Campaign for Liberty Update on Gaza

Eric Margolis expounds upon What’s Happening in Gaza

·North American politicians and the media say Israel “has the right to defend itself.”

·Civilians suffer, says Israel, because the cowardly Hamas hide among them.

·While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so, too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.

·Gaza is one of the world’s most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch homemade rockets.

·Israel’s elections are only six weeks away, and Likud was leading until the air raids on Gaza began. Kadima and Labour are now up in the polls.

·Obama inherits this mess in a few weeks. During the elections, Obama bowed to the Israel lobby, offering a new US carte blanche to Israel and even accepting Israel’s permanent monopoly of all of Jerusalem.

·As he concludes forming his cabinet, his Middle East team looks like it may be top-heavy with friends of Israel’s Labour party.

·Obama will take office facing a Middle East up in arms over Gaza and the entire Muslim world blaming the US for the carnage in Gaza.

·Those Americans who still do not understand why their nation was attacked on 9/11 need only look to Gaza, for which the US is now being blamed as much as Israel.

The 3am Phone, a “hallmark of Empire”

Just finished The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray Rothbard. Awesome book. So inspiring to know that the movement that Ron Paul stands for is not new. This book chronicles Murray’s life in regards to the Old Right as well as the major players in politics and media from the 30’s to the 70’s.
It’s dedicated to Howard Homan Buffet, Frank Chodorov, and the Old Right.

It was this excerpt I harkened to when I saw Clinton’s 3am Phone Ad:

What, then, were the hallmarks of Empire? The first requisite, Garrett declared, was that “the executive power of government shall be dominant.”

“For what Empire needs above all in government is an executive power that can make immediate decisions, such as a decision in the middle of the night by the President to declare war on the aggressor in Korea.”

LoL.
Ain’t that the awful truth.

“In previous years, he added, it was assumed that the function of the Congress was to speak for the American people. But now it is the President, standing at the head of the Executive Government, who says: “I speak for the people” or “I have a mandate from the people.”. . . Now much more than Congress, the President acts directly upon the emotions and passions of the people to influence their thinking. As he controls Executive Government, so he controls the largest propaganda machine in the world. The Congress has no propaganda apparatus at all and continually finds itself under pressure from the people who have been moved for or against something by the ideas and thought material broadcast in the land by the administrative bureaus in Washington.”

I continue to cite Rothbard citing Garrett:
A second hallmark of the existence of Empire, continued Garrett, is that “Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.” This is what happened to Rome, and to the British Empire. It is also happening to us, for
as we convert the nation into a garrison state to build the most terrible war machine that has ever been imagined on earth, every domestic policy is bound to be conditioned by our foreign policy. The voice of government is saying that if our foreign policy fails we are ruined. It is all or nothing. Our survival as a free nation is at hazard. That makes it simple, for in that case there is no domestic policy that may not have to be sacrificed to the necessities of foreign policy—even freedom.. . . If the cost of defending not ourselves alone but the whole non-Russian world threatens to wreck our solvency, still we must go on.

Garrett concluded,
We are no longer able to choose between peace and war. We have embraced perpetual war. . . . Wherever and whenever the Russian aggressor attacks, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, there we must meet him. We are so committed by the Truman Doctrine, by examples of our intention, by the global posting of our armed forces, and by such formal engagements as the North Atlantic Treaty and the Pacific Pact.

Hmmm…strikingly similar to the nightly news isn’t it?

A third brand of Empire, continued Garrett, is the “ascendancy of the military mind.” Garrett noted that the great symbol of the American military mind is the Pentagon Building in Washington, built during World War II, as a “forethought of perpetual war.” There at the Pentagon, “global strategy is conceived; there, nobody knows how, the estimates of what it will cost are arrived at; and surrounding it is our own iron curtain.” The Pentagon allows the public to know only the information that it wills it to learn;

All the rest is stamped “classified” or “restricted,” in the name of national security, and Congress itself cannot get it. That is as it must be of course; the most important secrets of Empire are military secrets.

Garrett went on to quote the devastating critique of our garrison state by General Douglas MacArthur:
Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. . . . Indeed, it is a part of the general patterns of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.

Garrett then interprets that quotation as follows:
War becomes an instrument of domestic policy. . . . [The government may] increase or decrease the tempo of military expenditures, as the planners decide that what the economy needs is a little more inflation or a little less. . . . And whereas it was foreseen that when Executive Government is resolved to control the economy it will come to have a vested interest in the power of inflation, so now we may perceive that it will come also to have a kind of proprietary interest in the institution of perpetual war.

A fourth mark of Empire, continued Garrett, is “a system of satellite nations.” We speak only of Russian “satellites,” and with contempt, but “we speak of our own satellites as allies and friends or as freedom loving nations.” The meaning of satellite is a “hired guard.”
As Garrett notes:
When people say we have lost China or that if we lose Europe it will be a disaster, what do they mean? How could we lose China or Europe, since they never belonged to us? What they mean is that we have lost or may lose a following of dependent people who act as an outer guard.

Armed with a vast array of satellites, we then find that “for any one of them to involve us in war it is necessary only for the Executive Power in Washington to decide that its defense is somehow essential to the security of the United States.” The system had its origins in the Lend-Lease Act of 1941. Garrett concludes that the Imperial Center is pervaded by a fear of standing alone in the world, without satellites.
Fear at last assumes the phase of a patriotic obsession. It is stronger than any political party. . . . The basic conviction is simple. We cannot stand alone. A capitalistic economy, though it possesses half the industrial power of the whole world, cannot defend its own hemisphere. It may be able to save the world; alone it cannot save itself. It must have allies. Fortunately, it is able to buy them, bribe them, arm them, feed and clothe them; it may cost us more than we can afford,
yet we must have them or perish.

So how did we arrive at this point????

Garet Garrett’s classic The Revolution Was talking about the “revolution within the form”.

Conclusion
“So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them. Much of it is irreversible. That is true because habits of dependence are much easier to form than to break. Once the government, on ground of public policy, has assumed the responsibility to provide people with buying power when they are in want of it, or when they are unable to provide themselves with enough of it, according to a minimum proclaimed by government, it will never be the same again.

All of this is said by one who believes that people have an absolute right to any form of government they like, even to an American Welfare state, with status in place of freedom, if that is what they want. The first of all objections to the New Deal is neither political nor economic. It is moral.

Revolution by scientific technic is above morality. It makes no distinction between means that are legal and means that are illegal. There was a legal and honest way to bring about a revolution, even to tear up the Constitution, abolish it, or write a new one in its place. Its own words and promises meant as little to the New Deal as its oath to support the Constitution. In a letter to a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging a new law he wanted, the President said: “I hope your committee will not permit doubt as to Constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.” Its cruel and cynical suspicion of any motive but its own was a reflection of something it knew about itself. Its voice was the voice of righteousness; its methods therefore were more dishonest than the simple ways of corruption.

“When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen… and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, allthe tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few… in such a case we find, it impossible not to believe that… all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck.” —Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery.”

Guns and Butter

An excerpt from:

America – A Bankrupt Empire
Financial instability rooted in economic ‘blowback’ from our disastrous foreign policy
by Justin Raimondo

(be sure to see the original version, Justin has tons of links throughout the article)

“……How many Americans realize the US military budget is greater than that of the rest of the world combined? This doesn’t include our “off-budget” expenditures in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, which surpass the combined military budgets of Russia and China. For the first time, the bill for the “defense” of the United States – a task left to the Department of Homeland Security [.pdf], not the Defense Department – exceeds $1 trillion. And that’s just what’s public: the secret “black budget” costs are unknown, and on this score Johnson advises us to heed economist Robert Higgs, who advises us to take any official Pentagon figures and simply double them.

Empires are expensive, and the American version has a peculiarly altruistic twist to it, in that, as Garet Garrett remarked, “everything goes out, and nothing comes in.” We’ve financed it all with deficit spending, and rather than impose direct taxation – always a risky proposition – the powers that be have simply set the printing presses of the Federal Reserve on overdrive, creating a huge bubble that’s about to pop.

…..Public works, in the form of ever-higher military spending, created an ever-expanding war-industry that sucked vital resources into avenues that led to a cul de sac, i.e. that had no productive use, such as nuclear bombs. Our mighty nuclear arsenal, which continues to expand even after the Soviet meltdown, represents trillions of dollars in frozen resources which go nowhere – that is, which produce no goods, and yield no continuing economic benefits. This has led to the fatal distortion of the American economy, and the massive misallocation of scarce resources: it is the root cause of the collapse of the US manufacturing sector. As Johnson puts it:

“Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide.”

Read the rest here….

Chalmers Johnson: “Blowback” “covert activity” and US liabilities

Blowback is a term that refers to unintended consequences through covert actions by governments.
Listen to a great interview here.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley. He first visited Japan in 1953 as a U.S. Navy officer and has lived and worked there with his wife, the anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson, every year between 1961 and 1998.

Johnson has been honored with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and in 1976 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written numerous articles and reviews and some sixteen books, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power on the Chinese revolution, An Instance of Treason on Japan’s most famous spy, Revolutionary Change on the theory of violent protest movements, and MITI and the Japanese Miracle on Japanese economic development. This last-named book laid the foundation for the “revisionist” school of writers on Japan, and because of it the Japanese press dubbed him the “Godfather of revisionism.”

He was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS television series “The Pacific Century,” and he played a prominent role in the PBS “Frontline” documentary “Losing the War with Japan.” Both won Emmy awards. His most recent books are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which was published by Metropolitan in January 2004. Blowback won the 2001 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation.

Recession or Depression? by Rockwell

You can find the article here.

Many people are finally saying the R word: Recession. The fundamentals don’t look good. The externals are even scarier: dollar and stocks skidding, gold and other prices (particularly producer prices) rising. But what has tipped the psychological scales is the statistic no one has cared much about in many years: unemployment.

The actual rate is very low by any historical standard: 5%. What matters here is the direction of change. It jumped from 4.7%. In the old days, unemployment rates of 5% and 6% were considered “full employment” in the Keynesian models. If government attempted to push employment below that level (and it is absurd to think that anyone in Washington can control the economy in that way), it would risk setting off inflation, or so it was believed.

If the actual unemployment rate is low, why this wave of pessimism? All data in the postwar period of American economic history consistently show that an increase in the rate has coincided with the onset of recession. The parallel between the two is the most consistent feature of the business cycle. See the NBER list: 2001, 1990–91, 1981–82, 1980, 1973–75, 1970, 1960–61, 1957–58, 1953–54, and so on. In each case, unemployment begins to rise at the onset.

Now, keep in mind that the link between rising unemployment and recession is largely true by definition only. In other words, those charged with defining what is and what isn’t a recession put a huge weight on rising unemployment. So of course it appears that weak labor markets are what push an economy into recession.

This is sheer fallacy, and a particularly dangerous one. Rising unemployment is a symptom of a recession, not its cause. If the critical problem of recession is unemployment, policy makers are tempted to address this one area to the exclusion of everything else.

Already, Bush administration spokesmen are talking about a “fiscal stimulus” to counter this trend. But why isn’t this laughable on its face? Perhaps if Bush had been a famed penny pincher, you could see how a stimulus would make some sense on the surface. But it is hard to imagine a more fiscally profligate regime than the Bush administration. We can confidently say that more spending is not the answer.

The view that unemployment causes recession was one of the great errors of the New Deal and the Great Depression. The government looted the private sector and transferred it to visible jobs programs. It forced business to maintain high wages precisely when the market was attempting to equilibrate them downward. It increased the costs of hiring just when the costs needed to be lower.

None of it did any good; in fact, it delayed recovery for many years. Lionel Robbins, in his classic book The Great Depression, wrote this in 1934: “If it had not been for the prevalence of the view that wage rates must at all costs be maintained in order to maintain the purchasing power of the consumer, the violence of the present depression and the magnitude of the unemployment which has accompanied it would have been considerably less…. A policy which holds wage rates rigid when the equilibrium rate has altered, is a policy which creates unemployment.”

Writing in 1931, in his book Causes of the Economic Crisis, Ludwig von Mises explained that there would be no involuntary unemployment in a free market. There will always be some unemployment in a market in the same way that there are houses that are empty and not selling and resources that are not being used for production. This isn’t due to market failure but to individuals who have the freedom to lower their asking price, provided they are permitted by policy to do so and businesses are free to negotiate wages freely.

What, then, is the solution to unemployment? “The determination of wage rates must become free once again. The formation of wage rates should be hampered neither by the clubs of striking pickets nor by government’s apparatus of force. Only if the determination of wage rates is free, will they be able to fulfill their function of bringing demand and supply into balance on the labor market.”

There is an error even more fundamental than seeking an interventionist solution to the problem of unemployment. It is the attempt to seek a solution to the recession itself, as if it were the critical problem. Writing all throughout the 1930s, both Mises and F.A. Hayek tried to explain that the recession itself served a market purpose, in the same way a correction to an inflated stock market serves a purpose. It re-coordinates economic structures that have grown seriously out of balance.

In other words, they urged that we look back before the recession, to the good old days of economic boom, and realize the prosperity of the past was a partial illusion. The recession is the way that the economy tells the truth about the fundamentals. The illusion itself is caused by errors in monetary policy. Interest rates are driven down by the Fed, and this causes widespread errors in the investment sector. These investments are unsustainable over the long term. The recession is the time of cleansing out errors and reestablishing economic soundness.

The housing boom and bust is only a symptom of a wider problem. If the economy has indeed fallen into recession, we can know with certainty that recession is precisely what the economy needs the most. It is the equivalent of the drunk who needs time on the wagon.

The rap on the Austrian School of the 1930s is that they counseled a do-nothing policy on the depression. That is not true. There are many things that government can do but they all amount to doing less, which is a positive action of sorts. It must not attempt to prop up and raise wages. It must stop taxing business so heavily and raising the costs of investment. It must cut regulations that are hampering recovery. It can cut spending dramatically as a way of returning resources to the private sector where they can do some good.

What government cannot do without causing even more problems is take positive action against symptoms, such as falling stocks or housing prices, rising unemployment, business failures, and falling incomes. This is precisely what caused the Great Depression to get its name instead of being called what it might have been called: the recession of 1929–1931.