PISA Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts

An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math even though the country has spent billions to close gaps with the rest of the world.

‘It Just Isn’t Working’: PISA Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Efforts
By Dana Goldstein
NYT, Dec. 3, 2019

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.

And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency.

The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers.

Over all, American 15-year-olds who took the PISA test scored slightly above students from peer nations in reading but below the middle of the pack in math.

Low-performing students have been the focus of decades of bipartisan education overhaul efforts, costing many billions of dollars, that have resulted in a string of national programs — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, the Every Student Succeeds Act — but uneven results.

There is no consensus on why the performance of struggling students is declining. Education experts argue vociferously about a range of potential causes, including school segregation, limited school choice, funding inequities, family poverty, too much focus on test prep and a dearth of instruction in basic skills like phonics.

About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the exam.

Those students, he said, face “pretty grim prospects” on the job market.

Daniel Koretz, an expert on testing and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said recent test results showed that “it’s really time to rethink the entire drift of policy reform because it just isn’t working.”

Because the United States lacks a centralized system for teacher training or distributing quality instructional materials to schools, Professor Koretz said, states and districts did not always effectively carry out the Common Core or other initiatives.

Because the United States lacks a centralized system for teacher training or distributing quality instructional materials to schools, Professor Koretz said, states and districts did not always effectively carry out the Common Core or other initiatives.

The Common Core, which began almost a decade ago, has been a national effort by governors, state education chiefs, philanthropists and school reformers to enrich the American curriculum and help students compete with children around the world. Its priorities include increasing the amount of nonfiction reading, writing persuasive essays using evidence drawn from texts and adding conceptual depth in math.

The effort became a political lightning rod, with the left opposing a new generation of standardized tests tied to the Core, and the right seeing the effort as an unwelcome intrusion into local control of schools. Some states that initially signed on to the Core later rejected it.

Even in those places that stuck with the effort, the curricular changes that flowed from the Common Core could be made without necessarily improving the quality of teaching, Professor Koretz said.

He suggested a renewed focus on classroom instruction, and on providing students and families who are poor, or are recent immigrants, with support like social workers and translators.

The most recent PISA test was given in 2018 to 600,000 15-year-olds in 79 education systems around the world, and included both public and private school students. In the United States, a demographically representative sample of 4,800 students from 215 schools took the test, which is given every three years.

Although math and science were also tested, about half of the questions were devoted to reading, the focus of the 2018 exam. Students were asked to determine when written evidence supported a particular claim and to distinguish between fact and opinion, among other tasks.

The top performers in reading were four provinces of China — Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Also outperforming the United States were Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland and Ireland. The United Kingdom, Japan and Australia performed similarly to the United States.

Among the countries that demonstrated improvement on the test were Portugal, Peru and Colombia.

There were some bright spots for the United States: Achievement gaps between native-born and immigrant students were smaller than such gaps in peer nations.

Mr. Schleicher, of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said it was a common misconception that socioeconomic achievement gaps in the United States were much larger than those in the rest of the world. Three percent of American children from poor families were top performers in reading, compared with an average of 4 percent of poor children among O.E.C.D. countries.

In math, socioeconomic status explained 16 percent of the variation in American performance, similar to the average of 14 percent across O.E.C.D. nations.

Mr. Schleicher said that differences in school quality affected the performance of American students less than it affected the performance of students in many other nations — meaning that in the United States, there is more achievement diversity within schools than across schools.

Some education leaders said they saw no reason to drastically change policy directions.

William G. McCallum, a mathematician and one of the lead writers of the Common Core State Standards, said he remained hopeful that a strategy of rigorous standards, quality classroom materials and effective teacher training could improve student achievement.

He noted that Washington, D.C., which has been committed to the Common Core, had recently demonstrated impressive performance gains.

“Frustration is understandable,” he said of low test results. But, he added, “Maybe this is just a really hard problem.”

Dana Goldstein is a national correspondent, writing about how education policies impact families, students and teachers across the country. She is the author of “The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession.”

Trump impeachment & The End of the Rule of Law

US Democrats beat their drums over the sad demise of Rule of Law by Trump while they themselves are responsible for flouting the Law of the Land...

The End of the Rule of Law
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig 25 November 2019

Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Department of Justice and a constitutional scholar, has identified 12 impeachable offenses committed by Donald Trump. But, as he notes, many of these constitutional violations are not unique to the Trump administration. They have been normalized by Democratic and Republican administrations. These long-standing violations are, for this reason, ignored by Democratic Party leaders seeking to impeach the president. They have chosen to focus exclusively on Trump’s attempt to get the Ukrainian president to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for $400 million in U.S. military aid and a visit by the Ukrainian leader to the White House. Ignoring these institutionalized violations during the impeachment inquiry, Fein fears, would legitimate them and lead to the death of democracy.

In a letter on Friday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also signed by Ralph Nader and Louis Fisher, Fein warns that Trump is “shattering our entire constitutional order.” He lists as the president’s most serious constitutional violations the “defiance of congressional subpoenas and oversight; spending billions of dollars on a southern border wall not appropriated for that purpose; continuing or expanding presidential wars not declared by Congress; exercising line-item veto power; flouting the Emoluments Clause; and, playing prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill any person on the planet based on secret, unsubstantiated information.”

But he also notes that many of these violations are not unique to Trump and were also carried out by Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

    “Many of the Democrats in the past have been complicit in these violations,” Fein said when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “They have unclean hands. They have acquiesced in illegal surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden. The most serious constitutional violations are the ones that are institutional usurpations. These usurpations [by both parties] have permanently
weakened, if not eviscerated, the power of the legislature versus the executive.”

    “We have a Congress whose members, by and large, do not want the responsibilities the Constitution entrusts them with,” Fein continued. “They like to give away everything to the president and then clamor if something goes bad. The most worrisome constitutional violations are, unfortunately, ones many members of Congress rejoice in. It enables them to escape making hard choices that might compromise their ability to win reelection. But you can’t rely on a past dereliction to justify its perpetuation indefinitely.”

    “If we take a narrow approach to impeachment, that will mean that all the more egregious violations will be viewed as having been endorsed and not rebuked and successive presidents will feel they have a green light to emulate Trump on everything except a Ukrainian shakedown,” Fein said. “This is dangerous for the country. This could boomerang, even if we get rid of Trump, by endorsing these usurpations forever. This would be a return to a one-branch government like the monarchy we overthrew in 1776. The unwitting result is to further the [power of the] executive rather than diminish it, which is what should be happening.”

Bush and Obama bequeathed to us nine illegal wars, if we include Yemen. None were declared by Congress, as is demanded by the Constitution. Bush placed the entire U.S. public under government surveillance in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which makes it a crime for the government to surveil any American citizen without
authorization by statute. Under the Executive Order 10333 the president spies on Americans as if they were foreigners, although this surveillance has not been authorized by statute. Bush embarked on a global program of kidnapping and torture, including of foreign nationals, which Obama continued. Bush and Obama carried out targeted assassinations, usually by militarized drones, across the globe. And Obama, reinterpreting the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Act, gave the executive branch the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens. The killings began with drone strikes on the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Such a violation denies U.S. citizens due process. By signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama—whose record on civil liberties is even more appalling than Bush’s gutted the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force.

These two presidents, like Trump, violated treaty clauses that required Senate ratification. Obama did this when he signed the Iran nuclear deal and Trump did this when he walked away from the deal. Bush and Obama, like Trump, violated the appointments clause of the Constitution by appointing people who were never confirmed by the Senate as required. The three presidents, to override Congress, all routinely abused their right to use executive orders.

At the same time the courts, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate power, have transformed the electoral system into legalized bribery through the Citizens United ruling, handed down by the Supreme Court in 2010. Corporations pouring unlimited money into elections was interpreted by the court as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech, essentially overturning the
people’s rights by judicial fiat. Also, the courts have steadfastly refused to restore basic constitutional rights including our right to privacy and due process. “The constitutional rot is in all three branches,” Fein said.

The 12 impeachable offenses committed by Trump and singled out by Fein are:

1. Contempt of Congress

Trump made clear his contempt of Congress when he boasted, “… I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

“President Trump has repeatedly and unconstitutionally systematically undermined the congressional oversight power, including the ongoing congressional impeachment inquiry of the President himself, by instructing numerous current and former White House staff and members of the executive branch to defy congressional subpoenas on an unprecedented scale far beyond any previous President,” Fein
wrote to Pelosi. “Without congressional authority, he has secretly deployed special forces abroad and employed secret guidelines for targeted killings, including American citizens, based on secret unsubstantiated information. He has unconstitutionally endeavored to block private persons or entities from responding to congressional requests or subpoenas for information, e.g., Deutsche Bank. He has refused to provide Congress information about nepotistic or other security clearances he granted in opposition to his own FBI security experts. He has refused to disclose his tax returns to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee contrary to a 1924 law, 26 U.S.C. 6103 (f).”

2. Abuse of the Powers of the President and Abuse of Public Trust

“Unlike prior presidents, he has made presidential lies as routine as the rising and setting of the sun, confounding civil discourse, truth and public trust,” the memo to Pelosi reads. “He has disrespected, belittled, and serially preyed upon women, mocked the disabled, incited violence against the mainstream media and critics, and encouraged and displayed bigotry towards minorities and
minority Members of Congress, including intercession with Israel in serious violation of the Speech or Debate Clause, Article I, section 6, clause 1, to deny two Members visitor visas.”

3. Appropriations Clause, Revenue Clause

“Congress has consistently voted much less money than President Trump requested to build an extensive, multi-billion-dollar wall with Mexico,” the memo reads. “In violation of the Clause and the criminal prohibition of the Anti-Deficiency Act, President Trump has committed to spending billions of dollars far in excess of what Congress has appropriated for the wall. The congressional power of the purse is a cornerstone of the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of the Constitution requires all revenue measures to originate in the House of Representatives.

“In violation of the Clause, President Trump has raised tens of billions of dollars by unilaterally imposing tariffs with limitless discretion under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962,” the memo reads. “He has become a Foreign Trade Czar in imposing tariffs or quotas or granting exemptions from his trade restrictions in his unbridled discretion to assist political friends and punish political enemies. Literally trillions of dollars in international trade have been affected. Riches are made, and livelihoods destroyed overnight with the capricious stroke of President Trump’s pen.”

4. Emoluments Clause

“Article I, section 9, clause 8 prohibits the President (and other federal officers), without the consent of Congress, from accepting any ‘present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign state.’

“President Trump has notoriously refused to place his assets in a blind trust,” the memo reads. “Instead, he continues to profit from opulent hotels heavily patronized by foreign governments. He has permitted his family to commercialize the White House. He has compromised the national interest to enrich family wealth on a scale unprecedented in the history of the presidency.”

5. Treaty Clause

Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 requires Senate ratification of treaties by two-thirds majorities. The text is silent as to whether treaty termination requires Senate ratification, and the Supreme Court held the issue was a non-justiciable political question in Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979).

“President Trump flouted the Treaty Clause in terminating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia unilaterally,” the memo reads. “The treaty assigned the termination decision to the ‘United States.’ The President alone is not the United States under the Treaty Clause.”

6. Declare War Clause

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 empowers Congress alone to take the nation from a state of peace to a state of war. That power cannot be delegated.

“In violation of the Declare War Clause, President Trump has continued to wage or has initiated presidential wars in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and has used special forces offensively in several African nations,” the memo reads.

“President Trump has claimed authority to initiate war against any nation or non-state actor in the world — not in self-defense — on his say-so alone, including war against North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela.”

7. Take Care Clause; Presentment Clause

Article II, Section 3 obligates the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

“In violation of that trust, President Donald J. Trump deliberately attempted to frustrate special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of collaboration between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia to influence the presidential election,” Fein points out.

“Among other things, the President refused to answer specific questions relating to his presidential conduct; endeavored to fire the special counsel; dangled pardons for non-cooperating witnesses; and, urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal decision to better protect his presidency. In all these respects, the President was attempting to obstruct justice.”

“President Trump has also systematically declined to enforce statutory mandates of Congress by arbitrarily and capriciously revoking scores of agency rules ranging from immigration to the Consumer Financial Protection Board to the Environmental Protection Agency in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act or otherwise,” the memo reads. “He has routinely legislated by executive order in lieu of following constitutionally prescribed processes for legislation.”

“In violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, Mr. Trump has dismantled and disabled scores of preventive measures to save lives, avoid injuries or disease, help families, consumers, and workers, and detect, deter, and punish tens of billions of dollars of corporate fraud,” the memo continues. “He has disputed climate disruption as a ‘Chinese hoax,’
compounded the climate crisis by overt actions that expand greenhouse gas emissions and pollution, and excluded or marginalized the influence of civil service scientists.”

8. Due Process Clause

The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall “be deprived of life … without due process of law.”

“In violation of due process, President Trump claims power, like his immediate two predecessors, to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill American citizens or non-citizens alike, on or off a battlefield, whether or not engaged in hostilities, whether or not accused of crime, and whether or not posing an imminent threat of harm that would trigger a right of preemptive self-defense,” the memo reads.

9. Appointments Clause

“President Trump has repeatedly appointed principal officers of the United States, including the National Security Advisor and Cabinet officials, who have not been confirmed by the Senate in violation of the Appointments Clause, Article II, section 2, clause 2,” the memo reads. “On a scale never practiced by prior presidents, Mr. Trump has filled as many as half of Cabinet posts with
‘Acting Secretaries’ who have never been confirmed by the Senate.”

10. Soliciting a Foreign Contribution for the 2020 Presidential Campaign and Bribery

“President Trump has endeavored to corrupt the 2020 presidential campaign by soliciting the President of Ukraine to contribute something of value to diminish the popularity of potential rival Joe Biden, i.e., a Ukrainian investigation of Mr. Biden and his son Hunter relating to potential corrupt practices of Burisma, which compensated Hunter handsomely ($50,000 per month). In so doing, Mr.
Trump violated the criminal campaign finance prohibition set forth in 52 U.S.C. 30121,” Fein’s memo reads.

“President Trump solicited a bribe for himself in violation of 18 U.S.C. 201 in seeking something of personal value, i.e., discrediting Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign with the help of the President of Ukraine to influence Mr. Trump’s official decision to release approximately $400 million in military and related assistance,” it adds.

11. Violating Citizen Privacy

“Government spying on Americans ordinarily requires a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate based on probable cause to believe crime is afoot,” the memo reads. “President Trump, however, routinely violates the Fourth Amendment with suspicionless surveillance of Americans for non-criminal, foreign intelligence purposes under Executive Order 12333 and aggressive interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

12. Suppression of Free Speech

“President Trump is violating the First Amendment in stretching the Espionage Act to prosecute publication of leaked classified information that are instrumental to exposing government lies and deterring government wrongdoing or misadventures, including the outstanding indictment against Julian Assange for publishing information which was republished by the New York Times and The
Washington Post with impunity,” the memo reads.

“The Republic is at an inflection point,” the letter to Speaker Pelosi reads. “Either the Constitution is saved by impeaching and removing its arsonist in the White House, or it is reduced to ashes by continued congressional endorsement, whether by omission or commission, of limitless executive power and the undoing of checks and balances.”

*
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Check up your understanding of ideologies...

Written mostly for American audience; nevertheless, this quiz is a valuable guide for non-Americans as well...

Ideology Quiz
By Kevin Duffy
December 13, 2019



    How much do you trust political figures?
        Totally
        Mostly
        Somewhat
        Hardly
        Not at all

    Do the ends justify the means?
        Yes
        Often
        Sometimes
        Rarely
        Never

    Should freedom of speech and expression be limited in any way?
        Yes, for threats, libel, slander, hate speech or criticism of government
        Yes, for threats, libel, slander or hate speech
        Yes, for threats, libel or slander
        Yes, for yelling fire in a crowded theater
        No

    How do you feel about taxes?
        They’re too low for the rich; taxes are the price we pay to live in a free country
        They’re about right
        They’re too high
        Income tax is unconstitutional and should be repealed
        Taxation is theft

    Should discrimination be tolerated in the workplace?
        No, not on the basis of race, sex, age, sexual orientation or gender preference; anti-discrimination laws should be vigorously enforced and quotas imposed
        No, not on the basis of race or sex; anti-discrimination laws should be enforced
        No, not on the basis of race or sex, but anti-discrimination laws go too far if they lead to affirmative action
        No, not on the basis of race or sex, but the means should be moral suasion, not government intervention
        Yes, for any reason, such as building a cohesive corporate culture. Firms that discriminate for economically irrational reasons will go out of business. Anti-discrimination laws often create conflict and lead to unintended consequences

    How big a problem is wealth inequality?
        Major problem that requires significant taxes on wealth
        Major problem, but not easy to remedy
        Minor problem; there are more pressing concerns
        Minor problem; the cure is worse than the disease
        Non-problem that will destroy the economy if pursued aggressively

    Are big companies like Amazon and Google becoming monopolies?
        Yes, we should break them up
        Yes, regulate them more
        Not sure
        No, there’s still plenty of competition
        As long as they’re not putting a gun to anyone’s head, who cares? We shouldn’t be punishing successful entrepreneurs

    Who should be responsible for K-12 education?
        Education is too important to be left to parents. Education is a basic human right… and responsibility
        Parents and government, with public schools available to all and federal government needed to establish standards
        Parents and government, with public schools and emphasis on local control
        Parents, but the government still has a role in making sure parents educate their children, either privately (including homeschooling) or with government-issued vouchers. Shut down the Department of Education
        Education is too important to be left to government bureaucrats. All education should be private and voluntary. Charity will fill the void for those in need

    Who are your favorite presidents?
        Lincoln, Wilson and FDR because they led in times of crisis
        LBJ, JFK and Obama because they were progressive visionaries
        Washington and Reagan because they were charismatic conservative leaders
        Jefferson, Cleveland and Coolidge because they avoided trouble and paid down debt
        William H. Harrison because he died just 31 days into his term

    Was Lincoln justified in waging the Civil War?
        Yes, on the grounds of abolishing slavery, preserving the union and majority-rule
        Yes, on the grounds of abolishing slavery and preserving the union
        Yes, but Lincoln went too far in jailing dissidents while Union generals like Sherman went too far in harming civilians
        No, the South should have been allowed to secede on the basis of self-determination
        No, Lincoln was a calculating politician who snuffed out any limited government impulses and ushered in an era of big government and total war

    What caused the Great Depression?
        Wild speculation led to the 1929 crash; FDR’s New Deal and World War II got the country out of depression
        The Federal Reserve made the mistake of sitting idly by while the money supply contracted sharply in the early 1930s
        Wild speculation led to the crash, but FDR’s New Deal spending went too far and possibly prolonged the depression
        FDR’s New Deal turned a garden variety recession into the country’s worst depression
        Aggressive money printing by the Fed caused a fake boom in the 1920s, while unprecedented monetary and fiscal intervention in the economy (by both Hoover and FDR) exacerbated and prolonged the depression

    What do you think about FDR’s social security plan enacted in 1935?
        Master stroke that kept many seniors out of soup lines; should be expanded and benefits means tested
        Good idea, but needs to be shored up, not expanded
        It made sense at the time, but didn’t take into account people living longer
        Very concerned. It should’ve been kept small, available only to those most in need
        Massive Ponzi scheme that will fuel generational conflict and likely bankrupt the country

    Which of these services should be provided by government?
        Roads, schools, courts, national defense, medical care
        Roads, schools, courts, national defense
        Schools, courts, national defense
        Courts, national defense
        None

    Which of these wars should the U.S. government have avoided?
        None
        Vietnam War
        Vietnam War, Iraq War
        Vietnam War, Iraq War, World War I
        Vietnam War, Iraq War, World War I, World War II

    How do you feel about the military?
        Heroes rooting out evil around the globe and defending our freedoms at home; we need to increase defense spending and create more jobs
        Doing heroic work, but we’re reaching limits on how much we can afford to spend on defense
        We should maintain a strong military presence abroad, but pull out of quagmires like Iraq and Afghanistan
        We could easily cut defense spending in half by shutting down bases and bringing our men in uniform home
        The military industrial complex is kicking over hornet’s nests around the globe, bankrupting the country, feeding the government parasite, and threatening our freedoms at home in the process. Dismantle the empire and ultimately privatize defense

    Where do you stand on the large trade deficit with China?
        Use all means possible to reduce this, even military force as a last resort
        Raise tariffs and apply political pressure on the Chinese to enforce intellectual property rights
        Use diplomacy
        Avoid any restrictions on free trade and enforce intellectual property rights
        Statistical nonsense. Trade is mutually beneficial; encourage more by removing all tariffs and other trade impediments

    What do you think about trade embargoes with countries like Iran, Cuba and North Korea?
        These are our enemies; starve them into submission
        Limit trade and any foreign aid to food and medicine
        Allow government vetted tourism and limited trade
        Allow unlimited tourism and limited trade
        End all embargoes, regardless of the regime in power, and allow our citizens to trade with and visit these countries without government interference

    How does it make you feel when a large multinational company builds a factory in a poor country and hires workers at well-below American wages?
        Sick to my stomach. This is capitalism at its worst: big business exploiting the poor who have few options
        I see where these companies are providing slightly better opportunities for these poor workers, but why don’t they do more to help them? Greed
        Mixed emotions. American consumers are benefitting from the lower prices, but some Americans are losing their jobs
        Pretty good, actually. Everyone benefits: foreign workers, the company and its shareholders, and American consumers
        In addition to the win-win-win of foreign workers, shareholders and consumers, the world is becoming more interconnected and less bellicose. These companies should be applauded

    What should the role of the Federal Reserve be?
        Smooth out the business cycle and prevent a systemic collapse, i.e. a “run on the bank”
        Focus on avoiding deflation (keeping inflation at 1-2%)
        I have no strong opinion, but probably prevent depressions
        Minimal role: should be audited and severely limited in its scope
        Should be abolished. The Fed serves special interests on Wall Street and creates the boom-bust cycle, misallocates capital, and causes inflation in the process

    What are your thoughts on health care?
        Should be a basic human right with medical services provided by government for everyone
        There should be private health care for those who can afford it and public health care for those who can’t. Government should provide more assistance
        System has its flaws, but it’s still the best in the world. No need for major changes
        Litigation reform and repealing state laws that mandate unnecessary insurance coverage would make health care more affordable
        System is a mess thanks to government intervention. Get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, licensing laws, and costly malpractice lawsuits and allow the free market to work its magic

    What are your thoughts about climate change?
        Global warming will reach crisis proportions within a decade. We need a massive world government response in order to save us
        This is a serious problem that must be dealt with, but I fear giving up our sovereignty to a world government. Bring on the Green New Deal
        I’m concerned, but fear the issue has been politicized. We need less hysteria and more balance
        This is an overreaction; global warming isn’t happening
        Global warming may or may not happen, but that doesn’t warrant impoverishing ourselves with world government solutions costing trillions of dollars. The free market is the best way to adapt to any changes in climate

    How do you feel about legalizing drugs?
        No way; drug use and addiction would explode
        Legalize marijuana, but regulate and tax it heavily
        Start with the least dangerous drugs and go from there
        Legalize all narcotics, but keep the FDA
        Legalize all drugs and abolish the FDA

    Where do you stand on intellectual property rights (patents, trademarks, copyright)?
        Necessary to promote innovation
        Necessary, but sometimes goes too far
        In need of reform
        Leads to frivolous lawsuits and in need of major overhaul
        Restricts competition and should be abolished

    Where do you stand on the Constitution?
        Too confining and gets in the way of governing
        Living document that should bend with the times
        Adaptable, but should be rigid when guaranteeing certain personal freedoms
        Should be (but hasn’t been) interpreted literally and faithfully, betraying the limited government vision of the founders
        Nice try, but opened the door to high taxation and big government

    What are your impressions of democratic government?
        Ideal way to govern and protect our freedoms; will of the majority should prevail
        Great idea, system of checks and balances was put in to prevent abuse of the minority by the majority
        Doesn’t work quite as well in practice as in theory; still, it’s the best system of government man has come up with so far
        Founders feared democracy and tried to limit government tyranny of the minority; they’re probably rolling in their graves
        Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner

To calculate your score:

(A) answers = 0
(B) answers = 1
(C) answers = 2
(D) answers = 3
(E) answers = 4

If your total score is 0-10, you believe the heavy hand of government is needed to restrain innate impulses of man towards chaos and depravity.  You identify ideologically as totalitarian along with people like Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot.  If your total score is 91-100, you believe a free society brings out the best impulses of man towards spontaneous order and goodness, while government intervention brings out the worst.  You identify as anarcho-capitalist along with people like Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Lew Rockwell.

Scores from 11 to 90 range from statist to minarchist (or classical liberal).  The labels “conservative” or “progressive” have little bearing on where one lands on the ideological spectrum, although conservatives usually have higher scores (but not always).

Influence of Wahhabite-Salafist ideology on Asia

Spreading to even the remotest hamlets in the 1980s, a more devout, less tolerant creed nurtured fundamentalism across the region...

How Arabization changed Islam in Asia
Jeff Kingston
The Asia Times, December 2019

In the introduction to his new book The Politics of Religion, Nationalism and Identity in Asia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019),  Jeff Kingston writes: “It is impossible to understand contemporary Asia without understanding the politics of nationalism and religion. They are a volatile mix that incites violence and poses a significant risk to secularism, tolerance, civil liberties, democracy, and political stability.

“This toxic tide has swept the region from Pakistan to the Philippines and Columbo to Kunming with tragic consequences. Recently the nexus of religion and nationalism is featured in headlines about 730,000 Rohingya Muslims being driven out of Myanmar, one million Uighur Muslims being locked up in China, Kashmiris slaughtered in India, and Islamic State affiliates wreaking havoc in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and in Sri Lanka.

“Who would have imagined hatemongering Buddhist monks inciting violence and intolerance or setting themselves on fire to protest ethnocide in Tibet? Or pious vigilantes beheading atheist bloggers in Dhaka?”

In this article excerpted from Chapter 4, he focuses especially on two of the largest predominantly Muslim Asian countries, Indonesia and Bangladesh:

Over the past few decades, a process of Arabization has influenced the practice of Islam in Asia, spreading a more devout and less tolerant creed that nurtures fundamentalism and militancy. The suicide bombings by Islamic extremists in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter 2019 are a tragic example of the consequences.

Saudi Arabian financing for mosque building and educational programs has promoted a profound shift in the role of Islam in society and national identities across the region. Arabization has polarized the Islamic word in Asia, fanning the flames of sectarianism, bigotry, hate, intolerance, and terrorism.

The contemporary Salafist wave has strongly influenced religious practice and mainstreamed Islamic reformism, but in threatening national unity and peace it has also generated a backlash by secular nationalists and the institutions of the state they have nurtured since independence. Thus, the battles over religion are also political battles over temporal power and national identity.

Many Muslims around the world see globalization as the equivalent of a crusade threatening to overwhelm their values and norms through an onslaught of popular Western culture, liberal values, secular attitudes, religious pluralism, and promiscuous lifestyles.

Anxieties have intensified due to the communications revolution over the past few decades beaming and streaming Western music, films, fashion, and images of the “good life” throughout the ummah.

This ubiquitous exposure to Western ways, penetrating Muslim minds and reinforcing a sense of weakness and subordination, provokes a backlash mobilized by conservative religious groups who try to assert a reinvigorated Islam as an authentic indigenous response.

Cultural invasion

Yet what is authentic? In some respects, Arabization represents a cultural invasion mirroring globalization, both welcome and resented.

For many Asian Muslims, an Arab-centric Islam is part of their identity, one that is cosmopolitan and gives them entry into an imagined community of global believers. They are influenced by the intellectual ferment and Islamic experiences around the world, adapting and responding to what they see and learn.

Often this imagined community is an Internet echo chamber of the like-minded, demonstrating the common tendency toward confirmation bias. It is a low-cost, low-commitment participation that entices through instantaneous access to developments in the Islamic world that encourages sympathy toward Muslim struggles ranging from Palestine and Kashmir to Afghanistan and Syria.

There is an immediacy and sense of empowerment of feeling solidarity with unknown people in distant places and having empathy for their suffering. Arabization enables Saudi Arabia to shape this experience and nurture a discourse that promotes its agenda. Educational programs and scholarships help it sway opinion by credentializing capable people who can exert influence over others.

Arabization and the intolerant creed of Salafism gain momentum in Muslim majority Asia due to lavish Saudi funding and socio-economic grievances that anger and frustrate youth in these nations. For them, the status quo and moderate Islam offer inadequate solace and little hope of change or a brighter future.

Globalization, tarnished as it is by failures and broken promises, gives impetus to Arabization. These unmet expectations reinforce a sense of neo-imperial subjugation and powerlessness, as remote and unresponsive forces discriminate, dictate terms, and determine destinies.

Militancy feeds on this discontent and alienation while fundamentalist Islam calls on believers to purify society, rendering this a sacred mission.

Religious community

The religious community empowers those who join the struggle and endows them with sacral dignity, status they would not otherwise enjoy, and a sense that they matter, that they are making a difference, and that they are needed. To the extent that democratic space for dissent and reform shrinks, fundamentalists are drawn to militant methods.

The forces of secularism remain resilient but appear to be on the defensive and losing the battle for youth in societies in which too many feel acute despair due to scant chances of advancement for themselves or their religious identity. It doesn’t matter that Arabization and fundamentalism don’t offer any sustainable solution, or that extremism is a dead end.

The righteous message is a tonic for the bypassed and deracinated dupes and prey of globalization. The legions of the aggrieved have a sense of being under assault, spawning a greater commitment and willingness to sacrifice in the name of Allah. It may seem hard in Muslim majority nations to conjure up credible threats to the primacy of Islam, but fearmongering clerics and state provocations stoke the necessary siege atmosphere.

The ideas and ideology fueled by Arabization are gaining adherents, creating momentum to continue challenging their country’s religious identity and national character. These advocates are skilled at manufacturing threats to the ummah, even in nations with some of the world’s largest Muslim populations.

Bangladesh and Indonesia are targets of Saudi-funded Arabization that is shifting Asian Islam toward a Salafist intolerance and reformist zeal that threaten minorities, the differently devout, and political stability.

Manufacturing or exaggerating threats, quick to take umbrage over minor or imagined insults and slights, showing little inclination to forgive and overcome differences, sanctimoniously denouncing and threatening Muslims or non-believers who disagree with or diverge from their austere religious vision, Salafists with their growing influence in Asia have been bad news for moderate Muslims, secularists, non-Muslim minorities and social cohesion.

There are interesting parallels between Indonesia and Bangladesh as they navigate the cross-currents of globalization and Arabization. Both nations embrace secular identities in their respective constitutions, but this has been challenged ever since they achieved independence by Islamic groups who seek to impose shariah and establish Islamic states.

Secular national identity has been maintained, but this has involved significant concessions to Islamic hardliners. Unelected pressure groups in both nations have exploited democracy and electoral politics to force secular leaders to grant concessions.

Indeed, Indonesian President Joko Widodo selected an Islamic hardliner as his running mate for the 2019 elections in order to fend off the prospects of an Islamic attack campaign like the one that had unseated his close ally in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial campaign. Choosing a vice presidential running mate who supported that campaign may have disappointed some Jokowi supporters but represented a sensible risk management strategy.

Prime Minister Sheik Hasina of Bangladesh has also made a series of concessions to Islamic groups and undercut secularists, revealing her anxiety about being portrayed as insufficiently Islamic. This pandering has gained momentum despite the fact she faces no significant opposition party.

Unlike the case in Indonesia, Islamic parties have held power in Bangladesh, but with the sidelining of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, political Islam has been marginalized from mainstream politics and thereby radicalized.

Not having a stake in the parliamentary system, Islamic groups are not subject to the constraints of party politics and appear to have little trouble shrugging off bans on their activities. Moreover, discontent with the Awami government helps discredit secularism and reinforces fundamentalist rejection of democracy as antithetical to Islamic precepts.

In both nations, the military has connived with Islamic groups against political forces on the left.

In 1965 and 1966 the Indonesian military, with tacit US support, slaughtered many while also helping Islamic youth groups carry out widespread massacres against suspected communists, an orgy of orchestrated violence that claimed several hundred thousand lives.

Since 1975 in Bangladesh the military has resorted to coups and manipulated militant Islam to neutralize the leftist leaning, secular Awami League. Remarkably, it even sponsored the rehabilitation of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamic group that fought alongside Pakistan’s military to quash Bangladesh’s independence, engaging in brutal atrocities.

Another military leader revised the Constitution in 1988 to make Islam the national religion, attempting to assert the primacy of religion in national identity and thus overturn the language-based secular national identity that was at the core of the civil war and embraced by the Awami League since independence in 1971.

Security forces

Militants in Indonesia remain bitter that the state has not fulfilled the promises of the Jakarta Charter of 1945 requiring all Muslims to abide by shariah, an agenda shared by their counterparts in Bangladesh.

Islamic extremism and terrorism have also led to extra-judicial killings by the security forces in both nations, thereby undermining the rule of law that is essential to democracy and human rights.

Both nations have experienced significant backsliding in their secular and tolerant pluralist national identities.

Although Saudi Arabia has devoted considerable resources to promoting a more rigid Islam, in Indonesia there seems to be a more widespread pushback against a Salafist identity at the local level.

In rural Bangladesh, too often the only effective educational, health or spiritual support on offer emanates from Saudi-financed initiatives that limit the scope for defiance.

In both nations, Saudi promotion of intolerance toward Islamic minorities such as the Shi’a or Ahmadiyya has gained momentum, and in both blasphemy has become a powerful political weapon.

Finally, in both nations Islamic militant groups maintain important transnational ties, owing a degree of allegiance while gaining enhanced legitimacy and in some cases training and funds. These are run on both a franchise model relying on existing outfits or through targeted recruiting.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and the Islamic State provide varying degrees of external inspiration and promote radicalization that is riding in on the latest wave of Arabization, making the most of shambolic governance and vast inequalities.

Aside from educational scholarships, an important conduit of Salafism is the annual haj. The greatest number of hajis come from Indonesia, 221,000 in 2017, while Bangladesh is number four (127,000) – after Pakistan (179,000) and India (170,000). These Asian countries account for 700,000 out of the worldwide annual total of two million haji.

Usually, pilgrims spend forty days touring religious sites in Saudi Arabia, and this is often a transformative experience that exposes hajis to religious practice in the home of Islam, boosting their religiosity and stature back home.

Moreover, overseas workers in the Middle East encounter discrimination and harsh treatment but have prolonged exposure to Salafist practice and thus are an additional source of transmission. With over a million workers in Saudi Arabia alone, half of all those Bangladeshis working in the Mideast, this constitutes a significant potential influence especially given prolonged periods of residence.

Indonesia completely banned the dispatch of Indonesia workers to the Middle East since 2015 due to widespread abuses, but this doesn’t affect most of the 1.5 million Indonesians already working in Saudi Arabia.

Compared with previous waves, Arabization since the 1980s has been a tsunami involving sustained multi-dimensional interactions, hyper-connectedness, and lavishly funded institutionalization that marks it as vastly more powerful than anything that has come before, sweeping up far more people in even the remotest hamlets.

It is an Arab-centric strand of globalization, carrying similar implications as both are viewed as external homogenizing influences that provoke local backlash and unanticipated consequences. Conservative, authoritarian, and intolerant, contemporary Arabization is infusing national identities and polities with religious zealotry.

In pushing an illiberal agenda, hardline clerics have elicited illiberal responses from Jokowi and Hasina, thus sacrificing the tolerance and democratic values they are putatively trying to save.

Australia National University scholar Marcus Meitzner calls this backsliding “democratic deconsolidation,” a retreat from the values that contribute to political stability, heralding an escalation of religious-centered identity politics. The defense of democracy is best served, he argues, by deploying democratic means and the rule of law, not by criminalizing groups or adopting accommodationist policies.

Banning only strengthens and further radicalizes targeted organizations, gifting them an incendiary issue to rally around, while appeasement encourages incessant demands by those who insist on an Islamic national identity and nothing less.

Jeff Kingston is a director of Asian studies at Temple University, Japan

Carl Sagan on planet Earth

Carl Sagan summed up, in a paragraph, what our planet Earth is all about...

UK refuses to hand back Chagos Islands!

UK refuses to abide by court order while demanding other countries to do so...

UK’s refusal to hand back Chagos Islands doesn’t just make it an 'illegal colonial occupier' – it antagonizes a host of allies
RT : 22 Nov, 2019

Failing to meet the UN deadline this week to hand back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, the UK is now isolated from allies who had abstained on the issue, after the hash of Brexit.

Mauritius is understandably miffed at the British Government’s refusal to hand back control of the disputed Chagos Islands, but help may just come from an unlikely source and see them finally win their long-sought Chexit from colonial control.

Because, while the UK has failed to cede the disputed archipelago in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius by the UN-appointed deadline of November 22, this will not have gone unnoticed by the other 115 nations who backed Mauritius’ claim to sovereignty over the islands earlier this year.

When that vote went down in May at the General Assembly in New York, there were only six states who opposed an end to Britain’s colonial rule, but there were 56 that abstained.

Among those abstainees were former firm Euro buddies Germany and France.

The UK’s EU links with nations like those two have, in the past, been enough to either rely on support at the first call or, with a bit of arm-twisting, to at least talk them around to seeing things through a UK lens.

The future of that diplomatic strategy is now certainly in doubt, following the fallout from the frankly disastrous Brexit, and could well see allies who were formerly abstainees turned into votes against a UK position having finally become sick of the legendary British obstinacy.

And it’s not just the General Assembly the UK is choosing to ignore. The UN High Court told the UK it should leave the islands “as rapidly as possible” way back in February of this year, saying the de-colonization process was handled unlawfully.

And in September even Pope Francis, on-tour in Mauritius, took a position on Britain’s failure to heed the United Nations and weighed in to accuse the UK of placing greed over humanity.

“Not all things that are right for humanity are right for our pocket, but international institutions must be obeyed,” said the Pontiff.

The UK has behaved pretty poorly. It leveraged the islands away from Mauritius in 1965, when it was still a British colony, in return for £3 million and, Mauritius claims, independence, only to then team up with the US and use some prime real estate on Diego Garcia to agree on building a joint military base, despite the fact that the island was already inhabited by 1,000 Chagossians.

Nevermind, they were simply evicted between 1967-73, sent off to Mauritius and the Seychelles 1,400 miles away and have never been allowed back. Many of those have since moved to the UK, as the housing they were offered was so poor, and to this day live in Crawley, West Sussex.

Meanwhile, the US has used its base on their home island of Diego Garcia to fly bombing missions over Afghanistan and Iraq and reportedly employed it as a CIA black site to interrogate terrorism suspects, so it is no surprise the locals are not welcome back.

The Mauritian Prime Minister Pravid Kumar Jug-Nauth, while condemning the forcible eviction of Chagossians as “a crime against humanity” has offered assurances that his country would continue to allow the military base to operate “in accordance with international law” if Mauritius were given control of the islands, but that still hasn’t been enough for the UK.

But now, with the UN General Assembly, the UN High Court, 116 opposing nations and some pretty powerful players on the fence, pressure is mounting on the Brexit-bamboozled British Government to play ball and do the right thing.

There could be one other shortcut for the Mauritians in achieving their goal, in the shape of Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He said on the day of the UN deadline that he would “right the wrongs of history” and hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius if he becomes Prime Minister.

Now, if those general election polling figures would just head the right way, the Chagos Islanders could be celebrating this Christmas at home.

By Damian Wilson, UK journalist & political communications specialist.

USA support destabilizing China over Hong Kong

Meddling in China's internal affairs openly and in violation of international laws...

House and Senate Unanimously Support Destabilizing China
By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, November 20, 2019


Non-intervention by nations in the internal affairs of others is fundamental international law.

In Nicaragua v. United States (1986), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled against Washington for breaching international law and violating Nicaraguan sovereignty by supporting Contra death squads in the country, along with mining its waters and operating illegally in its airspace.

Unilaterally imposed sanctions by nations on others breach the principle of non-intervention and the UN Charter — giving the Security Council exclusive authority to take this action.

UN Charter Article 2 (4) states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Time and again, the US breaches the letter and spirt of international and its own constitution — operating exclusively by its own rules, making them up to serve its interests.

Last month, House members unanimously passed the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 by voice vote.

On Tuesday, Senate members unanimously adopted its version of the same measure — violating the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.

Among 535 congressional members, not a single profile in courage opposed the hostile, interventionist measure, breaching international and constitutional law.

It has nothing to do with promoting democracy, a notion the US abhors and tolerates nowhere, especially not at home.

It has nothing to do with supporting human rights in Hong Kong — US dirty hands all over months of violence and chaos in the city, aiming to destabilize China by attacking its soft underbelly.

On Wednesday, Xinhua reported the following:

    “The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the top legislature of China…firmly opposed…and strongly condemned the passing of the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 by the US Senate.”

    “The US Senate passed the bill on Tuesday local time despite stern representations and strong opposition from China.”

    “The move ‘grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs,’ ” the NPC stated, adding: Adopting the measure is all about “US intervention in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs.”

China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the measure’s adoption, saying:

It “disregards the facts, confuses right and wrong, violates the axioms, plays with double standards, openly intervenes in Hong Kong affairs, interferes in China’s internal affairs, and seriously violates the basic norms of international law and international relations. The Chinese side strongly condemns and resolutely opposes this,” adding:

“In the past five months, the persistent violent criminal acts in Hong Kong have seriously jeopardized the safety of the public’s life and property, seriously trampled on the rule of law and social order, seriously undermined Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability, and seriously challenged the bottom line of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle.”

“(W)hat Hong Kong faces is not the so-called human rights and democracy issues, but the issue of ending the storms, maintaining the rule of law and restoring order as soon as possible.”

“The Chinese central government will continue to firmly support the Hong Kong SAR Government in its administration of the law, firmly support the Hong Kong police in law enforcement, and firmly support the Hong Kong Judiciary in punishing violent criminals in accordance with the law, protecting the lives and property of Hong Kong residents and maintaining Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.”

“(A)ttacks on the police and other criminal acts (have nothing to do with) the pursuit of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy.’ ”

They have everything to do with “support(ing) the extremist forces and violent elements in the anti-China chaos and to undermine Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.”

“This bad behavior of the United States not only harms China’s interests, but also undermines the important interests of the United States itself in Hong Kong.”

“Any attempt by the US to intervene in China’s internal affairs and hinder China’s development will not succeed.”

“Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong, and Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs.”

“If the US (continues its hostile actions), China will surely take effective measures to resolutely counteract and firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests.”

The unacceptable measure calls for annual reviews of Hong Kong’s special status. It challenges China’s “one country, two systems” status.

Congressional adoption supports CIA orchestrated violence and chaos in the city.

On Wednesday, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) said Beijing summoned the US embassy Minister Counsellor for Political Affairs William Klein, China’s Foreign Ministry saying:

Its ruling authorities “will take strong opposing measures, and the US has to bear all the consequences.”

“If the US sticks to its course, China will surely take forceful measures to resolutely oppose it to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interest.”

House and Senate reconciliation of differences in the measures passed will follow. Given unanimous adoption by both houses negates Trump’s veto power if he opposes the legislation.

The measure amends the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act. It “directs various departments to assess whether political developments in Hong Kong justify changing Hong Kong’s unique treatment under US law.”

It requires annual certification by the secretary of state on whether US special treatment should be afforded to Hong Kong.

It requires the president to identify persons involved in committing human rights abuses in the city — freezing their assets, denying them entry into the US.

It requires the president to determine whether to revise the US/Hong Kong extradition agreement and State Department’s travel advisory for the city.

It requires the commerce secretary to issue annual assessments on whether Hong Kong authorities are enforcing US regulations regarding certain dual-use items and sanctions it (unlawfully) imposed on various nations, notably Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.

Months of violence and chaos in Hong Kong, followed by unacceptable congressional legislation certain to become US law, are all about illegally meddling in China’s internal affairs by the Trump regime and Congress.

Unacceptable US actions aim to undermine China’s economic, financial, technological, and military development — what its ruling authorities won’t tolerate.

A Final Comment

Last Sunday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the following:

    “Every time we emphasize that Moscow and Beijing fully share stance that any foreign meddling in domestic affairs of all countries, and in particular Russia and China, is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable to impose any system of values on other countries.”

Illegally meddling in the internal affairs of other countries is longstanding US policy.

It’s all about seeking control over their sovereignty, resources and populations — preemptive wars, color revolutions, economic terrorism, and other hostile actions its favored strategies.

Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War

This is the title of a book by Lindsey A. O’Rourke published by Cornell University Press, 2018.

Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War
By David Gordon
Mises.org   October 4, 2019

Lindsey O’Rourke has given us a devastating indictment of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War and after. O’Rourke, who teaches political science at Boston College, is not a principled non-interventionist in the style of Ron Paul. To the contrary, she sympathizes with the “Offensive Realism” of John Mearsheimer, under whom she studied at the University of Chicago. Accordingly, she does not oppose the efforts of states to increase their power over other states but rather regards this as inevitable.

Her argument is that a key element of American foreign policy has failed to achieve its purpose. The United States has often aimed at “regime change,” both overt and covert. The latter type of regime change has been especially unsuccessful, and, to show that this is so, the bulk of the book analyzes in detail a number of instances of covert regime change during the Cold War.

She states her conclusion in this way: “The vast majority of America’s overt and covert regime changes during the Cold War did not work out as their planners intended. Washington launched these regime changes to resolve security-oriented interstate disputes by installing foreign leaders with similar policy preferences. American experiences during the Cold War, however, illustrate that this was often quite difficult in practice. Thirty-nine out of sixty-four covert regime changes failed to replace their targets, and because America’s role in most of these failed attempts generally did not remain a secret, they further soured Washington’s already negative relationship with the target state. Even nominally successful covert operations — where the US backed forces assumed power — failed to deliver on their promise to improve America’s relationship with the target state.”

Readers of Ludwig von Mises will at once recall this pattern of argument. Just as Mises argues that economic interventions such as minimum wage laws fail to achieve the stated goals of their proponents, so does O’Rourke maintain that regime change, especially of the covert variety, suffers from the same flaw. Again, just as Mises does not challenge the stated goal of higher wages without unemployment, so does O’Rourke accept the goal of an increase in the power of the United States.

In order to grasp the way O’Rourke reaches her conclusion, we must first understand her use of terms. By “regime,” she means “either a state’s leadership or its political processes and institutional arrangements.” A covert regime change “denotes an operation to replace the political leadership of another state where the intervening state does not acknowledge its role publicly. These actions include successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, sponsor coups d’état, influence foreign democratic elections, incite popular revolutions, and support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government.”

We have so far stressed how Mises and O’Rourke argue in a similar way, but now a crucial difference requires our attention. Mises showed by a priori reasoning that intervention must fail, but O’Rourke does not do this. She says instead that a detailed examination of many cases shows that the covert regime changes in fact tend to fail.

A few examples will illustrate how she proceeds. In the beginning years of the Cold War, the United States tried to “rollback” Communist regimes in Eastern Europe through covert operations. “The Anglo-American operations in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania … were doomed to failure from the start. As early as October 1945, MGB (Russian Ministry for State Security) counterintelligence officers captured Latvian infiltrators carrying Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) codebooks and radios. Forcing the infiltrators to collaborate, the MGB was able to provide false intelligence and identify the time and location of future infiltrations. Ultimately, Soviet forces set up two fictional resistance movements, which the United States and the United Kingdom covertly supported until 1954.”

Operations in Southeast Asia succeeded no better. Notoriously, “although the 1963 US-backed coup in South Vietnam successfully overthrew [Ngo Dinh] Diem’s government, it still did produce the results the planners had hoped for. Contrary to policymakers’ predictions, the leaders who took over after Diem were unstable, unpredictable, and incompetent, which in turn hampered South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself without US assistance and encouraged the Viet Cong to escalate their attacks.”

Covert regime change was likewise ineffective in Latin America. “To combat the [Dominican Republic’s] chronic political volatility, Washington backed General Rafael Trujillo’s authoritarian regime after he seized power in a 1930 coup. By the late 1950’s, however, US leaders began to question Trujillo’s increasingly erratic and brutal rule. Concerned that his regime might spark a popular revolt similar to the one that had toppled Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Eisenhower authorized a covert campaign to overthrow Trujillo in 1960. But the operation misfired. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, but his fall brought his equally cruel son to power, which in turn led to a series of coups.”

Given this sorry record, the question naturally arises: why did the United States again and again pursue covert regime change? O’Rourke’s own explanation is along realist lines: nations see regime change as a way to enhance their power, and the pursuit of increased power is a constant in the international system. “I argue that states pursue regime change for motives akin to the ones that Realist scholars have provided to explain war … there is no single security motive driving states to intervene, and operations may have multiple overlapping motives. Nevertheless, the security motives that drove the United States to intervene can be grouped into three ideal types: offensive, preventive, and hegemonic. Each aimed to increase America’s relative power in a different way.”

If a key thesis of realist theory is right, though, regime change is unlikely to succeed. “[O]ne of the central tenets of Neorealism is that the specific composition of a state’s domestic leadership is irrelevant for explaining its international behavior because great powers behave in similar predictable patterns given their relative share of material power and geostrategic position.” If this is true, the newly installed government after a regime change is unlikely to shift its foreign policy in the way the intervening state wants. But states, avid for power, persist in this mistaken policy. (For this argument to Given this sorry record, the question naturally arises: why did the United States again and again pursue work, O’Rourke’s claim about the predictable patterns of great powers must apply also to smaller powers, since most efforts at regime change are not directed at great powers.)

O’Rourke criticizes other explanations of the pursuit of regime change, and her criticism strikes at the heart of democratic peace theory, a frequent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy. “According to normative variants of DPT [democratic peace theory], democracies do not go to war with other democracies, because liberal norms shape how democratic policymakers view one another and choose to resolve conflict.” If this hypothesis were correct, we would expect a democratic United States to support other democracies. But if covert operations are taken into account, this hypothesis fails. “American covert operations habitually violated norms of justified intervention: Washington installed brutal dictators. It broke international law. It collaborated with many unsavory organizations, including … numerous groups known to have committed mass killings.”

O’Rourke, one gathers, hopes that the United States will learn from the failure of covert regime change and instead pursue the inevitable grasp for power in a more rational manner. In this she resembles her mentor John Mearsheimer, who hopes that America will abandon ideological crusades in favor of “offshore balancing.” Those of us who, like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, favor a noninterventionist foreign policy will not be satisfied with this. Instead, we need to ask deeper questions. Is the pursuit of power in the international system indeed inevitable? Does it not depend rather on human free choice? If so, the time has come to abandon completely a failed policy. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”

Why America Needs War?

GR Editor’s Note: This incisive article was written on April 30, 2003 in the immediate wake of the war on Iraq, by renowned historian and political scientist Dr. Jacques Pauwels, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

The article largely pertains to the presidency of George W. Bush.

A timely question: Why Does the Trump administration need war, including a $1.2 trillion nuclear weapons program?

War against North Korea, Iran, Russia and China is currently on the drawing board of the Pentagon.

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen…

Why has the US been at war for more than half a century … ? And we call that period “the post war era”. Deliberate destruction of sovereign countries. Millions of deaths. And why do Americans support the US military agenda?

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 25, 2019

*     *     *

Why America Needs War
By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels
Global Research, November 25, 2019
Indy Media Belgium and Global Research 30 April 2003

Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason not completed, by his father at the time of the Gulf War; others believe that Bush Junior expected a short and triumphant war which would guarantee him a second term in the White House.

I believe that we must look elsewhere for an explanation for the attitude of the American President.

The fact that Bush is keen on war has little or nothing to do with his psyche, but a great deal with the American economic system.

This system – America’s brand of capitalism – functions first and foremost to make extremely rich Americans like the Bush “money dynasty” even richer. Without warm or cold wars, however, this system can no longer produce the expected result in the form of the ever-higher profits the moneyed and powerful of America consider as their birthright.

The great strength of American capitalism is also its great weakness, namely, its extremely high productivity. In the historical development of the international economic system that we call capitalism, a number of factors have produced enormous increases in productivity, for example, the mechanization of the production process that got under way in England as early as the 18th century. In the early 20th century, then, American industrialists made a crucial contribution in the form of the automatization of work by means of new techniques such as the assembly line. The latter was an innovation introduced by Henry Ford, and those techniques have therefore become collectively known as “Fordism.” The productivity of the great American enterprises rose spectacularly.

For example, already in the 1920s, countless vehicles rolled off the assembly lines of the automobile factories of Michigan every single day. But who was supposed to buy all those cars? Most Americans at the time did not have sufficiently robust pocket books for such a purchase. Other industrial products similarly flooded the market, and the result was the emergence of a chronic disharmony
between the ever-increasing economic supply and the lagging demand. Thus arose the economic crisis generally known as the Great Depression. It was essentially a crisis of overproduction. Warehouses were bursting with unsold commodities, factories laid off workers, unemployment exploded, and so the purchasing power of the American people shrunk even more, making the crisis even worse.

It cannot be denied that in America the Great Depression only ended during, and because of, the Second World War. (Even the greatest admirers of President Roosevelt admit that his much-publicized New Deal policies brought little or no relief.) Economic demand rose spectacularly when the war which had started in Europe, and in which the USA itself was not an active participant before 1942, allowed American industry to produce unlimited amounts of war equipment. Between 1940 and 1945, the American state would spend no less than 185 billion dollar on such equipment, and the military expenditures’ share of the GNP thus rose between 1939 and 1945 from an insignificant 1,5 per cent to approximately 40 per cent. In addition, American industry also supplied gargantuan amounts of equipment to the British and even the Soviets via Lend-Lease. (In Germany, meanwhile, the subsidiaries of American corporations such as Ford, GM, and ITT produced all sorts of planes and tanks and other martial toys for the Nazi’s, also after Pearl Harbor, but that is a different story.) The key problem of the Great Depression – the disequilibrium between supply and demand – was thus resolved because the state “primed the pump” of economic demand by means of huge orders of a military nature.

As far as ordinary Americans were concerned, Washington’s military spending orgy brought not only virtually full employment but also much higher wages than ever before; it was during the Second World War that the widespread misery associated with the Great Depression came to an end and that a majority of the American people achieved an unprecedented degree of prosperity. However, the
greatest beneficiaries by far of the wartime economic boom were the country’s businesspeople and corporations, who realized extraordinary profits. Between 1942 and 1945, writes the historian Stuart D. Brandes, the net profits of America’s 2,000 biggest firms were more than 40 per cent higher than during the period 1936-1939. Such a “profit boom” was possible, he explains, because the state ordered billions of dollars of military equipment, failed to institute price controls, and taxed profits little if at all. This largesse benefited the American business world in general, but in particular that relatively restricted elite of big corporations known as “big business” or “corporate America.” During the war, a total of less than 60 firms obtained 75 per cent of all lucrative military and other state orders. The big corporations – Ford, IBM, etc. – revealed themselves to be the “war hogs,” writes Brandes, that gormandized at the plentiful trough of the state’s military expenditures. IBM, for example, increased its annual sales between 1940 and 1945 from 46 to 140 million dollar thanks to war-related orders, and its profits skyrocketed accordingly.

America’s big corporations exploited their Fordist expertise to the fullest in order to boost production, but even that was not sufficient to meet the wartime needs of the American state. Much more equipment was needed, and in order to produce it, America needed new factories and even more efficient technology. These new assets were duly stamped out of the ground, and on account of this
the total value of all productive facilities of the nation increased between 1939 and 1945 from 40 to 66 billion dollar. However, it was not the private sector that undertook all these new investments; on account of its disagreeable experiences with overproduction during the thirties, America’s business people found this task too risky. So the state did the job by investing 17 billion dollar in
more than 2,000 defense-related projects. In return for a nominal fee, privately owned corporations were permitted to rent these brand-new factories in order to produce…and to make money by selling the output back to the state. Moreover, when the war was over and Washington decided to divest itself of these investments, the nation’s big corporations purchased them for half, and in many cases only one third, of the real value.

How did America finance the war, how did Washington pay the lofty bills presented by GM, ITT, and the other corporate suppliers of war equipment? The answer is: partly by means of taxation – about 45 per cent -, but much more through loans – approximately 55 per cent. On account of this, the public debt increased dramatically, namely, from 3 billion dollar in 1939 to no less than 45 billion
dollar in 1945. In theory, this debt should have been reduced, or wiped out altogether, by levying taxes on the huge profits pocketed during the war by America’s big corporations, but the reality was different. As already noted, the American state failed to meaningfully tax corporate America’s windfall profits, allowed the public debt to mushroom, and paid its bills, and the interest on its loans, with its general revenues, that is, by means of the income generated by direct and indirect taxes. Particularly on account of the regressive Revenue Act introduced in October 1942, these taxes were paid increasingly by workers and other low-income Americans, rather than by the super-rich and the corporations of which the latter were the owners, major shareholders, and/or top managers. “The burden of financing the war,” observes the American historian Sean Dennis Cashman, “[was] sloughed firmly upon the shoulders of the poorer members of society.”

However, the American public, preoccupied by the war and blinded by the bright sun of full employment and high wages, failed to notice this. Affluent Americans, on the other hand, were keenly aware of the wonderful way in which the war generated money for themselves and for their corporations. Incidentally, it was also from the rich business people, bankers, insurers and other big
investors that Washington borrowed the money needed to finance the war; corporate America thus also profited from the war by pocketing the lion’s share of the interests generated by the purchase of the famous war bonds. In theory, at least, the rich and powerful of America are the great champions of so-called free enterprise, and they oppose any form of state intervention in the economy. During the war, however, they never raised any objections to the way in which the American state managed and financed the economy, because without this large-scale dirigist violation of the rules of free enterprise, their collective wealth could never have proliferated as it did during those years.

During the Second World War, the wealthy owners and top managers of the big corporations learned a very important lesson: during a war there is money to be made, lots of money. In other words, the arduous task of maximizing profits – the key activity within the capitalist American economy – can be absolved much more efficiently through war than through peace; however, the benevolent
cooperation of the state is required. Ever since the Second World War, the rich and powerful of America have remained keenly conscious of this. So is their man in the White House today [2003, i.e. George W. Bush], the scion of a “money dynasty” who was parachuted into the White House in order to promote the interests of his wealthy family members, friends, and associates in corporate
America, the interests of money, privilege, and power.

Obama’s Permanent War Agenda

In the spring of 1945 it was obvious that the war, fountainhead of fabulous profits, would soon be over. What would happen then? Among the economists, many Cassandras conjured up scenarios that loomed extremely unpleasant for America’s political and industrial leaders. During the war, Washington’s purchases of military equipment, and nothing else, had restored the economic demand and thus made possible not only full employment but also unprecedented profits. With the return of peace, the ghost of disharmony between supply and demand threatened to return to haunt America again, and the resulting crisis might well be even more acute than the Great Depression of the “dirty thirties,” because during the war years the productive capacity of the nation had increased considerably, as we have seen. Workers would have to be laid off precisely at the moment when millions of war veterans would come home looking for a civilian job, and the resulting unemployment and decline in purchasing power would aggravate the demand deficit. Seen from the
perspective of America’s rich and powerful, the coming unemployment was not a problem; what did matter was that the golden age of gargantuan profits would come to an end. Such a catastrophe had to be prevented, but how?

Military state expenditures were the source of high profits. In order to keep the profits gushing forth generously, new enemies and new war threats were urgently needed now that Germany and Japan were defeated. How fortunate that the Soviet Union existed, a country which during the war had been a particularly useful partner who had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the Allies in Stalingrad
and elsewhere, but also a partner whose communist ideas and practices allowed it to be easily transformed into the new bogeyman of the United States. Most American historians now admit that in 1945 the Soviet Union, a country that had suffered enormously during the war, did not constitute a threat at all to the economically and militarily far superior USA, and that Washington itself did not
perceive the Soviets as a threat. These historians also acknowledge that Moscow was very keen to work closely together with Washington in the postwar era.

Indeed, Moscow had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from a conflict with superpower America, which was brimming with confidence thanks to its monopoly of the atom bomb. However, America – corporate America, the America of the super-rich – urgently needed a new enemy in order to justify the titanic expenditures for “defense” which were needed to keep the wheels of the nation’s
economy spinning at full speed also after the end of the war, thus keeping profit margins at the required – or rather, desired – high levels, or even to increase them. It is for this reason that the Cold War was unleashed in 1945, not by the Soviets but by the American “military-industrial” complex, as President Eisenhower would call that elite of wealthy individuals and corporations that knew how to profit from the “warfare economy.”

In this respect, the Cold War exceeded their fondest expectations. More and more martial equipment had to be cranked out, because the allies within the so-called “free world”, which actually included plenty of nasty dictatorships, had to be armed to the teeth with US equipment. In addition, America’s own armed forces never ceased demanding bigger, better, and more sophisticated tanks, planes,
rockets, and, yes, chemical and bacteriological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. For these goods, the Pentagon was always ready to pay huge sums without asking difficult questions. As had been the case during the Second World War, it was again primarily the large corporations who were allowed to fill the orders. The Cold War generated unprecedented profits, and they flowed
into the coffers of those extremely wealthy individuals who happened to be the owners, top managers, and/or major shareholders of these corporations. (Does it come as a surprise that in the United States newly retired Pentagon generals are routinely offered jobs as consultants by large corporations involved in military production, and that businessmen linked with those corporations are
regularly appointed as high-ranking officials of the Department of Defense, as advisors of the President, etc.?)

During the Cold War too, the American state financed its skyrocketing military expenditures by means of loans, and this caused the public debt to rise to dizzying heights. In 1945 the public debt stood at “only” 258 billion dollar, but in 1990 – when the Cold War ground to an end – it amounted to no less than 3.2 trillion dollar! This was a stupendous increase, also when one takes the inflation
rate into account, and it caused the American state to become the world’s greatest debtor. (Incidentally, in July 2002 the American public debt had reached 6.1 trillion dollar.) Washington could and should have covered the cost of the Cold War by taxing the huge profits achieved by the corporations involved in the armament orgy, but there was never any question of such a thing. In 1945, when the Second World War come to an end and the Cold War picked up the slack, corporations still paid 50 per cent of all taxes, but during the course of the Cold War this share shrunk consistently, and today it only amounts to approximately 1 per cent.

This was possible because the nation’s big corporations largely determine what the government in Washington may or may not do, also in the field of fiscal policy. In addition, lowering the tax burden of corporations was made easier because after the Second World War these corporations transformed themselves into multinationals, “at home everywhere and nowhere,” as an American author has
written in connection with ITT, and therefore find it easy to avoid paying meaningful taxes anywhere. Stateside, where they pocket the biggest profits, 37 per cent of all American multinationals – and more than 70 per cent of all foreign multinationals – paid not a single dollar of taxes in 1991, while the remaining multinationals remitted less than 1 per cent of their profits in taxes.

The sky-high costs of the Cold War were thus not borne by those who profited from it and who, incidentally, also continued to pocket the lion’s share of the dividends paid on government bonds, but by the American workers and the American middle class. These low- and middle-income Americans did not receive a penny from the profits yielded so profusely by the Cold War, but they did receive their share of the enormous public debt for which that conflict was largely responsible. It is they, therefore, who were really saddled with the costs of the Cold War, and it is they who continue to pay with their taxes for a disproportionate share of the burden of the public debt.

In other words, while the profits generated by the Cold War were privatized to the advantage of an extremely wealthy elite, its costs were ruthlessly socialized to the great detriment of all other Americans. During the Cold War, the American economy degenerated into a gigantic swindle, into a perverse redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the advantage of the rich and to the disadvantage not
only of the poor and of the working class but also of the middle class, whose members tend to subscribe to the myth that the American capitalist system serves their interests. Indeed, while the wealthy and powerful of America accumulated ever-greater riches, the prosperity achieved by many other Americans during the Second World War was gradually eroded, and the general standard of living declined slowly but steadily.

During the Second World War America had witnessed a modest redistribution of the collective wealth of the nation to the advantage of the less privileged members of society. During the Cold War, however, the rich Americans became richer while the non-wealthy – and certainly not only the poor – became poorer. In 1989, the year the Cold War petered out, more than 13 per cent of all Americans –
approximately 31 million individuals – were poor according to the official criteria of poverty, which definitely understate the problem. Conversely, today 1 per cent of all Americans own no less than 34 per cent of the nation’s aggregate wealth. In no major “Western” country is the wealth distributed more unevenly.

The minuscule percentage of super-rich Americans found this development extremely satisfactory. They loved the idea of accumulating more and more wealth, of aggrandizing their already huge assets, at the expense of the less privileged. They wanted to keep things that way or, if at all possible, make this sublime scheme even more efficient. However, all good things must come to an end, and in
1989/90 the bountiful Cold War elapsed. That presented a serious problem. Ordinary Americans, who knew that they had borne the costs of this war, expected a “peace dividend.”

They thought that the money the state had spent on military expenditures might now be used to produce benefits for themselves, for example in the form of a national health insurance and other social benefits which Americans in contrast to most Europeans have never enjoyed. In 1992, Bill Clinton would actually win the presidential election by dangling out the prospect of a national health plan, which of course never materialized. A “peace dividend” was of no interest whatsoever to the nation’s wealthy elite, because the provision of social services by the state does not yield profits for entrepreneurs and corporations, and certainly not the lofty kind of profits generated by military state expenditures. Something had to be done, and had to be done fast, to prevent the threatening
implosion of the state’s military spending.

America, or rather, corporate America, was orphaned of its useful Soviet enemy, and urgently needed to conjure up new enemies and new threats in order to justify a high level of military spending. It is in this context that in 1990 Saddam Hussein appeared on the scene like a kind of deus ex machina. This tin-pot dictator had previously been perceived and treated by the Americans as a good friend, and he had been armed to the teeth so that he could wage a nasty war against Iran; it was the USA – and allies such as Germany – who originally supplied him with all sorts of weapons. However, Washington was desperately in need of a new enemy, and suddenly fingered him as a terribly dangerous “new Hitler,” against whom war needed to be waged urgently, even though it was clear
that a negotiated settlement of the issue of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was not out of the question.

George Bush Senior was the casting agent who discovered this useful new nemesis of America, and who unleashed the Gulf War, during which Baghdad was showered with bombs and Saddam’s hapless recruits were slaughtered in the desert. The road to the Iraqi capital lay wide-open, but the Marines’ triumphant entry into Baghdad was suddenly scrapped. Saddam Hussein was left in power so that the threat he was supposed to form might be invoked again in order to justify keeping America in arms. After all, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union had shown how inconvenient it can be when one loses a useful foe.

And so Mars could remain the patron saint of the American economy or, more accurately, the godfather of the corporate Mafia that manipulates this war-driven economy and reaps its huge profits without bearing its costs. The despised project of a peace dividend could be unceremoniously buried, and military expenditures could remain the dynamo of the economy and the wellspring of sufficiently
high profits. Those expenditures increased relentlessly during the 1990s. In 1996, for example, they amounted to no less than 265 billion dollars, but when one adds the unofficial and/or indirect military expenditures, such as the interests paid on loans used to finance past wars, the 1996 total came to approximately 494 billion dollar, amounting to an outlay of 1.3 billion dollar per day!

However, with only a considerably chastened Saddam as bogeyman, Washington found it expedient also to look elsewhere for new enemies and threats. Somalia temporarily looked promising, but in due course another “new Hitler” was identified in the Balkan Peninsula in the person of the Serbian leader, Milosevic. During much of the nineties, then, conflicts in the former Yugoslavia provided the
required pretexts for military interventions, large-scale bombing operations, and the purchase of more and newer weapons.

The “warfare economy” could thus continue to run on all cylinders also after the Gulf War. However, in view of occasional public pressure such as the demand for a peace dividend, it is not easy to keep this system going. (The media present no problem, as newspapers, magazines, TV stations, etc. are either owned by big corporations or rely on them for advertising revenue.) As mentioned earlier, the state has to cooperate, so in Washington one needs men and women one can count upon, preferably individuals from the very own corporate ranks, individuals totally committed to use the instrument of military expenditures in order to provide the high profits that are needed to make the very rich of America even richer. In this respect, Bill Clinton had fallen short of expectations, and corporate America could never forgive his original sin, namely, that he had managed to have himself elected by promising the American people a “peace dividend” in the form of a system of health insurance.

On account of this, in 2000 it was arranged that not the Clinton-clone Al Gore moved into the White House but a team of militarist hardliners, virtually without exception representatives of wealthy, corporate America, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, and of course George W. Bush himself, son of the man who had shown with his Gulf War how it could be done; the Pentagon, too, was directly
represented in the Bush Cabinet in the person of the allegedly peace-loving Powell, in reality yet another angel of death. Rambo moved into the White House, and it did not take long for the results to show.

After Bush Junior had been catapulted into the presidency, it looked for some time as if he was going to proclaim China as the new nemesis of America. However, a conflict with that giant loomed somewhat risky; furthermore, all too many big corporations make good money by trading with the People’s Republic. Another threat, preferably less dangerous and more credible, was required to keep the military expenditures at a sufficiently high level. For this purpose, Bush and Rumsfeld and company could have wished for nothing more convenient than the events of September 11, 2001; it is extremely likely that they were aware of the preparations for these monstrous attacks, but that they did nothing to prevent them because they knew that they would be able to benefit from them. In any
event, they did take full advantage of this opportunity in order to militarize America more than ever before, to shower bombs on people who had nothing to do with 9/11, to wage war to their hearts’ content, and thus for corporations that do business with the Pentagon to ring up unprecedented sales. Bush declared war not on a country but on terrorism, an abstract concept against which one cannot really wage war and against which a definitive victory can never be achieved. However, in practice the slogan “war against terrorism” meant that Washington now reserves the right to wage war worldwide and permanently against whomever the White House defines as a terrorist.

And so the problem of the end of the Cold War was definitively resolved, as there was henceforth a justification for ever-increasing military expenditures. The statistics speak for themselves. The 1996 total of 265 billion dollar in military expenditures had already been astronomical, but thanks to Bush Junior the Pentagon was allowed to spend 350 billion in 2002, and for 2003 the President has
promised approximately 390 billion; however, it is now virtually certain that the cape of 400 billion dollar will be rounded this year. (In order to finance this military spending orgy, money has to be saved elsewhere, for example by cancelling free lunches for poor children; every little bit helps.) No wonder that George W. struts around beaming with happiness and pride, for he – essentially a spoiled rich kid of very limited talent and intellect – has surpassed the boldest expectations not only of his wealthy family and friends but of corporate America as a whole, to which he owes his job.

9/11 provided Bush with carte blanche to wage war wherever and against whomever he chose, and as this essay has purported to make clear, it does not matter all that much who happens to be fingered as enemy du jour. Last year, Bush showered bombs on Afghanistan, presumably because the leaders of that country sheltered Bin Laden, but recently the latter went out of fashion and it was once again
Saddam Hussein who allegedly threatened America. We cannot deal here in detail with the specific reasons why Bush’s America absolutely wanted war with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and not with, say, North Korea. A major reason for fighting this particular war was that Iraq’s large reserves of oil are lusted after by the US oil trusts with whom the Bushes themselves – and Bushites such as Cheney and Rice, after whom an oil tanker happens to be named – are so intimately linked. The war in Iraq is also useful as a lesson to other Third World countries who fail to dance to Washington’s tune, and as an instrument for emasculating domestic opposition and ramming the extreme right-wing program of an unelected president down the throats of Americans themselves.

The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. Right now, this addiction, this craving is being satisfied by means of a conflict against Iraq, which also happens to be dear to the hearts of the oil barons. However, does anybody believe that the warmongering will stop once Saddam’ scalp will join the Taliban turbans in the trophy display case of George W. Bush? The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the “axis of evil” countries: Iran, Syria, Lybia, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century, welcome to George W. Bush’s brave new era of
permanent war!

Jacques R. Pauwels is historian and political scientist, author of ‘The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War’ (James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002). His book is published in different languages: in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian and French.

Together with personalities like Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Robert Weil, Michel Collon, Peter Franssen and many others… he signed “The International Appeal against US-War”.

From the International Press on Saturday, March 22, 2003:

The cost to the United States of the war in Iraq and its aftermath could easily exceed $100 billion…Peace-keeping in Iraq and rebuilding the country’s infrastructure could add much more…The Bush administration has stayed tightlipped about the cost of the war and reconstruction…Both the White House and the Pentagon refused to offer any definite figures. (The International Herald Tribune,
22/03/03)

It is estimated that the war against Iraq will cost approximately 100 billion dollar. In contrast to the Gulf War of 1991, whose cost of 80 million was shared by the Allies, the United States is expected to pay the entire cost of the present war…For the American private sector, i.e. the big corporations, the coming reconstruction of Iraq’s infrastructure will represent a business of 900 million dollar; the first contracts were awarded yesterday (March 21) by the American government to two corporations. (Guido Leboni, “Un coste de 100.000 millones de dolares,” El Mundo, Madrid, 22/03/03).