Category Archives: Other Views

Good Little Maoists, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 1 comment

James Howard Kunstler confront campus political correctness run amuck. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life.

To continue reading: Good Little Maoists

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Call Congress:Tell Them No US Troops in Syria, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 2 comments

From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

Two years ago, as the War Party was agitating for US intervention in Syria and the President was announcing his capitulation to their demands, Barack Obama told the American people the following:

“I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo.”

Since that time, he and his principal spokespersons have repeated this promise or some variation of it no less than ten times, as the Washington Post has pointed out. But guess what? If you like your “no boots on the ground” you can keep your “no boots on the ground” – because our Dear Leader has turned on a dime.

Yes, folks, it has just been announced that US Special Forces are going into Syria in order to “advise and assist” the newly-formed “Syrian Democratic Forces,” yet another alliance of “moderate” Syrian rebels whose “moderation” consists mainly of wishful thinking on the part of this administration.

The formation of the “Syrian Democratic Forces” was announced just after the revelation that the Pentagon was giving up its training program to put US-vetted Syrian rebels in the field, and will instead ramp up its “covert” program of aiding existing rebel groups. A key change: while the commanders will be vetted, the fighters under their command will be given a Get Out of Jail Free card. That’s because the jihadists fighting the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad are all Islamist extremists of one sort or another, and connected ideologically if not organizationally either to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

To take a prime example: one of the thirteen groups under the “Syrian Democratic Forces” banner is “Suwar al-Raqqa,” otherwise known as the “Raqqa Revolutionaries.” These worthies defected to al-Qaeda in 2013:

“Hundreds of fighters under the command of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) have reportedly switched allegiance to al-Qaeda-aligned groups, in a move described as a huge blow to moderate rebel forces.

“Activists and military sources have told Al Jazeera that the 11th Division – one of the biggest FSA brigades – has switched allegiance to the al-Nusra Front in Raqqah province, a border province with Turkey. A video was uploaded to YouTube on Thursday purporting to show members of the 11th Division parading through Raqqah with Nusra fighters. In the video clip, a voice can be heard saying in Arabic, “Raqqah … September 19, 2013 … The convoy of Nusra … God is great … Nusra in Raqqah province.”

“The switch, if confirmed, tightens Nusra’s control of Raqqah just days after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) attacked members of the Free Syrian Army in Azaz, on the border with Turkey.

“The Reuters news agency, citing sources inside Syria, also reported that entire units of the FSA had joined Nusra and the ISIS in recent days. The Raqqah Revolutionaries – which is part of the 11th Division – has about 750 fighters in total, according to a source close to al-Qaeda linked forces.”

Remember those 3,000 people murdered on September 11, 2001, in the middle of New York City? We’re now aiding and abetting their murderers – in the name of the “war on terrorism.”

To continue reading: No US Troops in Syria

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Re Tony Blair: Save the Apologies, Just Stop Promoting War! by Ron Paul

Posted on November 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Ron Paul via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

Usually when politicians apologize it’s because they have been caught doing something wrong, or they are about to be caught. Such was likely the case with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who recently offered an “apology” for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair faces the release of a potentially damning report on his government’s conduct in the run-up to the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq.

Similarly, a batch of emails released from the private server of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton show Blair pledging support for US military action against Iraq a full year before the decision to attack had supposedly been made. While Prime Minister Blair was assuring his constituents that he was dedicated to diplomacy in the Iraq crisis, he was communicating through back channels that he was ready for war whenever Bush decided on it.

A careful observer of public opinion, Blair took the surprising step of “apologizing” for the Iraq war during an interview on CNN last month.

However, there are two other characteristics of politicians’ apologies: they rarely take personal blame for a misdeed and rarely do they atone for those misdeeds.

Thus Tony Blair did not apologize for his role in pushing the disastrous Iraq war. He did not apologize for having, as former head UN Iraq inspector Hans Blix claimed, “misrepresented intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to gain approval for the Iraq War.”

No, Tony Blair “apologized” for “the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong,” on Iraq. He apologized for “mistakes in planning” for post-Saddam Iraq. He boldly refused to apologize for removing Saddam from power.

In other words, he apologized that the intelligence manipulated by his cronies to look like Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the UK turned out to not be the case. For Blair, it was someone else’s fault.

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Ban Ki-Moon Condemns The American Stand On Syria, Endorses Putin’s, by Eric Zuesse

Posted on November 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

This article is as much about the western press and propaganda (ah, but I repeat myself) as it is about Syria. From Eric Zuesse at zerohedge.com:

In an interview with Spanish newspapers that was published October 31st, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from office, and Moon said: “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.”

Here is the entire quotation:

“The future of President Assad must be decided by the Syrian people. Now, I do not want to interfere in the process of Vienna, but I think it is totally unfair and unreasonable that the fate of a person [diplomatese here for: U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that Assad be removed from the Presidency of Syria] to paralyze all this political negotiation. This is not acceptable. It’s not fair. The Syrian government insists that Assad should be part of the transition. Many Western countries oppose the Syrian government’s position. Meanwhile, we lost years. 250,000 people have been killed. There are 13 million refugees or internally displaced. Over 50% of hospitals, schools and infrastructure has been destroyed in Syria. You must not lose more time. This crisis goes beyond Syria, beyond the region. It affects Europe. It is a global crisis.”

The U.N. Secretary General is here implicitly blaming all of this – lots of blood and misery – on U.S. President Obama, and on the “many Western countries” who ally with him and have joined with him in demanding regime-change in Syria.

The position of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been, and is, to the exact contrary of Obama’s: namely, that only an election by the Syrian people can determine whom Syria’s President should be. The U.N. Secretary General is here agreeing with Putin, and rejecting Obama’s demand, that the matter be determined instead by non-Syrians, and by non-democratic means (which is basically like George W. Bush did in Iraq, and like Barack Obama did in Libya).

Suckers in the West fall for the Western aristocracies’ line that Putin and not Obama is wrong on this and is the cause of the dragged-out Syrian war. Such fools don’t even ask themselves whether in this dispute it is Obama, or instead Putin, who is supporting the most basic democratic principle of self-rule by the people. But the average individual is that manipulable: so manipulable as to think that black is white, and white is black; that good is bad, and bad is good. Totally manipulable.

This interview was buried by Spanish newspapers, because the Spanish government is allied with the United States. For example, the most prominent Spanish newspaper to publish even quotations from this interview is El Pais, and their headline for the story is “Catalonia is not among the territories with the right to self-determination.” Even there, the headline is false. What Moon actually said instead on that issue of the Catalonian independence movement, was: “The Catalan question is a very delicate matter and, while the UN Secretary General, I’m not in a position to comment on that because it is a purely internal matter.” Lies and distortions in the Western ‘news’ media are that routine: so obvious, sometimes, virtually any intelligent reader can easily recognize that he’s reading lies and propaganda (like in that ‘news’ story).

To continue reading: Ban Ki-Moon Condemns American Stand On Syria, Endorses Putin’s

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Pew: Homicide Rates Cut in Half Over Past 20 Years (While New Gun Ownership Soared), by Ryan McMaken

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 1 comment

The argument that gun control will cut murder rates, and the converse, that increased gun ownership leads to more murders, are directly contradicted by the evidence. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

The Pew Research Center reported last week that the murder rate was cut nearly in half from 7 per 100,000 in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2013. Over the same period, overall gun deaths (including accidents and suicides) have fallen by one-third from 15.2 to 10.6 per 100,000.

In spite of this, Pew reports, the American public believes that homicides and gun deaths are increasing in the United States. Those who think violence is getting worse should probably watch less television and look around them instead. The murder rate in the US is currently similar to 1950s levels.

Meanwhile, the number of privately owned guns (and gun commerce in general) in the United States has increased substantially in recent decades.

According to the World Bank, here are the homicide rates in the US since 1995:

Here’s the homicide rate graphed against total new firearms (manufactured plus imported) in US (indexed with 1995 =100):

To continue reading: Homicide Rates Cut in Half While New Gun Ownership Soared

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How Arbitration Clauses are Stripping American Citizens of Their “Right to Go to Court,” by Michael Krieger

Posted on November 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

Corporations are putting arbitration clauses in contracts, denying aggrieved customers access to courts and just as importantly, stopping class action suits that are one of the best remedies against corporate depredations. Michael Krieger highlights this under-the-radar phenomenon at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies like American Express devised a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.

Thousands of cases brought by single plaintiffs over fraud, wrongful death and rape are now being decided behind closed doors. And the rules of arbitration largely favor companies, which can even steer cases to friendly arbitrators, interviews and records show.

The sharp shift away from the civil justice system has barely registered with Americans. F. Paul Bland Jr., the executive director of Public Justice, a national consumer advocacy group, attributed this to the tangle of bans placed inside clauses added to contracts that no one reads in the first place.

“Corporations are allowed to strip people of their constitutional right to go to court,” Mr. Bland said. “Imagine the reaction if you took away people’s Second Amendment right to own a gun.”

– From yesterday’s New York Times article: Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice

I’ve followed the dangerous trend of the increased corporate use of arbitration clauses in contracts for several years now, and yesterday’s New York Times investigation into their civil liberties destroying nature, is one of the best pieces I’ve seen on the subject to date.

What’s so fascinating about this article, is it goes all the way back to the origins of the practice, during which lawyers representing big banks got together with Philadelphia attorney Alan S. Kaplinsky, to strategize on how best to write class-action bans into arbitration clauses. It also explains how current Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had been actively petitioning the high court to uphold such bans while he was a corporate lawyer, and then led the way to a 5-4 decision to solidify the bans after becoming Chief Justice.

In practice, what these bans essentially achieve is to allow companies to nickel and dime consumers and their employees while leaving very little recourse available. While the individual infractions are generally minor financial burdens, when aggregated across a large number of victims, it can amount to billions of dollars.

To continue reading: How Arbitration Clauses are Stripping American Citizens of Their “Right to Go to Court”

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The Global Test Most Will Fail: Surviving the Bust That Inevitably Follows a Boom, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Now that virtually every nation is entering the bust phase, all are being tested.

Booms powered by credit, new markets and speculation are followed by busts as night follows day. This creates a very difficult test for every nation-state facing the inevitable bust: how does the leadership deal with the end of the boom?

As the world is about to learn once again, the “fix” may make the next bust even more destructive.

Let’s start by reviewing what conditions generate booms.

1. An undeveloped nation gains access to new credit, markets and resources and go through a “boost phase” much like a rocket lifting off when suddenly abundant finance capital ignites the country’s latent growth potential. When a country with little to no public or private debt suddenly gains access to essentially unlimited capital, growth explodes.

One variant of this is the discovery of vast new resources that quickly attract capital (for example, oil) or that generate new wealth (for example, gold).

The modern example of a developing nation gaining access to new credit, markets and resources is of course China, but this model also describes America in the 1790s and early 1800s, and many other nations in various phases of their development.

2. A new sector opens up in a developed nation’s economy. A recent example is the Internet, which exploded in a boost phase from 1995 to 2000. In these cases, the new sector simply didn’t exist, and the boost phase is as spectacular as the ones in newly developing economies.

Example from American history include the railroad-fueled boom of the 1870s and 1880s and the advent of electric light and later, radio.

3. A previously “safe” sector is financialized as the assets are collateralized into vast mountains of debt and leverage, both of which fuel runaway speculation.

The mortgage-backed-securities and subprime-fueled housing boom of 2002-2008 is a recent example of this: a safe, conservative sector (mortgages and housing) was rapidly financialized into a speculative frenzy.

Eventually this boost phase burns thru all the productive investments and moves into mal-investment, rampant speculation and outright fraud as insiders take advantage of new entrants. In the U.S., this occurred in the early 1890s once the construction of railroads had moved to the over-indebted, speculative mal-investment phase.

To continue reading: The Global Test Most Will Fail

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Former Congressman: I’m Quitting GOP, by Tom Tancredo

Posted on November 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

A former congressman realizes he’s part of the government uniparty and quits the Republican branch. From Tom Tancredo at breitbart.com:

In a panel discussion at the University of Colorado after the recent Republican debate, I was asked by a student why she should be a Republican. The question forced me to ask myself the same thing.

I gave the young woman the standard talking points–that Republicans believe in smaller government, individual rights, fiscal responsibility, and free enterprise. But as I drove home, her question–and my inability to respond with any level of real conviction–got me thinking: Does the Republican Party leadership fight for these values and principles today?

After much thought, I reluctantly concluded that the answer is “no.” The proudly socialist Democrats are full of passionate intensity, while the Republican leadership is full of pathetic excuses. After this week’s House GOP “budget deal,” which betrays nearly every promise made to grassroots conservatives since 2010, I have decided it is time to end my affiliation with the Republican Party.

This decision has been incubating over the past 17 years, years of watching the downward spiral of the Party of Lincoln and Reagan into the Party of Democrat Lite.

• As a Member of Congress for ten years (1998-2008), I was subjected to threats and pressures from the Congressional Leadership and President George W. Bush to support the creation of an expensive Medicare prescription drug program–even though creating a new government spending program financed by massive debt flies in the face of the Republican Party’s core principles.

• Our most powerful and influential “leaders” were shoving this down our throats in a crass political effort to use taxpayer money to buy the votes of senior citizens–particularly in the state of Florida in the next presidential election.

• I was incredulous about the fact that the most intense lobbying I had ever seen undertaken by our “leadership” was not an effort to limit government or the dollars it spends; it was to do just the opposite.

• That incident came just months after I was told by President Bush’s top political operative, Karl Rove, “never to darken the door of the White House again” because of my criticism of the administration’s dangerously lax immigration policies in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

When I first arrived in the U.S. House of Representatives, I naively believed that it was primarily the Democrats who were committed to open borders. But I quickly learned the entire Republican establishment also supported a policy of immigration non-enforcement.

I was repeatedly pulled into the office of the then-Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and threatened with dire consequences if I continued to speak out publicly for common-sense immigration policies and true border security – particularly if I was doing so in the districts of other Republican Members of Congress.

For most of those years after 2000, we had a Republican President and a Republican-controlled Congress, but the conservative agenda was largely ridiculed and abandoned.

To continue reading: Former Congressman: I’m Quitting GOP

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Mario Draghi Admits Global QE Has Failed: “The Slowdown Is Probably Not Temporary,” by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

The wonder is not that QE failed; the wonder is that anybody thought it would work. The world’s QEing central banks should have t-shirts made: Stock Markets Made New Highs and All the Rest of Us Got Were The Bills. Those bills, incidentally, are now coming due, and they’re dragging down the world economy. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Undoubtedly, the most amusing this about the prospect of more easing from the ECB (as telegraphed by Mario Draghi last week) and the BoJ (where Haruhiko Kuroda just jeopardized his status as monetary madman par excellence by failing to expand stimulus) is that both Europe and Japan both recently slid back into deflation despite trillions in central bank asset purchases.

In other words, the market expects both Draghi and Kuroda to double- and triple- down on policies that clearly aren’t working when it comes to altering inflation expectations and/or boosting aggregate demand. Indeed, both Goldman and BofAML said as much last week. For those who missed it, here’s Goldman’s take

The subdued and increasingly persistent inflation dynamics that have prevailed in recent years may have eroded central banks’ best line of defence in the face of adverse disinflationary shocks. The energy-price-driven decline in Euro area inflation from 2012 to 2015 has thrown this possibility into even sharper relief.

By embarking on unprecedented balance sheet operations and forward guidance, central banks in Europe have sought to ring-fence domestic inflation expectations and signal their intention to maintain monetary conditions easy for a protracted period of time. Mario Draghi himself described the ECB’s asset purchase programme as a way of ensuring that very low (and, at times, negative) inflation does not lead wage- and price-setters to adjust their behaviour to a perceived lower steady-state rate of inflation. However, judging from market-based implied measures of longer-term inflation expectations, the effectiveness of the ECB’s announcements has proved limited so far.

To continue reading: Mario Draghi Admits Global QE Has Failed

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A Glimmer of Hope for Syria, by Robert Parry

Posted on October 31, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com:

Exclusive: With new negotiations starting in Vienna – and with Iran now allowed to participate – there is finally a glimmer of hope that the Syrian slaughter might end. But that will require concessions from all sides and President Obama standing up to the neocons who put “regime change” ahead of peace, writes Robert Parry.

Despite all the ranting from armchair-warriors across Official Washington – urging attacks on the Syrian military and even Russian warplanes inside Syria – cooler heads may have finally prevailed with Secretary of State John Kerry agreeing to a formula that will let Iran participate in Syrian peace talks set to begin Friday in Geneva.

The point here is that Iran and Russia, as allies of the Syrian government, are in a strong position to urge concessions from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, much as Russian President Vladimir Putin did in 2013 when he pressured Assad to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. Also, in late 2013, Putin helped wrest concessions from Iran over its nuclear program.

Assuming Kerry shows corresponding flexibility by relenting on the U.S. demand that “Assad must go” as a precondition to negotiations – and puts pressure on the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition to accept some compromise with Assad – perhaps this humanitarian catastrophe can be brought under some measure of control.

It is way past time for sanity and realism to replace the endless “tough guy/gal” posturing that has consumed Official Washington since 2011 as a quarter million Syrians have been killed and millions have fled as refugees across the Mideast and into Europe.

The only narrative that’s been allowed in the mainstream U.S. press is that Assad is responsible for nearly every bad thing that’s happened, ignoring the support that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and even Israel have provided to jihadist fighters, including Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and Al Qaeda’s spinoff, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh).

President Barack Obama has been part of the problem, too, as he has bent to the “regime change” demands of “liberal interventionists” and their close cousins, the neoconservatives.

To appease those political/media voices, Obama has “covertly” intervened in the Syrian conflict by arming and training some rebel forces. Though the administration insists that it has armed and trained only “moderate” rebels, the reality is that such a “moderate” force is largely mythical, with many of the CIA’s recruits later joining Islamist armies and surrendering U.S.-supplied weapons to these extremists.

How U.S. officials have defined “moderate” is also in question. A source briefed on this strategy told me that the CIA supplied 500 TOW anti-tank missiles to Ahrah ash-Sham, an Islamist force founded, in part, by Al Qaeda veterans. Ahrah ash-Sham collaborates with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front as the two leading militias in the Saudi-backed Army of Conquest.

The sophisticated TOW missiles have been “credited” with enabling the Army of Conquest to make major advances around the city of Idlib and block counter-offenses by the Syrian army. In other words, U.S. support for “moderate” rebels has strengthened the military position of Al Qaeda, even if the administration can technically argue that it isn’t giving weapons to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

To continue reading: A Glimmer of Hope for Syria

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