should have that interest is an interesting philosophical question for a late-night discussion, followed by a sunrise when we return to reality. These places reflexively matter to the United States. The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible. For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.
  • The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible. For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm. This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power. It is crucial to understand the balance of power in detail, and to understand what might undermine it, so that any force can be applied effectively. This is the tactical part, and it is the tactical part that can go wrong. The strategy has a logic of its own. Understanding what that strategy demands is the hard part. Some nations have lost their sovereignty by not understanding what strategy demands. France in 1940 comes to mind. For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary. The ground where we are talking about applying this model is Syria and Iraq. Both of these central governments have lost control of the country as a whole, but each remains a force. Both countries are divided by religion, and the religions are divided internally as well. In a sense the nations have ceased to exist, and the fragments they consisted of are now smaller but more complex entities.
  • This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power. It is crucial to understand the balance of power in detail, and to understand what might undermine it, so that any force can be applied effectively. This is the tactical part, and it is the tactical part that can go wrong. The strategy has a logic of its own. Understanding what that strategy demands is the hard part. Some nations have lost their sovereignty by not understanding what strategy demands. France in 1940 comes to mind. For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary. The ground where we are talking about applying this model is Syria and Iraq. Both of these central governments have lost control of the country as a whole, but each remains a force. Both countries are divided by religion, and the religions are divided internally as well. In a sense the nations have ceased to exist, and the fragments they consisted of are now smaller but more complex entities.
  • There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions. To counter this, I would argue that the uprising by Iraq’s Sunni community was inevitable, with its marginalization by Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite regime in Baghdad. That it took this particularly virulent form is because the more conservative elements of the Sunni community were unable or unwilling to challenge al-Maliki. But the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago. Moreover, although the Islamic State is brutal, its cruelty is not unique in the region. Syrian President Bashar al Assad and others may not have killed Americans or uploaded killings to YouTube, but their history of ghastly acts is comparable. Finally, the Islamic State — engaged in war with everyone around it — is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack. In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
  • The issue is whether the United States can live with this situation or whether it must reshape it. The immediate question is whether the United States has the power to reshape it and to what extent. The American interest turns on its ability to balance local forces. If that exists, the question is whether there is any other shape that can be achieved through American power that would be superior. From my point of view, there are many different shapes that can be imagined, but few that can be achieved. The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
  • Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power. The use of air power against conventional forces that lack anti-aircraft missiles is a useful gambit. It shows that the United States is doing something, while taking little risk, assuming that the Islamic State really does not have anti-aircraft missiles. But it accomplishes little. The Islamic State will disperse its forces, denying conventional aircraft a target. Attempting to defeat the Islamic State by distinguishing its supporters from other Sunni groups and killing them will founder at the first step. The problem of counterinsurgency is identifying the insurgent. There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State’s forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways. They are now part of the fabric of the Sunni community, and only the Sunni community can root them out. Identifying Sunnis who are anti-Islamic State and supplying them with weapons is a much better idea. It is the balance-of-power strategy that the United States follows, but this approach doesn’t have the dramatic satisfaction of blowing up the enemy. That satisfaction is not trivial, and the United States can certainly blow something up and call it the enemy, but it does not address the strategic problem. In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States?
  • There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State’s forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways. They are now part of the fabric of the Sunni community, and only the Sunni community can root them out. Identifying Sunnis who are anti-Islamic State and supplying them with weapons is a much better idea. It is the balance-of-power strategy that the United States follows, but this approach doesn’t have the dramatic satisfaction of blowing up the enemy. That satisfaction is not trivial, and the United States can certainly blow something up and call it the enemy, but it does not address the strategic problem. In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges. The Islamic State had real successes at first, but the balance of power with the Kurds and Shia has limited its expansion, and tensions within the Sunni community diverted its attention. Certainly there is the danger of intercontinental terrorism, and U.S. intelligence should be active in identifying and destroying these threats. But the re-occupation of Iraq, or Iraq plus Syria, makes no sense. The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.
  • The danger is that other Islamic State franchises might emerge in other countries. But the United States would not be able to block these threats as well as the other countries in the region. Saudi Arabia must cope with any internal threat it faces not because the United States is indifferent, but because the Saudis are much better at dealing with such threats. In the end, the same can be said for the Iranians. Most important, it can also be said for the Turks. The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara. This is partly because of Ankara’s fear that the jihadist group might spread to Turkey, but more so because its impact on Iraqi Kurdistan could affect Turkey’s long-term energy plans.
  • The United States cannot win the game of small mosaic tiles that is emerging in Syria and Iraq. An American intervention at this microscopic level can only fail. But the principle of balance of power does not mean that balance must be maintained directly. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have far more at stake in this than the United States. So long as they believe that the United States will attempt to control the situation, it is perfectly rational for them to back off and watch, or act in the margins, or even hinder the Americans. The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them. It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins. The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance. The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
  • U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must — with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait — and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed. The tactical application of strategy is the problem. In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition. Such an American strategy is not an avoidance of responsibility. It is the use of U.S. power to force a regional solution. Sometimes the best use of American power is to go to war. Far more often, the best use of U.S. power is to withhold it. The United States cannot evade responsibility in the region. But it is enormously unimaginative to assume that carrying out that responsibility is best achieved by direct intervention. Indirect intervention is frequently more efficient and more effective.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Sep 14
     
    The article is by the Chairman of Stratfor, a private intelligence company. I don't agree with its analysis because I am decidedly non-interventionist. But this article should be required reading for all who have fallen for the war fever being spread by the War Party for full-scale military invasion of Iraq and Syria. The article at least lays a sound basis for a large degree of restraint.
Paul Merrell

DOJ's Motion to Dismiss in Smith v. Obama, the case challenging the legality of the war... - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...-challenging-legality-war-isil

war & peace Smith_v._Obama war-powers-resolution Iraq Syria litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • As I noted in an earlier post, Nathan Smith, a U.S. Army captain deployed to Kuwait as part of the campaign against ISIL, Operation Inherent Resolve, has sued the President, seeking a declaration that Congress has not authorized the hostilities in Iraq and Syria and that therefore the War Powers Resolution requires the President to remove U.S. forces from hostilities in those nations. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the case. Its brief in support of the motion includes one argument that I think is correct (albeit not for all the reasons the government offers) — namely, that Smith lacks standing to sue. That ought to be sufficient to have the case dismissed. The brief also includes an argument on the merits (albeit not designated as such) that is very interesting and potentially important — an account of how Congress has allegedly authorized Inherent Resolve in three ways: (i) in the 2001 AUMF; (ii) in the 2002 AUMF; and (iii) in current appropriations statutes. The heart of the brief, however, is devoted to a third argument — that Judge Koller-Kotelly must dismiss the case on the basis of the political question doctrine — that is not only wrong, but that simply ignores the Supreme Court’s recent (and repeated) repudiation of that very argument.
  • On page 39 of its 45-page brief, the government finally gets around to the reason why the court should dismiss the complaint: Smith lacks standing. Importantly, Smith’s theory of standing is not that he — an Army captain deployed to perform intelligence services in Kuwait — is more likely to be injured or killed by virtue of the President’s decision to deploy troops into hostilities in Iraq and Syria. It is, instead, that the President’s alleged failure to comply with the War Powers Act results in Captain Smith’s own violation of his officer’s oath to “support and defend” the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution.
  • The government’s standing argument begins (p. 35) by suggesting that “[p]laintiff’s claim that he is being forced to betray his oath is insufficient to establish standing because the violation of an oath, by itself, is not an injury in fact.” The cases the government cites for that proposition, however, do not say that a forced oath violation would not be an injury in fact — and that’s not a question the judge needs to resolve. What the cases establish, instead, is the point the government finally argues at page 39 — namely, that a government officer does not violate his oath by complying with superiors’ orders, even if it turns out that the law prohibits the military operation in which those orders are issued. Indeed, Smith would not violate his oath of office even if his superiors’ orders themselves were unauthorized, or if the intelligence activities he is ordered to performed were unauthorized. But he does not allege even those things (as I discuss below, he does not, for instance, alleged that he is being ordered to do anything unlawful). Instead, he merely argues that because President Obama should have withdrawn troops from Syria and Iraq 60 days after their deployment, Smith himself is violating his oath to “bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution.” This is a non sequitur: Even if Smith is right that the continuation of Operation Inherent Resolve is unlawful, that would not mean that he is acting in violation of his oath. (Much more on this in my earlier post.) And that simple fact is reason enough for Judge Koller-Kotelly to dismiss the case.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • One of Smith’s counsel, Professor Bruce Ackerman, argues that this reason for rejecting the oath-based theory of standing ignores the Supreme Court’s 1804 decision in Little v. Barreme. Little, however, is not on point. In that case, Navy Captain Little was sued by the owners of a Danish ship for damages caused when Little seized that neutral ship. The Court held that Little could be liable, notwithstanding the fact that he was following orders, because the capture violated a implicit statutory prohibition on the military’s seizure of ships sailing from France to the United States. In this case, however, Captain Smith has not argued — nor could he — that he has been ordered to do anything unlawful (in violation of a statute), let alone that he has been ordered to do something that would subject him to possible liability for damages. He is, instead, arguing that President Obama violated a statute. That is not enough to establish Smith’s standing to sue.
  • The government’s main argument, to which it devotes far too many pages, is that the judge must dismiss the case because it raises a “political question” that courts cannot answer. This is flatly wrong — and it ignores several controlling precedents, including the Supreme Court’s recent 8-1 rejection of virtually the same government argument in Zivotofsky v. Clinton.
  • The most interesting thing about the government’s brief — and by far the most important aspect of it, for public purposes apart from the lawsuit itself — is that, in the section ostensibly arguing that the case is nonjusticiable (see pp. 25-30, and also pp. 4-14), DOJ actually offers the Executive branch’s most detailed defense yet about why Operation Inherent Resolve is congressionally authorized. As some of us predicted, the government relies on three arguable authorizations, any one of which would be sufficient to defeat Smith’s WPR claim if the courts were to reach the merits. In this post I’m not going to assess the merits of the three arguments. For now, my purpose is only to describe them, and to raise one issue with respect to the third. i. First, the government argues that the 2001 AUMF authorizes the operation against ISIL.
  • Second, the government argues that the 2002 AUMF also authorizes Operation Inherent Resolve, just as it authorized operations in Iraq against AQI (which became ISIL) from 2003 to 2011, after the Hussain regime fell.
  • Finally, and most interestingly (in part because the government has not previously made this argument), DOJ argues that a recent “unbroken stream” of appropriations statutes not only confirm the authorities allegedly conferred by the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, but also offer their own, independent congressional authorization.
  • Two things are fairly clear from this: The members of Congress approve of Operation Inherent Resolve — indeed, there’s virtually no opposition. And Congress has (most likely) appropriated funds to pay for it. The operative question, however, is whether Congress’s appropriations also serve as an authorization that would supersede the requirement of WPR section 5(b). The government brief alludes to one important argument that the plaintiff will undoubtedly raise: Section 8(a)(1) of the WPR provides that, for purposes of tolling the 60-day clock of section 5(b), “[a]uthority to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations wherein involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances shall not be inferred (1) from any provision of law . . . including any provision contained in any appropriations Act, unless such provision specifically authorizes the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into such situations and states that it is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of this chapter.” Obviously, the 2016 Act does not satisfy that requirement. Is that fatal to the appropriations-as-authorization argument?
  • As the Office of Legal Counsel 50 U.S.C. 1542 and 1543). These provisions might be read simply to convey that the executive must continue to comply with the consultation and reporting requirements of WPR sections 3 and 4, even after the 2016 Act authorizes the introduction of troops into hostilities in Iraq and Syria. Or they might alternatively be construed to also specify that the Act is not providing the authority that section 5(b) of the WPR calls for.
  • Not surprisingly, DOJ argues for the former view (pp. 27-28 of the brief): “[I]n the few provisions in which Congress did reference the War Powers Resolution, to clarify that no funds made available for Operation Inherent Resolve are to be used ‘in contravention’ of the Resolution, Congress signaled its agreement that the President’s counter-ISIL military actions were authorized by simultaneously funding Operation Inherent Resolve. If Congress believed that the United States had been conducting airstrikes and other counter-ISIL military activities ‘in contravention of the War Powers Resolution,’ it would have made no sense for Congress to use the ‘in contravention’ proviso in the same laws that make funds available for the express purpose of continuing those military activities.” That’s not a bad argument, at least at first glance; but it’s not a slam-dunk, either, in part because appropriations provisions do not necessarily establish authorizations. It’ll be interesting to see how Captain Smith’s lawyers respond to this particular aspect of the merits argument. I doubt Judge Koller-Kotelly will reach it, however, because she is likely to dismiss the case for want of standing.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Jul 16
     
    I've read the brief. I don't think the implied partial repeal of the War Powers Resolution argument should fly. The relevant provision establishes a rule of interpretation of later statutes and the appropriations bills neither reject the rule of interpretation nor specifically provide authorization for use of military force. They just authorize funding. On the standing issue, I think the DoJ position is correct; the oath of office applies only to senior officers who make the decision to initiate a war. But DoJ may have opened the door to a more compelling standing argument by arguing that the war does not constitute a war crime, a crime against peace, or a crime against humanity under international law. DoJ did not need to make that argument because Smith had not alleged in his complaint that he was being ordered to commit such crimes, but by doing so DoJ waives any argument that such issues are beyond the scope of Smith's standing and the evidence that the Iraq and Syrian wars are illegal under international law is, to say the least, strong.
Paul Merrell

Loopholes, Filing Failures, and Lax Enforcement: How the Foreign Agents Registration Ac... - 0 views

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Congress corruption foreign-agents-registration

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Why This Matters The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign clients to disclose significantly more information about their activities than what is required of domestic lobbyists. This includes the actual documents used to influence policy makers, called informational materials. These materials include draft legislation, speeches, press releases and more, all created to influence U.S. policy. But the lobbyists do not always follow the letter of the law and enforcement by the Justice Department has been lax in recent years. Furthermore, the law itself seems to have loopholes that make enforcement difficult if not impossible. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is intended to bring transparency into the world of foreign lobbying. But when American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign interests fail to follow the law, or the Justice Department fails to enforce it, the American people are left in the dark.
  • Why This Matters The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign clients to disclose significantly more information about their activities than what is required of domestic lobbyists. This includes the actual documents used to influence policy makers, called informational materials. These materials include draft legislation, speeches, press releases and more, all created to influence U.S. policy. But the lobbyists do not always follow the letter of the law and enforcement by the Justice Department has been lax in recent years. Furthermore, the law itself seems to have loopholes that make enforcement difficult if not impossible. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is intended to bring transparency into the world of foreign lobbying. But when American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign interests fail to follow the law, or the Justice Department fails to enforce it, the American people are left in the dark.
  • Executive Summary The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that all American citizens working to influence U.S. policy on behalf of foreign governments register with the Department of Justice and to disclose information on any and all political activity in which they engaged for foreign clients. This includes filing, within 48 hours, any informational materials disseminated to two or more people.
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  • Table of Contents Executive SummaryIntroductionBackgroundWhat the Foreign Influence Database ShowsEgypt: A Case Study Of Foreign InfluenceSame-Day ContributionsSystemic Foreign InfluenceQuid Pro Quo or Coincidence?Foreign Money and the LawLax Compliance with and Enforcement of FARAEnforcementConclusionRecommendationsEndnotes
  • The law requires lobbyists for foreign interests to plainly and conspicuously identify themselves as such in any materials distributed in the course of their lobbying—for example, emails, other correspondence, or publications. We found that many documents filed with the Justice Department lack this identification statement; furthermore, many lobbyists admitted that they did not comply with this requirement. More than half (51 percent) of the registrants we examined in a sample from 2010 checked a box on a the semi-annual Justice Department questionnaire saying they had filed informational materials, and checked another box saying they had not met the legal requirement that they identify themselves in those materials as working on behalf of foreign interests. Toby Moffett, a former Member of Congress from Connecticut who is now Chairman of the Moffett Group and one of its registered lobbyists, told POGO that “Around the edges there’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff going on. People representing foreign interests and not reporting.”[4] But even when lobbyists do report to the Justice Department, the information they provide is not easily accessible to the public. Astonishingly, informational materials are not available online, despite the fact that the Justice Department has an electronic filing system. Instead, these documents are kept in an office at the Justice Department that is only open for four hours each weekday. Hard copies of the documents are kept in folders that are often disorganized and susceptible to misfiling. This archaic system undermines the intended transparency of the law.
  • The Project On Government Oversight examined thousands of these materials spanning four years, as well as additional public records related to the Justice Department’s oversight of lobbyists for foreign interests. We found that lobbyists for foreign interests have routinely failed to comply with the law—a failure that prevents journalists and watchdogs from scrutinizing the lobbying activities while foreign interests are trying to influence U.S. policy. We found a pattern of lax enforcement of FARA requirements by the Justice Department. We found that the Justice Department office responsible for administering the law is a record-keeping mess. And we found loopholes in the law that often makes it difficult if not impossible for the government to police compliance or to discipline lobbyists who fail to comply. Here are some highlights of our investigation:
  • Though federal law bars foreign money from U.S. political campaigns, there appears to be a gray area in the law that can let in such money indirectly. POGO found many instances in which members of lobbying firms made political contributions to Members of Congress on the same day that those firms were lobbying the Members of Congress or their legislative staffs on behalf of foreign clients.[1] Lobbyists who fail to comply with certain FARA requirements may have little to fear from the Justice Department. “The cornerstone of the Registration Unit’s enforcement efforts is encouraging voluntary compliance,” a Justice Department website says.[2] When lobbyists do not voluntarily comply, the Justice Department rarely uses one of the key tools at its disposal to enforce the law—seeking a court injunction. A representative of the Department’s FARA unit told POGO: “While the FARA statute and regulations authorize the pursuit of formal legal proceedings, such as injunctive remedy options, the FARA Unit [has] not pursued injunctive remedy options recently and has instead utilized other mechanisms to achieve compliance.”[3] It appears that some registered foreign agents have been distributing materials but not filing them with the Justice Department. It’s unclear the extent to which that illustrates a lack of compliance with the law or loopholes in the law. In the process of researching this report, POGO noticed that many more lobbyists were registering as foreign agents than had filed informational materials that we could locate at the FARA office. To determine what was happening, we looked at a sampling of questionnaires that the Justice Department requires registered agents to complete every six months. Some checked one box indicating they had distributed materials and another box stating they did not file them with the FARA office.
  • We set out to determine the extent to which lobbyists for foreign interests were filing lobbying materials at the Justice Department within the required time frame. Based on a review of filings made in 2012, in those instances where it was possible to answer the question, POGO estimates that almost half—46 percent—were filed late. Fifteen percent were filed more than 30 business days after they were distributed, and 12 percent were filed more than 100 business days after they were distributed. In many instances, the Justice Department would be hard pressed to enforce the filing deadline. Based on the records the Department maintains to enforce the law, we found that in more than a quarter (26 percent) of the 2012 filings, it was impossible to determine whether the lobbyists complied. For example, in many cases, the records did not show when the lobbyists disseminated the materials to the targets of their lobbying. In a glaring omission, the law does not require lobbyists to provide that information. Without it, there may be no way for the government or the public to know whether lobbying materials were filed on time.
  • When lobbyists for foreign interests do not follow the law, when the U.S. government fails to enforce it, and when the Justice Department makes it difficult for the American people to access records to which they are legally entitled, the public is left in the dark. To bring more transparency to this opaque realm, POGO has made four years of informational materials available for the first time online with our Foreign Influence Database, allowing the public to see how lobbyists attempt to influence American policies on behalf of their foreign clients.
  • With the release of the Foreign Influence Database, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is making years of documents from this key set of FARA filings electronically available for the first time. The materials were previously only available in hard copy at the FARA Registration Unit in Washington, DC, which is only open to the public from 11am to 3pm on weekdays.[12] In this digital age it is surprising that these materials could not be read online and are instead stored in file folders, where they are disorganized and susceptible to misfiling. Even those that were electronically filed by the registrants are not available to the public in an electronic format. POGO’s database includes informational materials filed in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.[13]
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Dec 14
     
    POGO does thorough work and doesn't let up until it gets results. Forcing DoJ to puts its foreign agents registration materials online should be a fairly trivial battle. The real war, though, will be forcing better enforcement. The new database is at http://www.pogo.org/tools-and-data/foreign-influence-database/ I punched up the word "Israel" and came up with 113 documents in the search results. Each search hit lists the name of the nation involved that the lobbying was done for. Of those 113 document hits, only two were for the nation of Israel, both for its Ministry of Tourism. The rest were by other nations who had mentioned Israel in their lobbying materials.  Now that is fairly incredible, given that Israel outright controls Congress when it comes to Middle East policy.  The last administration to attempt to do something about Israeli lobbyists not registering was the the Kennedy Administration. The result was that the major Israeli lobbying group disbanded and was promptly reformed under a new corporate charter and name. That was the very last attempt at enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act against Israel's lobbyists in the U.S., despite the fact that the reformed group, AIPAC, has even been caught more than once being passed highly classified U.S. documents by double agents working inside the U.S. military establishment. The leakers went to prison but the AIPACers were never prosecuted. AIPAC rules.  
Paul Merrell

Responding to Failure: Reorganizing U.S. Policies in the Middle East | Middle East Poli... - 0 views

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war & peace Mideast Israel Arabs Shia-nations U.S.-foreign-policy recommendations

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • I want to speak with you today about the Middle East. This is the region where Africa, Asia, and Europe come together. It is also the part of the world where we have been most compellingly reminded that some struggles cannot be won, but there are no struggles that cannot be lost. It is often said that human beings learn little useful from success but can learn a great deal from defeat. If so, the Middle East now offers a remarkably rich menu of foreign-policy failures for Americans to study. • Our four-decade-long diplomatic effort to bring peace to the Holy Land sputtered to an ignominious conclusion a year ago. • Our unconditional political, economic, and military backing of Israel has earned us the enmity of Israel’s enemies even as it has enabled egregiously contemptuous expressions of ingratitude and disrespect for us from Israel itself.
  • • Our attempts to contain the Iranian revolution have instead empowered it. • Our military campaigns to pacify the region have destabilized it, dismantled its states, and ignited ferocious wars of religion among its peoples. • Our efforts to democratize Arab societies have helped to produce anarchy, terrorism, dictatorship, or an indecisive juxtaposition of all three. • In Iraq, Libya, and Syria we have shown that war does not decide who’s right so much as determine who’s left. • Our campaign against terrorism with global reach has multiplied our enemies and continuously expanded their areas of operation. • Our opposition to nuclear proliferation did not prevent Israel from clandestinely developing nuclear weapons and related delivery systems and may not preclude Iran and others from following suit.
  • • At the global level, our policies in the Middle East have damaged our prestige, weakened our alliances, and gained us a reputation for militaristic fecklessness in the conduct of our foreign affairs. They have also distracted us from challenges elsewhere of equal or greater importance to our national interests. That’s quite a record.
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  • One can only measure success or failure by reference to what one is trying achieve. So, in practice, what have U.S. objectives been? Are these objectives still valid? If we’ve failed to advance them, what went wrong? What must we do now to have a better chance of success? Our objectives in the Middle East have not changed much over the course of the past half century or more. We have sought to 1. Gain acceptance and security for a Jewish homeland from the other states and peoples of the region; 2. Ensure the uninterrupted availability of the region’s energy supplies to sustain global and U.S. security and prosperity; 3. Preserve our ability to transit the region so as to be able to project power around the world; 4. Prevent the rise of a regional hegemon or the deployment of weapons of mass destruction that might threaten any or all of these first three objectives; 5. Maximize profitable commerce; and 6. Promote stability while enhancing respect for human rights and progress toward constitutional democracy. Let’s briefly review what’s happened with respect to each of these objectives. I will not mince words.
  • Israel has come to enjoy military supremacy but it remains excluded from most participation in its region’s political, economic, and cultural life. In the 67 years since the Jewish state was proclaimed, Israel has not made a single friend in the Middle East, where it continues to be regarded as an illegitimate legacy of Western imperialism engaged in racist removal of the indigenous population. International support for Israel is down to the United States and a few of the former colonial powers that originally imposed the Zionist project on the Arabs under Sykes-Picot and the related Balfour Declaration. The two-state solution has expired as a physical or political possibility. There is no longer any peace process to distract global attention from Israel’s maltreatment of its captive Arab populations. After years of deference to American diplomacy, the Palestinians are about to challenge the legality of Israel’s cruelties to them in the International Criminal Court and other venues in which Americans have no veto, are not present, or cannot protect the Jewish state from the consequences of its own behavior as we have always been able to do in the past. Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza are fueling a drive to boycott its products, disinvest in its companies, and sanction its political and cultural elite. These trends are the very opposite of what the United States has attempted to achieve for Israel.
  • In a stunning demonstration of his country’s most famous renewable resource — chutzpah — Israel’s Prime Minister chose this very moment to make America the main issue in his reelection campaign while simultaneously transforming Israel into a partisan issue in the United States. This is the very opposite of a sound survival strategy for Israel. Uncertainties about their country’s future are leading many Israelis to emigrate, not just to America but to Europe. This should disturb not just Israelis but Americans, if only because of the enormous investment we have made in attempts to gain a secure place for Israel in its region and the world. The Palestinians have been silent about Mr. Netanyahu’s recent political maneuvers. Evidently, they recall Napoleon’s adage that one should never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake. This brings me to an awkward but transcendently important issue. Israel was established as a haven from anti-Semitism — Jew hatred — in Europe, a disease of nationalism and Christian culture that culminated in the Holocaust. Israel’s creation was a relief for European Jews but a disaster for the Arabs of Palestine, who were either ethnically cleansed by European Jewish settlers or subjugated, or both.  But the birth of Israel also proved tragic for Jews throughout the Middle East — the Mizrahim. In a nasty irony, the implementation of Zionism in the Holy Land led to the introduction of European-style anti-Semitism — including its classic Christian libels on Jews — to the region, dividing Arab Jews from their Muslim neighbors as never before and compelling them to join European Jews in taking refuge in Israel amidst outrage over the dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland. Now, in a further irony, Israel’s pogroms and other injustices to the Muslim and Christian Arabs over whom it rules are leading not just to a rebirth of anti-Semitism in Europe but to its globalization.
  • The late King `Abdullah of Saudi Arabia engineered a reversal of decades of Arab rejectionism at Beirut in 2002. He brought all Arab countries and later all 57 Muslim countries to agree to normalize relations with Israel if it did a deal — any deal — with the Palestinians that the latter could accept. Israel spurned the offer. Its working assumption seems to be that it does not need peace with its neighbors as long as it can bomb and strafe them. Proceeding on this basis is not just a bad bet, it is one that is dividing Israel from the world, including Jews outside Israel. This does not look like a story with a happy ending. It’s hard to avoid the thought that Zionism is turning out to be bad for the Jews. If so, given the American investment in it, it will also have turned out to be bad for America. The political costs to America of support for Israel are steadily rising. We must find a way to divert Israel from the largely self-engineered isolation into which it is driving itself, while repairing our own increasing international ostracism on issues related to Israel.  
  • Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s recent public hysteria about Iran and his efforts to demonize it, Israel has traditionally seen Iran’s rivalry with the Arabs as a strategic asset. It had a very cooperative relationship with the Shah. Neither Israelis nor Arabs have forgotten the strategic logic that produced Israel's entente with Iran. Israel is very much on Daesh’s list of targets, as is Iran. For now, however, Israel’s main concern is the possible loss of its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Many years ago, Israel actually did what it now accuses Iran of planning to do. It clandestinely developed nuclear weapons while denying to us and others that it was doing so. Unlike Iran, Israel has not adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or subjected its nuclear facilities to international inspection. It has expressed no interest in proposals for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. It sees its ability to bring on nuclear Armageddon as the ultimate guarantee of its existence.
  • To many, Israel now seems to have acquired the obnoxious habit of biting the American hand that has fed it for so long. The Palestinians have despaired of American support for their self-determination. They are reaching out to the international community in ways that deliberately bypass the United States. Random acts of violence herald mayhem in the Holy Land. Daesh has proclaimed the objective of erasing the Sykes-Picot borders and the states within them. It has already expunged the border between Iraq and Syria. It is at work in Lebanon and has set its sights on Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. Lebanon, under Saudi influence, has turned to France rather than America for support. Hezbollah has intervened militarily in Iraq and Syria, both of whose governments are close to Iran. Egypt and Turkey have distanced themselves from the United States as well as from each other. Russia is back as a regional actor and arms supplier. The Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Turkey now separately intervene in Libya, Syria, and Iraq without reference to American policy or views. Iran is the dominant influence in Iraq, Syria, parts of Lebanon, and now Yemen. It has boots on the ground in Iraq. And now Saudi Arabia seems to be organizing a coalition that will manage its own nuclear deterrence and military balancing of Ir
  • To describe this as out of control is hardly adequate. What are we to do about it? Perhaps we should start by recalling the first law of holes — “when stuck in one, stop digging.” It appears that “don’t just sit there, bomb something” isn’t much of a strategy. When he was asked last summer what our strategy for dealing with Daesh was, President Obama replied, “We don’t yet have one.” He was widely derided for that. He should have been praised for making the novel suggestion that before Washington acts, it should first think through what it hopes to accomplish and how best to do it. Sunzi once observed that “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." America’s noisy but strategy-free approach to the Middle East has proven him right. Again the starting point must be what we are trying to accomplish. Strategy is "the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means" [John Lewis Gaddis].Our desired ends with respect to the Middle East are not in doubt. They have been and remain to gain an accepted and therefore secure place for Israel there; to keep the region's oil and gas coming at reasonable prices; to be able to pass through the area at will; to head off challenges to these interests; to do profitable business in the markets of the Middle East; and to promote stability amidst the expansion of liberty in its countries. Judging by results, we have been doing a lot wrong. Two related problems in our overall approach need correction. They are “enablement” and the creation of “moral hazard.” Both are fall-out from  relationships of codependency.
  • Enablement occurs when one party to a relationship indulges or supports and thereby enables another party’s dysfunctional behavior. A familiar example from ordinary life is giving money to a drunk or a drug addict or ignoring, explaining away, or defending their subsequent self-destructive behavior.  Moral hazard is the condition that obtains when one party is emboldened to take risks it would not otherwise take because it knows another party will shoulder the consequences and bear the costs of failure. The U.S.-Israel relationship has evolved to exemplify codependency. It now embodies both enablement and moral hazard. U.S. support for Israel is unconditional.  Israel has therefore had no need to cultivate relations with others in the Middle East, to declare its borders, or to choose peace over continued expansion into formerly Arab lands. Confidence in U.S. backing enables Israel to do whatever it likes to the Palestinians and its neighbors without having to worry about the consequences. Israel is now a rich country, but the United States continues to subsidize it with cash transfers and other fiscal privileges. The Jewish state is the most powerful country in the Middle East. It can launch attacks on its neighbors, confident that it will be resupplied by the United States. Its use of U.S. weapons in ways that violate both U.S. and international law goes unrebuked. 41 American vetoes in the United Nations Security Council have exempted Israel from censure and international law. We enable it to defy the expressed will of the international community, including, ironically, our own.
  • We Americans are facilitating Israel's indulgence in denial and avoidance of the choices it must make if it is not to jeopardize its long-term existence as a state in the Middle East. The biggest contribution we could now make to Israel's longevity would be to ration our support for it, so as to cause it to rethink and reform its often self-destructive behavior. Such peace as Israel now enjoys with Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians is the direct result of tough love of this kind by earlier American administrations. We Americans cannot save Israel from itself, but we can avoid killing it with uncritical kindness. We should support Israel when it makes sense to do so and it needs our support on specific issues, but not otherwise. Israel is placing itself and American interests in jeopardy. We need to discuss how to reverse this dynamic.
  • Moral hazard has also been a major problem in our relationship with our Arab partners. Why should they play an active role in countering the threat to them they perceive from Iran, if they can get America to do this for them? Similarly, why should any Muslim country rearrange its priorities to deal with Muslim renegades like Daesh when it can count on America to act for it? If America thinks it must lead, why not let it do so? But responsible foreign and defense policies begin with self-help, not outsourcing of military risks. The United States has the power-projection and war-fighting capabilities to back a Saudi-led coalition effort against Daesh. The Saudis have the religious and political credibility, leadership credentials, and diplomatic connections to organize such an effort. We do not. Since this century began, America has administered multiple disappointments to its allies and friends in the Middle East, while empowering their and our adversaries. Unlike the Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Turkey, Washington does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran. Given our non-Muslim identity, solidarity with Israel, and recent history in the Fertile Crescent, the United States cannot hope to unite the region’s Muslims against Daesh.  Daesh is an insurgency that claims to exemplify Islam as well as a governing structure and an armed force. A coalition led by inhibited foreign forces, built on papered-over differences, and embodying hedged commitments will not defeat such an insurgency with or without boots on the ground.
  • When elections have yielded governments whose policies we oppose, we have not hesitated to conspire with their opponents to overthrow them. But the results of our efforts to coerce political change in the Middle East are not just failures but catastrophic failures. Our policies have nowhere produced democracy. They have instead contrived the destabilization of societies, the kindling of religious warfare, and the installation of dictatorships contemptuous of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities. Frankly, we have done a lot better at selling things, including armaments, to the region than we have at transplanting the ideals of the Atlantic Enlightenment there. The region’s autocrats cooperate with us to secure our protection, and they get it. When they are nonetheless overthrown, the result is not democracy or the rule of law but socio-political collapse and the emergence of  a Hobbesian state of nature in which religious and ethnic communities, families, and individuals are able to feel safe only when they are armed and have the drop on each other. Where we have engineered or attempted to engineer regime change, violent politics, partition, and ethno-religious cleansing have everywhere succeeded unjust but tranquil order. One result of our bungled interventions in Iraq and Syria is the rise of Daesh. This is yet another illustration that, in our efforts to do good in the Middle East, we have violated the principle that one should first do no harm.
  • Americans used to believe that we could best lead by example. We and those in the Middle East seeking nonviolent change would all be better off if America returned to that tradition and forswore ideologically motivated hectoring and intervention. No one willingly follows a wagging finger. Despite our unparalleled ability to use force against foreigners, the best way to inspire them to emulate us remains showing them that we have our act together. At the moment, we do not. In the end, to cure the dysfunction in our policies toward the Middle East, it comes down to this. We must cure the dysfunction and venality of our politics. If we cannot, we have no business trying to use an 8,000-mile-long screwdriver to fix things one-third of the way around the world. That doesn’t work well under the best of circumstances. But when the country wielding the screwdriver has very little idea what it’s doing, it really screws things up.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    Chas Freeman served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the war to liberate Kuwait and as Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993-94. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "diplomacy" and is the author of five books, including "America's Misadventures in the Middle East" and "Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige."  I have largely omitted highlighting portions of the speech dealing with Muslim nations because Freeman has apparently lost touch with the actual U.S., Saudi, UAE, Kuwait, and Turish roles in creating and expanding ISIL. But his analysis of Israel's situation and recommendations for curing it seem quite valid, as well as his overall Mideast recommendation to heed the First Law of Holes: "when stuck in one, stop digging."   I recommend reading the entire speech notwithstanding his misunderstanding of ISIL. There is a lot of very important history there ably summarized.
Gary Edwards

The Civil War is Here | Frontpage Mag - 0 views

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civil-war

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 17
     
    "Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A civil war has begun. This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn't want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn't control. The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don't accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left. It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.   It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it's for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over. It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become "patriotic". There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that's not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it's treason. After losing Congress, the left consolidated
Gary Edwards

Who owns the Bank of England? |Dark Politricks - 0 views

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banksters Banksters-of-America Rothschild-Bank-of-England

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13
     
    "Who owns the Bank of England? A brief history of World Banksters By Dark Politricks First a few historical comments by people who helped create two of the worlds most famous central banks, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence The Bank of England was created in 1694 by a Scotsman William Paterson who famously said: The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. - William Paterson The history of the Bank of England and how it was taken over by one powerful family hundreds of years ago. Up until 1946 when it was nationalised the Bank of England was a private run bank that lent money it created out of nothing to the English government and was paid back with interest. A very famous story relates to the Bank of England and the infamous Rothschilds, that all powerful banking family. This story was re-told recently in a BBC documentary about the creation of money and the Bank of England. It revolves around the Battle of Waterloo in which Nathan Rothschild used his inside knowledge of the outcome and his faster horses and couriers to play the market by getting the result of the battle before anyone else knew the outcome. He quickly sold his English bonds and gave all the traders who looked to him for guidance the impression that the French had won at Waterloo. The other traders all rus
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Doug Casey on the Continuing Debasement of Money, Language and Banking... - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...-and-Banking-in-the-Modern-Age

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • This isn't going to last because the way you get wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference – not by consuming more than you produce, and borrowing the difference. With the Fed keeping interest rates at artificially low levels, hoping to increase consumption, they're making it very foolish to save – when you get ½% or 1% on your savings. So people are saving less and they're borrowing more than they otherwise would. This is a formula for making things worse, not better.
  • They are, idiotically, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be.
  • In point of fact, the Fed should be abolished; the market, not bureaucrats, should determine interest rates. We wouldn't be in this pickle to start with if the government wasn't involved in the economy.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • The Chinese, the Japanese – everybody is selling, trying to pass the Old Maid card of US Government debt, which represents return–free risk. Nobody other than the Fed is buying, and interest rates would skyrocket if they stopped. The more QE there is, the more distortions it will cause, however, making for a bigger disaster the longer it goes on.
  • Will the Fed continue to inflate the money supply? Doug Casey: They have to, because with the huge amount of debt in the world – and the amount of debt in the world has increased something like 40 or 50% just since the Greater Depression started – if they don't keep increasing the amount of money in the world then nobody's going to be able to service the huge amount of debt that is out there. So I don't see anything changing in the years to come. They've truly painted themselves into a corner. They're caught between Scylla and Charybdis, and we don't have Odysseus steering the ship of state.
  • Let me say, again, that the Fed serves no useful purpose and it should be abolished. Central banks create "super money" by buying government or other debt with new currency units that they credit to the sellers' accounts at commercial banks. That's the actual engine of inflation.
  • But it's greatly compounded in the commercial banking system through fractional reserve lending – which would not be possible without a central bank. Fractional reserve lending allows banks to multiply the money supply several times.
  • If $100 of Fed super money, freshly created, is deposited in a commercial bank like Chase or Citibank, then $90 can be lent out with a 10% reserve, the current number. That money is redeposited. They'll then lend out 90% of that $90, or $81, and then 90% of that $81, so it multiplies.
  • Central banking and fractional reserve lending go hand-in-hand.
  • Without a central bank, any bank that engaged in fractional reserve banking would be considered guilty of fraud and, when discovered, would be punished by a bank run, followed by criminal charges. The point to be made here is that the entire banking system today is totally unsound and totally corrupt.
  • In a sound banking system you have two types of deposits – checking account (or demand) deposits, and savings account (or time) deposits. They are completely different businesses. With demand deposits, you pay the bank to store your money securely, and write checks against it. A bank should no more lend out demand deposit money than Allied Storage should lend out the furniture you're paying them to store.
  • Savings accounts are completely different. Here you lend money to a bank, perhaps at 3%, and they relend it at 6%, making 3% to cover costs, risks and profits. A sound bank not only has to match the maturities of its deposits with the maturities of its loans, but must insure loans are both highly secured and self-liquidating.
  • These principles have been totally lost. Today banks operate as hedge funds.
  • As an aside, if someone were to set up a well-capitalized 100% reserve bank in a tax haven, especially using gold as an alternative currency, it would be immensely successful in the years to come – when most all conventional banks will fail.
  • By all historical, normal parameters, the stock market is greatly overvalued.
  • The trillions of new currency units that the Fed is creating are creating bubbles, and one of them is in the stock market. The biggest bubble, of course, is in the bond market – that's a super bubble.
  • Not only does the dollar have no real value but the banks you keep it in are all insolvent.
  • There are few sound investments out there. Today there are no investments; there are only speculations.
  • From the economist's point of view, the bubbles created by central banking are a disaster, but from a speculator's point of view they're a godsend. It's becoming harder and harder to be an investor; I define an investor as someone who allocates capital to productive business. It's hard to be an investor because you now have to spend more money on lawyers than on engineers and workers if you want to produce something. You're increasingly forced to be a speculator in today's climate.
  • Stock and bond markets all over the world are overpriced – with the exception of Russian stocks right now; they could be a very interesting speculation. I wouldn't touch anything in China yet, because all the Chinese banks are going to go bust.
  • The Chinese have been more profligate inflating the yuan than the Americans have been with the dollar. It's fantastic what the Chinese have done since Deng liberalized the economy in the early '80s, but now's not a time to be in their markets.
  • You've got to remember there are two types of people in the world: people who want to control material reality and people who want to control other people.
  • It's that second type who go into politics. They play games – here it's called the Great Game, which dignifies it in a way it shouldn't be – with other people's lives and property. It's been this way ever since the state was created about 5,000 years ago, and I don't think you should play games with other people's lives.
  • On the bright side, there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in all of human history put together, and so technology is advancing more rapidly than ever for that reason. That's a huge plus.
  • The second good thing is that the average person, at least those who aren't on welfare, tries to produce more than he consumes. That creates capital.
  • But I'm afraid that Western civilization reached its peak before World War I. World War I destroyed a huge amount of capital and, more importantly, it changed the moral bases of so many things.
  • Then World War II institutionalized the State as the most important part of society – which is perverse, because the state is actually the enemy of civil society.
  • I think Western civilization reached its peak in 1913, when it reached its maximum geographical extent. That was coincidental with the peak of its technological and philosophical influence on the world, much the way the Roman Empire reached its peak at about the end of the first century, then went down, slowly at first and then quickly. That's what's happening to the West.
  • Relative to the rest of the world, and contribution to world production, our piece of the economic pie is getting smaller and smaller. If we have another serious war it would be absolutely smaller, and the final nail in the coffin. Meanwhile, the US, with its bloated military, is just itching for another war. It's out of control, and unlikely to change at this point. That's a big trend that is in motion that I think is going to stay in motion.
  • Europe is in particularly bad shape. The place is a fascist/socialist disaster.
  • It was possible for the average European to keep his head above water through tax evasion in the past, but now those governments have broken bank secrecy everywhere, and it will destroy a lot of capital.
  • The "nation-state" is a really stupid and dysfunctional idea, and I'm glad it's on its way out.
  • That said, even the US, which from a cultural point of view is as much of a country as any place in the world, should actually break up into at least five or six regions.
  • Canada should break up into at least five or six regions initially.
  • I don't think politically; politics is the problem, not the solution. I think that the ideal solution is for every individual to opt out of the current system. When they give a war, you don't come. When they give a tax, you don't pay. When they give an election, you don't vote. You even try not to use their currency and their banking system. T
  • he ideal thing is to let the system collapse under its own weight as opposed to starting a new political party and then continuing to act politically, which is to say to use force on other people.
  • Market risk is huge today, but political risk is even bigger. One indication of that was, when the banks in Cyprus went bust some months ago, the government essentially confiscated everybody's account above 100,000 euros, in what they called a "bail-in."
  • You need several options. It seems like people haven't learned anything from what happened in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, China in 1948, Cuba in 1959, or Vietnam in 1975. Rwanda, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Syria ... there are lots of examples and these things can and will eventually happen almost everywhere. When the chimpanzees go crazy, you don't want to be where they are. You've got to have a Plan B. You've got to have a crib out of that political jurisdiction. Acting like a plant, and staying put, isn't a good survival strategy for a human.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 15
     
    "Doug Casey: I don't see a real recovery until they stop debasing the currency, radically cut government spending and taxation and eliminate most regulation. In other words, cease doing the things that caused this depression. And that's not going to happen until there's a collapse of the current order. Things have cyclically improved since the height of the crisis of 2008-09. The trillions of currency units created by the Federal Reserve have jammed the stock market higher and kept the big banks from going under. What surprises me is that retail prices have not moved as significantly as I would have expected. The reason, I believe, is that most of that money is still sitting in financial institutions. It has gone into cash out of fear, into stocks because they represent real wealth with earning power and into various speculative assets like artwork and collectible cars. Real estate has recovered somewhat, not because of strong fundamentals but strictly because of money creation. This isn't going to last because the way you get wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference - not by consuming more than you produce, and borrowing the difference. With the Fed keeping interest rates at artificially low levels, hoping to increase consumption, they're making it very foolish to save - when you get ½% or 1% on your savings. So people are saving less and they're borrowing more than they otherwise would. This is a formula for making things worse, not better. They are, idiotically, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be. Although, I hasten to add, I hate to pontificate on what the Fed "should" do. In point of fact, the Fed should be abolished; the market, not bureaucrats, should determine interest rates. We wouldn't be in this pickle to start with if the government wasn't involved in the economy. In fact, if it wasn't for the state, I suspect we'd all have a vastly higher standard of living, and would be colonizing the Moon, Mars and
Gary Edwards

Dear Lou Dobbs, Who Owns the Federal Reserve? - 0 views

tvnewslies.org/...-owns-the-federal-reserve.html

Banksters Federal-Reserve Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel New-World-Order banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Oct 11
     
    This is the March of 2008 repub of the infamous Dear Lou letter, written by Jesse Richard. Tracks exactly with the March 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns and the subsequent Federal Reserve - US Treasury bailout. IMHO, the Bear Stearns bailout and conversion was a test run to determine how the public and Congress would react. The key factor was the massive conversion of private Bankster debt to public (taxpayer) debt. Another way of saying this: socialize the losses and privatize the profits. The go between in this mechanism is the secret connection between the Federal Reserve cartel of private Banksters, and the US Treasury. Congress, through war and social programs, racks up enormous debt. Currently about $4 Billion of debt per day. This is the amount of spending beyond taxes and other revenue sources. To fund this debt, the Treasury sells bonds, most of which are currently being purchased by Banksters and Financial interests closely associated with a cascading network of interconnected Federal Reserve shareholders. Foreign sovereign bond purchasers like China and Japan mostly dropped out of participation in the Treasury auctions in 2008, as they started dumping US Treasury holdings. Today, the circle of USA debt works like this; the Federal Reserve provides member Banksters and International Bankster associates with Trillions of dollars of near interest free money ($16.1 Trillion in 2009-2010). The Banksters then purchase the US treasury bonds at whatever the auction interest rate turns out to be. In essence, we are loaning ourselves the money to pay off our government debt, with interest. Exactly as Mr Richard claims in his infamous letter. excerpt: Let me ask you a simple question: what country in its right mind would create a system that would force it to lend itself money and have to repay the money WITH INTEREST? What country would charge itself interest? What nation would put itself out of business by making it bankrupt because
Gary Edwards

The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever - and the VESTS Solution - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...l-Ever--and-the-VESTS-Solution

Banksters matt-taibbi LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13
     
    excerpt: Uber financial investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has discovered what we too realized when we began to scrutinize the financial industry. In his latest article, he writes, "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever." The article's cut line is, "The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix." Taibbi's incredulity is evident throughout the article, as well it should be. The interest-rate swap market is part of the larger derivatives market that totals over one billion TRILLION dollars............................... "Given the endless financial scandals that keep sweeping across the industry, it is fairly obvious that this regulatory system needs a good deal of improvement. In fact, I think that it may be no coincidence that so much is being revealed now. The idea is surely to create the conditions for another international regulatory effort that will end up further controlling what is left of free-market capital raising. It is a global game for globalists. The game is to regulate everything and then to position oneself above the regulations and above the governments that wield them. This gives you tremendous power over everyone else. One of the tools being used to whip up sentiment for a larger regulatory revisiting is scandal and more scandal. There have been revelations of so-called crooked practices in a number of areas lately, mostly in the area of industry pricing. It turns out that many standard prices are set via indications of interest rather than outright competition. We can see the same system at work in the gold market, where a small group of wise men set the price for physical gold every day. And now, as Taibbi and others have revealed, the dysfunctional system also affects interest rate swaps. This has incensed Taibbi, who opens his article as follows: Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the
Gary Edwards

The FED (Federal Reserve Bank) is a Commercial Privately Owned Bank - 1 views

www.federalbudget.com/fed.html

Federal-Reserve Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The US Congress has the option to buy back the FED at $450 millions (per Congressional Records). When the Congress does this, it will own back the billions of US Government Bonds held by the FED. The US Government will actually PROFIT by buying back the FED! Also, the US government no longer has to pay interests to the FED owners on those bonds.
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Dec 12
     
    Excellent research on the Federal Reserve! excerpt: WHY THE FED SHOULD BE ABOLISHED 1. The US Congress has the option to buy back the FED at $450 millions (per Congressional Records). When the Congress does this, it will own back the billions of US Government Bonds held by the FED. The US Government will actually PROFIT by buying back the FED! Also, the US government no longer has to pay interests to the FED owners on those bonds. 2. Through their ownerships in the FED, FOREIGN POWERS CAN and WILL influence the US economy. By controlling our interest rates and money supply, they can actually create economic disaster in the US , should the US disagree with them. 3. Although the FED directors must be confirmed by the Senate, the awesome lobbying power of the FED owners makes this process meaningless. The owners of the FED can and will put whoever they wish in the position. 4. Abolishing the FED will lead to lower inflation. At this moment, the FED prints as much money as needed to buy the US Government Bonds. Since the FED prints this MONEY out of THIN AIR, this leads to an INCREASE of MONEY SUPPLY, WITHOUT increase in GOODS/SERVICES. This, as all of us know it, leads to INFLATION. If the general public buy those bonds with money that they EARNED by providing GOODS/SERVICES, the money supply level is contant in relation to the goods/services level. Thus, there is no inflationary pressure from selling these bonds. 5. Abolishing the FED will reduce the national debt level. By buying back the FED at $450 millions, the US Government will buy back the billions of dollars of bonds held by the FED. Thus, the net effect is a reduction in national debt. After buying back the FED, the US Government does not have to pay interest on those bonds it buys back, further reducing the national debt. 6. Abolishing the FED will lead to eventual balance budget. Today, even if the US Economy only grows by a meager 2% per year, the US Government should be able to put 2% of US-GDP dol
Paul Merrell

Victory! Federal Court Recognizes Constitutional Rights of Americans on the No-Fly List... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...ctory-federal-court-recognizes

war on terror™ no-fly-list Due Process litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • A federal court took a critically important step late yesterday towards placing a check on the government's secretive No-Fly List. In a 38-page ruling in Latif v. Holder, the ACLU's challenge to the No-Fly List, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown recognized that the Constitution applies when the government bans Americans from the skies. She also asked for more information about the current process for getting off the list, to inform her decision on whether that procedure violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process. We represent 13 Americans, including four military veterans, who are blacklisted from flying. At oral argument in June on motions for partial summary judgment, we asked the court to find that the government violated our clients' Fifth Amendment right to due process by barring them from flying over U.S. airspace – and smearing them as suspected terrorists – without giving them any after-the-fact explanation or a hearing at which to clear their names. The court's opinion recognizes – for the first time – that inclusion on the No-Fly List is a draconian sanction that severely impacts peoples' constitutionally-protected liberties. It rejected the government's argument that No-Fly list placement was merely a restriction on the most "convenient" means of international travel.
  • Such an argument ignores the numerous reasons an individual may have for wanting or needing to travel overseas quickly such as for the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a business opportunity, or a religious obligation. According to the court, placement on the No-Fly List is like the revocation of a passport because both actions severely burden the right to international travel and give rise to a constitutional right to procedural due process: Here it is undisputed that inclusion on the No-Fly List completely bans listed persons from boarding commercial flights to or from the United States or over United States air space.  Thus, Plaintiffs have shown their placement on the No-Fly List has in the past and will in the future severely restrict Plaintiffs' ability to travel internationally. Moreover, the realistic implications of being on the No-Fly List are potentially far-reaching. For example, TSC [the Terrorist Screening Center] shares watchlist information with 22 foreign governments and United States Customs and Boarder [sic] Protection makes recommendations to ship captains as to whether a passenger poses a risk to transportation security, which can result in further interference with an individual's ability to travel as evidenced by some Plaintiffs' experiences as they attempted to travel abroad by boat and land and were either turned away or completed their journey only after an extraordinary amount of time, expense, and difficulty. Accordingly, the Court concludes on this record that Plaintiffs have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the list. The court also found that the government's inclusion of our clients on the No-Fly List smeared them as suspected terrorists and altered their ability to lawfully board planes, resulting in injury to another constitutionally-protected right: freedom from reputational harm.
  • The importance of these rulings is clear. Because inclusion on the No-Fly List harms our clients' liberty interests in travel and reputation, due process requires the government to provide them an explanation and a hearing to correct the mistakes that led to their inclusion. But under the government's "Glomar" policy, it refuses to provide any information confirming or denying that our clients are on the list, let alone an after-the-fact explanation and hearing. The court has asked the ACLU and the government for more information about the No-Fly List redress procedure to help it decide the ultimate question of whether that system violates the Fifth Amendment right to due process. We are confident the court will recognize that the government's "Glomar" policy of refusing even to confirm or deny our clients' No-Fly List status (much less actually providing the reasons for their inclusion in the list) is fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13
     
    A case decision in August that I had missed, right here in Oregon. One of our Oregon federal judges gets it right after being reversed the first time by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. I've read the opinion. Looks quite solid. Plaintiffs were carefully chosen for this test case, 13 citizens placed on the no-fly list, all with compelling stories of winding up stranded, some overseas. Several are U.S. military veterans. All were told by government officials that the reason they could not board was because they were on the TSA no-fly list. At issue is whether they have a right to be informed of the information that resulted in them being placed on the no-fly list and a right to a hearing to seek correction of the information. Their constitutional interest in their reputations is also in play, since they have been classified by their government as too dangerous to allow to travel by commercial airline.   The district court case is not done; the judge has ordered further briefing on some issues. But the government is trying to defend a process in which no one is ever formally notified that they are on the no-fly list and is never advised of the reasons they are on the no-fly list. The number of Americans on the no-fly list is now over 700,000. But the judge has recognized that there is a constitutional right to travel and that it extends to international travel. From the opinion: "Plaintiffs contend the government has deprived them of their protected liberty interest in travel. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held "[t]he right to travel is part of the 'liberty' of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment."  Id. at 125. As noted by the Ninth Circuit, "the [Supreme] Court has consistently treated the right to international travel as a liberty interest that is protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment." DeNieva v. Reyes, 966 F.2d 480, 485 (9th Cir. 1992)(emp
Gary Edwards

t r u t h o u t | Recent Rulings Could Shield 62 Million Homes From Foreclosure - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/on-homes-from-foreclosure62448

MERS ForeClosure-Mill financial-collapse subprime banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Most courts continue to look the other way on MERS' lack of standing to sue, but the argument has picked up enough steam to consider the rather stunning implications. If MERS is not the title holder of properties held in its name, the chain of title has been broken and no one may have standing to sue. In MERS v. Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance, MERS insisted that it had no actionable interest in title, and the court agreed.
  • An August 2010 article in Mother Jones titled "Fannie and Freddie's Foreclosure Barons" exposes a widespread practice of "foreclosure mills" in backdating assignments after foreclosures have been filed. Not only is this perjury, a prosecutable offense, but if MERS was never the title holder, there is nothing to assign. The defaulting homeowners could wind up with free and clear title.
  • "'Produce the Note' Movement Helps Stall Foreclosures":
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "The ticking time bomb in the US banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.
  • "... The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest US banks combined and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest US banks to fail...."
  • homeowner movement to tear off the predatory mask called MERS
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 10
     
    Technicality or Fatal Flaw? To foreclose on real property, the plaintiff must be able to produce a promissory note or assignment establishing title. Early cases focused on MERS' inability to produce such a note, but most courts continued to consider the note a mere technicality and ignored it. Landmark newer opinions, however, stress that this defect is not just a procedural. but a substantive failure, one that is fatal to the plaintiff's case. The latest of these decisions came down in California on May 20, 2010, in a bankruptcy case called In re Walker, Case no. 10-21656-E-11. The court held that MERS could not foreclose because it was a mere nominee and that as a result plaintiff Citibank could not collect on its claim. The judge opined: "Since no evidence of MERS' ownership of the underlying note has been offered and other courts have concluded that MERS does not own the underlying notes, this court is convinced that MERS had no interest it could transfer to Citibank. Since MERS did not own the underlying note, it could not transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to another. Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law."
Paul Merrell

Amend the Federal Reserve: We Need a Central Bank that Serves Main Street | Global Rese... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5360637

banksters federal-reserve Federal-Reserve-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • December 23rd marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve. Dissatisfaction with its track record has prompted calls to audit the Fed and end the Fed.  At the least, Congress needs to amend the Fed, modifying the Federal Reserve Act to give the central bank the tools necessary to carry out its mandates. The Federal Reserve is the only central bank with a dual mandate. It is charged not only with maintaining low, stable inflation but with promoting maximum sustainable employment. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly high, despite four years of radical tinkering with interest rates and quantitative easing (creating money on the Fed’s books). After pushing interest rates as low as they can go, the Fed has admitted that it has run out of tools. At an IMF conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers suggested that since near-zero interest rates were not adequately promoting people to borrow and spend, it might now be necessary to set interest at below zero. This idea was lauded and expanded upon by other ivory-tower inside-the-box thinkers, including Paul Krugman. Negative interest would mean that banks would charge the depositor for holding his deposits rather than paying interest on them. Runs on the banks would no doubt follow, but the pundits have a solution for that: move to a cashless society, in which all money would be electronic. “This would make it impossible to hoard cash outside the bank,” wrote Danny Vinik in Business Insider, “allowing the Fed to cut interest rates to below zero, spurring people to spend more.”
  • Business Week quotes Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office: “We’ve had four years of extraordinarily loose monetary policy without satisfactory results, and the only thing they come up with is we need more?” Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, calls the idea “harebrained.” He is equally skeptical of quantitative easing, the Fed’s other tool for stimulating the economy. Roberts points to Andrew Huszar’s explosive November 11th Wall Street Journal article titled “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” in which Huszar says that QE was always intended to serve Wall Street, not Main Street.  Huszar’s assignment at the Fed was to manage the purchase of $1.25 trillion in mortgages with dollars created on a computer screen. He says he resigned when he realized that the real purpose of the policy was to drive up the prices of the banks’ holdings of debt instruments, to provide the banks with trillions of dollars at zero cost with which to lend and speculate, and to provide the banks with “fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions.”
  • Bernanke created debt-free money and bought government debt with it, returning the interest to the Treasury. The result was interest-free credit, a good deal for the government. But the problem, says Lounsbury, is that: The helicopters dropped all the money into a hole in the ground (excess reserve accounts) and very little made its way into the economy.  It was essentially a rearrangement of the balance sheets of the creditor nation with little impact on the debtor nation. . . . The fatal flaw of QE is that it delivers money to the accounts of the creditors and does nothing for the accounts of the debtors. Bad debts remain unserviced and the debt crisis continues.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Bernanke delivered the money to the creditors because that was all the Federal Reserve Act allowed. If the Fed is to fulfill its mandate, it clearly needs more tools; and that means amending the Act.  Harvard professor Ken Rogoff, who spoke at the November 2013 IMF conference before Larry Summers, suggested several possibilities; and one was to broaden access to the central bank, allowing anyone to have an ATM at the Fed. Rajiv Sethi, Barnard/Columbia Professor of Economics, expanded on this idea in a blog titled “The Payments System and Monetary Transmission.” He suggested making the Federal Reserve the repository for all deposit banking. This would make deposit insurance unnecessary; it would eliminate the need to impose higher capital requirements; and it would allow the Fed to implement monetary policy by targeting debtor rather than creditor balance sheets. Instead of returning its profits to the Treasury, the Fed could do a helicopter drop directly into consumer bank accounts, stimulating demand in the consumer economy. John Lounsbury expanded further on these ideas. He wrote in Econintersect that they would open a pathway for investment banking and depository banking to be separated from each other, analogous to that under Glass-Steagall. Banks would no longer be too big to fail, since they could fail without destroying the general payment system of the economy. Lounsbury said the central bank could operate as a true public bank and repository for all federal banking transactions, and it could operate in the mode of a postal savings system for the general populace.
  • The Federal Reserve Act was drafted by bankers to create a banker’s bank that would serve their interests. It is their own private club, and its legal structure keeps all non-members out.  A century after the Fed’s creation, a sober look at its history leads to the conclusion that it is a privately controlled institution whose corporate owners use it to direct our entire economy for their own ends, without democratic influence or accountability.  Substantial changes are needed to transform the Fed, and these will only come with massive public pressure. Congress has the power to amend the Fed – just as it did in 1934, 1958 and 2010. For the central bank to satisfy its mandate to promote full employment and to become an institution that serves all the people, not just the 1%, the Fed needs fundamental reform.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13
     
    In my view, the Fed is beyond salvage. It needs abolition, not a new role. The Constitution grants Congress the power to mint and coin money, not a group of rent-seeking banksters. 
Paul Merrell

Resurrecting the Dubious State Secrets Privilege | John Dean | Verdict | Legal Analysis... - 0 views

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Dark-State state-secrets government secrecy Restis DoJ Holder

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a motion to make a private lawsuit simply disappear. While the U.S. Government is not a party to this defamation lawsuit—Victor Restis et al. v. American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc.—filed July 19, 2013, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is concerned that the discovery being undertaken might jeopardize our national security.
  • The government’s argument for intervening in this lawsuit is technical and thin.
  • The strongest precedent in the government’s brief in the current case is the 1985 case of Fitzgerald v. Penthouse Intern., Ltd. Fitzgerald had sued Penthouse Magazine for an allegedly libelous article, but the U.S. Navy moved to intervene on the ground that the government had a national security interest which would not be adequately protected by the parties, so the government requested the action be dismissed, after invoking the state secrets privilege. The federal district court granted the motions and dismissed the case, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for Fourth Circuit affirmed. So there is precedent for this unusual action by the government in a private lawsuit, but the legitimacy of the state secrets privilege remains subject to question.
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  • In February 2000, Judith Loether, a daughter of one of the three civilians killed in the 1948 B-29 explosion, discovered the government’s once-secret accident report for the incident on the Internet. Loether had been seven weeks old when her father died but been told by her mother what was known of her father’s death and the unsuccessful efforts to find out what had truly happened. When Loether read the accident report she was stunned. There were no national security secrets whatsoever, rather there was glaringly clear evidence of the government’s negligence resulting in her father’s death. Loether shared this information with the families of the other civilian engineers who had been killed in the incident and they joined together in a legal action to overturn Reynolds, raising the fact that the executive branch of the government had misled the Supreme Court, not to mention the parties to the earlier lawsuit.
  • Lou Fisher looked closely at the state secrets privilege in his book In The Name of National Security, as well as in follow-up articles when the Reynolds case was litigated after it was discovered, decades after the fact, that the government had literally defrauded the Supreme Court in Reynolds, e.g., “The State Secrets Privilege: Relying on Reynolds.” The Reynolds ruling emerged from litigation initiated by the widows of three civilian engineers who died in a midair explosion of a B-29 bomber on October 6, 1948. The government refused to provide the widows with the government’s accident report. On March 9, 1953, the Supreme Court created the state secrets privilege when agreeing the accident report did not have to be produced since the government claimed it contained national security secrets. In fact, none of the federal judges in the lower courts, nor the justices on the Supreme Court, were allowed to read the report.
  • Lowell states in his letter: “By relying solely upon ex parte submissions to justify its invocation of the state secrets privilege, especially in the unprecedented circumstance of private party litigation without an obvious government interest, the Government has improperly invoked the state secrets privilege, deprived Plaintiffs of the opportunity to test the Government’s claims through the adversarial process, and limited the Court’s opportunity to make an informed judgment. “ Lowell further claims that in “the typical state secrets case, the Government will simultaneously file both a sealed declaration and a detailed public declaration.” (Emphasis in Lowell’s letter.) To bolster this contention, he provided the court with an example, and offered to provide additional examples if so requested.
  • The Justice Department’s memorandum of law accompanying its motion to intervene states that once the state secrets privilege has been asserted “by the head of the department with control over the matter in question . . . the scope of judicial review is quite narrow.” Quoting from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling establishing this privilege in 1953, U.S. v. Reynolds, the brief adds: “the sole determination for the court is whether, ‘from all the circumstances of the case . . . there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military [or other] matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.’”In short, all the Justice Department need claim is the magic phrase—”state secrets”—after assuring the court that the head of department or agency involved has personally decided it is information that cannot be released. That ends the matter. This is what has made this privilege so controversial, not to mention dubious. Indeed, invocation by the executive branch effectively removes the question from judicial determination, and the information underlying the decision is not even provided to the court.
  • As Fisher and other scholars note, there is much more room under the Reynolds ruling for the court to take a hard look at the evidence when the government claims state secrets than has been common practice. Fisher reminds: “The state secrets privilege is qualified, not absolute. Otherwise there is no adversary process in court, no exercise of judicial independence over what evidence is needed, and no fairness accorded to private litigants who challenge the government . . . . There is no justification in law or history for a court to acquiesce to the accuracy of affidavits, statements, and declarations submitted by the executive branch.” Indeed, he noted to do so is contrary to our constitutional system of checks and balances.
  • Time to Reexamine Blind Adherence to the State Secrets PrivilegeIn responding to the government’s move to intervene, invoke state secrets, and dismiss the Restis lawsuit, plaintiffs’ attorney Abbe Lowell sent a letter to Judge Edgardo Ramos, the presiding judge on the case on September 17, 2014, contesting the Department of Justice’s ex parte filings, and requesting that Judge Ramos “order the Government to file a public declaration in support of its filing that will enable Plaintiffs to meaningfully respond.” Lowell also suggested as an alternative that he “presently holds more than sufficient security clearances to be given access to the ex parte submission,” and the court could do here as in other national security cases, and issue a protective order that the information not be shared with anyone. While Lowell does not so state, he is in effect taking on the existing state secrets privilege procedure where only the government knows what is being withheld and why, and he is taking on Reynolds.
  • To make a long story short, the Supreme Court was more interested in the finality of their decisions than the fraud that had been perpetrated upon them. They rejected the direct appeal, and efforts to relegate the case through the lower courts failed. As Fisher notes, the Court ruled in Reynolds based on “vapors and allusions,” rather than facts and evidence, and today it is clear that when it uncritically accepted the government’s word, the Court abdicated its duty to protect the ability of each party to present its case fairly, not to mention it left the matter under the control of a “self-interested executive” branch.
  • Lowell explains it is not clear—and suggests the government is similarly unclear in having earlier suggested a “law enforcement privilege”—as to why the state secrets privilege is being invoked, and argues this case can be tried without exposing government secrets. Citing the Fitzgerald ruling, Lowell points out dismissal is appropriate “[o]nly when no amount of effort and care on the part of the court and the parties will safeguard privileged material is dismissal warranted.”
  • No telling how Judge Ramos will rule, and the government has a remarkable record of prevailing with the deeply flawed state secrets privilege. But Lowell’s letter appears to say, between the lines, that he has a client who is prepared to test this dubious privilege and the government’s use of it in this case if Judge Ramos dismisses this lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where that ruling would be reviewed, sees itself every bit the intellectual equal of the U.S. Supreme Court and it is uniquely qualified to give this dubious privilege and the Reynolds holding a reexamination. It is long past time this be done.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Sep 14
     
    Interesting take on the Restis case by former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean. Where the State Secrets Privilege is at its very nastiest, in my opinion, is in criminal prosecutions where the government withholds potentially exculpatory evidence on grounds of state secrecy. I think the courts have been far too lenient in allowing people to be tried without production of such evidence. The work-around in the Guantanamo Bay inmate cases has been to appoint counsel who have security clearances, but in those cases the lawyer is forbidden from discussing the classified information with the client, who could have valuable input if advised what the evidence is. It's also incredibly unfair in the extraordinary rendition cases, where the courts have let the government get away with having the cases dismissed on state secrecy grounds, even though the tortures have been the victim of criminal official misconduct.  It forces the victims to appeal clear to the Supreme Court before they can start over in an international court with jurisdiction over human rights violations, where the government loses because of its refusal to produce the evidence.  (Under the relevant treaties that the U.S. is a party to, the U.S. is required to provide a judicial remedy without resort to claims of national security secrecy.) Then the U.S. refuses to pay the judgments of the International courts, placing the U.S. in double breach of its treaty obligations. We see the same kinds of outrageous secrecy playing out in the Senate Intellience Committee's report on CIA torture, where the Obama Administration is using state secrecy claims to delay release of the report summary and minimize what is in it. It's highly unlikely that I will live long enough to read the full report. And that just is not democracy in action. Down with the Dark State!   
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