LETTER TO NYTIMES / IT WAS A HOAX!
WM. Safire, in his clever sophistical way, tries to alibi the uncomfortable false tales told by the Bush-team before the invasion about Saddam's huge, dangerous stockpiles of radioactive materials, gases, and germs (missed by the feckless UN inspectors). He says a prudent warmaker always assumes the worst, as we wrongly--but honestly--assumed that Saddam's army would fight fiercely in Baghdad. Similarly, says Safire, we wrongly, but honestly, assumed the presence of the WMDs. This was a 'wise mistake', motivated by prudent pessimism, not in any way a hoax./
Were our leaders pessimistic about the invasion? They said they worried about Saddam's army--we don't know that they really did. In fact, Adelman said "It will be a cakewalk."/
Most incredibly, they predicted that they would never have to leave hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq after the victory: in the first place,the Iraqis would welcome us; in the second place, the French would relieve us by providing occupation troops. Both predictions were disastrously optimistic./
The Bush-team may have thought, as many did, that Saddam would have ready at least enough gas and germs to use against invaders--not that he had enough to threaten the world, justifying a preemptive strike. The latter claim was backed by no real evidence, and they knew it; it was a simple hoax.
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POURING GASOLINE ON THE FIRE: Pres.Bush, attending the G-8 Summit, said it's time to move beyond the war (presumably he meant that people should quit harping on the British/American lies about WMDs intended to justify the invasion). At the same time he denounced the French again, as did Condoleeza Rice; he threatened to move Nato bases to Poland, to reward them as 'allies' and to punish 'old Europe'./
Amazingly, he cited Hitler's invasion of Poland as meaning that we have to strike back at evil right away.. /Reuters31May./ Perhaps he doesn't know that Hitler elaborately justified that invasion precisely as a PREEMPTIVE STRIKE at dangerous little Poland, who was getting ready to attack the mighty Wehrmacht--(with about the same probability as Iraq attacking America) !/ The Bush-team is a constant source of black humor.
Bush met privately with Chirac, but, AT A SUMMIT OF TRANSATLANTIC LEADERS snubbed Germany's Schroeder! Could he dream that he would thereby split up the French/German alliance?! (He did exchange a few words with Schroeder at a banquet--but no private meeting. (Actually, Chirac left the banquet early, before he had to face a similar smile.) SOME CONCILIATION! /
Bush also cut short his foray into hostile Europe, perhaps to avoid the tens of thousands of protesters who showed up to demonstrate European disgust at him and his policies./
One wonders if Bush realizes how most of the people in the world despise him (go to news.google.com and seek PEW+POLLS+AMERICA.)--uniquely among American Presidents. Or do his handlers not want to bother his pretty little head?
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CHENEY'S SNARL: / v.p. Cheney told the West Point graduates: "[about terrorists] "no policy of containment or deterrence will be effective..[Pres. Bush is determined to] destroy them completely and utterly." /Reuters31May./
The report did not say if Cheney frothed at the mouth during his talk. He used Iraq as an example of what we would and could do to these 'enemies'. Remember that it was never proved that Iraq had harbored terrorists, though around 50% of Americans think Iraq did, and indeed that there was at least one Iraqi among the 9/11 crew of 19! [Indeed, captured AlQaeda leaders, even at the mercy of their U.S. captors, say there was no alliance between them and Saddam ! ]/9Je/
What Cheney is saying is that the U.S. can announce, without proof, that ANY nation is harboring terrorists; then the dumb Americans will support our destroying that nation completely and utterly./
Ah, but which nation goes first? Iran is tempting...but consider Wolfowitz's statement that one main reason to invade Iraq was to permit us to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia. A nervous Saudi prince would wonder why 'Wolf' was making that rather embarrassing admission right now--wondering if we aren't removing those troops (potential hostages) before 'finding' that S.A. Is harboring terrorists..(they probably are!)..and proceeding to bomb the hell out of them, perhaps to invade with all those 200,000 troops remaining in nearby Iraq. /
More likely, Wolf's statement, plus Cheney's, was intended to frighten S.A. into doing whatever we demand about the world oil market. But if the wealthy Saudi princes are smart, they'll buy a few completed nukes now from Russia and or China, and then tell Bush that while he can of course destroy them, they can wound us (remove a U.S. city or two) from their grave. /
They could also blow up their refineries and oil-wells on their way out. Those possibilities might limit the intimidation we can inflict./
And the Saudis might ask us to reflect: "If the mere presence of infidel GIs in sacred Arabia was enough to enrage Muslims like binLaden, what would be the effect (in recruiting new terrorists) on one billion Muslims worldwide, if The Great Satan bombed hell out of sacred Arabia?"
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FRIEDMAN'S NEW TRIAL BALLOON: Thos. Friedman again straddles the
middle. /NYT25May/ On the one hand, he compares the Saudi regime with the Soviet Union! (as
unreformable). On the other hand, he blames the U.S. for being unable to 'tell Saudis the
truth'--i.e. force them to 'reform'--because we're addicted to their oil./
He doesn't explicitly consider [though he may have this at the back of his mind] the obvious 3d possibility: that we take them over, one way or another, and then have all the oil we want for our SUVs, while still controlling a very large portion of the world's oil (in Iraq and Saudi Arabia!)--AND removing a wealthy foe of Israel ! /
Does this make Iran safer for a while? That depends on how crazy the Bushies are..they don't
seem to mind getting ready for another Mideast War while also preparing for an awful war in
Korea. Maybe they think they can manage three wars at once!/
--------------------------
One interesting variable: the 200,000 U.S. troops stuck in Iraq and Kuwait. High-testosterone
men who may have rather enjoyed a quick, not-really-dangerous invasion--such men might not
be content to endure months of boring but dangerous occupation duty among a hating population (screaming insults and threats), in blazing heat; by now they've heard that the war was justified by a tissue of lies. They may not enjoy hearing they have to invade Iran or Saudi Arabia also--or both--before they can go home. (Already there are notable morale problems /nyt2je). /
Also, as noted above--this is one variable nobody considers--200,000 brave Americans are now quite vulnerable to VX gas or anthrax germs, when it's simply too hot to don their spacesuits again.
Friedman may be overestimating our omnipotence.

 
A DEVASTATING ATTACK ON LYONS, ANSWERED IN THE PIECE BELOW THIS ONE. (If you're not interested in this local controversy, skip over this and the next piece.)/ To express YOUR opinion, click on COMMENTS under each essay (or set of essays).
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(Background: I wrote an earlier letter ridiculing Moore's logic in a claim about higher education.
He came back promptly and aggressively, in COLORADOAN 27APR, with this letter.) :/
"WHERE ARE THE LOGICIANS?/
"When he is not taking pot-shots at my column, professor Dan Lyons evidently spends his time writing furiously for the Poudre Valley Green Party Web Site. Among his gems I found this closing to a letter to philosopher Michael Walzer:
" 'With fighting and working completely automated, the typical American (semi-literate, semi-numerate, 90 percent ignorant and uninterested in anything outside his immediate pleasure)..this American is almost completely redundant today..That's why I think the main effort of 'do-gooders' must be to cut the birth-rate of typical Americans, so there will be fewer miserable inferiors.'
"What does all this gibberish mean? Elsewhere on the Web, Lyons can be found writing on the alleged shortcomings of both our military and economic systems (his doubts of U.S. Military power and of the bravery of our ground troops being registered only weeks before the stunning victory in Iraq). In his recent critique of my column ("Where's the logic?") this supposed logician protested that I generalized by taking professor Nicholas de Genova's anti-Americanism to be representative of higher academe.
"I shall gladly revise my proposition. There are at least two professors in this country who despise Americans and what America stands for. "/ by T.O. Moore, Ft.Collins.

 
MOORE SCORES--OR DOES HE? [A response to the letter just above]:/
I published a devastating, and valid, criticism of the logic of Dr.T.O. Moore recently in COLORADOAN (he argued from one dumb,vicious remark by one untenured professor, to condemn hundreds of disparate U.S. universities!) Moore retaliated on 27Apr with a devastating (though invalid) attack on my humanitarianism and patriotism. /
Moore found this outrageous-sounding paragraph in one of my PVGREENS-DISCUSS pieces (a remark NOT endorsed by the local Green Party!):
"With fighting and working completely automated, the typical American (semi-literate,
semi-numerate, 90% ignorant, and uninterested in anything outside his immediate pleasure)..this
American is almost completely redundant today..that's why I think the main effort of 'do-gooders'
today must be to cut the birth-rate of typical Americans, so there will be fewer miserable
inferiors." /
Sounds awful!--but I can defend these claims as sadly plausible, not 'gibberish'--and show that
they were intended, not contemptuously, but as a bleak, benevolent warning. My problem is that
I over- emphasize brevity, so I can be easily misinterpreted. /
--First, by 'typical American' I mean the median American, the 50th-percentile American such
that half of our people rank higher in cognitive skills and discipline, and half rank lower./
--Second, I tend to talk about the emergency as if it's already here, when I mean it's clearly on
the way. So when I refer to 'Americans', I am emphasizing the plight of young Americans, who
face this bleak future./
-- "..with fighting and working completely automated..' The NYTIMES magazine, on 20 Apr,
asked "Will we be able to fight wars using no soldiers at all?" And one colonel said we can fight future wars overseas without leaving the U.S.! What soldiers we do need will be competent operators of computers for our completely automated military./
Our civilian workers face competition from cheap foreign workers--but ultimately, competition from automated production..in Japan, once-programmed robots can make auto carburetors without needing any other human input. We are producing more and more factory goods while needing fewer and
fewer workers. This is happening all over the world, so our workers are competing with foreign
computers also./
Books can now be checked out of libraries by machines. Experimental machines are found in stores for self-service checkouts. When we're used to that, all the checkout clerks will be laid off. (Fast-food places could automate overnight,as a local Taco Bell did experimentally, depriving the less-skilled of millions of jobs.) And so it goes. /
-- "The typical American is semi-literate, semi-numerate.." For nearly 50 years,
I have taught young Americans in the 60th-90th percentile range; my sobering experience there, I
think, makes me able to extrapolate tentatively how weak are skills and knowledge of people down in
the 50th-percentile.Also, in my youth I spent 6 years working and living with typical Americans, in a factory and in the army; and I don't believe anyone claims that the youth today have improved in skills and discipline over their grandfathers./
In any case, my gloomy diagnosis is confirmed by the annual studies of NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showing, for instance, that typical college grads have a tough time figuring correct change in restaurants, and that hardly any high-school students can comprehend a NYTIMES editorial. 60-70% of profs and employers find our high-school grads deficient in writing and math skills./
--Here's a revealing anecdote you will have to take my word for (my word that I checked it
personally with the proper executive). Larimer County would be counted one of the elite
locations in the United States; we have no Denver slums, and so on. And yet...for a certain type
of job, HP needed personnel who had mastered 6th grade math skills and 8th-grade reading
skills. An expert designed a test for this level of skills. Almost no local high-school
graduates could pass the test; so HP began to allow only people with 'some college' even to
take the test--not that these people had learned these skills at college, but that the elite
who managed some schooling after high-school would be likely to include a reasonable number
who had mastered 6th-grade math and 8th-grade reading skills. /
--About 'ignorance': every general test of typical young Americans' knowledge of history or
geography or literature or science has hair-raising results..for instance,a survey by the National Association of Scholars, in Dec.'02, seemed to show that the typical college grad today knows little more about the world than the typical high-school grad knew 50 years ago. This is especially problematic when our government is launching a World Empire project..who will staff the Empire overseas? /
-- "..uninterested in anything outside his immediate pleasure"..This is perhaps overstated. But
when you read how many hours the typical youth here spends watching TV, and then add the
number of hours he spends playing computer-games or on chat-rooms or watching internet porn..when you read that over 40% of youth are allowed to have TV in their bedrooms, with little supervision--when you read the UCLA studies of how seldom high-school seniors (those going on to college!) ever read a
book, or use a library--when you realize that obese youths here hate their obesity as they would cancer, and yet continue to eat junk food and not to exercise--and when you hear of the refusal to save for retirement by even well-to-do Americans--you must come to a fairly gloomy assessment of the
pleasure-postponement capacity of our people, especially of our youth, tomorrow's citizens./

-- ".. this typical American is almost completely redundant today": In the days when slave-labor
undersold free labor, the only good job for ordinary whites was managing slaves. Similarly,
the well-paying jobs now will be managing our 'computer-slaves', programming and operating
very complex computers and robots--a role requiring high analytic skills, skills in working with
precise 'artificial languages'. And even those Americans who can manage such 'slaves' had
better be very good at it; U.S. companies often send their computer-projects, say to India, to be
completed there by skilled, underpaid workers, and returned; or they import skilled, low-paid
foreign workers here./
Americans in the 50th percentile usually get no college--hardly any typical Coloradoans go beyond 12th grade.--or, unusually, 'some college'. Ask in private the underpaid teachers at community colleges what is the typical skill-level of their students..one referred to such instructors as 'the homeless teaching the clueless." People with 'some college' don't earn much more than people with only high-school diplomas./
And even the persons attending regular colleges and universities are very often unqualified.
Colorado State U. was demanding for admission two years of high-school instruction in some foreign language; but when it became clear that this requirement meant turning away many, many applicants, and losing much, much tuition money, CSU simply dropped the requirement./
These typical youths are not able to work with complex computer-programs. They're not even trying.
Enrollment in technical programs has sunk over the last 20 years, just when the need (and the
pay) for super-skilled workers has risen enormously. Even car-repair jobs go unfilled, now that
a car involves many computers. /
Some low-pay, low-skill jobs (e.g., orderlies in nursing homes, or airport baggage-checkers),
will for a long while, remain open here; but they will be few relative to the masses of untrained youths competing for them! The vocation of nursing requires rigorous training and great dedication--there is an urgent shortage of nurses here now [15,000 short just in Colorado by 2020] not even factoring in bioterror attacks. A huge proportion of people who start nurses' training flunk out; the number taking license-exams has plummeted. (The students competent enough to finish often drop out before long, frustrated by working conditons in commercial hospitals.)/ Even pharmacists are in short supply.

-- "That's why I think the main effort of do-gooders today should be to cut the birth-rate of
typical Americans, so there will be fewer miserable inferiors." By 'miserable' I meant unhappy,
NOT contemptible..unemployed people ARE often miserable. Domestic violence rises in an almost 1 to 1 ratio with unemployment./
By 'inferiors' I meant that these people are economically inferior to the elite people who will function well in the Information Society--not that they are humanly inferior. I personally think that people who love poetry and art and scorn 'artificial languages' may well be humanly superior to computer-geeks--but they are still economically inferior. (Earning 19cents an hour, I was once a miserable inferior!)

--I used to dream that the stupendously rich elite Americans would share enough with the
underskilled to help them to live a decent life. Now it's clear that the patron saints of our well-to-do are Miss Piggy and Mr. Scrooge; they will cheerfully watch their fellow-Americans suffer greatly from lack of health care and tolerable housing./
So those of us who care about the welfare of the 'losers', i.e, we 'do-gooders', had better quit trying to get them subsidized, and start helping them to live on less. We do have the 'richest poor in the world' so far, though that is changing. Any of us who survived the Depression could tell
low-income people lots of 'necessities' they could do without, like gambling and cars and separate houses on quarter-acres of land./
But one of the biggest ways to economize is for them to cut down the number of their children. The 'morning-after' pill is quite effective as a backup for condoms, but the low-income people who
need it the most often don't even know about it. (Only 60% of Americans even know about this back-up form of contraception--RMNEWS,19May)
Most of the elite would agree that the bottom 20% would do well to have fewer children; it's
not just so there will be fewer unfortunates; it's also so that those remaining, with fewer
children, won't be so badly off--nor will the children. The only way I am different is that I see
an emergency shaping up for at least the bottom 50% of our population.
--------
Besides that explosive paragraph, Moore says I doubt the bravery of our ground troops. I never
said that. However, I do question the brave dedication of our typical young males. Everyone is
forgetting that the Marines and Army personnel who have shown such bravery as ground-forces in Iraq are themselves a very small military elite..fewer than 200,000 out of a population of 300 million. (The
B-52 crews, the Navy missile-launchers, may be brave, but this war--like our wars since WWII--has not tested their bravery at all)./
About the rest of our young men: when told that we need to fight awful villains in Iraq, Iran,
Korea and other places, our youths applaud and watch the fighting avidly..but THEY DON'T
ENLIST! Especially our upper class doesn't. NYTIMES recently cited a survey showing that
our military forces are representative of our population, except that the top quarter of our youth
are not often found there. But it is these elite youth who are especially needed to operate competently our nifty computerized weapons. Rumsfeld just said that half of the numerous accidents among the military were uncalled for./
I deny vigorously that I despise Americans, though I feel sympathy for many--(I do despise their right-wing leaders!) In no way do I despise what America stands for! I foolishly let myself be drafted into the Korean war, though I could have insisted on a physical deferment. It's precisely because I stand ardently for the things that John Adams and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson stood for, that I complain so bitterly now over the new streak of Amerikanism polluting our national tradition./
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At the very end of his article, Moore says he is willing to revise his first proposition (that
universities here are generally semi-treasonous) to say instead that at least 2 profs are. Very smooth; but that's a hell of a backdown, offered only when his silly generalization was pointed out by someone else------------------------------------
For more about our automated military, see the blog below: PENTAGON ROBOTS, 4/23 .

 
THEY NEVER LEARN!/ The Sunday A.M. Talkshows (25may) featured various U.S. Government sages saying we need to oust the 'ayatollah' regime in Iran. These nincompoops have forgotten that our meddling, decades ago, put these ayatollahs into power!/
We ousted Mossadegh, the leader elected by Iranians, replacing him with that murderous fool, the Shah. He so enraged the people that 1 in 4 took to the streets (the most democratic revolution in modern times) and replaced him with the Ayatollahs./
Now many young Iranians are sick of the ignorant, backwards rule by ayatollahs--but they will be enraged at word that we're going to meddle arrogantly again--this will speedily bring them back into the fold, loyal again to their present rulers./
It looks like the only way to oust the present regime in Iran is to bomb the hell out of them and then invade, as we did in Iraq. Iran is a much more dangerous foe than Iraq. Such are the uncomfortable alternatives facing the new World Emperor.
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EXCESS PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY: TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT?/
On 27May, USATODAY, amazingly, devoted a whole page to the threat of 1930s-type DEPRESSION (not just temporary recession!) Of course they said the chances of this disaster were very small--but real./
One expert said the chances of deflation [inability to sell all the goods we're producing] have risen sharply. And it is said that 'excess productive capacity' is a temporary problem, ascribed to overinvestment in productivity during the last decade. (Of course, journalists will still call 'increases in productivity' a boon!)
It's now clear that we must distinguish, oddly, between ACTUAL over-capacity (where we already have the excess productive facilities built) and POTENTIAL over-capacity (such excess facilities could be quickly built.) (We are now able to sell only 72.5% of the products of our actual capacity. Orders for durable goods fell an unexpected 2.4% in April./Reuters28May) Actual excess capacity could theoretically be cured, simply by limiting production until world consumption catches up--if it does./
Of course, production must be cut all over the world. A decade ago, this would seem quite possible, when the 'rich' countries were friendly and ready to cooperate. But now, when the Bush-team has basically declared 'cold-war' on many other rich countries, such needed cooperation is in no way guaranteed. Indeed, by cheapening our dollar (as Japan is also cheapening the yen) we may be starting a 'beggar-thy-neighbor' spiral like that which triggered the Great Depression./
Suppose production-quotas could be set up world-wide (as farm-production quotas have been set up). There would still be a huge excess of capital, needing outlets for investment. Interest-rates could approach zero worldwide, as in Japan now and (nearly) in America. This will produce bellows of rage from rich investors. (Our gigantic national deficit might be easier to finance.)/
POTENTIAL OVER-CAPACITY:/
Investment might move to fund new research which would make the same amount of product, only cheaper and better. Every country would have to follow suit, or be undersold. That process would likely involve using less human input ('labor') and thus lowering the typical person's ability to consume, leading to another cycle of world deflation./
As computers and robots get more and more efficient, with no obvious ceiling, the world's POTENTIAL for excess capacity will skyrocket. Sooner or later, each country will be tempted to move to autarky, using tariffs of one kind or another to squeeze foreign producers out of domestic markets. Another move to restore the GREAT DEPRESSION! /
In other words, overproduction is not just a temporary threat, but a permanent possibility for the future./
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GLOBAL GLUT: [W.Keegan in London OBSERVER,25MAY] /(paraphrase) /
There is a deficit of aggregate demand in Europe; Europe is awash with excess productive capacity. Before, with a strong dollar, U.S. was 'import machine' that kept up European exports. But now, when Bush desperately needs more exports, fewer imports to revive American economy before the 2004 election, U.S. is deliberately cheapening the dollar, declaring 'currency wars' ['beggar-thy-neighbor'] on the whole world.. / The 1930s will be echoed if each nation devalues their currency to maximize their share of manifestly inadequate global demand./
After Bush cut out from the G-8 summit, the remaining 7 nations issued a statement that emphasized 'currency stability' as a main prerequisite of growth--i.e., warning against the competitive currency-devaluations started by U.S. & Japan.
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DOLLAR: CHEAP OR STRONG?/ Just after Secy.of Commerce Snow said that the cheap dollar was helping U.S., Pres. Bush assured the G-8 summit that we want a 'strong dollar'. One observer said we want a cheap dollar, but not a dollar crash--so our leaders talk 'ambiguously' (out of both sides of their mouth)./
The cheap dollar has already helped our exports (our goods are cheaper)--but Germany, Japan, and other countries are very worried that it's lowering THEIR exports, which they are very dependent on. Deflation may already be happening in Germany. Glut & overproduction are problems everywhere./
The prices of manufactured goods in America are already falling./
We can't afford to alienate these other rich countries: Europe, Japan and Canada together buy more than half of our exports./ (If they manage to deflate their currencies--e.g., by Europe lowering their interest rate as they're getting ready to do--we'll lose the export advantage we got from cheapening ours.)/
One expert predicted that, despite Bush's mouthings, the dollar will sink some more./ Bloomberg.Com2June
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SOLUTION? UNDERCONSUMPTION is the other face of overproduction. In the near future, money must be shovelled to the ordinary people of the world, who are eager to consume more. A national deficit which increased employment would be a good idea--unlike the Bush deficits which go to enrich the engorged wealthy, who will not spend more. (Two million U.S. jobs have disappeared since Bush came in, in spite of a war.) War used to trigger extra employment, but the $70 billion planned for new weapons next year will go into automated production, and the new 'lean' military (lean in personnel, not in stupendously-expensive gadgets!) does not relieve unemployment./
Congress is going to extend unemployment benefits (only for those still on the benefits, and only for 13 weeks.) We could cut out the FICA payroll tax (with a top threshold to exclude the wealthy), which would give 8% more to each worker. We could drop the FICA tax which costs the employer 10 cents extra for every dollar he pays to American workers. We could enlarge the tiny present tax-credit for the working poor, instead of meanly spying on recipients as the Bush team is doing. (Every American with taxable income of $100 per year(!) must now pay $11 of that in income tax.)
We could hire millions of people needed for anti-terror measures (e.g., inspecting thousands of dangerous containers coming into our ports each day.) /
The government could pay workers' health-insurance, which would lessen the disincentive firms might have to hire new workers./
In other words, there are many ways to shovel money to eager consumers and thus mitigate the deflation-recession-Depression tendency. But will the wealthy be intelligent enough to see and implement this solution? /
One measure might be accepted by the wealthy. Birth-control measures would eventually limit the very-dangerous glut of workers worldwide. This process has already started; the goofy Bush-team, to appease its fundamentalist backers, is trying to block it--but with condoms backed by the 'morning-after' pill, population will shrink--but perhaps too slowly to prevent disaster. (Sages cluck over the decrease in the number of workers for each pensioner..actually, with each still-employed worker stupendously more 'productive', this decrease is a good thing.) /
Birth-control limits the absolute number of potential consumers. But most of them couldn't afford to consume much anyway. (The ideal thing would be to limit the births or training of innovative inventors, who worsen the overproduction problem!)
So, it's up to the world's wealthy to decide if they want to pay the (modest) price for preventing permanent overproduction, which would plunge the world into another GREAT DEPRESSION.
===============
UNREQUITED LOVE: Not only will the rich get far more actual money back in the new tax-cut (of course!) But they'll get more than TWICE THE PERCENTAGE back: 1.33% refunded to the parent with adjusted-gross-income of $30,000, compared to 2.84% refund for parent with AGI of $100,000. The top rate drops nearly 4% (38.4% to 35%) while the 27% rate drops only 2% to 25%. (NYT,reprinted in DenverPost29May)
Wealthy Bush, without any embarrassment, loves only the wealthy; the average slob loves Bush. Go figure.
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WEALTHY SHOOT SELVES IN FOOT: Consumer spending was supposed to rise a little in April; instead it fell a little./The inflation-rate (which is now a plus!) is down to 1.3%, the lowest level since the '60s. The feds' expected lowering of rate below 1.25% will do little good, since even a zero rate of interest wouldn't be much lower than inflation rate./
"Corporations might be shooting themselves in the foot", said one expert. "They fear insufficient demand; but when they don't hire..that can become a vicious circle." /Reuters30May (The average time a person is unemployed just rose to the highest in 20 years.)

 
OBJECTIVE, WELL-BALANCED VIEWS? HELL,NO!/These pieces do not pretend to 'give both sides'.
The Bush propaganda machine (using U.S. media like NYTIMES) is flooding us with pollyanna views of our imperial project. Like TRUTHOUT.ORG (only in much briefer forms) I'm trying to present the negative, 'Cassandra' side, to show what awful risks we're taking with this 'wannabe' Empire, for what illusory gains.
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IRAQ DISASTER? Senator Richard Lugar, senior REPUBLICAN authority on foreign relations, has warned that our attempted 'reconstruction' of Iraq, after our bombing, is 'on the edge of disaster'. To read the full story from the London TIMES, goto TRUTHOUT.ORG/
The 'allies' who 'supported' our invasion are now balking at sharing the costs of reconstruction. The Pentagon says we'll need 40,000 GIs kept there, but independent analysts say we might need 100,000, at a cost of $25 billion a year.[Assoc.Press28May]
[29May] 200,000 MUST STAY ON: Earlier, Pentagon civilians predicted that a force of 100,000 soldiers would stay on for a short while after victory; then, they said, as Iraqis welcomed the liberators (!) and France contributed peace-keeping forces (!!) , we could send many of them home. Well, 9 GIs were killed this week and 2 dozen were maimed or wounded--so all our troops there (160,000 in Iraq and 40,000 more in Kuwait) will remain for now.[NYT & USATODAY & NPR] /
Turkey and Poland might contribute some troops for the occupation; but Britain has already begun pulling out its troops, and will continue to do so./
500 Shiites protested against the arrest of some of their clerics, with a leaflet threatening suicide-bombings. [reuters/29may] /
=======/
MORE EVIDENCE OF PRIORITIES: [Assoc.Press24May]Congress is passing a bill to give $400.5 BILLION to the Pentagon next year. Well, no, some of this is to go for homeland defense. How much? $270 Million (not 'billion') . Whereas there is $3.5 billion (over 10 times as much) to develop ONE KIND of new bomber. $70 billion will go for weapons development in general (over 200 times as much as for the home-defense amount.)/
But the most hilarious part of the budget is the $9 billion for MISSILE DEFENSE! Thousands of huge containers come into our ports each day; only 2% of them are inspected; any one could contain a nuclear bomb. What attacker would need a missile?! Yet this bill will spend more than 30 times as much on pointless missile defense as on all aspects of homeland defense./
Satire staggers and dies in the face of such real-life black humor.
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Cities and States, strapped for cash and receiving very little from the feds, are now mainly ignoring the 'orange' warnings from the feds.They simply can't afford all the extra precautions against terrorists that might be in order. [nyt24may] One can imagine Al Qaeda causing enough false alarms (by increasing their 'chatter') to bankrupt the cities and states--then attacking when our precautions have been cut to the bone.
===============
TWO VERY DIFFERENT WAYS TO DEFEND US:/ Letter to NYTIMES:
A letter-to-editor to NYT on 25May said the Democrats were inconsistent because 1) they complain the Bush-team wasn't doing enough to counter terror-threats, and (2) yet they object to the limits on civil liberties that are necessary for such countering.
There are 2 general classes of measures in the war on terror: Type 1 are quite expensive, but not threatening to our democratic traditions: e.g. Training nurses for a possible bioterror attack, financing extra firemen in cities, blocking small planes from approching the waste-ponds of our 104 n-power sites, inspecting the thousands of large containers entering our ports each day.
Type 2 are cheap, but threatening to our liberties: e.g., 'sneak and peak' raids on citizens' houses without search-warrants and without subsequent notice to the homeowners; inspecting library lists of books that citizens have read, then commanding librarians to keep silence about such snooping.
The Bush-Ashcroft team is eager to use methods of type 2 to the fullest; but they are grossly underfunding the far more necessary precautions of type 1 (a recent appropriation bill allotted less money per year to the cities to guard against terror than the Pentagon gets each DAY!)
This disparity shows that the Bush-team doesn't really give a damn about Homeland Defense. Their chatter about it is just to justify spying on dissident citizens in a 'permanent emergency'.

 
MEMORIAL DAY: On this day, we pretend to honor the victims of the disease of militarism (the soldiers killed in our countless, mostly pointless wars)--but in fact we're honoring the DISEASE./
Let's face it: something in us REVERES this disease.
======================
--MORE TERRRORISTS are being used as martyr-murderers (23 for the Saudi & Moroccan explosions). That suggests that the supply of volunteers has indeed gone up because of our invasion./
--Bush says we've destroyed 'half' of Al Qaeda. But the remaining half is growing like a cancer./
--Observers say that A.Q. is not a centralized organization (easy to decapitate). Its function is to organize spontaneous, independent local Islamist groups (motivated by our invasion) all over the world. /
--It won't be necessary for the next set of attackers to live in U.S. for months, to prepare. They can come in at the last minute--the local knowledge being provided by resident sympathizers. /
--The Afghan training camp is now unnecessary. [from ABCNEWSONLINE & GUARDIAN, cited by TRUTHOUT.ORG.]/
==================
FREEDOM OF INQUIRY:/
In a May issue of THE ECONOMIST, it was revealed that U.S. scientists had just published a detailed description of the genome of the ANTHRAX germ, which might make it easier for terrorists to make it invulnerable to vaccines and antibiotics. And it turned out that nobody, in the labs or at the journal or in the government, had really asked if this was a prudent thing to do. We're too dumb to be scared.

 
FEROCIOUS, FELONIOUS NUNS:/ 3 elderly nuns defaced an obsolete Colorado missile silo with their own blood. A prosecutor charged them (he didn't have to) and a jury convicted them of a felony: INTERFERING WITH NATIONAL DEFENSE (!) They await sentence of 5 to 8 years. They may well die in prison./
This confirms my opinion that most Americans, pushed by the whore-media spouting Bushite propaganda, are now in the grip of war fever. Periodically madness seizes most of certain populations--often American populations./
Some say that Truth is the first casualty of war. Not so--good sense perishes first; then there's no demand for truth./
The good news: almost 100 million Americans have stayed sane, seeing (with the rest of the world's peoples) the evil of this "road to war paved with lies." (from an English official) , this 'unjust, illegal, disastrous war' (from Pope John Paul II.) We are outnumbered here, but we're not alone.
-----------------------------------
Letter to ROCKYMOUNTAINNEWS/ OF COURSE NOT!
The line you emphasized from Charles Krauthammer's predictably hawk column on 19May was quite entertaining: "Iraq today is a social, economic, ecological and political ruin not because of allied bombing but because of Baath rule." Never mind that Western reporters before the bombing, after decades of Baath rule, didn't notice the ruin--just because the ruin appeared ONLY AFTER our bombing, that doesn't prove it happened BECAUSE OF our bombing. Let's be logical!

 
RECONSTRUCTION SHORTFALL: An analysis by Spanish authorities claims that the U.S. plan to finance Iraq's reconstruction by selling Iraqi oil is just a dream. In the first place, the reconstruction will cost much more than was foreseen; in the second place, getting Iraqi oil flowing again will require billions in investment, and much time. The Americans have budgeted only $2.5 billion for this reconstruction; they expect other countries to chip in.[London OBSERVER19May] /
What happened earlier in Afghanistan? The other countries did NOT chip in, and neither did the Americans; the reconstruction was just dropped. (For horrific details, see Peter Osborne's article in London OBSERVER [OBSERVER.CO.UK] 25 MAY.)And we have got away with it so far; that is, U.S. soldiers have not been killed in large numbers by guerillas, which is all our people basically care about./
But Iraq is a different situation; if their reconstruction (after our devastating bombing) is just ignored, they may rise up violently against the occupying troops./
At least 10,000 Shiites have just marched to oppose our continued occupation. And Baghdad police say they'll fight the Americans if they don't get paid. In 4 separate ambushes, 2 Gis were killed and 4 wounded. "They deserved it, and deserve more," said one Ali Abbas. "They are occupiers, not liberators."/
A Shiite cleric, asked to disarm his militia, said that Iraqis had a right to defend themselves, since the Americans are failing to keep the peace. [Reuters26May]
A general shrugged, "1 a day have been killed since the major war ended. That's no more than the rate of our training accidents!"[nyt25May] Wait a minute: that's as if the training-deaths were suddenly doubled. And such a steady, continuing rate of ambush deaths (40 in 42days, plus ??# maimed or wounded/nyt2je) will remind Americans that we are there as hated invading occupiers, not as welcome liberators. (We admired French partisans who ambushed and sabotaged the German invaders.)

 
SOUTH KOREANS ARE ANTI U.S:/ Polls show that only 46% of South Koreans have a favorable attitude toward the U.S., their rescuer in 1950. Why ? The Rumsfeld loonies are deliberately trying to provoke a war with North Korea, which would destroy the whole peninsula./
Letter to DenverPost PARTIAL TRUTHS/
James Brady's article on Korea in PARADE (25may) at least mentioned the 37,000 GIs in South Korea, which U.S. media rarely do--for instance, a May issue of the respected magazine THE ECONOMIST had a malevolent picture of N.Korea's Kim on the cover, and full-page, bellicose article within that DID NOT TELL ITS READERS HOW AWFUL THE STAKES ARE IN THIS GAMBLE..IT NEVER MENTIONED THE 40,000 YANKS AT PERIL THERE, OR THE FACT THAT N.KOREA COULD FIRE 400,000 SHELLS PER HOUR AT THEM./
However, even Brady's article didn't tell the whole truth./
Why are these men still stationed there, 50 years after the war? The general answered: "Because we signed..a treaty..to maintain the peace in Korea." Brady incuriously didn't ask the general how 37,000 troops could 'maintain the peace' against 1.2 million North Koreans if they attacked./
The truth is these troops are there not to fight, if trouble breaks out again--but just to die.
They have served as a 'trip-wire', to reassure the South Koreans (perhaps worrying that we might not rescue them a second time) that if the Kim regime attacked, these Yanks would be killed first, and America would come rushing into the fight. We kept troops in Europe also as a trip-wire to reassure the Europeans that, with Yanks killed, we'd come blazing in if the Soviet attacked. One French general said, "I don't care if they send over high-school girls--just so some Americans are here to get killed."
But to this ruthlessness we added stupidity, when we decided that WE would launch a first strike at NORTH KOREA! These GIs, like Seoul, are in artillery range; North Korea could fire 400,000 shells per hour and finish them off in a day.(said Nat Hentoff in a NYT column some time ago.)
Such an attack would be suicidal; why worry? Because the Kim people may think they're doomed anyway; holding these troops as hostages is about the only 2d-strike deterrent they possess to dissuade us from unleashing the B-52s we have lurking on Guam. They can say, "You can devastate our land, as you did 50 years ago; but 'from our graves' we can wound you by wiping out in a day thousands of your troops."/
So--we'll just pull our GIs out. However, the minute we start that withdrawal, the Kim regime might reasonably figure we're going to attack imminently. Faced with a "use 'em or lose 'em" dilemma, they might strike first. Worried about that, we might attack earlier; realizing this, they might attack any day.
South Korea's President asked us NOT to pull out the hostages. But then he cares about Seoul disappearing instantly. You'd think the U.S. Government would tread very carefully through this minefield, aptly called 'the most dangerous place on earth'. However, Bush announced publicly that he 'loathed' President Kim personally; we labeled them as part of the Axis of Evil, and demonstrated in Iraq that this label could mean a first-strike attack. We moved a B-52 armada to Guam as a vivid threat, when they could attack just as well from Missouri. And recently, the Pentagon leaked a memo suggesting that we should cooperate with China to topple the Kim regime. Moreover, when President Kim went into seclusion for 5 weeks, we bragged that with our 'precision' bombs we could murder the top echelon
in North Korea personally. In other words, the Bush-team is eager to provoke a war./
In the Kim regime, the Rumsfeld loonies may have come up against rulers as mad as they are themselves./
----------------------
HERE WE GO...The Pentagon is planning to move around all its troops in Asia (a scheme cunningly planned to disguise the removal of our GIs in Korea and Japan, and Okinawa from artillery/missile range of N.Korea.)/
They admit they're removing 'some' of troops from Korea, but they say "the numbers will be lower, but the capabilities will be higher." SO: instead of 37,000 troops stoutly resisting 1 million N.Koreans, we'll have, say, only 1000..but super-armed so they can stand up just as well to the 1 million N.Koreans.
What a farce..they still pretend that our troops there are intended to fight, not just to die, in a 'trip-wire' role./
The troops will be removed in October. That gives the Kim regime ample warning that we intend to bomb them to bits just after October, after they have stood by to let us remove our hostages. One might wonder if they will stand by, or strike first before October./
As I said before: either the Rumsfeld people are really stupid to take such a gamble, or they don't mind our troops being slaughtered in a day. I would imagine that Seoul property values and the So. Korean stock-market will now sink rapidly, and that any So.Koreans who can do so will bug out.[LATIMES,reprinted in DENVERPOST29May]/
Small wonder that South Korean youths (who will perish along with our Yanks) have fallen out of love with America. With allies like the Pentagon, who needs enemies?

 
For the amazing (& personally embarrassing) story of SISTER PHILOMENA, goto 4/1.
[To read earlier pieces, under ARCHIVE at left, (for instance) click on week of 3/30 -4/5, then move down to 4/1]
==================
WOW! REPORT SHELVED/
A recent U.S. Treasury report (ignored by Bush-team) predicted a gigantic, heart-stopping budget shortfall of $4.4 trillion (4.4 million millions)(94% of present U.S. household assets!) when baby-boomers reach retirement--a 66% increase in income taxes will be needed./[London FINANCIAL TIMES/29May]
So the Republicans pass a huge tax-cut for the rich, and appropriate over $400 billion for the Pentagon next year. In the words of the old song, THERE'S NO TOMORROW!
===================
INDEX VIII from 1 May forward:
5/1 BLAIR SINCERE? SO WHAT?/
5/3 BUSH SENIOR & JUNIOR/
5/4 HOME DEFENSE? OWENS BORED!/
AT WAR (VS. CIVIL RIGHTS) /
INTERVIEW WITH BAGHDAD WITNESS FISK /
5/5 ECON.CONSEQUENCES OF UNILATERAL ARROGANCE /
5/6 DANGER IS NOT FROM NATIONS /
FRIEDMAN THE FLACK /
5/7 DEFLATION ACKNOWLEDGED /
5/8 MEGATECH & OVERPRODUCTION (A LUDDITE VIEW) /
5/9 PUNISHING FRANCE MIGHT BACKFIRE./
5/10 MITIGATING THE GLUT OF LABOR/
DEFLATION & UNEMPLOYMENT/
5/11 NO WMD'S!/
5/12 AMERICAN EMPIRE & LINGUISTIC SKILLS/
REACTION TO 9/11? NOT AT ALL! (BREMER TO IRAQ)/
'PRECISION BOMB' THREAT MAY DETER, OR PROVOKE, N.KOREANS./
5/14 MONEY TO THE RICH TO INCREASE CONSUMPTION? OFFERING MORE FOOD TO AN ALREADY-STUFFED PYTHON/
5/15 DEFLATION WORRIES/
STRANGE PRIORITIES: DESTROYING BEATS DEFENDING. /
older index at 5/3
=====================
TAX TRICKS AND COMICS PROPAGANDA:/
Lately, propaganda often shows up in the comic-strips. For instance inTHE WIZARD OF ID, the people object to a tax break for the rich, so the king says, "OK, no tax refund at all!" and you are to think the
people are foolish for rejoicing./
However: given that government is determined to spend even more than they take in, then when the rich pay less, unrich people must pay more. For instance, under Pres.Reagan, the income-tax rates were lowered, but the FICA employment tax, which falls most heavily on ordinary people, was raised. Luckily the average person was too dumb to figure that out. /
Right now, income taxes are being lowered, but various fees (paid by ordinary people) are being raised.
We'd be smart to prefer no tax break at all to one favoring mainly the wealthy.
--------------
ANOTHER CARTOON raised a similar right-wing incantation: "Any reference to tax-cuts as 'tax-expenditures' assumes that they're giving me money, not just giving some of my money back!"/
NOT SO: suppose the government is spending $100, and you're paying $50 in tax and I'm paying $50. If they lower your tax to $20, then either: a) they must raise mine to $80--in that case, this has exactly the same effect on me as if they started spending $130..it's like an extra expenditure.
Or else (b) they lower my taxes too and the extra $60 goes into a deficit. That has exactly the same effect as if they spend $160 instead of $100..it's like an extra expenditure.
But suppose they lower our taxes and then lower their expenditures to $40. Yeah, and suppose cows fly. Republicans have been compulsive spenders (mainly on war.)/
So the phrase 'tax-expenditure' is a perfectly good expression of what's going on with tax-cuts.
Justified tax-cuts should be called justified tax-expenditures; they need the same kind of justification as increased spending.

 
SAFER NOW? C'MON! The Bush-team constantly tells us that our invasion of Iraq was 'one victory in the War Against Terror'. But has it made us one bit safer from terrorist attack? A sly NYTIMES headline 17MAY says "SOME OFFICIALS THINK AL QAEDA HAS REVIVED." Ah, but was A.Q. ever dead? Even sick?/
Counter-terror officials here say that our invasion of Iraq--as we doves predicted--caused a 'spike' in terrorist recruitment. We have nabbed some big guys; but with 1 billion angry Muslims out there, why should it be difficult for A.Q. to recruit new leaders, not just foot-troops? A U.S. official speculated that '2d-tier' leaders have filled in..quite effectively. A Republican Congressman speculated that there are 'thousands' of A.Q. trainees out there, and some are in the U.S. [Reuters19May] /
The Saudi minister who was supposed to counter terrorism announced that Al Qaeda was crippled, just days before the big explosion. (One is reminded of the way our generals in Vietnam said the VietCong had been castrated, just before their devastating Tet offensive.)There have been similar explosions (aimed at Westerners) in tourist-hungry Morocco and Tunisa--just after bin Laden announced that Morocco was ready for 'liberation' (from a government unfriendly to A.Q.). 21 filling-stations with Western names have been bombed in Pakistan. It looks as if A.Q. is picking off the easily-attacked targets before taking on America's homeland./
Of course, arrests were made after the Saudi bombing, as there were after the Bali bombing. And confessions might be extracted by torture. But outsiders have no assurance that the right people have been nabbed, so they may still be free to strike again./
Or else, even more worrying, there may be free-lance terrorists around, besides the A.Q. guys. One U.S. general said, "What terrifies me is the thought of a lot of 'wanna-be' terrorists." Timothy McVeigh, after all, was not part of an organization; nor were the snipers who paralyzed the D.C. area. Eric Rudolph, whose bombs have injured hundreds, was a loner. Also a loner, apparently, was the 'Anthrax' guy. The army said of the recent attacks on GIs in Iraq, "There's no evidence that these incidents are connected." That's good news, that independent agents are attacking our troops, vs. an organization that could perhaps be decapitated?! More free-lancers might be mobilized by our invasion./
The Institute for Strategic Studies in Britain (not a left-wing pacifist group!) says that A.Q. Is 'more insidious and just as dangerous' as before 9/11. Sen.Robert Graham goes further: having seen the Congressional report on 9/11 (which the Bush-team won't allow to be published!) he says the Administration basically lost interest in fighting terrorism, in its eagerness to use our new 'go-boom' gadgets to pound Iraq. And a Republican, Sen. Shelby, who has also seen that secret report, agreed with Graham. (Paul Krugman in NYT16May). And Gen.Myers told the AirForceAcademy recently that we are in more danger than ever from terrorism.(DenverPost)./
It's been said that budgets are the index of real concern. The basic fact is that the Republicans in Washington have starved Homeland Defense. The Dept. Of Homeland Security gets for a whole year about what the Pentagon gets each month. ALL the cities together (our 1st line of defense) get a miserably insufficient allocation of $700 million for the YEAR, which is less than the Pentagon gets every DAY. /
It turned out, alas, that our stupendous OFFENSE in Iraq was NOT the best DEFENSE for our Homeland. A Victory parade right now might be premature./
On the other hand, these Republicans may WANT more attacks on our homeland--which could, after all, rush panicked Americans even further toward Bush-led fascism.

 
FRANCE, GRRR! / Letter to RockyMountainNews /
The French government has--amazingly--complained formally that the Bush-team is deliberately spreading false rumors against France. Now we discover that the Bushies' local agent, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, has been insulting France also--insults which the RockyMountainNews, his whore-on-retainer, passed on to us on the front page. Why would these people want to do that?/
Americans want to believe that only France opposed our invasion, not facing the fact that practically everyone in the outside world saw the invasion as "unjust, illegal, and disastrous" in the words of Pope John Paul II. The Bushies and Owens may want to strengthen that France-only delusion. /
Maybe Owens should boycott Holy Communion, just to show that Saddam-loving Pope.
----------------------
About the danger of MUTUAL boycotts between U.S. and other nations, which would damage gravely our quite-fragile economy, see below PUNISH FRANCE? [5/9]

 
DEFLATION WORRIES: Reuters(15May) ran a story on the startling drop in wholesale prices (2% in April) ; the headline was THE ECONOMY? READ IT AND WEEP. [Deflation is when the amount of goods/services which people CAN and will buy falls below the level of goods produced. So sellers can't raise their prices--usually they have to lower (deflate) their prices.]/
"Deflation is like quicksand", said a top Wells Fargo economist; "We want to be 10,000 miles away from it. The consequences are so severe it's hard to get out of it."/[Assoc.Press16May] /
U.S. consumers are incredibly greedy; but the ABILITY to buy is what's in question. The number of bankruptcies keeps rising; Americans are sobering up, borrowing at a lower rate than before.
Consumer prices rose in April at the lowest rate in 37 years. Housing price-rises diminished; on the other hand, consumer-confidence rose--but what counts is how consumers behave, not how they feel.
[Reuters, 16MAY] /
The next stage of trouble is when the producers adjust to this lower demand by cutting production (and jobs) even further..then the workers can buy even less.The U.S. is now using the lowest percentage of its productive capacity since 1983, and less than 94% of its 'labor' potential. Factory orders are dropping. Our 'growth-rate' is dangerously low./
Japan has been suffering from incurable deflation, in and out of recession, for years; Germany is in recession, and other countries are near it --these countries can't be counted on to buy our excess goods. Other countries are also over-producing./
Our Treasury Secy. Snow just reproached foreign countries for not pushing Growth better; (U.S. growth is 1.6% annually, and Snow cited our coming tax-cut FOR THE WEALTHY as our way of boosting growth! (Reuters says economies are weak in EVERY REGION in the world.) (Reuters17MAY)
Go to 5/8 below (OR, under ARCHIVES at left, click on week 5/4 to 5/10) to see MEGATECHNOLOGY AND OVERPRODUCTION at 5/8), for a technophobe LUDDITE's explanation of this strange dilemma.

 
Letter to USATODAY / STRANGE PRIORITIES:DESTROYING TRUMPS DEFENDING./
Your editorial on 15May perceptively noted two main unsolved problems for our Homeland
Defense: a) Of the thousands of huge containers coming into our ports each day, only 2% are
inspected! Each could contain a small nuclear bomb or large drums of poison gas, or a stock of
shoulder-fired missiles to bring down our airliners.. [Some of these awful missiles are already here--USATODAY16May] /
(b) there is no real way of tracking the thousands of small private planes in the air every day; they could be loaded with explosives and crashed into the waste ponds of our 104 nuclear power plants, with devastating effect on nearby residents--who have been advised to keep potassium iodide in stock, just in case./
Many other problems persist, e.g., the horrible danger from biowar, when we already face an
urgent shortage of nurses. / Undercover agents testing our borders had no trouble getting in just by saying they were Americans and flashing forged drivers' licenses. The flaw was ascribed to 'bad training' for border agents--but we can't afford better training.(NYT14May) /
Whatever else is needed, solving these problems will require many billions of dollars. But
our total budget FOR 2004 for the Dept. of Home Security is less than 1/10th of the money given each year to the Pentagon. The cities are our 1st line of defense; all the cities together got $700 million for home-defense [DENVERPOST,16MAY]; this amount for the YEAR is significantly less than the money we give to the Pentagon each DAY. /
We can destroy any other nation quickly and efficiently--but our government is not even making a serious attempt to defend our Homeland.

 
Letter to USATODAY / OFFERING MORE FOOD TO AN ALREADY-STUFFED PYTHON
In a letter on 14 May R.Wagner likens Bush's tax-cut to Walmart Discounts as stimulating the economy. He ignores one important fact: the discount enables ordinary people to buy more--people who are eager to buy more. The tax-cut just enables the wealthy to 'keep more of their money' (the refunds for ordinary people will be negligible); but the wealthy are already spending all they physically could..they're not going to plow their refunds into retail spending. Only taxing the rich to subsidize ordinary people (to reverse partially the huge previous redistribution from ordinary people to wealthy people) will increase retail spending./
Bloody likely. Count on deflation continuing from weak effective demand.

 
"THREAT OF PRECISION ATTACK MAY DETER NORTH KOREA"(nyt12may)--
Or it might provoke them into slaughtering 40,000 Americans in one day. Who knows? Who cares?
------------
N.K. ruler Kim went into seclusion for 50 days after mid-February, just after we moved an armada of B-52s to Guam. Now the Pentagon hopes that our awesome powers of precision bombing--perhaps aimed at the N.K. rulers personally--would scare them into complying with our demands./
Wait a minute--we twice hurled 'precision' missiles at the houses where our 'intelligence' was sure Saddam was hiding out. But it turns out he's still alive, weeks later--though many women and children were blown to bits. Osama also survived our 'precision' bombing earlier. The story implies that Kim is now out of seclusion--perhaps chuckling/
. "The goal is to assemble in Korea the same kind of detailed intelligence on high-priority targets [as we displayed in Iraq]"--this after we had to learn from South Korea that N.K. had restarted their nuclear program. Wow--what are they smoking in that strange 5-sided building?/
"We could now have increased deterrence with fewer U.S. Troops in South Korea" the story says. As if our puny present force of 37,000 troops could deter N.K's army of over a million. They have been stationed in this vulnerable position, just across the DMZ, for 50 years--not to fight, but simply to die. They have been a 'trip-wire' force: if So.Korea doubted that we would come to help them--in another N.K. Invasion--then the knowledge that these Americans would die at the beginning of the attack would assure S.K. that we would come roaring in to join the new fight./
We had a similar 'trip-wire' force in Europe to assure Western Europe that we would join the fight if the Soviet invaded. One French general said, "I don't care if they send high-school girls--just so some Americans are here to get killed."/
To the ruthlessness of this 'tripwire' strategy was added a note of stupidity, when we decided that WE wanted to attack N.K. preemptively. Now the 40,000 Yanks were magically turned into HOSTAGES! Naturally N.K. sought a '2d-strike deterrent', a way of maiming America even from their grave, to scare us off from attacking them. One such deterrent is their ability to fire 400,000 artillery shells each hour at the nearby Yanks./
No doubt we want to 'reduce our force' in Korea--because they are now hostages. But (the S.K. Government worries) if we even start that withdrawal, N.K. may think this shows we plan an immediate first-strike with our Guam-based B-52s--so they had better attack first. Knowing they might think this, we might attack even earlier--knowing that we might think this way, they might attack any day. Such is the fun of preemptive attacks which we have now legitimized./
If Kim & his associates really think they will be blown to bits by our 'precision bombs' , they may figure they have nothing to lose by striking first. So when they read that the Pentagon is counting on this ability, the chance of an insane conflict (some say one million people will die) is increased, not deterred./
President Roh of South Korea is naturally worried, since if the conflict blew up, South Korea would be ravaged as much as the 40,000 Americans. Meeting with Bush this week, he asked that the U.S. commit itself not to use force--which the Bush-team explicitly refused to do. Roh also asked that we NOT move out the hostages until the nuclear issue had been settled. (NYT printed in DenverPost15May)./
We'd better hope that the Rumsfeld loonies have not, in the Kim regime, come up against rulers as mad as they are themselves./
For more on this emergency, go to 5/11

 
REACTION TO 9/11? NOT AT ALL! We launched our first preemptive attack on Libya in the 80s, killing 40 civilians..but NOT Quadaffi--describing our attack as 'self-defense against future attacks.' (Libya killed about 150 people later, in retaliation, by bombing the PANAM plane over Scotland.)
In 1996, a Wall-Street Journal article recommended that Pres.Clinton say this: "The Secy.ofState will alert the Iranians tonight that if our country gets ANY INDICATION of Iranian involvement in terrorism against Americans anywhere, Iran can expect to receive the full weight of American might. The [Pentagon] is to update target lists within Iran.." (Note that our bombs would be triggered on a sovereign nation not by a PROBABLE involvement with terrorists, but by ANY INDICATION of involvement!) /
The anti-terrorist advisor at the time of the Libya bombing was L.Paul Bremer; he also authored that fictional warning to Iran in 1996. This thug has just been named as King of New Iraq./
The terrorists needn't fear: our counter-terrorist agencies (here and in Iraq) will likely continue to be as ferocious and ignorant and ineffective as ever. An anonymous source in the State Dept. told NEWSDAY: "What Bremer knows about Iraq would not quite fill a thimble." (from Ft.Collins Weekly, 14 May).
Bremer had hardly arrived in Iraq before Shiite leaders threatened to get one million people into the streets to protest his regime. [usatoday19May]
===============
AMERICAN EMPIRE & LINGUISTIC SKILLS: /
--I've been worrying about the lack of interest in foreign languages among U.S. youth, when our leaders are planning a world-empire. Now come 2 newsbits from Iraq about this problem: /
---- The anarchic crime-rate in Baghdad is blamed by Iraqis on the failure of U.S. leadership. One U.S. leader insisted that we hire 50 top interpreters..But even now, 'language support remains a sore point.' ./
--The present U.S. team hunting for WMDs in Iraq (they've refused to admit UN inspectors) have just about given up. Critics say that changes are desperately needed: "They can't get much accomplished without interpreters and translaters, this is basic stuff." /
The problem with using non-Americans as translators is that our ignorant staff are at the mercy of their translations. Who says these foreigners have U.S. interests at heart? (The same problem is found in solving the computer-specialist shortage here--450,000 jobs unfilled--by moving projects to India, to be worked on by low-pay specialists there, supervised by other foreigners. Who says these people have U.S. interests at heart?) /
Someone said, "The linguist problem can be solved just by making this study worth money." /But a) there are many jobs in America going begging (e.g., computer-specialists, pharmacists, auto-repair) that pay well, but require rigorous training. Our 'elite' youth seem to hate hard work more than they love good pay. (They may be so childish they think they can have the pay without the work !) /
b)There is no word of any move by our rulers toward an emergency (well-funded) program to train language teachers and then train thousands of people to be skilled in foreign languages (and, say, anthropological knowledge of Muslim culture.) /
It's not clear that the 'imperialist' nincompoops in the Bush administration even understand that an empire would require thousands of Americans knowledgeable about foreign languages and cultures./
One British expert says he used to favor a U.S. Empire--until he moved here and decided that our government couldn't even persuade talented young Americans to LIVE in the colonies! (The hostile reaction to our wonderful GIs in Iraq, the kidnapped European tourists in Algeria, and the bombing of the European compounds in Saudi Arabia,as well as the bombing of Westerners in Morocco, Indonesia, and Tunisia are examples of tactics the terrorists can use to make sure that very few Yanks will want to live in the colonies ! ) Englishmen have been advised that Kenya is not safe for them.
Our rulers may think an empire can be built on bombs and missiles alone! (One colonel says we could run future (automated) wars overseas without ever leaving the U.S. [nytmag20Apr] Why not an Empire as well?) /
As I say, these 'empire-dreamers' seem as silly as they are lethal.

 
NO WMDs! The thousand-man U.S. team looking for hidden WMDs in Iraq has all but given up the search. [Washington Post/10May]/
Certainly any significant amount of poison gas would have enough volume to be found by now. Iraqi scientists, now unafraid of Saddam, still insist there were no WMDs all along./
Bush flacks like T.Friedman now have the gall to say that doesn't matter, even though that threat was the only reason we offered the UN to justify our invasion of a sovereign country. A British official summed it up beautifully: "The Road to War was paved with lies."/
The rest of the world now has real reason to fear us: our imperial proclamation last September ("We will feel free to attack any nation that even tries to catch up with us in weapons") has been confirmed by the unilateral Blitzkrieg we unleashed on Iraq, after a blizzard of shameless and clumsy lies./
But fearing the Bush-team doesn't bar the world from also holding them in contempt. I recall a TV show about a gigantic, mutated hen--terrifying, but also quite ridiculous--more awful than awesome./
Responding to U.S. as they do with fear and contempt, other nations are more and more likely to unite in an alliance (military and commercial) against us. (Reading that 79% of Americans think the invasion was legitimate even if no WMDs were involved[usatoday13may], foreigners might expand their fear and contempt to the majority of the American people, who seem to care only that we 'won' without too many American casualties.) /
We are not all-powerful: our homeland is very vulnerable, and our economy is quite fragile.

 
MOVE AWAY THE U.S.TROOPS? We have stupidly stationed 37,000 GIs (and 3000 civilian staff) right near the border with N.Korea, within their artillery range (they could get off 400,000 shells per hour.)/
Rumsfeld wants to bomb N.Korea so badly he can taste it. But they'd wipe out our GIs first. So the obvious thing is to move those troops away./
But Reuters(10may) says the So.Korea government worries that when he even STARTS this process, he could be signalling N.Korea that he does indeed plan to unleash our Guam-based B-52s on N.Korea--so they may launch a preemptive first strike at the troops, at Seoul, and Japan./
There'll be black humor aplenty when So.Korea's President Roh goes to the Bush ranch this week.
Roh was elected on a 'move away from America' platform; Bush will likely be resentful of our puppet daring to talk back. We know about Bush's discretion, since he announced that he 'loathed' North Korea's ruler Kim.
AN ATTEMPT TO END THE SILENCE:/ Letter to NYTIMES / BELATED NOTICE/
The Korean emergency has finally hit your front page (11MAY), but your writers downplayed the awful stakes our leaders are risking. You admit that the Bush-team has not ruled out a military first-strike at North Korea--indeed we have given the Kim regime many reasons to think that is our plan. You mention in passing that they might 'lash out' at Japan--and our forces in the region. But you never suggest that North Korea might be threatening this attack in the hope of deterring our B-52s recently moved to Guam, ready to pound them into the ground./
We'd belatedly like to pull our forces out of range, of course. But if we start this withdrawal, Pyongyang may figure our attack on them is imminent, and launch a preemptive first strike--firing 400,000 shells per hour at our 40,000 hostages just across the DMZ--besides destroying Seoul and hurling missiles at our troops in Japan. And yet the Bush-team seems determined to provoke a war ! /
Perhaps our leaders simply don't care about these American hostages. After all, with the U.S. media's silence on this emergency, if the average American heard that these troops were wiped out in a single day, they'd only be a number...this would be the first our ordinary citizens heard of this awful possibility./
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For a fuller discussion of this emergency, along with references to earlier pieces on Korea, go to 4/25 [i.e., under ARCHIVES at left, click on week 4/20 to 4/26, and move to 4/25]

 
MORE ON DEFLATION & UNEMPLOYMENT: REUTERS(9May) said (a) there is a world glut of supply; (b) the Sars epidemic might disrupt supplies from China, might mitigate the glut, so might mitigate deflation.
Deflation has to be a great threat for them to see this as good news!
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MITIGATING THE 'LABOR' GLUT: We now have 10 million unemployed (including 'discouraged workers' who no longer even apply); there are also a couple of million Americans forced to work only part-time (with few or no benefits). 2 million jobs have been lost since 2000. How could we 'make' more jobs? /
We might start by not penalizing people who hire Americans. As it is now, we levy a 10% FICA tax on every firm for each dollar that they pay to U.S. workers! (then we also tax each worker 8% of his pay!)
War used to make more jobs, because it took labor to make (& replace) weapons; but now weapon-making is automated. We're reconstructing Iraq, but the money goes to those crooks at Bechtel and Haliburton, who will hire foreign laborers, not Americans. /
Classically, a government deficit stimulates the economy and makes jobs. But in this case the deficit comes from a war and from outrageous tax-cuts for the rich--when more money goes to the rich, they don't spend it, and the economy is not stimulated. /
The following measures would increase the number of jobs available: a) financing the recruiting and training of thousands of nurses and medical personnel who will be urgently needed during and after the first bioterror attack here; (b) financing the cities to hire enough police and firemen,etc., to respond to terror attacks; (c) financing the inspection of the thousands of containers coming into our ports each day, each perhaps containing a nuclear bomb or its equivalent. (d) financing the recruitment and increased pay of child-care workers, now that the Bushies are demanding that mothers work full-time (France has great child-care provisions.) (e) financing enough training for teachers to mitigate the 'Ignorance-gate' here that disgraces and threatens our society. /
There are obvious ways to move closer to full employment here--but the Bushies and Republican legislators simply don't care--not even if the job-shortage increases deflation and recession, and in the long run will harm the rich as well as the poor. These ruthless nincompoops don't care about the long run.

 
PUNISH FRANCE? THIS MIGHT BACKFIRE! /
In the French Wines section of a local liquor store, one brand had an extra placard on the shelf: "This brand is owned by a Briton; support our ally!" The animus against France among so many Americans is rather odd. A couple of college students informed me that the opposition to our invasion came from the 'leftist' French government: Chirac a leftist?! /
Perhaps we don't want to admit the truth, that most people in EVERY country opposed our invasion; so we fasten on France and pretend they stand alone against us. (The French are claiming--in a very unusual formal way--that the U.S. government is circulating anti-French rumors! Why would they? This might be a clever strategy if the Bush-team wants us to concentrate on French opposition, and forget that almost everyone on earth despises our government for its 'unjust, illegal and disastrous' invasion (as the Pope called it. His Holiness could have added that it was a war based on lies.) /
(However, Americans are boycotting products also from Germany, Russia, China and India! [USATODAY19MAY] /
A few puny governments sided with us on paper (no real support) and they got $8 billion worth of payoff afterward. Countries that refused to side with us are being punished (e.g., Chile was just arbitrarily turned down for a U.S. Government contract.) /
We might get a big shock instituting boycotts against our 'enemies'. We ourselves are falling far short in exports. They outnumber us as a market (Europe is a big target for our exports. and Europe, Russia, China and India REALLY outnumber us); they may well start boycotting American goods. /
For instance, pressure from European governments meant that a low U.S.bid for airplane engines (a $2 billion contract) was rejected by the Airbus company; a French official conceded that hostility over the invasion might have contributed to this decision. "Clearly the atmosphere [for U.S. interests abroad] is not good." [All this from USATODAY9May]. /
The Bush-team's announcement last September that we intend to keep the whole world at our mercy militarily--this brazen imperialist proclamation could unite all nations against us economically, to balance our weapons-superiority. Explicit calls for boycotting U.S. brands have already been heard in many parts of the Muslim world (1 billion people)./
The invasion could also result in lower input of badly needed foreign capital into our needy economy. [See ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES below, 5/6] /
And boycotts against our exports would likely lead to more boycotts by Americans, significantly weakening global trade--at a time when worldwide excess productive capacity is tempting governments to use any methods to block competing foreign imports. [Japan spent $20 billion in one day to keep the yen's value down, to help their exporters and make imports more expensive.(Reuters8May)] (See blog just below]. The trouble with devaluing your currency is that when all nations do it, it does your nation no good.]
As I said before, liberal activists opposing 'globalist free trade' may find that the Bush-team has done more to undermine 'globalism' than any protesters could have.
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Americans have always been touchy about any foreign criticism whatsoever. College students have said to me, "What do we care what they think? They have no power." I reply that when the whole world (including the Pope) says the invasion was "unjust, illegal, and disastrous", it's likely that they're right and the American hawks are wrong. Cold silence is the response./
One million Italians showed up in ONE PARADE to object to our invasion. Nevertheless Berlusconi gave paper support to Bush. Now Berlusconi is in danger of jail for his domestic misdeeds.
The Spanish government is now denying that the bombing of Spaniards in Morocco is a response to their government (without the consent of the people) backing the invasion.
The only 2 governments who offered real troops to help our invasion were Britain and Australia. The Australian prime minister then was the first p.m. in history to be censured by his own party.
After long opposition to the war, the British public, since the war started, seem to support Tony Blair. But his Labor Party lost heavily in recent British elections; and Blair's other projects (needing European cooperation) are languishing. Perhaps being Bush's poodle won't really pay off in the long run.

 
MEGATECH & OVERPRODUCTION: We anti-megatech luddites worry that automation (super-computers/robots) will eventually produce, all over the First and Second Worlds, with very little human input, more products than can be sold worldwide--(not more than are needed; people with urgent needs but without much money are irrelevant in determining how much is bought; all that counts is EFFECTIVE aggregate demand, backed by money--how much people are willing AND ABLE to pay for each kind of goods.) Such worries about 'excess productive capacity' have now crept into conventional economic wisdom./
For instance, in America, 5% of the people produce so much food that, even though much is given away by food stamps, the rest can't be sold here or abroad--other crop-producing countries are also producing surpluses. /
"There's huge surplus capacity." The first sign of gross overproduction is deflation, falling prices. (For instance, meat in America is incredibly cheap, threatening our health; the demand for airline trips has dropped, so air-fares drop; the price of computers here recently fell by 22%--some say, by 60% !) /
Then producers cut production to match lower demand (e.g., the government pays farmers to produce less; the airlines run fewer flights)--then prices don't have to drop, BUT fewer jobs are offered, which means that ordinary consumers can afford to buy even less, so the cycle repeats. Since the end of 2000, 2.1 million American jobs have been lost! /
Most Americans feel very well-off (though insecure); this is mainly because of their wealth in house-values. But they're borrowing against this wealth recklessly; repossessions are rising; eventually the 'housing bubble' will burst. /
Things are made much worse by gross inequality: the wealthy owners of the robots,etc, get more and more money--they have bought all the goods they could possibly want--and the people who would love to buy more can't afford to. Ordinary Americans are so greedy, they will run into debt to buy as much as they can; but eventually, they can't borrow any more--indeed, they may have to declare bankruptcy..so their buying slows. /
I've been predicting for years a crisis of overproduction/underconsumption; the code word is 'deflation' (or ,in the Feds' euphemism , 'a dramatic and dangerous drop in inflation'!). Now respectable economists are explicitly warning of the danger: "Falling prices can be harder to combat than inflation." Again, " A few years ago, fear of deflation seemed presposterous. Not now...It's worldwide, not just American...global demand remains weak; surplus capacity discourages new investment; gluts depress prices." Japan has showed us how deflation can happen, persist , and damage the economy (the GNP of Japan has grown on the average only 1% annually since 1992--and this means that Japan has been in and out of recession for over a decade.) /
In America, inflation is now under 1%, the lowest since 1949! When inflation rates are higher than the Fed interest rate, an agency would be foolish not to borrow, thus enabling more consumption--but not so now. [references: R.J.Samuelson in WASHINGTON POST, reprinted in RMNEWS8MAY, and Hagenbaugh & Kirchhoff in USATODAY8May] /
The most obvious solution would be for the world's rich to give a bigger share to the world's poor, who are eager to consume more. Marxists predicted that the world's rich would never be that far-sighted; critics used to say that the rich turned out to be smart enough to do that. It looks like the Marxists were right./
And in the long,long run, until basic commodities run out, all-powerful automation could produce too much goods for the whole world, poor as well as rich (as has happened already in America). And even if we run out of, say metals and petroleum, the damn inventors might come up with ways of making too much of everything out of seawater and powering that production by seawater! /
THOSE NICE SCIENTISTS ARE THE BASIC THREAT:
The ultimate threat is from megatechnology. It not only puts diabolic destructive power into the hands of fools like Bush and lunatics like bin Laden--it also displaces human input into commercial production. Of the factors of production (land, capital and 'labor'--human input) Humanity is foolishly misusing megatech to'economize' on the one factor ('labor') that is in enormous surplus! /
The problem is very simply put: If computer/robots make all the goods, and practically all the money goes to their owners, and the rest of humanity is reduced to sweeping up after the computers (at Bangladeshan wages), WHO THE HELL WILL BUY ALL THE CRAP BEING PRODUCED? /
We luddites were right all along. Given the goofiness of most humans and their leaders, superhuman megatech powers will inevitably be misused.(For more on luddite theory, read ch.1 & 2 of my book DEMOCRACY, RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS, available by interlibrary loan.)
Also see my earlier piece here TECHNICAL INNOVATORS: ARE THEY DILBERT DUPES? (2/27)
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WHAT TO DO?
People say to Luddites: "Why carp about megatech, when you can't stop it?" I reply that even if I can't stop it, I don't have to like it. That's a liberating feeling. But also:
--Over time, we might be able to adjust to the gee-whiz gadgets we have now. [Mankind decided collectively--until recently--not to use poison gas in war. U.S. & Soviet worked out a 'MAD--Mutual Assured Destruction' to avoid blowing up the world.] /
What seems impossible is that humanity will adjust rationally to the WAVE AFTER WAVE of gee-whiz innovations we face. [For instance, now we face the combination of diabolic war germs and crazy individual terrorists that might well lead to world catastrophe.And the scientists announce triumphantly that they have mapped the genome of bacteria, making it easier to devise germs that resist vaccination and antibiotics.]
--Keeping up this constant flood of innovations depends on basic and general applied research, and that costs billions of dollars. If all the nations agreed to take a good part of this money away from the tech universities and labs and used it to make jobs, as described above, we'd all be better off. Bill Joy, one of the big brains behind Sun Microsystems, called for a moratorium on computer research, in his famous warning published a couple of years ago in WIRED. Bloody likely; Congress just appropriated a billion or two for 'nanotechnology' [Don't ask what it is!] /
So it's not that luddites can't imagine ways to slow down dangerous megatech innovation. It's that, in general, goofy humans are so in love with runaway innovation that they will never stand for its control. In the novel CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, after a nuclear war, ordinary people around the world did turn against technology in 'THE GREAT SIMPLIFICATION', and the lemming-race over the cliff was slowed down for a while. But in real life, no./
The only remedy is to put your head between your knees and kiss your innovative ass goodbye.

 
DEFLATION ACKNOWLEDGED: From a Federal Reserve official: "The lack of pricing power is the biggest threat to economic recovery." [USATODAY7May] Translation: "Companies can't charge as much as they'd like to, because then people won't buy."
They also warned of the "[minor] probability of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation", i.e., a general DEFLATION of prices. And as prices start to drop, people wait to buy, hoping that goods will get even cheaper..thus aggravating deflation. "A little of this psychology has already shown up": (from NYT9MAY)
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For more on this issue, see my previous pieces (in 2003) at 4/17, 2/7, and 1/1./ Also in 2002, 11/4
(to read blog on 4/17: under ARCHIVES at left, click on week 4/13 to 4/19, then move to 4/17.)
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THE SINKING DOLLAR: Treasury Secy.Snow, the other day, said that a Strong Dollar was our policy. But then on 12May he noted that a cheap dollar helped our exporters. (The dollar promptly sank some more.) He may have decided that since we can't stop the sinking, we might as well say it's helpful./
He's right that a cheap dollar helps our exports. But it raises the price of our imports; and a large number of U.S. Corporations import many components of their final product. So this could make 'U.S.-made' products more expensive, at a time when U.S. consumers (and those overseas) will balk at paying more./
We could diminish our huge national debt in dollars easily by just printing many,many dollars (devaluing the dollar). BUT we are running a yearly government deficit of $300 billion; we must borrow MORE overseas. Who would lend us money (buy our bonds) when we're acting like a banana republic? (Indeed the amount of our bonds bought by foreigners has been sinking for months.) We'll have to raise the rates of interest we pay, and that will affect our domestic economy--not to mention increasing our deficit (we pay almost as much in interest now as our megabudget for the Pentagon!) /
What's more, if all the nations devalue their currencies (to help their exporters and limit their imports by making imports more expensive), then this protectionist dodge will help no nation.

 
FRIEDMAN THE FLACK: T.Friedman, once a respected expert on the Middle-East, has become a complete PR man for the Bush-team over Iraq. He pretends to be even-handed, noting correctly that the Bushies intend to jockey their Iraq-triumph into a fast, strong move toward domestic repression. But then he speaks patronizingly to the Democrats: they won't serve as 'constructive critics' of Iraq reconstruction unless they first agree that the invasion was 'good for America because it will inhibit other terrorist-supporting regimes.'
There was never any evidence that Saddam was offering effective support for Al Quaeda or any other terrorists, except his flagrant rewards for martyr-murderers in Israel. Removing that boil on humanity was worthwhile--though it was not worth a) the death, maiming, and destruction in Iraq, (b) confirming the arrogance of Bushie imperialists, who really do dream of controlling the world! (c) the further enraging of Muslims worldwide and the marked increase in volunteers for the martyr-murderer role worldwide [aimed mainly at America!] (NYT 5MAY), and (d) the speedup of the move to domestic fascism. Also (e) [this is hard for ordinary people to see: ] our reckless gamble worked out well for us (we conquered Iraq with few U.S. casualties), but this doesn't prove that the wild gamble was sensible or moral--any more than driving drunk through a school zone is justified by the lucky fact that you got through without disaster.
Friedman is determined that we all agree that bombs and missiles are effective counters to terrorism--and thus approve of $1000 millions per day to the Pentagon. But after we devastated Iraq, Gen.Myers told AirForceAcademy that we are in more danger than ever from terrorists. [see next blog].
So the price for Democrats to be heeded at all in their 'constructive' (e.g. friendly) criticisms of the Bush-Bechtel-Haliburton reconstruction of Iraq--this price is forgetting that the invasion was 'immoral, illegal and (in the long run) disastrous' (as Pope JohnPaul II said). The compliance-price is too high for such an illusory benefit. We peacenik Democrats will continue to rant prophetically against the whole enterprise, and to offer unfriendly criticisms of present Bushie policies. We don't oppose the war because of some glandular response against Bush--although this response is shared by most of the world's peoples--we loathe the Bushies because of their ruthless war-mongering.

 
DANGER NOT FROM NATIONS: Our whole 'defense' stance is based on the idea that, to make us safe, we must attack and threaten & intimidate nations. That is what our stupendous Pentagon bombers and missiles are designed to do./
But what endangers our very vulnerable HOMELAND is NOT any NATION, but the readiness, all over the world, of hundreds or thousands of fanatic INDIVIDUALS who are ready or eager to die while killing Americans. A column by S. Atran in NYTIMES(5MAY) tries to describe the type of individual involved./
They are a tiny proportion of Muslims--but 1 in 10,000 of 1 billion Muslims would make 100,000 martyr-murder-volunteers. These volunteers are NOT usually ignorant,impoverished, mentally ill individuals, but (typically) educated, middle-class, psychologically normal youths. And besides those who will actually kill & die, there are many more who will support, finance, and conceal the martyr-murderers. (A poll showed that educated Palestinians supported the bomb attacks more than do illiterate ones.) /
Polls from Algeria to Indonesia show ever-rising support for 'martyrs'. A UN report said that once we began to gin up to invade Iraq, AlQuaeda recruitment picked up in 30 to 40 countries;
"Volunteers are beating down the doors to join us." /
These are religious Muslims. According to Bernard Lewis, Islam praises those who die fighting Islam's enemies even when they face certain death; but Islam condemns actual suicides to eternal hell. The borderline-case, those who blow themselves up as the only way to fight Islam's enemies, can be interpreted either way. /
They don't hate our democratic ideals; they hate our actions. A Defense Dept. report noted a strong correlation between our international involvements and increases in anti-American terrorist attacks. /
We will continue to visibly support Israel; and photos of the women and children we blew to pieces in Iraq and Afghanistan will further enrage Muslims all over the world. We'd better expect more terrorist-attacks, against which all our Pentagon gadgets will be fairly useless. The only practical thing we can do is to try to ward off attacks on our homeland, and repair/heal after those that get through./
Many billions of dollars would be needed to manage this anywhere near adequately; we can't afford tax breaks for the wealthy and $1000 millions per DAY to the Pentagon. Yet our rulers will likely continue to prefer these expenditures to any realistic program of Homeland Defense.

 
GOOD NEWS...A secret official tells a meeting of Saddam body-doubles: "There's good and bad news. The good news is that our Glorious Leader is still alive, so you guys still have jobs."/
"The bad news is that he's lost an arm and a leg."

 
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES? The Bush-team gloats that we stand alone at the top in terms of weapons..but that's not all that counts./
Some hints about economic drawbacks for America from the Bush-team's international arrogance (NYT30APR):
--Nearly 20% of U.S. Economy is not financed by domestic saving (is financed by foreign investors). "..more dependent on the rest of the world for capital than at any time for 50 years. Now [these investors] are being asked to fund Bush's tax-cut and the war in Iraq....the U.S. is prepared to act unilaterally [but] if you are a net debtor to the rest of the world, ultimately you have to be multilateral...a geopolitical change that could spell trouble for funding the U.S. Economy..is the most disturbing risk [to our] strong recovery."/
Another expert: "Heightened tensions with traditional allies [France & Germany] are affecting
international investors' confidence in U.S."/
Some experts say that the confusion before the invasion cost us $50 billion or more in lost spending by consumers & businesses..with corresponding drop in tax receipts. Also we have appropriated $79 billion already for war-related costs. "Foreign investors care about whether we are being fiscally prudent."
If the rest of the world changed its view of U.S., says Bowers, it would cut to the core of our economy. Our gross savings rate (households, government, + corporations) is lowest since 1945. So investment increases here depend on foreign funds./
[nyt6may]: Foreign investment in our stocks & bonds sank 46% in Dec.'02, 8% in January, and 31% in February. As a result the value of the dollar sank: in Nov. 01, the Euro was worth only 90cents; this April the Euro was worth $1.10.
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Hey--maybe we could use our splendid weapons to turn to piracy.

 
forHOMELAND DEFENSE? BORING! / Letter to DENVERPOST/
When Democrats said that Colorado Gov. Owens was recently 'invisible' (4May), his spokesmen
cited a dozen issues where he has been active. Interestingly, none of these dealt with Homeland Security! /
Is this an urgent issue? The director of the Rocky Mountain Center for Homeland Defense says that
Colorado is failing to take even possible precautions against the urgent possibility of a dozen kinds of likely attack. (RMN) And Gen.Myers told AirForceAcademy that we are in greater terror-danger than ever /
You might hope that, as the Head of the Republican Governors' Conference, Owens could persuade the Bush-team to give us adequate anti-terror money. But earlier, the Governor thanked them for giving Colorado, as home-defense money, an amount lower than the money for attracting tourists. /
We did hear that Owens went on CNN to discuss the Iraq invasion. And we remember that he once said that the way to protect Coloradoans from terrorists was to invade Iraq. Perhaps he finds attack far more interesting than defense. Too bad for us.

 
AT WAR (VS. CIVIL RIGHTS) /
TRUTHOUT.ORG just published a truly horrifying story by a Mr. Halperin. He and another Anglo were in a South Asian restaurant, when police and naturalization agents burst in, waving guns and terrorizing everyone (the Mexicans in the kitchen were made to crawl out on their hands and knees). The excuse given was, "DAMMIT, WE'RE AT WAR! And this is all authorized by the Patriot act!" (An agent later told Halperin the whole raid was a 'mistake'.)
In a recent bill, someone slipped in a provision that would allow the Pentagon and the CIA to trample our civil rights even more than they can now./
It might be thought that the feds are just overreacting from their real concern for terrorist dangers. But then we realize the gross underfunding the Bush-team is granting for homeland security. For instance, they allotted $100 million for the YEAR to give to ALL the cities (the first line of terrorist defense) for security--this equals the Pentagon budget for TWO HOURS! In a recent appropriation, $3 billion was allotted for Home Security (Bush wanted less!), while $8 billion went to pay off our 'allies' for pretending to back the invasion. Colorado Gov. Owens thanked the Bushies for allotting to the State for antiterrorism an amount less than the money he is spending to promote tourism./
When you think of the lack of concern shown by the Bush-team for funding Homeland Security, then you realize that all their alarmist chatter about the War on Terror is really intended simply to justify more domestic repression./
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Why am I so obsessed with setting up an adequate Homeland Defense program? I don't think the terrorists can destroy America by themselves. However, there are germs which don't do much harm themselves--but they may trigger an autoimmune reaction by which the infected organism destroys itself. I worry that terrorist attacks may be like such a germ, triggering a reaction among our people that will destroy the America we love./
I worry that a real bioterror attack that killed tens of thousands, and made cruel quarantines necessary all over the country, would push our people over the edge, in their desire for protection from a 'Strong Man', into a complete endorsement of fascist repression.