Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016
The Trump Revolution in The United States: What Will Be the New President’s Herculean Works?
Monday, July 11, 2016
The New Immoral Age: How Technology Offers New Ways of Killing People and of Destroying the World
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
The 2016 U.S. Election: A Possible Repeat of the 1964 Election?
Monday, May 30, 2016
Barack Obama’s Meager Legacy of incomplete accomplishments and of provoked wars: What happened?
Saturday, February 20, 2016
The Lies, Fabrications and Forgeries of the Bush-Cheney administration to Go to War Against Iraq, for Oil and for Israel
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Financial Turmoil and Increasing Risks of a Severe Worldwide Economic Recession in 2016-17
__________________________________________________
Saturday, January
23, 2016
Financial Turmoil and Increasing Risks
of a Severe Worldwide Economic Recession in 2016-17
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“May
you live in interesting times."
Popular curse,
purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse
"The sources of deflation are not a mystery.
Deflation is in almost all cases a side effect of a collapse of aggregate
demand —a drop in spending so severe that producers must cut prices on an
ongoing basis in order to find buyers. Likewise, the economic effects of a
deflationary episode, for the most part, are similar to those of any other
sharp decline in aggregate spending—namely, recession, rising unemployment, and
financial stress."
Ben S. Bernanke (1953- ), on November 21, 2002
“I’m about to
repeat what I said at this time last year and the year before…Sooner or later a
crash is coming and it may be terrific. The vicious circle will get in
full swing and the result will be a serious business depression. There may be a
stampede for selling which will exceed anything that the Stock Exchange has
ever witnessed. Wise are those investors who now get out of debt.”
Roger Babson
(1875-1967), on September 5, 1929
The
onset of 2016 has been most chaotic for global financial markets with, so far,
a severe stock market correction. As a matter of fact, the first month of 2016
has witnessed the most severe drop in financial stocks ever, with the MSCI All-Country World
Stock Index, which measures major developed and emerging stock markets,
dropping more than 20 percent,
as compare to early 2015. For sure, there will be oversold rallies in the
coming weeks and months, but one can expect more trouble ahead.
Many commentators
are saying that the epicentre of this unfolding financial and economic crisis
is in China, with the Shanghai Composite Index beginning to plummet
at the beginning of the year. In my view, reality is more complex and even
though China’s financial and economic problems are contributing to the collapse
in commodity prices, the epicenter of the crisis is still in Washington D.C.
That is because the current unfolding crisis is essentially a
continuation of the 2007-08
financial crisis which has been temporarily suspended and pushed
into the future by the U.S. central bank, the Fed, with its aggressive and
unorthodox monetary policy of multiple rounds of quantitative
easing (QE), i.e. buying huge quantities of financial assets from
commercial mega-banks and other institutions, including mortgage-backed
securities, with newly created money. As a consequence, the Fed’s balance sheet
went from a little more than one trillion dollars in 2008 to some four and a
half trillion dollars when the quantitative easing program was ended in October
2014. Other central banks have followed the Fed example, especially the central
bank of Japan and the European central bank, which also adopted quantitative
easing policies in monetizing large amounts of financial assets.
Why did the Bernanke Fed adopt
such an aggressive monetary policy in 2008? Essentially for three reasons:
First, the lame-duck Bush administration in 2008 was clueless about what to do
with the financial crisis that had started with the de facto failure of Bear Stearns in the
spring of 2008 and of Merrill Lynch in early September 2008, culminating on September 15, 2008, with the
failure of the large global investment bank of Lehman Brothers.
So the U.S. central bank felt that it had to step in. In fact, it financed the
merger of the two first failed mega-banks with the JPMorgan Chase bank and the
Bank of America respectively. (For different reasons, it did not intervene in
the same way when the Lehman Brothers bank failed.)
Secondly, bankers who have a huge influence in the way the Fed is
managed did not want the U.S. government to nationalize the American mega-banks
in financial difficulties, as it had been done in the 1989 when the George H.
Bush administration established the government-owned Resolution
Trust Corporation (RTC) to
take over some 747 insolvent savings and loans thrift
banks.
Thirdly, the Bernanke Fed was very worried that the 2007-08 banking
crisis would lead to a Japanese-style deflation that would wreak havoc with an
overleveraged economy. The hope was to avoid a devastating debt-deflation
economic depression like the one suffered in the 1930s.
By injecting so much liquidity in the system, the Bernanke Fed created a
gigantic
financial bubble in stocks and bonds, even though the real
economy has grown at a somewhat languishing 2 percent growth rate. Stock prices
went into the stratosphere while interest rates fell as bond prices rose. Last
December 16, the Fed announced officially that it will no longer blow into the
financial balloons and that it was raising short-term
interest rates for the first time since the financial crisis, setting the target range for the
federal funds rate to between 1/4 to 1/2 percent. This was a signal that the
financial party was over. And what’s more, this means that the stock market and
the bond market will once again go in different directions, as a reflection of
the state of the real economy, no matter what the Fed does.
Since 2008, the U.S. Fed has painted itself into a financial corner from
which I personally felt it would be difficult to extricate itself. Indeed, it
would be extremely difficult to correct the financial bubbles it has created —as
an unintended consequence of salvaging the mega-banks in creating trillions of
free money —without damaging the real economy of production and employment. If
global stock markets collapse and if price deflation accelerates, making it
more difficult to service the debt of consumers, corporations, and government
alike, a repeat on a larger scale of what has happened in Japan over the last twenty-five
years can be feared. This, at the very least, could lead to a global economic
recession in 2016-17. If we go back in history, it could also be a repeat of
the 1937-38 crash and recession, eight years after the crash and financial
crisis of 1929-32.
One thing can be made clear: The creation of the Fed in 1913, as a
semi-public American central bank, has not prevented the occurrence of
financial crises. It has, however, been a boon to large banks because it has
served as an instrument to socialize their losses.
Stay tuned.
_________________________________________________
Saturday,
February 20, 2016
The Lies, Fabrications and Forgeries of
the Bush-Cheney administration to Go to War Against Iraq, for Oil and for
Israel
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
We [the United States]
spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. ... Obviously, it was a mistake…
George W. Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.
We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East…
—They [President George
W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney] lied… They said there were weapons of
mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no
weapons of mass destruction.
Donald Trump (1946- ), during a CBS
News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016.
[George W. Bush] wants to
remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of
terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
—But the intelligence and
facts are being fixed around the policy.
Richard Dearlove (1945- ) Head of the British Secret
Intelligence Service (MI6), (in ‘Downing Street memo’, July 23, 2002).
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is
no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies,
and against us.
Dick Cheney (1941- ), comment made at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002
Spinning the possible possession of WMDs as a threat to the United States in the way
they did is, in my opinion, tantamount to intentionally deceiving the American
people.
Gen. Hugh Shelton (1942- ),
former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, (in his
memoirs ‘Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American
Warrior’, 2010)
We [the USA] went to war [in Iraq] not just
against the Iraqi forces and insurgent groups but also against a large part of
the Arab world, scores and scores of millions…It is a strategic error of
monumental proportions to view the war as confined to Iraq… [The Iraq war] is turning out to be the
greatest strategic disaster in our history.
Gen. William E. Odom (1932-2008), in a testimony before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 18, 2007
Republican
presidential candidate Donald
Trump has rendered a great service to the truth and to historians in
stating publicly, on Saturday, February 13, 2016, what most people by now know,
i.e. that the US-led war of aggression against Iraq, in March 2003, was not
only illegal under international law, it was also an exercise in pure deceptive
propaganda, and it was promoted thanks to well-documented lies, fabrications
and forgeries.
I personally published
a book in early 2003 detailing how the Bush-Cheney administration, with the
help of pro-Israel neocons in the higher echelons of the U.S. government, built
a case for war under false pretenses.
The publishing
house ‘Les Intouchables’ in Montreal, initially published the book in Canada,
in French, under the title of ‘Pourquoi Bush veut la guerre’. It was then
published in the U.S., by Infinity Publishing, in English, under the title ‘The
New American Empire’. The book was also published in Europe by l’Harmattan in
Paris under the title ‘Le Nouvel Empire Américain’, and later on translated
into Turkish by Nova Publishing in Ankara, under the title ‘Yeni Amerikan Imparatorlu›u’.
The
machinations and deceptions behind the disastrous war against Iraq, which have
resulted in literally hundreds of
thousands of deaths and created millions of refugees, and
which has completely destabilized the entire Middle East, constitute therefore
a topic that I have been studying for many years.
It is
no surprise that I was pleased to hear Mr. Trump forcefully conveying the truth
to the American people, even though those who have engaged in war crimes under
the Nuremberg
Charter and the United Nations
Charter have never been indicted for gross negligence and duplicity—if
not outright treason—let alone prosecuted. Worse still, there has never been a
serious public inquiry into this sordid episode at the beginning of the 21st
Century and how the Bush-Cheney administration planned a
pre-meditated military attack against Iraq in order to bring about a political
“regime change” in that country.
Let us summarize
the sad series of events that have led to what American General William Odom
has dubbed “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history”. We may add that this has
also led to a great disaster for the Middle East populations, and it could also
prove to have been a disaster for Europe and the world as a whole, if the
current mess in that part of the world were to lead to World
War III.
1- DECEPTION:
When George W. Bush took power in January 2001, his Treasury Secretary, Paul H. O'Neill
(1935- ), the former CEO of Alcoa, recalls that the
goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was raised by Bush during
the very first cabinet meeting of the new administration. In O’Neill’s
biography written by journalist Ron Suskind and titled The
Price of Loyalty, it is stated that George W. Bush
fully intended to invade Iraq and was desperate to
find an excuse for pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein. As Mr. Suskind writes it, there
was even a Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled “Foreign
Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts”, which included a map of potential areas
in Iraq for oil exploration. Such a detailed plan for a
U.S.-led military take-over of Iraq had never been mentioned during the 2000
U.S. presidential election, let alone debated.
However, a
pro-Israel neoconservative think-tank, The
Project for the New American Century, had drafted a blueprint for
regime change in Iraq as early as September 2000. The fundamental goal was to secure
access to Iraq’s oil reserves and remove a potential enemy to the state of
Israel. This think-tank, founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, was
mainly run by vice-president Dick Cheney; by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld;
by Paul Wolfowitz, (Rumsfeld's deputy at the Defense Department); by George W.
Bush's younger brother Jeb Bush, then governor of Florida; and by Lewis Libby,
Cheney’s deputy.
Their document about Iraq was entitled “Rebuilding
America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century”. It stated
clearly that: “The United States has for
decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While
the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the
need for substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue
of the regime of Saddam Hussein”. It was this plan that the newly elected
Bush-Cheney administration obviously intended to implement in secret, eight
months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It is also most
relevant to mention that the document on Iraq mentioned above was mimicking a
previous report written in 1996 for the Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli government
and titled “A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. The latter outlined a strategy for the state of
Israel in the Middle East in these terms:
“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in
cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling
back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq
–an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right –as a means of
foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
In 2001, the
Bush-Cheney administration seemed to have made its own the proposed strategy.
2- POSSIBLE
NEGLIGENCE: To what extent was the Bush-Cheney administration negligent in not
preventing the 9/11 terrorist attacks? This is a legitimate question,
considering that the George W. Bush White House received, on Monday August 6,
2001, 36 days before the terrorist attacks, a confidential report by the CIA
entitled “Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in US”. Mr. Bush was then on a month-long vacation at his
ranch in Crawford, Texas, and no special security steps seem to have been taken
to alert various authorities of the threat.
3- A PARALLEL GOVERNMENT: Early on, the
new Bush-Cheney administration established a special bureaucratic agency for
intelligence gathering, propaganda and war preparations. This was the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plan
(OSP) placed under the
supervision of Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. It was
designed, as reported by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, to circumvent the
CIA and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, and to serve
as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible
possession of weapons of mass destruction and its possible connection with al-Qaeda. That is also where various fake arguments were
invented to steer the United States into a war against Iraq. Douglas Feith, a
defense undersecretary, ran the shadow agency with the assistance of William
Luti, a former navy officer and an ex-aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Something that should have been investigated, but has not been, is how
some Israeli generals had free access to the OSP, as reported by Karen
Kwiatkowski who worked in that agency.
4- WAR
PROPAGANDA: After 9/11, few Americans were blaming Iraq for the terrorist
attacks, since none of the 19 terrorists involved had any connection with Iraq.
In fact, the 19
hijackers in the September 11 attacks of 2001 were affiliated with the
Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. Fifteen out of 19 were citizens of Saudi
Arabia, 2 were from the United Arab Emirates, and the other 2 came from Egypt
and Lebanon. None were from Iraq. And their training camps had been in Afghanistan.
That is why in polls taken soon after Sept. 11,
2001, only 3 percent of Americans mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein as the dark
forces behind the attacks. Obviously, such a perception had to be changed if
the Bush-Cheney administration were to start a war with Iraq. That is when the
fear of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq and the possible links of Saddam Hussein
with al-Qaeda were invented, with the active assistance of neocon media. By
September 2003, the propaganda had worked so well that, according to a Washington
Post poll, 69 percent of Americans had come to believe that Saddam
Hussein was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda, even
though there had been no proof of such a link between the two. Such is the
force of government propaganda when the mass media collaborate in the exercise.
This propaganda was instrumental in building a case for a war with
Iraq, without regard to factual evidence. History will reckon that
the United States did not retaliate against Saudi Arabia, a country that had a
lot to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it did react viciously against
Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks.
All these
facts are well documented and corroborated. Future historians will have
numerous sources to establish the historical truth.
Conclusion
The fact that
presidential candidate Donald Trump has alerted the American people to the
treachery used by the Bush-Cheney administration to go to war against Iraq is a
welcome development. Undoubtedly, the Iraq War has unleashed untold destruction
and misery in Iraq and in the entire Middle East. And the sequels to the
initial disaster continue today, thirteen years after the 2003 U.S.-led military
invasion of Iraq.
The only recent
comparable historical event, when a powerful country invaded militarily another
weaker country, was the decision by the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler to
invade Poland on September 1, 1939, thus plunging Europe into chaos for many
years. Let us hope that the current turmoil in the Middle East, with so many
countries conducting military operations in the devastated countries of Iraq
and Syria, will not lead to even greater catastrophes.
________________________________________________
Monday, May 30,
2016
Barack Obama’s Meager Legacy of incomplete
accomplishments and of provoked wars: What happened?
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“The evil that men
do lives after them.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), ‘Julius Caesar’
“The Constitution supposes, what the History of all
Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most
interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care,
vested the question of war in the Legislature…
—No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare.”
James Madison (1751-1836), in
a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1798, (and, in ‘Political Observations’, 1795)
“…War is sometimes necessary, and war at some
level is an expression of human folly.”
Barack H. Obama (1961- ), Nobel Peace
Prize acceptance speech, Dec. 2009
“As a nuclear
power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United
States has a moral responsibility to act… today, I state clearly and with
conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world
without nuclear weapons.”
Barack H. Obama (1961- ), in
a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, on April
5, 2009, [N.B.: On May 27, 2016, Pres. Obama repeated essentially the same
commitment at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, in Japan,
calling for a "world without nuclear weapons"]
“As
commander-in-chief, I have not shied away from using force when necessary. I
have ordered tens of thousands of young Americans into combat…
I’ve ordered
military action in seven countries.” [Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia]
Barack H. Obama (1961- ), in
a speech at the American University, Aug. 5, 2015
Ever since Neocons
de facto took over American foreign policy,
after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 and the end of the Cold war,
rejecting the ‘Peace Dividend’ that many had
logically expected, the cry in Washington D.C. has been to impose an
America-centered New
World Order, mainly through military means.
Successive administrations, both republican and
democratic, have toed the line and dutifully pursued the same policy of world domination by
launching a series of unilateral, direct or covert, wars
of aggression around the world, in violation of international law. This explains why the
United States has over 1,400 foreign military
bases in over 120 countries, and why they are being
expanded.
First there was the Gulf War of
1991, when Saddam Hussein’s regime felt into a trap, thinking it had
Washington’s tacit go ahead to integrate Kuwait, a territory that had been part
of Iraq throughout the nineteenth century and up until World
War I. Then there were the 1998-1999 U.S. military
interventions in the Yugoslavia’s ethnic
conflicts, under the cover of NATO,
in order to undermine Russian
influence in that region. In 2001, the “Pearl Harbor” type attack of 9/11 was
also a “god-given” event on the march to the new world order. Some high-ranking
U.S. officials had implicitly hoped
for such an event to justify huge increases in the U.S. military
budget. Nevertheless, it served as a justification to launch the 2001 war in Afghanistan,
eventually leading to a U.S.-led “preventive war” to
“liberate” Iraq, in
2003.
All this was followed by a string of covert operations
to overthrow
governments, elected or not, and to impose regime changes in
independent countries, such as in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, Haiti,
Somalia… etc., as this has been done in other
countries since 1953.
The election of Senator Barack Obama, in 2008, was expected to stop
these destructive American military vendettas around the world, most of them
under the initiative of the Executive, with little input from Congress,
contrary to what is stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. After all, in 2009,
President Obama accepted the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize,
which carried a stipend of about $1.4 million, for his promise of
creating a “new climate” in international relations
and of promoting “nuclear disarmament“.
Instead, it can be said that “Two
Full Terms of War” is the legacy of his two terms in office. Mr. Obama
didn’t settle any war, and he initiated many more.
In
accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama, referring to the more or less
discredited theory of “Just War” in modern times, said
that wars must be
waged “as a last resort or in
self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible,
civilians are spared from violence.”
Note,
however, that Obama was honest and lucid enough to acknowledge that there were
people “more deserving” than him to receive such a peace prize, stating that his
“accomplishments were slight”. —As it turned out, he was
right. Antiwar candidate Obama did not rise to the high
expectations placed on him in 2008: He did not bring peace to
the world; he did not stop American wars of aggression around the world, he did
not stop the American policy of overthrowing other independent countries’
governments, nor did he bring “nuclear disarmament”. In the latter case, he did
just the reverse,
as we will see below.
That is why, after a double mandate in the White House, it can be
demonstrated that President Barack Obama’s legacy is indeed very slight, if not
net negative. Let us look more closely, beginning with the positive side of
President Obama’s legacy, and following with the severe failures of his
administration.
Obamacare: A timid step in the right direction toward
social justice
Before spelling
out the Obama administration’s main failures, it is only fair to stress some
important successes it has achieved, even though some may deplore that they
have been few and far between. For one, in domestic affairs, President Obama
succeeded in getting a Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, passed
by Congress, in 2010. That law brought health coverage to close to some 20
million Americans who previously had been left out of secured access to
health services through employer-sponsored insurance. A similar attempt by Hillary Clinton in 1993 had
failed.
Obamacare, a private-based health insurance
program, was copied from
a Republican program signed into law in Massachusetts, in 2006, by then
Governor Mitt Romney. The initial objective was to adopt a universal health
plan similar to the 1965 single-payer Medicare program
for the elderly, but Republican opposition in Congress made that option
impossible. It is estimated that slightly more than 30
million Americans are still lacking comprehensive health insurance.
Nevertheless, it can be said that the Obamacare program, even though flawed,
was a step in the right direction.
It is worth
noting, however, that many American doctors are in favor of a Single-Payer
Health system. Last May, an impressive group of 2,231
physicians called for the establishment of such a system to cover all Americans
in need of medical care. The only presidential candidate, this time around, who
proposes a universal single-payer health system, is Senator Bernie Sanders.
President Obama has, on occasion, stood up to pro-war
pressures
In foreign
affairs, President Barack Obama has taken some initiatives, which have
distanced himself from President George W. Bush, by resisting pressures to
enlarge some ongoing military conflicts.
For instance, in
2013, the governments of Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, anxious to overthrow
the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, orchestrated what is widely believed
to have been a false flag
operation, in order to place the blame on the Assad government for
having allegedly used chemical
weapons against rebels. The objective was to provoke a hesitant Obama
administration into getting involved militarily in the Syrian conflict. Such a
gimmick had worked in 1986 in persuading the Reagan administration to bomb the
country of Libya.
To his credit,
President Obama did not fall for the plot, and resisted the “intense” pressures
coming from neocons, and
from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in his own administration, for a direct
U.S. military involvement in Syria. He backed instead a Russian proposal to
remove chemical weapons from Syria, thus avoiding the deaths of thousands of
people.
The Iran deal as a triumph of diplomacy over waging
destructive wars
Other
neocon-inspired pressures were exerted on President Obama, coming also from the
Israeli government, to have the U.S. launch military attacks against Iran, a
country of 80 million people. The pretext advanced this time was that Iran was
threatening Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region in allegedly developing a
nuclear weapon of its own.
Even though the
Iranian government asserted that its nuclear program was to produce energy and
was exclusively peaceful, President Obama was under strong pressure to attack
Iran “preventively” to destroy its nuclear installations. To his credit,
President Barack Obama resisted the pressures to launch what would have been
another illegal war of aggression, similar to the one George W. Bush initiated
against Iraq in 2003.
Instead,
President Obama opted to rely on diplomacy, and on July 14, 2015, six countries
(China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K. and the United States) reached an Iran deal,
which removed the possibility that Iran develop nuclear weapons in the
foreseeable future. Here again, an unnecessary war was avoided and thousands of
lives were saved.
The ending of more than half a century of an American
boycott of Cuba
President Barack
Obama must also be congratulated for having accepted Pope Francis’ mediation,
in 2014, to end the more than half a century of hostilities between the
government of the United States and the government of Cuba, two neighboring
countries. The Pope had written a personal appeal to Presidents Barack Obama and
Raul Castro and led closed-door negotiations between the delegations of both
countries.
In December 2014,
U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President
Raul Castro announced that they would begin normalizing
diplomatic relations between
the two nations. On April 11, 2015, President Obama and Cuban President Castro met in Panama to finalize the new
reality and declared themselves ready to “turn
the page and develop a new relationship between our two countries”, in Mr.
Obama’s words.
Since then, the two leaders have reopened embassies in each other's
countries and normalized exchanges. President Obama even visited Cuba in March
2016.
Therefore,
President Obama’s decision put an end to a sad chapter in the history of 20th
Century American foreign policy, especially considering that the U.S.
government has established full diplomatic relations with countries such as
China and Vietnam.
_____________________________
The list of
favorable actions by the Obama administration is not very long. There is,
however, a longer list of policies that belie many of Barak Obama’s promises
and the expectations he created when he ran for president in 2008.
President Obama enlarged the powers of the White House
to launch imperial wars with no temporal or geographical limits
As the quote
above by James Madison indicates, the U.S. Founding Fathers were well aware of
the danger of giving a king or dictator the right to launch wars on his own.
They feared that this would bring tyranny and oppression to their nation.
President George
W. Bush, in power from 2001 to 2009, behaved in a way the U.S. Founding Fathers
would have strongly disapproved, since he vied with the Congress to concentrate
the power to wage war in his own hands, using Congress as a rubber stamp.
One would have
thought that newly elected President Barack Obama, in a democratic spirit,
would have attempted to reverse this dangerous move toward turning the U.S.
presidency into an initiator of foreign wars. Unfortunately, President Barack
Obama did the reverse, increasing rather than reducing the president’s
discretionary powers to wage wars.
Indeed, Nobel
Peace Laureate Obama didn’t waste any time in arguing that he had, as U.S. president, the
authority to wage
war in Iraq, in
Syria, in Libya, or elsewhere, without U.S. Congress’s approval, contending
that previous so-called ‘use of force congressional authorizations’ remain in
effect indefinitely. Indeed,
President
Obama claimed, just as President George W. Bush had done before him, that the
broad ‘Authorization for use of
Military Force’ on terror (AUMF) passed by Congress after Sept. 11, 2001, and the 2002
‘Authorization to use Military Force’ in Iraq had, in fact, no expiration date
and that they authorize an American president to act like an emperor or a king,
and to unilaterally use
military force or wage war of his own volition.
This is a
very serious matter, because if this theory were to be confirmed and entrenched
in practice, without a formal constitutional amendment, the precedent would
mean that the U.S. Constitution has de
facto been pushed aside and the United States has become less of a
republic, and more of an empire. [This would tend to confirm the title of my
book ‘The
New American Empire’]
What is more,
President Obama has acted aggressively according to his theory of presidential
war powers. He has launched eight times as many drone
strikes in other countries as did President George W. Bush; and,
according to his own boasting, he has “ordered military action in seven countries”. This is not
a legacy he should be proud of.
The destruction of the independent nations of Iraq,
Libya and Syria and the worsening of the chaos in the Middle East
As far as U.S.
involvements in the Middle East are concerned, President Barak Obama did not
substantially break away from the neocon-inspired imperial policies of the
George W. Bush administration.
It is sometimes
argued that president Obama’s decision to withdraw American troops from Iraq,
in 2011, marked a break with the previous administration. In
fact, the Bush-Cheney administration had already decided on such a withdrawal
in 2008, when the Iraqi government refused to grant legal immunity to American
troops in that country.
In supervising
the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Obama administration was simply
implementing a Status
of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which
had previously been signed between
the U.S. government and the Iraqi government to that effect. According to the
agreement, U.S. combat troops had to be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011.
With one or two exceptions
mentioned above (the Iran deal and the normalizing of relations with Cuba),
President Obama has not failed to embrace a military solution to serve the
neocons’ many narratives in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In fact, if it can be said
that President George W. Bush destroyed the country of Iraq, President Barack
Obama, through his policies and actions, most of the time without the support
of Congress, destroyed two other Middle East countries, i.e. Libya and Syria, while extending the U.S. military
mission in Afghanistan, and while supporting
an embarrassing ally, Saudi Arabia, in destroying
Yemen.
These
countries were no threat to the United States. Even though President Obama
received a Nobel Peace Prize, he was no peace president, by a long shot. As a
matter of fact, President Obama has been continuously
at war longer than any
other American president in U.S. history. With his administration, it was
really more of the same and a far cry from his campaign
promises to “change
things in Washington D.C.”
Under the
cover of fighting terrorism, and to destabilize, divide and provoke “regime
changes” in Libya and in Syria, for example, the United States—but also
European countries such as France and the U.K., leading members of NATO—has
relied on covert operations to support foreign
mercenaries and Islamist groups of terrorists in these countries,
giving them arms and logistics support, and inciting them to overthrow the
established governments.
Thanks to the financial
assistance given these terrorist groups, especially the self-proclaimed Sunni Islamist
State (ISIS), by Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar or
Turkey, the pro-Israeli
neocons, who wanted to redraw the Middle East according to their
mad theory of “constructive
chaos”, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, with a devastating international
refugee crisis as an extra. Ironically, European countries are,
for now, the main victims of the waves of refugees resulting from the politics
of chaos.
As the de facto head of NATO, President
Barack Obama and his neocon advisers, with the latter’s Manichean view of the
world, must bear a large part of
the responsibility for these disastrous results. The chaos in the Middle East
is a huge failure for him, even though the neocons in his administration would
deem such a manufactured chaos, a success!
Indeed, the
countries of Iraq, Libya and Syria were considered, to different degrees, to be
regional rivals of Israel, besides having large reserves of oil. Moreover, the
latter countries have been on top of the list of seven countries discovered by General Wesley Clark,
in late September 2001, as being the very countries the Pentagon planned to
attack and destroy.
The destruction
of Iraq can be attributed to the Bush-Cheney administration, since they are the
politicians who used different subterfuges to launch an illegal war of aggression
against that country, on March 20, 2003. However, what is most amazing is the
fact that the Obama administration decided to follow the same policy in Libya
and in Syria. Sooner or later, Mr. Barack Obama will have to explain why.
President Obama has sided with Saudi Arabia and other
Islamic countries in their efforts to spread Wahhabi extremism around the world
The world, and
especially Western Europe, is under the threat of the most virulent brand of
Islamism, i.e. Wahhabi
extremism, a theo-fascist ideology, which is promoted by the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries, and which is, to a large extent,
behind global Islamic terrorism. Instead of denouncing that curse of the 21st
Century, President Obama has gone out of his way to be subservient and even to bow to the leaders
of Saudi Arabia during multiple trips to that country. The question has been
often raised: Why has President Obama
been so cozy with the Saudi Royal Family, even when the latter snubbed him publicly?
There is no country in the world that violates more openly basic human rights
than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One would think the United States
would be at the forefront to denounce such violations. The Wahhabi,
either from Saudi Arabia or other Islamic countries, have used hundreds of billions
of petro-dollars to build madrassas
and huge
mosques in Western countries, including in the United States, to promote their
corrosive ideology. The Obama administration did not raise any objection when
the largest
mosque in the United States was built, in Lanham, Maryland. It is worth noting
that, in 2010, Norway
did refuse the construction of mosques with foreign money in that
country.
The Obama administration has extended the
neocon-inspired politics of chaos to Ukraine and Russia, and it has rekindled a
Cold War II with Russia
Why has the Obama
administration been so anxious to start a
New
Cold War with
Russia? We see here another contradiction between what President Barack Obama
says, and what he does. For a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, are an aggressive military
encirclement of a country and the sending of military forces to its borders
acts of peace or acts of war? Why is Obama doing precisely that to Russia? Why
is he risking a nuclear confrontation with Russia? That defies logic.
The only stretch of logic
to explain such warmongering is that it is an attempt by the U.S. government to
sabotage any economic and political cooperation between Russia and European
countries, in order to keep Europe under some sort of an American protectorate.
Why is President Obama
following the neocon plan? Why did he choose Ashton
Carter as Secretary of Defense, a known warmonger and the Pentagon’s former
chief weapons buyer, who is on record as wanting a military
confrontation with Russia?
These are important questions that should be addressed to Mr. Obama, and
all the more so since Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has
indicated she would push in the same direction, if she were elected president.
Let us keep
in mind that in February 2014, the Obama administration eagerly jumped at the
opportunity to support a coup in Ukraine to overthrow that country’s elected
government. It also armed the
putchists, and encouraged them to commit atrocities against Ukraine’s ethnic
Russian population. Such interference in the affairs of another nation is part
of a larger neocon-inspired policy of militarizing Eastern Europe under the
cover of NATO.
President Obama’s personal
contribution to the nuclear arms race and to the threat of nuclear war
Even though
president Barack Obama promised a
nuclear-free world, and pledged, in a speech delivered in Prague, on April 5, 2009, “to seek the peace and security of a world
without nuclear weapons” and to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy”,
and again in Hiroshima, on Friday May 27, 2016, his words have not been
followed by concrete steps in that direction. Instead, Mr. Obama seemed
satisfied to passively pursue the same nuclear “modernization” program that involved the development
of a new set of American nuclear weapons, initiated under the previous
George W. Bush administration.
On September 30, 2004, then
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, in a debate with President George
W. Bush, complained that the Bush administration was “spending hundreds of millions of dollars to
research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new
set of nuclear weapons. It doesn’t make sense. You talk about mixed messages.
We’re telling other people, ‘You can’t have nuclear weapons,’ but we’re
pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.”
In a Nuclear
Posture Review on April 6, 2010, the Obama administration seemed to echo
Mr. Kerry and stated that the United States would “not develop new nuclear warheads or pursue new military missions or new
capabilities for nuclear weapons.”
However,
President Barack Obama wasted no time in violating
his promise of not “developing new nuclear warheads” and of “reducing the role of nuclear weapons in U.S.
military strategy”. Instead, he seemingly embarked on the same nuclear
program, which had apparently not been stopped at all, to develop an array of
new nuclear weapons that made contemplation of their use more acceptable
(smaller, more accurate, less lethal), just as the Bush II administration had
done before. In other words, Mr. Obama has prepared the United States to get
engaged in “small nuclear wars” in the future. This is quite a “legacy”!
The new American
nuclear weapon is, as the New York Times has reported, the
B61
Model 12, a
nuclear bomb tested in Nevada in 2015. This is the first of five new nuclear
warhead types planned as part of an American atomic revitalization program
budgeted at a cost estimated at $1 trillion over three decades. So much for “a world without nuclear weapons”!
Domestically, income and wealth inequalities have
continued to rise to high levels and poverty to increase under the Obama
administration
On Jan. 20, 2014, a Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans were
dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed in the U.S. —People
are therefore vaguely aware that there is something fundamentally wrong with
the way the economic system works, and they are right to think that the economy
is rigged against the interests of the majority and in favor of special
interests.
According to a new Pew Research Center
analysis of public data, the
American middle
class is shrinking, its proportion among U.S. households falling from 55 percent in 2000
to 51 percent in 2014. [N.B.: An American middle class family of two
adults and two children, in 2014, is one earning a minimum of $48,083]. This
shift has produced a wave of discontent
throughout the United States.
Presidential
candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, on opposite sides of the electoral
spectrum, reflect this deep dissatisfaction and even the anger at the economic,
financial and taxation policies pursued by the U.S. government and the
establishment, over the last thirty years.
Indeed, for the last fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014, the median income
of American households globally has declined by 8 percent.
-The median incomes of lower-income
families fell by 10 percent during the same period, from $26,373 to $23,811.
- The median income of middle-income
households decreased by 6 percent, from $77,898 to $72,919.
- And, reflecting the large inequalities even among upper-income households, the median income in that group also fell
by 7 percent, even though, as a group, the relative importance of this segment
of American households went from 17 to 20 percent. The group’s median income
fell from $186,424 in 1999 to $173,207 in 2014.
In fact, the only segment of the U.S. population that has benefited from
the economic, financial and taxation policies of the last three administrations
(Clinton-Bush-Obama), and from technological changes that have occurred during
the period, is the top echelon of the upper-income class.
The super rich have raked in the most, while profiting the most from
various tax
loopholes, which have lowered their average tax rate from 27 percent in
1992 to less than 17 percent in 2012. In fact, America's super rich get richer and
they are laughing their way to tax havens!
There is
something fundamentally wrong and corrupt going on in the U.S. economy, and
obviously, the Obama administration has been unable or unwilling to address the
problem.
Official government statistics tend to underestimate
real unemployment and real inflation
All those wars
waged abroad and the trillions of dollars spent on them have enriched some
super wealthy Americans, but not ordinary Americans. Instead, they have
impoverished them. Ordinary Americans are falling behind because their incomes
are stagnant or falling, and because real unemployment rates and inflation
rates are higher than reported.
According to official statistics, the
annual rates of unemployment and of inflation (the consumer price index) would
seem to be under control. For the first quarter of 2016, the U.S. unemployment
rate hovers around 5.0 percent, while the inflation rate is just above 1.0
percent, pushed down by the decline in oil prices and by a relatively strong
U.S dollar.
The problem with
official statistics, however, is that the method to measure them has changed
over time. This doesn’t mean that the new measures are willfully misleading. It
only means that the old measures may be a better indicator of how unemployment
and inflation impact certain sectors of the population.
In fact, some
economists prefer to rely on the old methods of calculating unemployment and
inflation to get a more realistic picture of what ordinary people are going
through. For example, U.S. economist Walter J. Williams calculates so-called “alternate” statistics of
unemployment and inflation.
For unemployment,
certain categories of unemployed people have been excluded from the published
official statistics. For instance, long-term and short-term discouraged workers,
not actively searching for work, were excluded from the new official measure of
unemployment rates, in 1994. Neither do official statistics count part-time
workers who are forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time
employment.
As a consequence, when labor force participation rates drop because of the
above, official unemployment figures indicate a decline in unemployment, even
though this is not really exact. According to some estimates, if unemployment
and underemployment were taken into consideration, the alternate
rate of unemployment, in April 2016, would have been 22.9 percent, not
the narrow official measure of 5.0 percent.
Similarly, official measures of inflation were changed in 1980 and in
1990, as a way to reduce the annual
cost-of-living-adjustments for retirement benefits. For instance, when
the price of certain items increases, they are replaced in the basket of
consumer goods by other items, which cost less. Similarly, even if the price of
some goods increases, such increase is reduced by a factor reflecting the
higher quality of the goods available. If the old method of calculating
inflation had been used, in April 2016, the alternate
annual inflation rate would not have been 1.13 percent, as the
official CPI measurements indicated, but would have been close to 5.0 percent,
according to one measure, and even close to 9.0 percent according to another
measure.
All this is to
say that when people see their rents, condo fees, taxes, grocery purchases,
etc., increase in price, and they experience a drop in their standard of living
because of their stagnant or declining incomes, they are not necessarily
hallucinating.
The Obama administration has allowed corporations and
megabanks to offshore jobs and profits
A major feature
of our times is that corporate
profits are way up, while wages are stagnant, and corporate
taxes are way down.
Indeed, a partial
answer to the many issues raised above is the fact that the Obama
administration has been guilty of pursuing and even intensifying the move
toward lower taxes for corporations, and more profits for large corporations
and megabanks on two accounts.
First, the Obama
administration has initiated two mammoth international “trade deals”. Those
trade “deals” were mostly kept secret because one of their main objectives is
to guarantee legal protection to world corporations and megabanks against
elected national governments and give them immunity from national prosecution.
The most recent
examples of such “deals” are the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe and
the Transpacific
Trade Partnership (TTP) with countries in Asia.
It must be understood by all that these so called “free trade”
agreements are really not genuine free trade agreements for the unhampered
movement of goods between countries, based on comparative national advantages,
but are really instead corporate and banking agreements to protect corporations
and megabanks against national governments, their taxation and their
regulations.
Such agreements, negotiated in near complete secrecy, pursue
geopolitical objectives. They are an attempt to build a worldwide economic and
financial order that supersedes national states and they represent also an
effort to protect the corporate and banking elites—the establishment 1%—against
national governments. In
the case of the TTIP, its geopolitical objective is to prevent European
countries from developing comprehensive trade agreements with Russia. In the
case of TTP, the objective is to isolate China. In the eyes of Washington D.C.
neocon planners, they are part of ongoing
economic warfare.
Second, the Obama
administration has not taken the necessary steps to stop rich individuals and
profitable corporations and banks from using tax
havens and industrial inversion
schemes to avoid paying
taxes at home.
The Obama administration, and even more so the entire U.S. Congress, are
under the influence of those interests whose objective is to build a worldwide
economic and financial system that shields the 1% establishment’s wealth and
power against any encroachment by national governments, at least from those
governments the international elite does not yet fully control. We are talking
here about an unelected world economic and financial empire with no frontiers,
unencumbered by normal democratic rules.
This may be a big
factor in explaining why the economy is languishing. Indeed, when corporate
profits are not reinvested in the economy, but are hoarded and stashed away in
tax havens, they do not increase domestic demand. U.S. corporations have about $1,400
billion ($1.4 trillion) sleeping in foreign tax havens. If all that
money were repatriated, not only would the government have a lower deficit, but
also the economy would greatly benefit from increased investments.
This is a
somewhat scandalous situation the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress
have done very little about. On the contrary, both have been slow in putting a stop to so-called corporate “inversions”, which have allowed companies to find a
foreign suitor and switch their headquarters abroad to dodge taxes. Both have also extended patent
protection to already entrenched corporations at the expense of startup
companies. And it is only recently that they have moved to block so-called megamergers—all
developments that have reduced competition, created oligopolies, increased
corporations’ market power and raised prices.
This maybe the
most glaring example of a lack of economic leadership on the part of the Obama
administration, second only perhaps to the imperial wars it has initiated and
encouraged. It is true that Mr. Obama has himself little competence or
experience in economics and in finance, and that may explain why the above issues
have not received all the attention they deserve.
President Barack Obama let neocons infiltrate his
administration at the highest levels
After President
Obama began making appointments to senior positions in his new administration,
in late 2008, a leading neocon, Richard Perle, former chair of the Defense
Policy Board under President George W. Bush and a leading architect of the Iraq
war, expressed his contentment in these words: “I’m quite pleased… There’s not going to
be as much change as we were led to believe.”
Therefore, it can
be said that President Obama’s betrayal of his promises to enact change began
very early in his administration. For instance, he kept George W. Bush’s
Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, in his post, as an indication he wanted
continuity and not a break with the previous administration.
Then, he went on
paying his electoral debts. First, he named
Rahm
Emanuel as his White House chief of staff, a neocon member of the House
of Representatives, and also a
former assistant to President Bill Clinton and a supporter of presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton.
Then, in a move that brought glee to the ranks
of neoconservatives, he appointed belligerent and neocon-supported
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The neoconservative Weekly
Standard applauded her nomination, calling her a “Warrior
Queen”! Even Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney declared to be “impressed”
with her nomination. As MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough branded her, Hillary Clinton is
a “neocon’s
neocon”, because “there’s hardly
been a military engagement that Hillary hasn’t been for in the past twenty
years.”
President Barack Obama went on to appoint a long
list of other neocons to senior positions in his administration, not
the least being the nomination of Ms. Victoria Nuland, a Dick Cheney adviser,
as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, in May 2013. From then
on, the die was cast as to what kind of administration President Obama would
lead. Real change would have to wait.
President Obama had zero influence in solving the
secular Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (1948- )
For nearly three
quarters of a century now, the rotten Palestinian-Israeli
conflict has endured for two main reasons: the intransigence of the
Israeli government in closing the door to any new settlements, and the active
pro-Israel veto of the U.S. government at the United Nations.
In 2008, one of presidential candidate Barack Obama
pledges was to actively pursue a peace agreement between Israel and the
Palestinians. He had, as he said,
a two-fold strategy: restoring America’s tarnished image among Muslims and
persuading the Israeli government to stop settlement expansion on Palestinian
lands. On both accounts, he failed. As it has been the case with Mr. Obama’s
other promises, there was less substance behind the rhetoric and the platitudes than
met the eye. For example, he did not set up a special task force to implement
the policy he professed to wish to put forward.
Consequently,
President Barack Obama has had no observable influence in stopping the
far-right Netanyahu Israeli government from pursuing its illegal settlements in
Palestinian territory. He did not get any success either in persuading the
government of Israel to enter into serious peace talks to solve the festering
conflict and end the occupation of Palestine. And the reason is obvious:
President Obama did not dare withdraw the U.S.
veto protecting the state of Israel at the United Nations, even though
there were some rumblings to that effect.
Worse maybe, is the fact that President Obama let himself be publicly
snubbed and humiliated by Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in early 2015, when the latter
disregarded a non-invitation by the Obama administration and nevertheless
entered the United States and addressed the U.S. Congress. This created a weird
occurrence, because this was a violation of basic diplomatic rules. It
was a public display of the Israeli government’s contempt for the American
President.
In 2001, Benjamin
Netanyahu boasted that he knew “what America is. —America is a thing that you
can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” What Netanyahu meant, of course, is that the
pro-Israel lobby in the United States is so financially and politically
powerful that an Israeli leader can publicly insult the American president,
with no consequences, and even with the enthusiastic approval of an obliging
U.S. Congress. President Barack Obama never looked so weak and so despondent as
during this awkward and unreal situation.
President Obama did not release elements of proof
linking Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 terrorists
A last point is
also worthy of mention. Despite numerous requests, President Obama has refused
to inform adequately the American people on the extent of Saudi Arabia’s
involvement in supporting the 9/11 terrorists. The families of the victims
of the 9/11 attacks and scores of others have called on Mr. Obama to release the classified 28-page portion
of a special House-Senate congressional
report on the 9/11 attacks, produced in 2002, and purportedly identifying individuals at the highest levels of the Saudi
government as the financing agents of some of the 9/11 terrorists. In mid-April,
President Obama even said that a decision to release the information was
“imminent”.
After his trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last April, it seems that the “imminence” of the release was
postponed sine die. Rather, President
Obama went even further and promised to refuse to sign into law a bill that
would have made the kingdom of Saudi
Arabia liable for damages stemming from the September 11 terror attacks.
However, he did not extend the same privilege to the Government of Iran, which
is being sued by Americans for alleged damages.
Even though
president Barack Obama promised, on January 29, 2009, “a new era of transparent
and open Government”, this seemingly did not apply to the rights of
Americans to know who was behind the 9/11 attacks that resulted in 3,000
horrific American deaths. This has led some observers to call his
administration “the
least transparent in history”.
This is another example of Mr. Obama saying one thing and doing the opposite.
It seems to be a pattern in his modus
operandi.
General conclusion
Why has there
been such a contrast between President Obama’s words and his deeds? After all,
he promised “to end the mindset that got
us into war”.
There are three
possible explanations. First, as a politician, Barack Obama may not have been
completely sincere when he said he wanted to change the mentality in Washington
D.C. He may have thought that these were only words to be soon forgotten.
—Politicians are ambitious opportunists and Mr. Obama was not different.
Second, those who wrote his speeches may not have been the same ones making the
policies. Thus, the gulf observed between the flowery speeches and the actual
policies. Third, there is possibly a less generous explanation: Mr. Obama may
have been a convenient figurehead
used by those who really control the U.S. government in the shadows. —It could
be a mixture of all these explanations.
One can surely
argue that the Obama administration, on the whole, was ‘less bad’ than the
previous Bush-Cheney administration, both domestically and internationally.
However, because elected presidential candidate Barack Obama arrived at the
White House without any administrative experience and without having his own
brain trust, and seemingly, without having a clear plan on how to implement his
lofty promises, he had to submit himself to the same neocon advisers and
warmongering interventionists who were omnipresent in the previous
administration. He ended up reacting rather than acting; following rather than
leading.
That is why the
Obama administration’s policies, especially foreign policy, with a few notable
exceptions, did not diverge appreciably from those imperial policies pursued by
the previous Bush-Cheney administrations. President Barack Obama, the Nobel
Peace Prize laureate, has failed to live up to the promises he made and the hopes
he raised.
Both
neocon-inspired administrations ended up creating an enduring mess in the world
that future governments, and even future generations, will have to deal with.
______________________________________________________
Tuesday, June 28,
2016
The 2016 U.S. Election: A Possible
Repeat of the 1964 Election?
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of
liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit
of justice is no virtue.”
Barry Goldwater (1909-1998)
US Senator (R-Arizona) and 1964 Republican
Presidential candidate, (in his Acceptance speech as the 1964 Republican Presidential
candidate, in San Francisco, July 16, 1964)
“Sometimes, I think this
country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and
let it float out to sea.”
Barry Goldwater (1909-1998)
US Senator (R-Arizona) and 1964 Republican
Presidential candidate, (in a December 1961 news conference)
“We’re going to hit them and
we’re going to hit them hard. I’m talking about a surgical strike on these ISIS
stronghold cities using Trident [nuclear] missiles.”
Donald Trump (1946- ), Republican
presidential candidate, (in an interview with ‘Meet the Press’, NBC News,
August 9, 2015)
…“They asked me the question
[about torture], ‘What do you think of waterboarding?’ —Absolutely fine. But we
should go much stronger than waterboarding.” Donald Trump (1946- ), Republican presidential candidate, (in a statement during a campaign event
at a retirement community, in Bluffton, S. C., Feb. 17, 2016)
The
way this 2016 American presidential election is unfolding, there is a good
chance that it could be a repeat of the 1964 U.S. election. In both instances,
a Democratic presidential candidate is facing a flawed and frightening
Republican presidential candidate who multiplies provocative and reckless statements and off-hand comments.
Politicians
sometimes forget that, once elected, they are expected to serve all the people,
not their narrow base of fanatical partisans. In that regard, their public
statements are very important because they give a clue about what type of
public servant a candidate would be. A candidate can easily self-destruct if he
or she forgets that, when talking to partisans, the entire electorate is
listening. Strong statements, good or bad, remain in people’s consciousness when time
comes to vote.
Let us look back
52 years to the 1964 U.S. election. Seeking election in his own right was
sitting Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), who had taken
office in 1963 following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and who was
about to escalate the Vietnam
War, which ended up costing the lives of 58,000 Americans and the lives of
more than a million Vietnamese. His Republican opponent was Senator Barry Goldwater
(1909-1998) of Arizona, who had fought against the party establishment and
succeeded in winning the Republican nomination over New York Governor Nelson
Rockefeller.
In 1964,
Republican candidate Barry Goldwater soon developed an image as an extremist on
many issues with a series of reckless and ill-thought out statements. For
instance, in foreign policy, he advocated using ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons in Vietnam
and in Europe. Domestically, he wanted to make Social Security voluntary. He even suggested that the
United States would be better off if the entire East Coast of the country were cut off
and sent out to sea!
Goldwater was never able to shake off his image as an
extremist on many issues, and he was never in a position to unmask the
Democratic candidate’s war plans. This was a key factor in his crushing defeat
in November 1964: Lyndon B. Johnson won about 61 percent of the vote to
Goldwater’s 39 percent, and took all but six states.
Therefore after
the election, President Johnson had a free hand in escalating the Vietnam War,
especially considering that the U.S. Congress had already adopted the infamous Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, on August 7, 1964. The
disastrous war would last ten more years, until 1975.
There is a good
chance that history might repeat itself next November.
Indeed,
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been acting as if he doesn’t
really care whether he wins the election or not, drawing attention to himself
with outlandish statements and reckless comments, presumably designed to shock
and create free “publicity” for his candidacy.
One day candidate
Trump wants to adopt torture as a public policy. The next day, he wants to
prevent Muslims from entering the United States and build a wall between the
U.S. and Mexico to stop illegal Mexican immigration. Later on, he advocates
using nuclear missiles against Islamist terrorists in the Middle East,
and—throwing away any humanitarian principle—even kill their families.
Domestically, he wants to abolish Obamacare, but so far, he has not spelled out
any replacement. Etc. etc. etc!
Moreover, he
doesn’t mind contradicting himself. Sometimes, he rebuts the pro-Israel lobby,
professing not to need its money. But then, he lets his Middle East advisor
state that a Trump administration would give the Israeli government a free hand
in expropriating the Palestinians.
Since Mr. Trump
has no government experience of any kind, one would think that he would
consult about policy issues he knows little about, before issuing a statement.
This does not seem to be the case. He even jokes: “my primary consultant is myself.” That is a sobering thought. The
candidate does not seem to have an overall plan; everything seems to be left to
improvisation. This indicates a lack of discipline. Indeed, candidate Trump
seems to be his own worst enemy. As a businessman, Mr. Trump may have great
qualities. As a politician, he seems to be lacking in political instincts,
self-control and restraint.
As
a result of his flippancy and inconsistencies, Mr. Trump's poll
numbers are
slipping badly, not because people necessarily like the alternative Democratic
choice, but mainly because they become increasingly disillusioned by the lack
of seriousness on candidate Trump’s part. They sense that he is unstable and
unpredictable, that he has no plan and no program.
All this is a
free gift to Democratic presidential Hillary
Clinton who has to defend 40 years of political involvement. Unless an
unexpected event occurs, and unless Mr. Trump changes profoundly his approach,
the choice in the U.S. next November will be between two main candidates with
net negative approval ratings, and the candidate with the lowest net negative
rating will win, by default. One would think that the American electorate
deserves better.
____________________________________________________________-
Monday, July 11,
2016
The New Immoral Age: How Technology Offers
New Ways of Killing People and of Destroying the World
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“It turns out … that I’m really good at
killing people.”
President Barack
Obama (1961- ), (as reported in Reed Peeples,
‘A President and his Drones’, June 29, 2016, —a review of the
book ‘Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone’, S.
Shane, 2015)
“We hold that what one
man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government,
representing many millions of men, cannot do.
—Governments are only machines, created by the
individuals of a nation for their own convenience; they are only delegated
bodies, delegated by the individuals, and therefore they cannot possibly have
larger moral rights of using force, or, indeed, larger moral rights of any
kind, than the individuals who delegated them.
—We may reasonably believe that an individual,
as a self-owner, is morally justified in defending the rights he possesses in
himself and in his own property—by force, if necessary, against force (and
fraud), but he cannot be justified in using force for any other purpose
whatsoever.”
“Nothing that is
morally wrong can be politically right.”
Hannah More (1745-1833) English writer and
philanthropist
“A belligerent
state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would
disgrace the individual.”
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939),
Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher
We
not only live in the computer and digital
age, we
also live in a profoundly immoral
age, in which the use of violence against people has become easily
justifiable, nearly routinely, either for religious, military or security reasons.
Let us recall
that the Twentieth Century was the most politically murderous period ever in
history. It is estimated that political decisions, mostly made by psychopaths
in various governments, resulted in the death of some 262 million
people—a democide or political
mass murder, according to scholarly works by political scientist Rudolph J.
Rummel. It remains to be seen if the Twenty-first Century will regress
from this barbarism or exceed it. So far, things do not look too good. Human
morality and empathy is not increasing; it is declining fast. And with nuclear
weapons in the hands of potential psychopaths, the next big step toward
oblivion will not be a cakewalk.
Indeed, a new
brand of immorality has permeated into some political minds, according to which
what one
individual cannot morally do on his own, i.e. cold-blooded murder of another
human being, a head of state, a government or a group of public officials can
do, in his place. Under what moral code can individuals delegate to governments or public
officials authority to do crimes that they themselves cannot do without being
immoral? Wouldn’t that be extremely hypocritical and a parody of morality?
According to
basic humanitarian or humanist
morality, as the Auberon
Herbert’s quote above illustrates, what is immoral for one
individual does not become moral because one million individuals do it, under
the cloak of a government or any other umbrella organization. In other words, a
head of state or a government cannot enjoy a wider choice of moral rules than
the ones that apply to every individual. The agent (the public person) cannot
have looser moral rules than the principal (the people). There cannot be one
morality for an individual in private life, and another one for an individual
acting within a government.
For example, it
is widely accepted under basic moral rules that an individual may only use
deadly force in self-defense, when his own life or the lives of his family are
threatened. Therefore, the delegated morality to a state by its citizens to use
deadly force cannot extend beyond the requirements of self-defense against actual or imminent attack, of the maintenance of order, and of the
implementation of justice. Any unprovoked act of deadly aggression, resulting
in the untimely and extrajudicial death of people, by a head of state, a
government or its officials against other people becomes automatically immoral,
if not illegal, notwithstanding in what legal mumbo jumbo such an aggression is
couched.
It is true that
the current chasm between individual and official morality has been long in
developing. When the Roman Emperor Theodosius (347-395), in 380, adopted Christianity as its official
state religion, it was difficult to apply Jesus Christ’s pacifist and
non-violence admonition that “all they that take the sword
shall perish with the sword”.
Christian theologians such as Augustine of Hippo (354-430) were thus obliged to develop the argument that moral
rules designed for individuals did not necessarily apply to an individual
becoming an emperor, a king or a head of state who must administer justice or
wage wars. In particular, the Commandment
“Thou shall not kill” was redefined to exclude heads of state involved in
so-called “just wars”, waged
by a ‘legitimate authority’. It was spelled out, however, that such wars could
not be pre-emptive, but strictly defensive to restore peace. Otherwise, such a
war would become immoral.
Nowadays, there
is a basic public morality inscribed in the United Nations Charter and in the
Nuremberg Charter. The latter clearly prohibits crimes against peace, defined
as referring
to the “planning, preparation,
initiation, or waging of wars of aggression”… A war of aggression is
defined as is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense, usually for territorial gain and
subjugation. The U.N. General Assembly adopted these definitions, on December
11, 1946, as part of customary
international law. Such was the core of public morality after World War II.
However,
over the years, public morality has steadily declined, most recently
illustrated in 2003 when U.S. President George W. Bush launched a U.S.-led war of unprovoked aggression against the country of Iraq,
assisted by British Prime minister Tony Blair. The latter unnecessary
and disastrous war, launched on a mountain of lies, has been thoroughly
investigated in the United Kingdom, but hardly at all in the United
States, the center of it all.
Therefore, notwithstanding that no serious
post-administration inquiry
has been carried out in the United States regarding the mischief caused by the
George W. Bush-Dick Cheney tandem, at the very least, future historians will
have the 12-volume Chilcot
Report to assess how some British and American politicians
fooled the people, in 2002-2003, and launched a war of aggression against an
independent country, with no direct consequences for themselves.
More
generally indeed, in the
Twenty-first Century, it can be said that killing technology has advanced at
the same time as public morality and personal accountability have declined.
In the U.S., for instance, it has long been suspected
that the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), (a sort of secret government within the government created by President Harry Truman in
1946), was
involved in covert illegal activities, especially when it came to sponsoring terrorist death
squads in various countries. In 1975,
for example, the U.S. Senate established a Select
Committee to study governmental operations with
respect to illegal intelligence activities, chaired by Senator Frank
Church (D-ID). That important committee investigated illegalities by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI).
Among the
matters investigated were the covert activities of the CIA involving attempts
to assassinate foreign leaders and attempts to subvert foreign national
governments. Following the reports and under the
recommendations and pressure by the Church committee, President Gerald Ford
issued Executive Order 11905 (ultimately replaced in 1981 by President Ronald
Reagan's Executive Order 12333) with the express intent to ban U.S. sanctioned
assassinations of foreign leaders.
Now, let us move
fast forward. The most recent instance of a public official known to have
assigned to himself the task of targeting some people, even American citizens,
to be assassinated with unmanned drones or other means, without charge and
outside of judicial procedures, and without geographic limits, is under
President Barack
Obama. Indeed, Mr. Obama seems to be the first American president to
have institutionalized what is called the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, during
which the American president, with the help of the head of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), decides
about the assassination or the capture of individuals deemed to be enemies of
the United States around the world.
Last July 1st,
the Obama administration released its own assessment
of the number
of civilians assassinated
by drone strikes in nations where the U.S. is not officially at war. It claimed
it has killed between 64 and 116 “non-combatant” individuals in Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and Libya, between January 2009 and the end of 2015. However,
the London-based Bureau
of Investigative Journalism has estimated that as many as
380 to 801 unarmed
civilians have been recorded to have been killed with the new
technology of unmanned drones.
Drone killing may be the most controversial
legacy that President Barack Obama is leaving behind. To my knowledge,
this is without precedent in U.S. history, at least at the
presidential level, that assassinations of people, including some Americans,
are carried outside of the legal framework, under direct supervision of a U.S. lethal
president. In a democracy based on checks and balances,
this would seem to be an example
of executive
overreach.
With such an
example originating in the White House, it may not be a surprise that an
American military officer has recently requested the “authority”
to assassinate people without presidential approval, in his
geographical area of responsibility, in Africa.
It is very disturbing to empower a government, any
government, with the power to execute people without trial or due process. This may be a sign
of our times, but this is not what we could call a progress of civilization or
of human morality. It seems rather that as killing technology has advanced, and
as power has become less constrained, humanitarian morality has
badly declined.
It is a sad truth
that advances in military technology over time have always been used to kill
people. Even the dreadful atom bomb has
been used to kill hundreds of thousands people. It is only a matter of time before it could be used again. It would only take one
psychopathic madman in power to destroy humanity.
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Addendum:
All this
immorality permeates into the management of the economy, under the motto “greed
is good”. As I assessed
at the beginning of this
year, the world economy is ripe for a huge awakening. A mixture of wars of
aggression and of financial market crashes
could shake the world in the coming months.
That is because
the people who fan the flames of war are the same ones who are pushing
financial markets to their limits and created a huge
asset bubble.
Barak Obama’s
little known neocon-inspired goal has
been to expand NATO to Russia’s borders and to isolate Russia. This mischievous
brinkmanship policy is being played out to the fullest. Indeed, there is
presently a suspicious and dangerous buildup of NATO
troops at the Russian border, with the obvious intent of provoking Russia into
some sort of conflict. These professional warmongers may get their wish and
they may soon plunge the world into chaos.
__________________________________________________
Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016
The Trump Revolution in The United
States: What Will Be the New President’s Herculean Works?
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“When
you give [money to politicians], they do whatever the hell you want them to
do… As a businessman, I need that.”
Donald
J. Trump (1946- ), in an interview to the
Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2015.
“We [the
United States] spent $2 trillion,
thousands of lives. ... Obviously, it was a mistake… George W. Bush made a
mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never
been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East…
—They [President George W. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney] lied… They said there were weapons of mass destruction.
There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass
destruction.”
Donald
J. Trump (1946- ), during a CBS News GOP presidential
debate, on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016.
“In my opinion, we've
spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that
frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United
States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our
airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better
off. I can tell you that right now.
—We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to the
Middle East; we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity.
—The people that have been killed, the people that
have been wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.
It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized.
—A total and complete mess.
—I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish
it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals,
roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.”
Donald
J. Trump (1946- ) in a GOP presidential
debate, on Tues. Dec. 15, 2015, in Las Vegas, NV.
“Throughout history, any profound political and
social change was preceded by a philosophical revolution, at least among a
significant section of the population.”
M. N. Roy (1887-1954), in ‘The Future of Democracy’, 1950.
There has
just been a generational political
earthquake in the United States and the after shocks are potentially
going to be huge. Indeed, on November 8, 2016, against all odds, the Republican
candidate Donald Trump (1946- ) was elected to serve as the 45th American
President, repeating ad nauseam his
main slogan “Make America Great
Again”. He will
be the first American president since Dwight D. Eisenhower
(1890-1969) to occupy the White House without having personal political
experience.
Trump’s rhetoric and
proposals have been squarely anti-establishment and anti-status quo, both
domestically and internationally. As such, Trump’s victory is a political
revolution in the making because it announces a break from American policies
pursued by both Republican and Democrat U.S. administrations since the 1990’s.
For this reason, Trump’s
election inspires both fear and hope. Fear
among the established elites, especially among the dominating
Washington/media/financial establishments, because the Trump victory will
undoubtedly be seen as a repudiation of their values and policies. And after last June’s Brexit, the writing may also be
on the wall for the current crop of European elites, who have also actively
pushed for a globalized world, with open frontiers, illegal immigration,
technological changes, and the deindustrialization of the more advanced
economies.
There is hope,
however, among those who have been left behind economically, politically and
socially, especially among those in the American
middle class whose real incomes have been stagnant or declining, and
who have suffered badly from the agenda and policies pursued during the last
three decades. Over the last 30 years, indeed, the upper 10 % and the
super-rich 1 % segments of the U.S. population have greatly benefited from
a shift
from a manufacturing to a service economy, while the bottom 90 %
was left behind.
Many disenfranchised American
workers, especially those with less than a high school diploma, saw in
Republican candidate Donald Trump and in defeated Democratic primary candidate
Bernie Sanders the hope to see things change for the better. It is symptomatic
that Americans in large urban areas voted massively democratic, while
industrial and rural areas voted massively republican. Contrary to polls, the
forecasting models that included the historical context and the desire for
change in their prediction had it right. This is the case of American
University professor Allan
J. Lichtman’s model.
Trump’s Herculean task ahead
President-elect Donald
Trump and his team have a Herculean task ahead of them if they are to deliver
on the promises they made.
1- Let us begin with the main foreign policy changes to be expected.
The biggest losers of the
November 8 election will be the foreign policy hawks and the Neocons in
the previous U.S. administrations, from the Bill Clinton administration to the
current Obama administration. They are the ones who have pushed to rekindle the
Cold War with Russia and who have designed the interventionist policies, which
are destroying the Middle East.
It is expected that a Trump
administration will reverse the U.S.-led NATO policy to provoke Russia by
multiplying hostile military moves at its borders. Also, it can be expected
that a Trump administration will strike a deal with the Russian government of
Vladimir Putin to bring the disastrous Syrian conflict to an end. This is bad
news for the murderous Middle-Ages style ISIS organization.
Of course, a Trump
administration can be expected to turn U.S. trade policy on its head. Trade
policy would likely be paired with an industrial policy. In practice, this
could mean that the two large multilateral free trade and free investment treaties,
the Transatlantic Free Trade
agreement (TAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement (TPP) will be stopped in their tracks.
In this sense, the Trump
revolution could mean that economic and financial globalization
is dead.
2- The main domestic policy shifts expected from a Trump administration.
A Trump administration will
attempt to prime-pump the U.S. economy through a series of economic policies.
After all, candidate Trump has promised to boost the U.S. growth rate to an average of 3.5 percent and to create 25 million jobs over the next decade. He has
also promised the “overhaul of our tax,
regulatory, energy and trade policies.”
How can a Trump administration
stimulate growth? First, by proposing a massive $ 4.4 trillion tax cut to
spur growth, not dissimilar from the 2001-2003 Bush-Cheney
administration $1.3 trillion tax cut program, which met with dubious
results, besides increasing the U.S. government fiscal deficit.
Second, a Trump
administration will attempt to boost U.S. manufacturing jobs. For that, it
would have to do better than the record achieved during the two Bush-Cheney
terms, when the United States lost over six million manufacturing jobs. To
reverse that trend, Trump may attempt to force the repatriation of the $2.1
trillion profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas and induce
those corporations to invest more within the United States. He may also raise
some import taxes to persuade American-owned corporations to create jobs in the
U.S. — To what extent a Republican-controlled Congress will acquiesce to such a
protectionist trade policy remains to be seen.
Finally,
candidate Trump has promised to launch a massive infrastructure
investment program, stating that he wanted to “build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels,
seaports, and airports.”
3- The Trump government’s
social challenges
By
far, the biggest challenge that a Trump administration will face will be to
make good on candidate Trump’s promise to abolish the national health program
known as the Obamacare. He has proposed to replace the American health
care law with a transfer of Medicaid
to the states, accompanied by a state block grant program, and to provide tax
exemption for employer-based health insurance plans, to be extended to
individuals who purchase coverage on their own. Candidate Trump has even
flirted with the idea of having the U.S. adopt a single-payer health care
system. It remains to be seen how such a complex issue can be resolved.
Conclusion
It will take weeks and
months before the Trump administration’s real agenda becomes clear. Under a
Donald Trump presidency, the United States can be expected to change direction
on many policies. As this revolution unfolds, the eyes of the world will be on
the Trump administration and on the new policies it will attempt to implement.
Let us hope that this will be done with care and intelligent thinking, and not
in precipitation and chaos.
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