As U.S. Loses Economic Edge, Its "One Clear Comparative Advantage is in Killing, and It’s Using It"

[marmar]

from Democracy Now!:




As 2010 draws to a close, what is the role of the United States in the world today? From the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the cuts to social programs here at home, where is there emerging hope for change around the world? We spend the hour with award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. "You vote for Democrat, you vote for Republican, you get the same thing on state murder, on preventable death. But we here have the right to rebel. We have to use it."

....(snip)....


AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a tall order to talk about the role of the United States in the world today, but why don’t we start right there?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, now, as the U.S. is losing its edge economically, it has one clear comparative advantage. And that’s in killing. And it’s using it. Obama has increased the attacks on Afghanistan, Pakistan. Brookings Institution last year estimated that for every one militant, as they put it, killed in Pakistan, the U.S. drones kill 10 civilians. And they said that was OK; they defended the U.S. policy. General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, also the National Security Agency, also former director of National Intelligence, said that our default position is to kill our adversaries, referring to the use of the drones. Harold Koh, who’s the legal adviser for the Justice Department, earlier this year at a State Department briefing on the results of the review conference on the International Criminal Court, described the international legal environment that the U.S. had helped shape. And he said this: "No U.S. national can be prosecuted for aggression. We ensure total protection to our American forces and other nationals going forward." So, in that situation, the U.S. defines who the adversaries is. The default U.S. position is to kill the adversary. When you kill the adversary, you kill 10 civilians. What are the survivors, the loved ones of those civilians, supposed to do, when the international legal system is rigged so that there is no peaceful redress, so they have no place to go? It’s unjustified. It’s terrorism by the U.S. law’s own definition.

But it’s also ominous for Americans, especially ominous in a historical moment where the U.S. is losing its edge. Right now it still has the massive military advantage, but how long is that going to last? Other countries have more people to field as troops. Other countries can manufacture weapons more cheaply. The U.S. still has the edge in military technology, but in today’s information age, that can’t last very long. So, if the appeal to decency can’t wake up Americans and make them say stop, maybe the appeal to self-interest and fear can do it.

Imagine a moment not too far in the future—some of the technical magazines just started writing about this—where foreign countries would have the capacity to put drones in the skies over New York, over San Diego, over Alabama, over Chicago. How would Americans feel about that, when the discretion on whether to push the button on the missile and launch it at anyone—at anyone in the U.S.—a member of Congress, a member of the President’s staff, a GI, someone walking down the street—when that discretion lies with someone in some foreign capital, some commander? And imagine how Americans would feel if those overseas controllers of the drones flying in the skies over the U.S. decided to apply American standards; if they decided to apply the Brookings standard that says, OK, if we target one American military planner and we kill 10 civilians, that’s OK; if they decide to apply General Hayden’s standard that, well, it’s our default position to kill these adversaries; and if they decide to apply the U.S. State Department standard, which says no matter what we do, we can’t be prosecuted. That’s the situation that the U.S. is setting up. And it’s going to be increasingly dangerous for Americans as time goes by.

AMY GOODMAN: The international soldier death toll in Afghanistan is, well, I think, as of this broadcast, around 709. Almost 500 of those are U.S. soldiers. It’s the deadliest year in what? We’re coming—we’re in the 10th year, the longest war the U.S. has been involved in, ongoing work, in the history of this country. What about Afghanistan, what you feel needs to be done?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s interesting that you mention the killings of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. To me, one of the most interesting points that’s made in the documents released by WikiLeaks came out in some of the earlier releases, particularly the Iraq war logs. If you read those, you see that when the U.S. military is reporting on U.S. killings of civilians in Iraq or in Afghanistan, they almost always say, "Well, we did it to protect our forces. Some of our soldiers came under fire. We responded. And we wiped out the house." In some cases, they end up wiping out the whole village compound. "And that’s why those civilians were killed." Or, "There was fire from the ground. Our men were in the air in a helicopter. We returned fire. It turned out that it was a wedding party on the ground, and they were shooting their guns in celebration. But we did it with the intent of protecting our forces."

And there’s a certain logic to that. If you’re a soldier and you’re in combat, naturally you want to protect yourself and protect your friends, and you will do everything possible to do that, including killing someone who you think, who you speculate, might be firing at you or might potentially fire at you. So that inevitably sets up a situation where when you send troops into a country in a hostile situation, when you invade a country, that means—really it means, in a practical sense—that in order to protect your troops, you have to kill civilians, you have to kill them in large numbers. And that’s what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan. That’s what it did in Iraq. And that’s what it’s setting up to do in a series of other places. It’s an inevitable result of the initial act, of the initial act of invasion, and, in legal terms, what is often the initial act of aggression. .............(more)

The complete piece (in transcript, video and audio formats) is at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/29/allan_nairn_as_us_loses_its

[snagglepuss]

1. This is a must read. The remark that 'killing is the American advantage'

is chilling and that it is not guaranteed to continue is bang on.

[DCKit]

2. How dare the rest of the world reject our hocus-pocus, voodoo economics!

I'm infuridated.

[tularetom]

3. How long before the rest of the world gets pissed off

and turns our "advantage" back on us? The way we're going we'll be so broke we can't afford any military forces or weapons.

[loudsue]

4. Not long, my friend. It's becoming more & more possible by the day,

and I think the rest of the world has had enough of our bullying.

[Lorien]

5. The American Empire must come to an end

because it's become a truly evil empire. Unfortunately, the decisions of the rich and our blindness to what is being done in our names will only harm those of us in the bottom 98%. The profiteers will be unscathed and will walk away from the corpse of our Nation with boatloads of loot.

[Xicano]

6. Here's an interesting interview.

Banks, Bailouts and Manufactured Market Crashes with Max Keiser: http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20101229-Wed1300.mp3 ((audio))




Excerpt from interview: (Starting at 37:50)


Max Keiser: "....They would do these corporate raids where they would borrow lots of money, take over a company, seize the pension assets, fire everybody and cut themselves a big fat paycheck.

Well this is exactly what the IMF is doing to Ireland, they see pension funds, they see cash, they're (the IMF) borrowing lots of money. The IMF has no money, they're bankrupt. They're using borrowed money because the IMF is mostly the U.S. and U.S. banks and these banks are all bankrupt. You know to say that they could bail-out anybody is ridiculous. They're simply using borrowed money to do leverage buy-out of a country to steal their wealth, and then the population will be left footing the bill.

Same thing in Greece, and Greece is really a tragic story because of course they should of never been in the Euro to begin with had it not been for Goldman Sachs cooking the books of Greece to make it look like they had a better cash position than they did and then they were let into the Euro. Then a few years later because they don't really have the cash; they can't keep up with the rest of the Eurozone and they fall behind. So the jackals swoop in and now they're turning Greece into a vassal state. Great place to park your yacht but don't try and get any kind of civil rights or human rights in Greece.

Same thing now for Portugal and Spain. The same kinds of things the IMF was actively doing in South America/Latin America for years during the period where a lot of leaders of those countries would fall out of airplanes and the IMF would come in.

Argentina is a great example. I mean Citigroup totally decimated that country as they convinced the government to put Citigroup's liabilities on to government's balance sheet and then they force the people to pay-off Citibank's loans. What a genius operation that was.

So they're using this technique of the leverage buy-out to go into these countries that are sitting ducks basically and they're stealing all their wealth and they're being successful again because people are not able to articulate the problem well enough to fight against it. They, again, the left as its called is completely bamboozled by markets and finance you know.

Ask your left-wing friends today a simple question. You say to them...ask ten of your left-wing friends today, say "what is the relationship between interest rates and bond prices? Now this is the most academic piece of financial knowledge that even a first year high school economics person would know the answer to. But I guarantee you that if you ask a hundred of your left-wing friends, not a single one will know the answer. That is a problem because they don't have any idea what they're fighting against. All they know is that they're upset about something and then that's all they know and its not enough and they're getting killed."


KPFA's Bonnie Faulkner: "What are the prospects for a collapse of the Euro and a break up of the Eurozone? We are now beginning to hear this yet again."


Max Keiser: "I call it Germany 4.0 which is a new tech way of saying the fourth reich. This crisis is playing into Germany's hands. Remember after WWII Germany was split up and never to be raised again. Then under the creation of the Euro they said well....you can reunify East/West German again but it will be diffused under the rubric of the Euro.

Well now that the Euro is breaking apart and Germany will break away. It'll have a reunified country, its own central bank, the Bundesbank, which is essentially the same as the European central bank, and it will be the second biggest exporter in the world, second only to China, and, China and Germany will be battling for world superpower status within ten years.

So its....Germany's loving it....this whole crisis because as long as it continues the Euro is cheap which helps their export market. When they do finally break apart they'll be a superpower."


Bonnie Faulkner: "So you do see the Eurozone as breaking apart eventually?"


Max Keiser: "Well yeah, because Germany wants it that way and Germany is always an imperial....always has imperial ambitions. Its the fourth reich. Germany is back again.

Before WWII seventy five percent of all the technical texts in the world were written in German. Germans have a notion of a certain divine right, which they'll try again, to be the world's superpower. They're gonna try again and the United States gave them the way to do it and the rest of the world simply opened the door. If you open the door to Germany they're not gonna sit back and contemplate their navel, they're gonna go for it.


Bonnie Faulkner: "What about the incredible bail-outs of U.S. and foreign banks by the FED secretly amounting to over twenty trillion. What can you tell us about the FED itself, I mean they're the ones that do what? Manufacture the money right, or the credit?"

Max Keiser: "Well the FED you know...its ahh...as Ben Franklin said one of the reasons why America broke away from the British Empire was the bank of England. The bank of England is a usurious, co-opting organization that was undermining the colony's ability to economically grow, and, the constitution expressly forbid the use of any money that wasn't gold & silver and put up a lot of fire-walls to prevent anything like a central bank from coming into existence because its a menacing force to the economy.

You want to be able to coin your own money for your own people. You don't want to out-source your money creation to a third-party, especially when that third-party is aligned with foreign interests. That doesn't make any sense. I mean American doesn't out-source its nuclear weapons program to the Chinese or the Iranians. Why would America out-source its money creation program to the Europeans and the Russians and the Japanese and everyone else around the world vis-à-vis the Federal Reserve Bank. It is not an American bank. Federal does not refer to America. Federal Reserve is American as....its like Federal Express. Its just a brand, its not a federal organization. Its a third-party, internationally owned lending facility meant to undermine the dollar in ways that help only the constituents of the FED.

So the fact that the FED engineered a bail-out of its foreign interests was a mandate of course by the foreign interests who still look at America as a colony. America is still a colony, that's what this crisis has reveled. The revolutionary war of 1776 was a washout. It did not produce independence as some imagined. Obviously if the FED is bailing out foreign banks with Americans money, then what do you call that? That's called a colony. America is still a colony. You have fifty colonies now under the American/global banking flag instead of thirteen. But its a colony. Therefore...we need to re-stage the independence movement and re-stage the revolutionary war for independence because it didn't work the first time, that was a big wash-out. Whens the real revolution coming because that first one was a damp squib."


Bonnie Faulkner: "Right and when you say the "constituents of the FED" you're talking about all the other banks, right?"


Max Keiser: That's right. They are in the business of loaning money in ways that put people into onerous amounts of debt. As is the case with any feudal lord over his indentured servants. It's a model from the middle-ages that made a lot of people rich. And if it weren't for some of the changes back in the last millennium we would still be under that...the yolk of a feudal system, but, because of the history, for example, the black plague, etc. which wiped much of the work-force in Europe and forced the lords to actually pay people money to keep care of their estates.

This is the beginning of the middle-class which is the beginning of the French, American, Russian revolutions, but, that force of aristocracy and monarchy didn't go away. They want to go back to it was a thousand years ago. They want to go back to peasants and lords. They don't want....they hate the middle-class. They hate the idea that people can get on an airplane and fly around the world for twenty bucks because it doesn't make them special.

You know if I can do the same thing that David Gaffen can do, what makes David Gaffen special? Not much. You know these people want to be able to do things that nobody else can do. Flying around cheaply and doing these types of things is something they want to remove that privilege because its not fun being an aristocratic monarch if everybody can do the same thing. What's the fun in that?"


Bonnie Faulkner: "Exactly, and debt is a system of control basically."


Max Keiser: "Always has been. Always has been and this is why, again, the American revolution...ahh, they didn't want a central bank...to get back to the central bank. There wasn't a central bank in the U.S. until 1913. Then during a lame-duck end of the year session they brought in the central bank in 1913. Shortly thereafter they started having financial calamities. They had a big one in 1929, the collapse of the stock market, a direct result of the creation of the central bank in 1913. And its been a systematic picking away at the underline financial strength of the constitution ever since.

1971 Nixon who could no longer afford to bomb the Vietnamese closed the gold window out to renege on his international debts. This brought in the hyper-inflation of the late 70's and early 80's which of course was another period of massive wealth creation substituting the petrodollar for the gold back dollar but the integrity of the system continued to degenerate.

Then you had the listing of formalized options trading in the 70's and gaining strength in the 80's and 90's. The options volatility formula which was crated by Nobel prize winning economists, which is like the equivalent of the E=MC² formula for matter & energy is the options pricing volatility formula separating risk from reward. So with options you can trade risks separately from reward just like you could...nuclear bomb you can separate energy from matter, and armed with this technology is the bases of all algorithmic trading so that any computer can go into the system, figure out the reward, take it and leave the risk.

The risks then becomes socialized or it becomes distributed over the masses who can't afford it, have to go into debt to pay for it. And this is how through using computer programs there's been this wealth confiscation period resulting in the reemergence of an entrenched kleptocratic aristocracy which knows only one deterrent, and it was played out in France here in 1839, its called the guillotine."


Bonnie Faulkner: "Can you explain the foreclosure scandal or mortgage-gate? For instance what was Bank of America up to. I mean how deep does the fraud go?"


Max Keiser: "Well the foreclosure fraud is an interesting one because its fraud taken to the point of an assembly line. Remember Henry Ford famously created the "assembly line" and the masses could afford...cars.

Bank of America, Wells Fargo and these other banks created an assembly line of fraud. It wasn't just a one-off, it wasn't just a few forged documents and a few bribes here and there. They created an assembly line where tens of thousands of documents were forged, tens of thousands of mortgages were illicitly and fraudulently induced into the population. And as a result by some estimates Bank of America is now attached to a six trillion dollar liability which is even bigger than the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac liability of five trillion dollars.

Remember the U.S. has fourteen trillion in debt but if you add the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac liability which is off the balance sheet, but, why, I mean they still owe this money, that's five plus fourteen. So you got nineteen trillion in debt plus six trillion in this Bank of America foreclosure debt. So that's twenty five trillion actually in debt the U.S. has, not including the unfunded liabilities of social security and medicaid which is another fifty trillion in debt. So the U.S. has seventy five trillion in debt...the economy is eleven or twelve trillion in size. Clearly its insolvent, the U.S. is insolvent.

But getting back to the foreclosure fraud. I mean in the case of Goldman Sachs, for example, they committed fraud in a number of different ways. The mortgages were fraudulently sold. The people who bought them were fraudulently induced to buy a mortgage. When you buy a so-called liar's loan, there is no such thing as a liar's loan. The seller of the mortgage has a fiduciary responsibility that they, the mortgage of acquirer has some expectation of paying it back. To be involved in a transaction like this is maleficence on the part of the financial institution, it has nothing to do with the person taking on the mortgage. That's not the problem here. The problem is fraudulent inducement, ok?

Its like going into court after a woman has been raped and saying she asked for it. That's not a defense. If somebody ties somebody down and rapes them, the defense can't be that she asked for it. If somebody like Goldman rapes a homeowner with a fraudulently induced mortgage their defense can't be, well they asked for it. Naa, that doesn't work. So that was a fraud. Then, they took this fraudulent paper and they bundled it up into mortgaged backed security and sold it to banks around the world, that's another piece of fraud.

Then knowing that the banks who bought that paper were going to go out of business, they took out bets on the credit default swap market against the performance of those banks. So they made negative bets against the customers that they sold these two to begin with based on the fraudulent inducement that started the whole chain to begin with. So that's three layers of blatant, heinous fraud.

Any piece of that would put every single one of those guys in jail, and they did it not on a one-off, but, on tens of thousands of examples. It is you know a plague of fraud. It is so enormous that, that is the problem is that is hard to prosecute. Its like tying to, you know, outlaw gravity. Its just so enormous its hard to know even where to begin.

And of course it gets back to, you know, what is it...Goldman Sachs modus operandi, if the fraud is big enough there's no way you can prosecute us...because its like cancer isn't it. I mean its incurable, its eating off of your organs, there's nothing you can do about it, your the host, we're the predator, shut up and die."


Bonnie Faulkner: "Exactly, and nothing is being done about it, right?"


Max Keiser: "Nope".

[lunatica]

7. Countries should start ejecting the American military bases

Or downsizing them considerably. What do they need us to 'protect' them from when we're the killingest country on the planet? We're like the mob extracting protection money from our victims.

[L0oniX]

8. We might as well hire out our military to other countries ....hmmm maybe we already do ...

but we just don't get paid for it.